The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “Go back to visual!” George-Étienne said.

  “We can’t see anything,” Pascal said, switching back to the grainy, swaying view.

  As he unspooled the last of the cable, the camera threw itself about crazily as it passed another bend, and then settled in a slow eddy in the lee of the bend.

  “What the hell is that?” George-Étienne demanded.

  The swaying had stopped, but the snowy static almost filled the screen. A triangular shape showed in outline under the silt. Then static swallowed their view.

  SIX

  EVEN WHEN PASCAL began rewinding the cable, he couldn’t get a signal back from the camera. He worried he’d lost both the camera and the spare wheel in the terrible wind, that maybe he hadn’t tied the cable properly. No one could work very precisely through manipulator arms. But when, through the probe’s main camera, the spare wheel and camera appeared from the gullet of the cave, relief soaked into him.

  Pascal untied the wheel with the manipulator arms and repacked everything into the tool panel. The wind hadn’t let up. It had, in fact, strengthened to eleven kilometers per hour around the shelter of their boulder. They had to get the probe out of there. The winds forty-five kilometers higher would carry the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs inexorably west, and soon they would be out of recovery distance.

  Pascal launched the probe into the air, riding on a hard burst of propellers. In ninety-three atmospheres of pressure, every churn of the props lifted the probe, but the view on their screen lurched wildly as the wind sucked it towards the cave. The rock-face approached fast; when only a meter separated it from dashing into stone, the probe’s buoyancy and lift finally got it above the current. It swayed drunkenly above Diana Chasma and then ascended more certainly.

  An hour later, George-Étienne went outside to tie it to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Then they turned the habitat propellers on a course to catch up with their flock, floating fourteen hours downwind of them.

  George-Étienne came back in from stowing the probe, holding the spare wheel. Pascal took it with a small sense of awe. He was holding something that had traveled beneath the surface of Venus. Although it had been scratched and dented, the wind had scoured its black carbon down to the metal beneath and polished it mirror-bright. Experimentally, he held the tread face of the wheel in front of himself. In its curved surface, his face stretched, distorting so much that, for once, he could stand to see his own reflection. His inflated green eyes stared back. His distended nose overwhelmed his face. His long brown hair framed his face from a great distance.

  Pascal detached the beaten camera. Remarkably, for all the blows it had taken, the diamond lens had survived. He downloaded the images.

  “They’re clear,” his father said in wonder.

  They were, as much as they could be. The still images taken every ten seconds, where not ruined by poor light or quick movement, weren’t bad. None of the snowy static they’d been seeing in the live feed showed in the pictures.

  “I wonder if the transmitter burnt out,” Pascal said.

  He began a diagnostic of the transmitter while they looked at the pictures. They had good ones of the clean walls, sometimes blurred at the edges. They had three worth keeping of the first eddy and the silt build-up. These photos would be worth a lot to geologists. What might they ask for in trade?

  Then they came to two pictures at the end, in the last eddy. The graininess in them was entirely due to the fading light from the failing battery. Not static like they’d seen in their feed. The black and white pictures showed a flat triangular shape buried under silt, about four meters long. At its apex something shiny and smooth and not at all basaltic reflected the light.

  “What is it?” George-Étienne asked.

  Pascal couldn’t even guess. He knew of no geological process that would create a perfect isosceles triangle. It wasn’t made of the same materials as the rock. It had to be artificial.

  “Do you think the Russians or Chinese or Americans sent down some secret probes?” Pascal hazarded.

  “You mean maybe we aren’t the first to find this cave?”

  Pascal shrugged. He couldn’t think of anything else. Maybe one of the big powers had sent something down to look at the geology of Venus up close.

  “None of them have done anything on Venus for over a hundred years,” Pascal said. The exploration of Venus by bigger nations had never amounted to much more than seeing Venus as a dead end on the road to colonizing the solar system. No one had contested the claim to the clouds of Venus by a new sovereign Québec sixty years ago. Why would they?

  “But what if one of the Banks sent down an automated probe,” Pascal said, “looking for whatever Banks look for—minerals, or rare metals, something that would make their investment worth it? The triangular shape looks a little like a wing. What if they didn’t know the wind was there? While their automated probe was gliding, maybe it got caught in the wind and sucked into the cave?”

  George-Étienne brushed at his beard.

  “Maybe,” he said. “The bloodsuckers in the Bank stick their noses into la colonie’s business, looking to take over. Never seemed to me to be worth their while; we’re too poor for them to make any real money off us. Maybe they knew something was down here.”

  “That still doesn’t explain where the wind is coming from,” Pascal said, “or where it’s going.”

  “Whatever that probe is,” George-Étienne said, staring at the frozen image, “it’ll be good salvage. Three meters long minimum. In metals alone, it’ll be more than we harvest.”

  “How are we going to get it out?” Pascal asked. “Against the wind?”

  “It got in there somehow,” his father said. “We’ll make a salvage plan and we’ll get it out.”

  George-Étienne wandered away cheerfully to resume chores that hadn’t been done for a day, especially now that Pascal couldn’t put on his suit for a few days. Pascal turned his attention back to the pictures. He flipped through them more slowly, examining each one minutely.

  All the static came from the bad transmitter. They’d need a new transmitter for the next try, or he’d need to disassemble and rebuild this one. At least he could do that while his legs were healing. He ran a diagnostic program on the transmitter to see what parts he’d need.

  But the diagnostic failed. Nothing was wrong with the transmitter. It passed all the tests and should have transmitted all the way back to the probe, even through the cave. He wasn’t an expert on supercritical carbon dioxide, but he didn’t think Venus’s atmosphere could have interfered with radio waves.

  He dug deeper into the camera’s simple operating system. In the admin levels, he found the logs for the last ten minutes of operation, a kind of transmitter black box for diagnostics if the device stopped working. It wasn’t coded for easy user interface, but he made his way through the code and memory buffers and found a lot more radio signal than there should have been.

  A very defined radio wave curve showed, increasing in strength as the camera descended into the cave. Even with only ten minutes of sample, it was unmistakable. What would produce radio waves under the surface of Venus? He didn’t think it was the triangular probe, if it really was a probe. It had been the same temperature as the rest of its environment, which meant its circuitry was probably inactive.

  The radio signals repeated with the regularity of some kind of machinery. But what machinery would have survived in the crushing pressure and melting depths of Venus? And why? The basaltic rock had nothing of value. Except the wind?

  He ran all his calculations again, then called Pa.

  SEVEN

  ÉMILE PULLED THÉRÈSE close, playfully pulled the joint from her lips, took a drag and then replaced it. They lay naked under a blanket in one of the cargo bays. Music played, too low for the kind of angry yelling in the song. It was a hard-bitten album of rock rage, heavy percussion, but playing quietly, making of the music an echo of anger.

  Other couples who had communed with
Venus snuggled there too, under their own blankets, or stretched out on boxes, speaking in hushed voices. All mellow. No one had refused to remove their helmet. Every one of them had looked upon Venus with naked eyes, breathing her breath, as they would on Earth. It was empowering, overwhelming and humbling. Émile didn’t know quite what to do with the feelings he couldn’t name.

  He was high. And drunk. And sore, like he had been punched over and over. He’d gotten off easier than Thérèse. The low pressure had given her two black eyes, and the white of one of them had filled with blood. His joints ached. His bones ached. But he felt like he’d done something enormous.

  Across the storeroom, someone gasped in pain and stamped their foot over and over, swearing.

  “Mmm,” Thérèse said. “Hélène is aciding.”

  Émile didn’t try to see. He’d heard of aciding. Hélène and her friends used acid-resistant stencils to paint new, artful scars onto their bodies. They baptized themselves with sulfuric acid, consenting to be marked by their new home, and making of the baptism works of art. Émile had seen dozens of such marks, but the idea of intentionally burning his skin with acid was still alien to him. He had too much of the coureur des vents in him. He’d been painfully touched by Venus many times. Before now, he’d never understood their meaning. A naked, brown-haired man about his age came across the room.

  “You guys want to acid too?” he asked, crouching. A spray of five tear-shaped acid scars marked each cheek symmetrically. Old acid.

  Émile shook his head. He wanted to consecrate this moment, but maybe not with acid, and not yet. He ached too much already.

  “I don’t want to mess with the buzz, Réjean,” Thérèse said.

  “You don’t need it, n’est-ce pas?” Réjean said to Émile. “Your hands are covered. Were you in an accident?”

  Émile lifted his arms out of the blanket and considered them. His muscles ran deep. Raised red spots speckled them. Snaking, wormy lines of raised scar flesh made inscrutable patterns. Deep divots showed where acid had melted his muscle before he could stop it.

  “Just years in the lower decks,” Émile said.

  “The lower cloud decks?” Réjean said. “No shit! Just the hands?”

  “All over,” Thérèse said with a satisfied grin as she snuggled close to Émile.

  Réjean’s face twitched, then he smiled.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Émile.”

  “D’Aquillon,” Thérèse added.

  “D’Aquillon. Aren’t you the one with the retarded brother?” Réjean laughed.

  Émile shrugged off Thérèse and stood. Réjean was of a size with Émile, which made him pretty big, but Émile punched him so hard that he fell back over a protesting couple, spraying blood from his lips and nose. Émile stomped over to him and grabbed his hair, his fist cocked back for another go.

  “Don’t ever call my brother retarded!” Émile said, shaking the man’s head.

  Réjean flinched, waiting for another blow. Blood painted his chin. Émile’s heart thumped. He was within an ace of clocking the colon again. Who the crisse was he to call Jean-Eudes anything?

  Thérèse tugged softly on his arm. She stood pale and naked beside him.

  “He got it,” she said. “Come on, fighter-boy. Bring your scars back under the covers.” She pulled more insistently. “Come on. Less fighting, more loving. This is Venus.”

  Émile released Réjean’s hair and stood straight, then let himself be led back by the hand to their little nest. Réjean swore in the gloom, and the others watched him slink back to the far end where he’d been aciding Hélène. Under their inadequate blanket, on their sides, nose to nose, he and Thérèse radiated warmth. Thérèse smiled.

  “How drunk are you?” she whispered.

  “Half?”

  “How high are you?”

  “The other half.”

  “Are you always this violent when you’re drunk?” she said softly.

  He shook his head.

  “What’s your brother like?”

  He examined her face, her one blue eye, her one eye filled with bright blood, her raised brows, the thin nose and parted lips. She wasn’t making fun of him. She wasn’t playing for anything. She was present. She was always present. The only thing that ever shifted was the target of her attention.

  “Jean-Eudes is older than me by two years,” Émile said slowly. “The doctors found out he had Down Syndrome and told Pa and maman to abort. Pa told them to fuck off. They told Pa that la colonie couldn’t afford to support people like Jean-Eudes and that he’d never get rations or medicine.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said.

  “Maybe. Pa told them to fuck off again and got a deep trawler habitat. The rest of us were born at fiftieth rang.”

  She traced the lines of his face with slow fingers.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  Her expression was not wise or sympathetic. It was predatory, on the scent of a secret.

  “You hate the government?”

  He worried at the rough weave of their blanket. Pinched at it. Brushed at dirt and lint.

  “No,” he said finally. “I agree with what they did.”

  “They took away rations and medicine from your family!”

  He shook his head fractionally.

  “The government didn’t take away rations and medicine from all of us. Just Jean-Eudes. But my Pa said that if Jean-Eudes couldn’t get rations and medicine, none of the D’Aquillons would.”

  “What did your mother say?”

  “She never said. I guess she loved her son as much as Pa does.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said after some thought.

  “There’s only so much medicine,” he said, working at the fabric again, conscious of the heat of her eyes on his face. “There’s only so much food. La colonie needs every pair of hands to produce something, to earn their keep, to strap up their own suits. That wasn’t a secret to anyone, least of all my father when he emigrated here. If he’d been a man, he would have done the right thing.”

  “Abort your brother?”

  “Yup,” he said with a quiver in his voice. He cleared his throat. “Because of Pa’s choice, we had to move into the parts of Venus that are like Hell. My father wasn’t man enough to bear his own pain, so he spread it over his children. My mother died down there, too far away from medicine. My sister and her husband died down there, trying to make a living in the depths, and now my nephew Alexis is an orphan.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s my father.”

  “You just punched Réjean.”

  He traced the deep bruising around her eyes with his rough fingertips. She was fragile. He was fragile. And they huddled under a blanket, seeking animal warmth in high cold clouds.

  “I don’t hate Jean-Eudes,” Émile said. “My big brother is the most innocent, gentle person I’ve ever known. I love him, but I hate myself for knowing my father picked the wrong path for all of us. He didn’t have the right to put a curse on our family.”

  She stroked his chest. Her face had become pensive. The hunter of secrets had found something she didn’t know what to do with, and contemplated playing with her food.

  “What would you choose now, for your brother?” she asked softly.

  “I’d do anything to protect Jean-Eudes. I’d fight a hundred Réjeans. Pa exiled us, but taught us one thing that’s true: family always comes first.”

  “That’s noble,” she said. “You don’t need to hate your own nobility.”

  He chuckled and his joints hurt again. “That’s not nobility. Gangsters have the same values.”

  She laughed delightedly and stroked his cheek. “I’m imagining you as a gangster,” she said, “standing on corners, getting protection money.” She smiled at her fairy tale. “How often do you see your father?”

  “I saw him five years ago.”

  Her eyes widened. “What happened?”

&nbs
p; He flattened her hands between his. Both of them traced the ropey red lines of acid scars on his hands with their eyes. These scars weren’t artistic, just the terrible and inevitable injuries of living in the lower cloud decks. He’d survived his accidents by luck.

  “I couldn’t respect a man for making children pay for his choice and he couldn’t see how he’d hurt his family. And he didn’t like my drinking or my getting high. He called me an alcoholic.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Tabarnak, if there’s one place we need a drink, it’s Venus,” she said.

  He grinned.

  “Fifty kilometers down,” she said wonderingly. “You’ve lived wrapped in Venus. Literally. In Venusian life.”

  He gave a short laugh. She took his hands and kissed all the raised acid scars, one by one.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

  Her lips pressed against his, wet and hot.

  “But you came up,” she said. “You came to the sun.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? If you could live deep.”

  “Deep is shitty,” he said. “It’s not easy to stay alive down there, including your habitat. To keep someone alive, you have to hold up a seventy-degree temperature gradient across the inside and outside, and a half an atmosphere of pressure. For the trawler, you’ve got to keep parasites from latching on. You’ve got to graft in extra capacitors to take off the electrical strain, polish all the valves daily because they’re not evolved to work across a temperature gradient, and it goes on and on. And every few years, no matter what you do, something fails.”

  “Could you maybe take me down?” she asked. “To visit?”

  “If we can find a habitat to visit that isn’t my home. Pa also doesn’t approve of poets or artists.”

  She laughed. “You’ve found the right crowd. We approve of poets and artists and fighter-boys with scarred hands. I want to see the depths.”