The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  He traced the hard line of her collarbone with his fingertip. “I’ll show you any part of Venus you want.”

  She laughed again. “You can’t show me the surface.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  She rolled over him, putting her elbows on his chest so that her hair fell around them.

  “What?”

  “Pa brought me below all the clouds and hazes when I was fifteen. Thirty-first rang.”

  “Ostie,” she whispered. Her eyes narrowed. “You saw it from thirty-one kilometers? I can’t even imagine.”

  If he’d known any of this interested Thérèse, he would have brought it up a lot sooner. Most of his time in the flotilla at sixty-fifth rang, he felt like a country hick, disconnected from people who’d gone to school together, seen each other regularly, gone to the same festivals and parties. He’d run with a drinking, pot-smoking crowd for a while until he’d worked up the courage to call himself a poet and meet other artists. They didn’t exactly give him any better sense of belonging. He stopped taking it personally when he found out that no one felt like they belonged.

  “What was it like?” she asked.

  “A lot like the pictures. Hadean. Stygian. Blackened. Endless. Broken. Sterile. Nothing can survive beneath thirty-second rang, not even Venusian life. It’s the bottom of a living ocean and the top of a dead one.”

  “But you’ve really seen her.”

  He’d never thought about it in those terms. He’d seen Venus, but he hadn’t seen Venus in the momentous, experiential sense she meant. Could he see Venus again, in her way?

  “I can show you other things,” he said. “The transparent layers at Les Plaines and Grande Allée. Between the cloud decks, you feel like you’re flying and you can see for kilometers, but all the world is sandwiched between two sheets of clouds. I can show you the storms where the thunder feels like it will break your bones and lightning feels like it will blind you.”

  He wanted her to say yes. He could show her. And he could imagine some habitat for them at an easier depth, like fifty-second rang, where the two of them could herd trawlers and grow food and make art. Artists could visit and stay and create, in the clouds. The image in his mind grew clearer.

  She pouted. “I made such a big deal of knowing Venus, and I hardly know it at all. I haven’t really touched it.”

  “I would never have looked at it with my naked eyes if not for you,” Émile said.

  “It was a high,” she said, squirming her naked body a little higher so that her nose was above his, and her voice quieted. “But I feel like I’ll never be close enough, no matter what I do, like I’ll never belong to Venus no matter how much I try. What did you feel?”

  Her red, Venus-marked eye stared at him.

  “I felt that you touched Venus,” he said, “that you belonged, and that through you, I belonged too.”

  She softened, looked away shyly and then kissed him. The world narrowed in the same awe-inspiring, swept-up-on-the-winds feeling he’d had when he’d stared upon Venus’s clouds with naked eyes. Everything was more alive. A constant high.

  Then someone kicked him in the back.

  “Champion des épais!” a woman’s voice said behind him.

  His heart sank.

  Thérèse looked up, looking like it was her turn to punch someone. Émile held her hands.

  “Who are you, conne?” Thérèse demanded.

  Émile rolled her beside him, wrapping her tighter in the blanket.

  “This is Marthe,” he said. “My little sister.”

  “The Causapscal-des-Vents started venting today, colon,” Marthe said. She was red-faced angry, still in her survival suit, sans helmet, hands on her hips in tight fists.

  “What?” he asked, sitting up.

  “You’ve only got a couple of jobs, ostie d’con,” Marthe said. “Keep the habitat floating! Harvest the crops! You’re drunk or high most of the time, and I had to fix what you ought to have noticed weeks ago!”

  “Ostie, who invited the buzzkill?” someone asked, rolling deeper under their blanket.

  Marthe surveyed the storage room with the hard judgment he hated.

  “Gang de caves! Why don’t you get to work?” she said, her voice echoing off the hard walls. “Thousands of people are working their asses off trying to keep us all alive and you’re just getting high and diddling around with acid.”

  “Get started,” Réjean said sarcastically. “We’ll be along shortly.”

  A few people snickered. It didn’t matter to Marthe. He could see it in her glare. Lazy people deserved only her contempt.

  “Get your fucking ass to the Causapscal,” she said to Émile, “and go bow to stern and find every other wear spot, abrasion and piece that needs fixing, primping, or replacing and fix them.”

  She glared at him for a few seconds, daring him to answer back. He felt his face going hot down to his chest, heat throbbing in his ears as everyone watched him.

  “He’s not your slave, bitch,” someone said. “If there’s that much work, why don’t you do half?”

  Marthe wasn’t tall, but she had a head of steam going and she was looking at these people the way Pa would have. She flipped them the bird. No one else said anything. Marthe spun, marched to the door and slammed it closed after herself.

  Émile couldn’t read Thérèse’s expression. He didn’t know her well enough. His face was hot and his body felt cold. Wordlessly, he stood, grabbed his survival suit and helmet, and padded out naked.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS TEN o’clock and Alexis and Jean-Eudes were asleep. The walls of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs still glowed with some light from the clouds, but wouldn’t for long. Venus rotated so slowly that each day lasted eighty-eight Earth days, but that wasn’t how les colonistes measured things. Those who lived in the habitats above the clouds at sixty-fifth rang circled Venus every ninety-six hours. They had forty-eight hours of bright daylight and forty-eight hours of auroras and misty starscapes. The winds at forty-eighth rang circled Venus at a more stately pace, every eight days, half in somber light, half in a dark gloom.

  Pascal liked sunsets and sunrises. He’d suited up and watched many of them from the gantry, sometimes with Pa, sometimes by himself. Venus had layers and secrets and ways of being that existed beyond what he could label, that only she understood. As her clouds reddened at sunset, that wavelength of light triggered hibernation responses and buoyancy surges in the photosynthesizers, like the ball-shaped blastulae, the onion-shaped rosettes, and even the aerial bacteria of the clouds. Only the trawlers carried their wakefulness into the dark, because they fed on the atmospheric static and storm lightning, indifferent to time.

  Venus never tolerated true darkness, though. On still nights when lightning didn’t backlight the clouds, wind eddies triggered directionless glows from bioluminescent aerial bacteria. The clouds became embers throbbing with fairy glows of pink, turquoise and pale lime. Some coureurs took them as Venus’s welcome message to humanity; others saw in these spectral glows will-o’-the-wisps to draw the unwary.

  George-Étienne followed Pascal’s look, then scanned the arc of the ceiling appraisingly, assessing the texture of the light. “About four more hours,” he said. Then he turned back to the three datapads they’d placed side-by-side on the table to show Pascal’s analysis. Pascal had found two or three small channels blowing into the main cave they’d entered with the camera.

  “A pressure sink,” his father said wonderingly, “is incredibly valuable if we can find out how to use it.”

  “It doesn’t belong to us,” Pascal said.

  “It sure as hell does!”

  “It belongs to la colonie, Pa. That’s the law.”

  “Most of the laws are bullshit,” George-Étienne said. “The law creates an artificial supply problem to keep metal and mineral prices high.”

  “Those are the laws we’ve got.”

  “Which means our pressure sink belongs to the Bank that holds the colonial de
bt,” George-Étienne said, stabbing a finger at the still image on the pad in front of Pascal.

  “It’s not like la colonie can exploit or even explore it, Pa.”

  “Non. We’ll explore it,” George-Étienne said. “And we’re not sharing it with a corrupt government or the extortionists at the Bank!”

  “The probe nearly didn’t survive,” Pascal said. “Working remotely is too slow for the time we’re in radio range.”

  His father smiled meaningfully. “We don’t take the probe.”

  Pascal looked at him incredulously. “The bathyscaphe? Does it still even work?”

  “Of course it works!” George-Étienne said. “It just needed a bit of love. We can explore the cave from just outside. With the right equipment. And we can pull out that probe.”

  “We?”

  “It’d be cramped, but we’ll need both our brains on this one.”

  His father’s grin was infectious. A tiny, fearful thrill built in Pascal. He might see the real surface of Venus.

  “What about the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs?”

  “It runs mostly by itself,” George-Étienne said, “and can for a dozen hours. And Alexis is here.”

  “Pa...”

  “Alexis is ten years old,” George-Etienne said. “At ten, Chloé, Émile and Marthe were already maintaining the habitat and even worked outside. At ten, I was programming tractors to plow hundreds of acres of fields.”

  Pascal didn’t roll his eyes. If half the stories his father told of his childhood were true, it was a wonder they’d been born. Twelve hours felt like a lot, but the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs did just mostly float with the wind. And they could control some of its propulsion remotely if needed. The larger worry was losing some of their herd of trawlers.

  “We’ll need to fit the bathyscaphe with cables, and a remote set of manipulator arms, and a camera,” his father said. “And we should make a frame we can put around the probe or whatever it is. As we pull it out, it’s going to hit the walls as hard as our camera did. I don’t want to risk it coming loose or getting too dented.”

  “The cable has to be really long, and the camera needs a stronger transmitter, or even a repeater,” Pascal said, warming to the topic. “And real radio recording equipment to listen for that signal.”

  George-Étienne laughed and clapped Pascal on the shoulder.

  NINE

  THE NEXT DAY passed quickly. Pascal had a lot of thinking to do. He had a natural aptitude for math and machines. George-Étienne had gotten him all the electronic texts and virtual professors to study engineering. And not just any engineering. To survive in the clouds of Venus, they needed people as comfortable with electrical engineering as they were with aeronautical and aerospace engineering. And, counter-intuitively, the new Venusians even needed to understand the principles of marine engineering for anything they wanted to send all the way to the surface. He needed all of what he’d learned and more for what they were planning.

  The day bled out again, and Jean-Eudes and Alexis had gone to bed. George-Étienne was too excited to sleep, and he’d gone back out to modify the bathyscaphe to Pascal’s specifications.

  Pascal was restless, though. He looked at maman’s picture for a long time. She was beautiful, in the effortless way some people carried beauty. Her brown eyes looked out from the picture, one fractionally narrower than the other, under a clear forehead marred by a spattering of acid scars. Her lips were thin, smiling lopsidedly under a nose bent just so. She owned her gifts and flaws with the self-knowledge and self-acceptance that created beauty out of nothing. He wanted her confidence, the sui generis certainty of herself.

  He padded slowly to his father’s empty room. There were few limits in their home and nothing was secret about his father’s room. Alexis romped in there as much as anywhere else in the habitat. Still, Pascal was grown up and felt strange about stepping in. But hanging on the curved wall in old discolored plastic was a dress: maman’s. George-Étienne had preserved as much as he could of his wife from recycling and reuse, for himself and for his children.

  Jeanne-Manse’s dress was both historical artifact and proof of life. Jeanne-Manse had lived. Maman had lived. Pascal brushed his fingertips across the crinkly plastic. The tightly-woven hemp dress was dyed green, with pink- and blue-petaled flowers painted on the material with her own hands. This was her wedding dress—vivid, fertile, alive. Venus didn’t have a lot of green, so it was a special color, something many colonistes felt they themselves had brought to Venus. Human eyes expected to see green everywhere because they came from a green world. The absence of green from their new world made it fit strangely.

  Pascal carefully lifted the plastic. The vivid colors had faded, but still balmed the primitive, unthinking parts of his brain. His fingers found the tiny, inevitable melt-marks and then the buttons, which came undone only stiffly. The old fabric protested, but soon he held the dress before him. It didn’t smell of maman. It smelled faintly of sulfur, like everything else in the habitat.

  He hugged it tightly, and then, without thinking it through, put it over his head and slipped his arms into the sleeves. His heart beat faster and his fingers started to shake, faltering at the buttons. He took deep breaths and did one button slowly, then another. At sixteen, he wasn’t much bigger than maman had been fully grown. The fabric creaked, but didn’t break.

  His father’s room had a sink and head with a mirror over it. He approached hesitantly. He brushed his hair with his fingers, imitating what he could of the way maman’s hair had hung. Then, shyly, he looked in the mirror. He flushed deep red from neck to hairline.

  The dress looked good. A tiny elation grew in his chest, spreading through his body. His green eyes stared from beneath thin eyebrows. He had his mother’s slightly-bent nose, her light brown hair, her thin lips. He tried smiling like her, with one side of her mouth more than the other, and found it not so hard. He belonged.

  Loud laughing burst in the doorway and Pascal’s heart stopped.

  Jean-Eudes stood in his underwear, eyes wide, laughing louder than Pascal had ever heard him laugh, big, joyful, surprised, ridiculous guffaws, so hard that he collapsed against the door frame, sitting, holding his shaking belly. Pascal’s mouth was dust. He was so embarrassed he thought he was going to pass out.

  “Jean-Eudes...” he said helplessly.

  But Jean-Eudes rolled sideways onto the floor, still laughing.

  Pascal wanted to be angry. At being interrupted. At being seen. He felt like he should be angry. But his shoulders slumped. Jean-Eudes’s laugh was infectious. It was a little funny. Despite himself, Pascal began to laugh, softly at first, with a strange relief, and then harder until he was sitting beside his brother, laughing until the laughing came in after-fits, like the smaller flashes of lightning that followed a storm.

  Jean-Eudes panted like he’d been running. “You wore maman’s dress,” he said, trying to make his laughing fit come back.

  “Oui.”

  “That was so funny.” Jean-Eudes giggled a bit more.

  Pascal rose and looked at himself once more in the mirror. He looked like his mother, but it wasn’t Jeanne-Manse staring back. Someone new and real and beautiful stared back at him.

  “That was so funny,” Jean-Eudes said.

  Pascal unbuttoned the dress.

  “Put it on for papa!” Jean-Eudes said, sitting up. “Put it on for Alexis!”

  Pascal shook his head and then gently lifted the dress over his head.

  “I might want to keep this a secret,” he said.

  “Awww,” Jean-Eudes said. “Papa won’t be mad! He’ll laugh. It’s soooo funny.” He laid back onto the floor and his voice trailed off wistfully. “So funny.”

  “Do you remember maman much?” Pascal asked.

  “I remember everything,” Jean-Eudes insisted, as he always did.

  “You’re lucky,” Pascal said, putting the dress back on its hanger. “I was too little to remember much about her. I’ve got the
pictures. And this dress.”

  His brother came close. “I can tell you everything about her,” Jean-Eudes said. “She liked finger-painting! She made spicy food. We wrestled. She danced with me and Émile and Chloé. I can teach you.” His face saddened. “I miss maman.”

  Pascal pulled the plastic back over the dress. “Me too.”

  “Is that why you put on maman’s dress?” Jean-Eudes asked. “I can tell you everything about her, okay?”

  “Oui.”

  Jean-Eudes hugged Pascal impulsively. His older brother still outweighed him and sometimes gave breath-crushing hugs out of sheer enthusiasm.

  “Papa’s gonna laugh about the dress,” Jean-Eudes said.

  “Yes, he will,” Pascal said with a sinking feeling.

  TEN

  MARTHE TOOK A seat and rolled herself a cigarette while she waited for the other members of l’Assemblée to arrive. She took a long drag and blew smoke upward, trying to dissipate the tightness between her shoulders. Émile hadn’t changed. Pa hadn’t changed. Only she had changed. She’d become Pa, and now she was yelling at Émile.

  Her exhaled smoke curled and dispersed into a gray fog. Smoke wasn’t like the clouds. Cloud droplets were too big to stay suspended. Smoke particles were too small to see and seemed to defy gravity, like the particulate haze below forty-eighth rang where she’d spent a lot of her childhood. The end of her cigarette glowed bright red again and she inhaled deeply before exhaling slowly. Pa’s rages, and Émile’s, and hers, all defied gravity too. It took them time to come down.

  Nine years ago, she’d been fifteen years old, crowded into the new Causapscal-des-Profondeurs with Pa, Émile, Chloé, Mathurin, baby Alexis, Jean-Eudes and Pascal, impatiently learning all the things she was clumsy at, like patching suits. Alexis had been sleeping, rocked very deliberately by Jean-Eudes, who watched Marthe getting frustrated with maman’s survival suit. Maman had died about the time Alexis came into the world, and Marthe had just grown big enough to fit into maman’s suit—if she could cut and seal a few parts.