Pascal smiled shyly and expanded an engineering schematic on his pad. Around a rough outline of the cave, he’d drawn a cap to go over the cave mouth, with a massive door in it. Deeper in the cave were other caps, each with airlocks, and some with turbines to generate electricity.
Under this design, in each successive portion of the cave system, the temperature and pressure dropped, like a series of refrigerators one inside the other, taking advantage of the final pressure drop into the hard vacuum. Two portions of the cave system had areas where eddies had scoured out voluminous caverns. Pascal had designed underground habitats in these, with bioreactors, tool shops, hydroponic areas, small living spaces, and even a tiny port from which they could use powered vacuum suits to explore the other side. Marthe blew smoke upwards and butted out her cigarette in a bowl.
“Good work, Pascal.”
“It works,” he insisted. “We can build it. This is all off-the-shelf tech.”
She made a face. “How much steel do you need to hold back ninety atmospheres of pressure?” she asked.
“We don’t need to hold all ninety-three atmospheres at once,” he said. “Because the airlocks are nested, we can distribute twenty to thirty atmospheres across any given one. The steel we have will survive that.”
“We don’t have any steel, Pascal,” she said.
“Oui,” her father said, smiling.
She caught his meaning. Her mind raced, looking for any other possible meaning to his cryptic assertion. At the same time, her thoughts ran down rabbit holes of implications.
“Non,” she said. “That’s insane.”
“What?” Pascal asked. “What’s insane?
“There’s lot of metal in the Causapscal-des-Vents,” George-Étienne said.
Pascal’s eyebrows rose. Then rose again. At any other time, it would have been funny. It wasn’t any other time. Pa was grinning now. Marthe sighed. Pa took her tobacco case, rolled her a cigarette and handed it to her. Then he started laying out his ideas.
TWENTY-THREE
AFTER SO MANY hours of shocks, the family finally settled. Alexis had to go to bed. Pa broke out a jar of tord-boyaux he’d brewed a while ago. He and Marthe continued drinking together. Pascal had rarely seen Pa drink and didn’t really want to now. And Pa and Marthe looked like they wanted to speak quietly between themselves anyway.
Pascal felt strange. Seeing Marthe woke weird feelings he couldn’t put his finger on. He shepherded Jean-Eudes to their room and made Alexis get into his hammock. His older brother was breathless and smiling.
“So many movies!” Jean-Eudes said, yawning. “And music. I love it when Marthe comes! I wish she’d live with us.”
“Help me with her hammock,” Pascal said, holding out one side of the hammock ropes. It wasn’t a job he needed help with, but he and Pa and Marthe all found things that Jean-Eudes could help with. Jean-Eudes was happiest when he was taking care of his family. And his elaborately overdone knots never slipped.
“What’s a saint?” Jean-Eudes asked after he’d tied a fist-sized knot on one side of Marthe’s hammock.
“Where’d you hear that word?”
“In one of the movies. Also, a lot of people are called saint something,” Jean-Eudes said. “Saint Cyr. Saint Hyacinthe. There’s more. Saint Siméon.”
“In the olden days, people believed in lots of things that weren’t true,” Pascal said, sitting on his own hammock. The slow sway of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs rocked him. “Saints are magical things, like fairies. In the olden days, they believed that some people were so great in life that they became magical after they died, and that their magic helped people who believed in them.”
“You don’t believe in saints?”
“No, buddy,” Pascal said. “That’s just make-believe.”
Jean-Eudes began the fourth layer of his knot. It was now bigger than his fist. Marthe wouldn’t fall. “That’s too bad. If saints were true, maman would be a saint and we’d see her.”
“Saints didn’t always appear like fairies,” Pascal said, laying back. “I think you felt them around you while they helped you.”
Jean-Eudes had no more rope. It was all in his fat knot. He tugged to test it and moved into his own hammock. His breathing became deep and slow and Pascal thought he’d dozed off.
“If saints were real, papa could be a saint too,” Jean-Eudes said. “And he would keep watching us, protecting us.”
Pascal looked over. Jean-Eudes was making a face, and his eyes watered.
“What is it, buddy?” Pascal asked, sitting up.
“I don’t want papa to go away like maman,” he said with a trembling voice.
“Pa is young, Jean-Eudes,” Pascal said. “He’s going to be around a long time, so long that you’re going to have to help take care of him when he’s old.”
Jean-Eudes gave a little laugh at the thought. “But he’s older than me,” he said. “Who will take care of us then?”
Pascal reached across the swaying space and put his hand on his brother’s arm.
“Marthe will. She’s like Pa,” he said. “She’s not scared of anything.”
“Of anything?” Jean-Eudes asked.
Pascal couldn’t imagine anything that would even give her pause.
Jean-Eudes laughed into the silence, answering his own question. “No. My little sister isn’t afraid of anything.”
They were quiet for a time, listening to the hushed voices outside, the barks of sudden laughter against the creaking of the trawler in the wind. Marthe and Pa had the same tone of laugh. After a time, Marthe came in.
“You guys are still awake?” she said. “I think it’s only afternoon for Émile and me.”
She swayed a bit and her cheeks had pinkened. She’d stripped down to shorts and a loose tank top, but she was still sweating. Pulling a small bottle from the pouch of her suit, she sat on her hammock and pulled one foot up.
A directionless longing rose in Pascal. His mouth was dry.
“How are you doing, Pascal?” she asked. Her elegantly raised eyebrow was a kind of compulsion he had trouble resisting.
“I’m okay,” he said quietly.
She opened the bottle, revealing a tiny brush covered with red lacquer. How had she gotten nail polish? Had someone made it? With all the things that they couldn’t have on Venus, his sister had nail polish.
“You’re sixteen,” she said. “You must get lonely here.”
“I’m here,” Jean-Eudes said. “He’s not lonely.”
“Shhhh, Jean-Eudes,” she said, painting one toenail. “We’ll get to you in a minute. We let the little brother talk first.”
Pascal’s face felt hot. He stared at the glistening polish.
“You’ve never seen a girl paint her toes?” she smiled.
He looked away, embarrassed.
“Chloé and I made our own polish as soon as we knew enough chemistry,” she said. “Our first few tries were awful. Oils and resins from blastulae are good for the lacquer, but we could only make a puke color.”
“Puke!” Jean-Eudes cackled. “Puke!” Marthe smiled at him, but kept painting.
“Chloé talked about boys,” she said. “I talked about girls. We were going to go into business and sell our nail polish all over la colonie and make everyone beautiful.”
Pascal thought he could remember those times, when Chloé had been fifteen and Marthe thirteen, Pascal had been just five or six and still sleeping in a room with Pa and maman. The Causapscal-des-Profondeurs had been new then, and they’d since changed the layout. Chloé and Marthe had shared a room that he remembered as immense, although it had probably been little better than a closet with hammocks. Jean-Eudes and Émile had hammocked in the main room. Pascal had wanted desperately to be old enough to share a room with his sisters, and Chloé had let him sleep in her hammock a few times.
“Did you?” Pascal asked.
She shook her head. “Chloé got her boy,” she said wistfully. “And other people make b
etter stuff than this. I make my own for fun.”
“Can you paint my toes?” Jean-Eudes said.
“That’s for girls, Jean-Eudes,” Pascal said uncertainly.
“It’s for anyone who washes their feet,” Marthe corrected.
“I can wash my feet!” Jean-Eudes hopped from his hammock.
“Come on, Pascal,” she said. “It’s fun.”
His churning stomach hollowed nervously, but he hopped off his hammock. She came off hers and sat on the floor. Jean-Eudes sat beside them.
“You have to dry them, silly,” she told him.
Jean-Eudes hustled back to the basin, leaving wet foot prints. She motioned Pascal to give her his foot. It was scary and thrilling. He didn’t understand why. The brush licked his big toenail, leaving red. Marthe gave two other strokes and then the first nail was done. It looked beautiful.
“You should come to the upper clouds, Pascal,” she said, painting the next nail. “You need to see people your own age.”
The idea terrified him. Two strokes and the next one was done too.
Marthe tilted her head, examining her work, blowing on the first three toes.
“Do you like girls? Boys? Both?” she asked.
The smell of Pa’s homemade sipping whiskey was on her breath.
His answer slipped out of him before he had a chance to question it. “I don’t even like myself.”
Jean-Eudes looked at Pascal strangely, but Marthe had already told him to wait his turn and he was quietly attentive, feet drying. Marthe didn’t look at Pascal strangely. She nodded at him as if what he’d said was the most logical thing in the world. She turned to the last two toes and finished them in one stroke each.
“Don’t touch them to anything until they dry,” she said. “That’s good advice for toes and people.” She capped the bottle. “You don’t need to decide between boys and girls, but no brother of mine isn’t going to like himself,” she said, pulling him into a headlock and knuckling the top of his head. It turned into a hug, and for a moment he felt safe. He loved Marthe. And he was jealous of how comfortable she was in her skin.
TWENTY-FOUR
ÉMILE STUMBLED INTO the habitat area of the Jonquière. He’d been drinking. And smoking weed. For hours. He was actually hammered, and he’d still made it here on his wing-pack. The day he couldn’t fly hammered was the day Venus really should take him. He’d nearly missed the upper landing platform. He’d fallen, bent one of his wing struts, but caught himself before he’d gone over the edge. He didn’t know who lived on the Jonquière, or whose party this was, but he hadn’t dented their stuff.
Thérèse had been moody and unresponsive. She hadn’t answered his messages. Even Marthe, with whom he got on well enough sometimes, had gone. He was kicking about their shitty habitat alone. Sometimes cleaning. Sometimes fixing. Mostly just sitting around, smoking Marthe’s cigarettes and fermenting a new batch of bagosse that couldn’t be ready fast enough. He’d scrawled shitty lines of stilted, unimaginative poetry on his pad until he’d decided to crash this party.
He took off his helmet and hung it in the webbing under the ceiling. Beyond the door was drumming. He spun the wheel and opened the door. The drumming echoed loud in a haze of cigarette and hashish smoke hanging oily in the air.
Émile came face-to-face with Réjean.
“This your habitat?” Émile asked.
“Oui,” Réjean said.
Émile swayed. Réjean’s pupils were all fucked up. Émile clapped a hand on Réjean’s shoulder and leaned in. “As long as you don’t say anything about my family, we got no problems,” he said.
Réjean’s screwy pupils stared back. He had a huge bruise on his neck.
“Did I do that?”
Réjean looked puzzled for a second, then touched his neck. “Hoarders.”
“What?” Émile said.
“Didn’t break, but it was close,” Réjean said, slurring a bit. “I’m a constable. We got called in to raid some black-marketing family, a big operation. I got hit with a bat right in the neck. Thought she broke it.”
“Sapristi. I thought you guys had tasers.”
“It was too close. I tasered one guy, but then hit one of my buddies. But we had back-up, Bank security.”
“What the hell does Bank security care?” Émile said.
Réjean shrugged. “The government asked them to back us up ‘cause it was a big operation. And I think the Bank guys need the practice. They haven’t got much to do. And who knows? Black-marketing may cut into their profits.”
“Quick mop up?” Émile said, swaying.
“Not so much. These guys were hoarding everything! Metal. Tools. Food. Liquor. Cigarettes.”
“Crisse!”
“They weren’t ready to give up. But the Bank guys had guns.”
“Really?”
“Really. Gunpowder. Goddamn loud.”
“They shot them?”
“One of them,” Réjean said.
“Why wasn’t it in the news?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the Bank or the government didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Maybe they think it’ll make people nervous. Makes me feel better. Fucking hoarders. I got some of their stock. I don’t have much, but there’s enough for a shot or two for everybody,” Réjean said, jerking his thumb to a plastic bag of clear liquid hanging on the wall.
Émile smiled. This might be a good party.
“I write shitty poetry,” he confessed, swaying closer.
“I paint acid scars,” Réjean said. “I did a lot of Thérèse.”
Émile didn’t trust the meaning, and rocked Réjean back and forth with hard muscles. “You did some really nice work on the vines,” he said finally, then released Réjean and walked around him.
The gondola, all of the Jonquière’s habitat, really, was packed with partiers. Blinds blocked out the omnipresent sun, leaving hard straight beams of sunlight to cut through the gaps and across the smoky room. He put his empty metal flask beneath the spigot and filled it.
He turned, took a swig and shuddered.
Crisse!
Terrible. Coarse and bitter and sulfurous. It burned all the way down. Mouth. Throat. Stomach. It had already been diluted, but just with water. Nothing masked the awful taste.
In the corner across from him, under slashes of bright daylight, a young man drew a knife across the inside of his forearm. The angle of the light and the arm showed rows of scars from old cuts. Émile flexed his left arm self-consciously, where his acid burn in the shape of a trawler was slowly healing.
Venus only receives us with pain, Thérèse had said. He took another swig of bagosse, swayed in place uncertainly. He wanted to help the kid, but who was he to get between the boy and Venus? Who was he at all? His communion had not given him answers, any more than Thérèse’s communion had. Émile stumbled forward, put his hand on the cutter’s shoulder.
“I write shitty poetry,” Émile said.
The young man regarded him uncertainly. Émile ran a fingertip across the many scars, dragging the new-welling blood across them.
“You already gave Venus her due,” he said.
“Clouds don’t touch anything,” the young man said. His pupils were huge; he was so high.
“No,” Émile said, drinking again, not taking his eyes from the man, “I guess they don’t.”
“We’re all clouds,” the young man said. Then he began to weep quietly.
Émile retreated.
Few people here had ever seen Earth. They had mostly been born here. Venus was their birthright, their home, but it often fit like an oversized survival suit. Or a suit with a wrinkle in it you just couldn’t reach. Their home was a gift. Wondrous. Worth poetry, better than what he wrote. Worth more than the artful scars on their bodies. But it always felt like a gift that ought to have been given to someone else.
That’s why people fell apart. He’d heard of it happening in the asteroidal colonies, on the moon and on Mars. People lost their shi
t when they left the Earth. A million years of evolution and brain wiring couldn’t be undone so fast. Nothing wrote that fast. And so they couldn’t deal with it. And they all couldn’t deal with it in their own ways. This guy cut himself. Thérèse invented religion. Marthe got into political fights. What did Émile do?
Nothing. He drank. He put whatever he could find into his body. And he didn’t know how to stop.
He chugged the flask empty and stumbled against the wall, wondering how okay it would be to go back for a refill.
People surrounded him, dancing, drinking, drumming on the walls and floor, but the noise and darkness was a cocoon of aloneness. The press of bodies hid the cutter, who wept alone. Émile hung his flask on his belt and pushed towards the tiny bedrooms. One guy looked up at him as he was pushing, and his face lit with recognition.
“D’Aquillon!” he yelled into Émile’s ear.
“What?”
“You’re Émile D’Aquillon!” the man said. He was clean, in the way flotilla people were clean. Baby hands, with only spot-scars. “You guys are getting a shitty deal from l’Assemblée,” the man said. “You don’t deserve to lose the Causapscal.”
“It’s a box of holes floating under a bag of oxygen,” Émile said. “What do you care?”
“I’m Laurent Tétreau,” he said, extending a pale hand. Émile took it warily, conscious of the ropey scars on his hands. “I work for a member of l’Assemblée. There are more than a few people who think this could have been handled better. The présidente has made a little war with your father for no reason. I know people who want to fix it. And you have a role to play in making peace with your family.”
Émile snorted. “If you want somebody my father trusts, talk to Marthe.”
“You can have influence,” Tétreau said. “You just need to try. Marthe is leading the D’Aquillons in a direction that isn’t good for anyone.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Émile said. “Pa called Marthe back to Causapscal-des-Profondeurs.”
“Do you know why?”
“They don’t tell me.”
The House of Styx Page 14