“They should. You’re a D’Aquillon. If they aren’t giving you the respect you deserve, there are other jobs and places to live. I know places that could use a guy like you.”
“A job?” Émile asked, still swaying.
“Keep me in mind, Émile,” Tétreau said. “You have a role to play in making peace, maybe more than Marthe.”
He held out a cup of bagosse. “I think I’m done. You want it?”
Émile took the cup and poured it carefully into his flask, not losing a drop. Then he handed it back and drank deeply. Tétreau staggered past him and swung his arm over another guy’s shoulder. Émile watched him for a while, the bagosse slowing him so that the world dragged for moments at a time, movement strobing.
When he turned to keep moving to the bedrooms, he saw Thérèse, her slim body swaying, making out with some guy. A sculptor maybe? Sculptor bullshit. Sculpt shit. Anything they made here was eventually going to be swallowed by Venus. There was no ground. No place to rest, ever. What the fuck were you going to put your sculpture on? The clouds? The clouds ate everything, down to the bone.
Émile grabbed the guy’s shoulder, yanked him away, and punched him right where she’d just been kissing him. Émile stared at the guy, a little too drunk to do any more, waiting for him to do something. The guy wiped his bloody lips, looked up at the size of Émile, thought better of it, kicked at the wall and slunk away. Émile turned. Thérèse had her back to him, dancing by herself.
He unzipped the front of his survival suit and stripped to his waist, tying the arms around his hips. Then he moved close to her and showed his left arm, where he’d already taken the bandages off. The wound was scarring in exactly the trawler shape she’d made. He touched it. She eyed him with a kind of exhaustion, then melted and touched the wound too, leaning her head down to kiss it.
“I’m fucked up,” she yelled in his ear over the drumming. Her breath smelled of hash.
“I am too,” he said.
“Venus doesn’t want us.”
“Venus needs us,” he said in her ear.
“We’re puzzle pieces that don’t fit here.”
He rested his hands on her shoulders. “Nobody fits anywhere. The joke’s on us.”
She smiled, kept dancing, more slowly, swaying, independent of the raucous drumming and singing.
“It’s not a very good joke,” she said.
She leaned against him. Her body radiated heat. These two puzzle pieces matched. Her head was under his chin, until she looked up. He thought she wanted a kiss, but she avoided his descending lips and said in his ear, “I need to fit somewhere.”
“Would you like to fit with me?” he said, half-teasing.
As soon as he said it, he knew he’d fucked up, missed out on something, some connection she was seeking and he could have made. But he didn’t know how. She nodded anyway, like she hadn’t expected better. They rested against one another, trees against the storm, rocking slowly to discordant music in the thickening smoke.
TWENTY-FIVE
PASCAL WOKE VERY early the next day. He swayed almost imperceptibly as the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs followed the contours of pressure at forty-fifth rang. Jean-Eudes was breathing softly, and Marthe snored in her hammock.
Last night seemed wonderful, like a weight had been lifted away. He didn’t want to ruin the moment by moving, by bringing his body and the world into focus. But the idea of fresh stubble bothered him more and more. He couldn’t stand the thought of hair standing stiff on his chin, over his lip, on his cheeks, touching his pillow. His hammock creaked as he slipped out. In the dark, he shaved by touch.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
“You can turn on the light, Pascal,” Marthe mumbled.
“I’m done,” he whispered quickly.
He scraped the last of his face clean, toweled himself, cleaned the straight razor and hurried to the galley. Two cups smelling of tord-boyaux had tipped and rolled to the table edge in the swaying of the habitat during the night. He wiped and shelved them, then sat at the table and regarded his ten red toenails in wonder.
Marthe staggered out of their room soon after, adjusting her tank top and scratching at her hip. At the galley, she poured two cups of water and sat across from him.
His toes were so beautiful. For years, he’d never felt anything but ugliness, wrongness. It was a feeling that had taken a long time to sneak up on him, to realize that other people didn’t feel the same way. He didn’t mind being ugly, if only he could feel right. He desperately wanted out from under this feeling of wrongness.
“You’re going through a tough time,” she said, before sipping at her water with distaste.
He didn’t answer.
“Jean-Eudes says you’re sad.” She tried swallowing more, but gave up partway. “He’s worried about you, but he doesn’t know what to do.”
“He told Pa, too. It’s not anything.”
“Pa thinks everything that happens to teenagers is just adolescence,” she said.
He laughed nervously and tried to look blasé. “He’s right.”
But she didn’t say anything. She looked at him like Pa did when he was trying to figure out if he’d done anything wrong. His put-on smile melted.
“When I was about fourteen I think I realized that Venus doesn’t want us,” Marthe said.
“I love Venus.”
“So do I, but when I was fourteen, I didn’t think she loved us back.”
It was an alien concept to him. He didn’t feel unloved. Venus wasn’t about love. She was about hiding and showing. Mostly she hid, but every so often, in a break in the clouds, a strange timbre of sound, she hinted at her true secret self.
“Do you still think that?” he asked.
“She can’t physically eject us anymore,” Marthe said, “so she attacks us psychologically. She makes us hate ourselves. Others. Our lives. She’s hitting Émile too. Has been for years.”
“Is he okay?”
She shrugged. “He’s Émile.” She pulled close the container of tord-boyaux that had been full last night. “He got a taste for this too early.” She unscrewed the box, sniffed and pulled away. “Well, not this. Bagosse and weed are more his vices.”
“He’s been sending me his poems.”
“He writes poems?” Marthe asked.
“They’re beautiful.”
Marthe’s expression was hard to read. He didn’t have a lot of experience and she was almost a politician. It wasn’t hurt he saw in her eyes, but a kind of wistfulness.
“I’ll ask to read them some time,” she smiled.
“Is Venus attacking you?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. It depends what you call an attack.”
She sipped her water and he took up his. She set her cup down and leaned across the table, taking his hand in hers.
“It’s okay to be sad, Pascal. I was. Sometimes I still am. But sharing makes it lighter. I’ve always got your back.”
Even hungover, her half-lidded regard was penetrating. She reminded him of maman, and Chloé, what he could remember of both of them. His throat felt tight. He pulled his hand away and tucked his feet out of sight. Plateaus, tesserae and coronae of scars, red-pink and bulbous, padded the backs of his hands, a reassuring erasure of an alien body. His breath felt thin and insubstantial. Her words terrified him.
“I feel wrong all the time,” he whispered. “Everyone looks like they belong, like they’re right in the world. I can’t even look in the mirror.” He took a deep breath and leaned over. The vision of his ten bright toenails split and wavered through tears. “I put on maman’s dress.”
She came around and knelt in front of him, taking his hands. She was smiling.
“How did it feel?” she asked.
“Really good,” he whispered. His world was spinning.
“You didn’t put it on because you missed her?”
Pascal shook his head.
“Put it on,” she said, “as many times as you want. Maman woul
d have done anything to make you happy, including giving you the dress off her back.”
He nodded.
“It’s stupid,” he said, his voice thinning and tears falling. “It’s just stupid.”
“When I was growing up,” Marthe said, “Pa was expecting me to like boys. Émile likes girls. Chloé liked boys. But I didn’t and it didn’t matter to him. Don’t worry. Be whoever you want.”
She was trying to soothe him, but making it worse. What if he didn’t know what he wanted to be?
TWENTY-SIX
MUCH LATER, HER father and Jean-Eudes got up. Jean-Eudes was laughingly proud of his bright red toenails. They breakfasted, and Pascal’s mood seemed to lift a bit in the morning energy of family.
“Jean-Eudes, Alexis,” Marthe said, “you couldn’t have watched all the movies yet. Why don’t you chill while we talk engineering?”
The pair didn’t need a second invitation, and scooped tortillas off the table and ran for George-Étienne’s room.
“They’re not going to get anything done today,” her father said.
“Pascal, bring your pad,” Marthe said. “I want to poke holes in your plans.”
Pascal shared a smile with his father. He brought out his pad and thumbed through his designs. Marthe put an arm over his shoulders and opened the blueprints for the Causapscal-des-Vents.
“Pa, you propose using the metal from the Causapscal-des-Vents,” she said. “You’re not stupid, so you’re not talking about asking for it.”
“Correct,” George-Étienne said.
“So, we’re talking about stealing a massive piece of kit from la colonie,” she said. “Right now, the metal is slated to offset some metal imports so that we can use real money on the cost of the asteroid.”
“That bitch can fuck herself with her asteroid,” he said. “She’s shoveled us shit all our lives.”
“La colonie has to pay for the loss,” she said, “everyone who lives up at sixty-fifth rang, and all the coureurs.”
“How many habitats have we lost just because of wear?” George-Étienne said. “This is one more, that’s all.”
Pascal looked at her. She squeezed his shoulder.
“You’re right, Pa,” she said. “But even if we sink it, we don’t get it. It’s designed to run in a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure. By fiftieth rang, it’ll start crushing. By the time it drops to twenty kilometers, it’ll be a smoking raisin.”
“Of course,” George-Étienne said. “We have to catch it.”
“With what?”
“We organize our trawlers,” he said, “tie them to the Causapscal-des-Vents as it’s sinking and use them to slow and stop its descent.”
She looked at her brother. “Would that work?”
“If we use all of them and the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” he said, “we could just make it.”
“With no margin for error and a big chance of damaging some or all of our herd,” Marthe said. “And our only home. Are Alexis and Jean-Eudes going to be in the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs while we try this, Pa?”
“This is the only way,” George-Étienne said. “The math can work.”
She shook her head. “Wild trawlers can’t take that kind of extra stress for long.”
“Ours are modified,” Pascal said.
“She’s not talking about you and I grafting some equipment into a wild trawler, Pascal,” George-Étienne said. “She’s talking about the big bio-engineered trawlers. Different breeders are designing bigger trawlers to be larger habitats.”
“And they’re all spoken for, or not ripe yet,” Marthe said.
“Marie-Pier Hudon has a herd of four that should be mature enough,” George-Étienne said.
“One or two of those will be confiscated by the gouvernement,” Marthe said.
“All the better. She’ll be more motivated to help us,” her father said.
“Good,” she said. “I thought you were going to propose that we steal her trawlers.”
“They can help us,” George-Étienne said.
“But why would they?” Marthe said. “Marie-Pier has her own problems.”
“She’ll have to trust us,” George-Étienne said.
“No one trusts you,” Marthe said.
Her father’s face twisted momentarily, but he didn’t seem capable of regretting what she’d said.
“And on that basis, we can’t ask the Hudons to help us commit theft,” Marthe said.
“Then you should go talk to Marie-Pier,” George-Étienne said.
“And pitch a heist to her?”
“No one can talk better than you,” he said. “You’re right. She’d turn me away at the door.”
“What’s in it for her, Pa?” she said.
“We think we’ve found a wormhole under the surface of Venus,” her father said. “It changes everything, even if we don’t yet know how. She can be a partner.”
“You’re going to take a business partner?”
“A minor partner.”
“No one will help commit a crime for second banana. Equal partners or nothing.”
“It’s ours!” he said. “We need it.”
“Something this big can help both of you. You want half the big prize or all of nothing?”
George-Étienne huffed loudly, but didn’t disagree.
“How do we know she won’t just go to the présidente?” Pascal said.
Pa looked at her for long seconds.
“Marthe will know how far to talk, and what not to say,” he said.
Marthe tried to imagine what she might say to Marie-Pier Hudon and came up with nothing. Pa wanted her to sell a hole in the world, based on trust. And they didn’t have trust. They didn’t have anything. Marthe was soon to lose any political influence when she stopped being a delegate to l’Assemblée.
“Even if Marie-Pier says yes, I don’t know if that’s enough partners,” she said.
“No more.”
Marthe gave him a doubtful look.
“Who’s going to do all that work, Pa? Do you even have the tools to take apart the Causapscal-des-Vents? You and Pascal aren’t going to be enough.”
“You,” her father said.
She gave him the look again.
“Émile,” Pascal said.
George-Étienne frowned and ignored the remark.
“If I need to try to convince Marie-Pier, this is all going to come up,” she said. “The Causapscal-des-Vents won’t float in the clouds for a year while you take it apart and try to hammer its parts into different shapes. We don’t have the equipment. And I’m not sure this can be done.”
“Damn it, Marthe, that’s why I asked you for advice! La colonie has been shitting on the D’Aquillons for twenty-seven years. Now we’ve struck gold! If we lose this chance, it’ll kill me. To give our family something would make it all worth it. Show me how.”
Pa was alone in many ways. Jeanne-Manse was dead. Chloé and Mathurin had been taken by Venus too. Émile had left because he was Émile, and because Pa was Pa. And here Pa still was, trying to keep his family alive and happy beneath the lower cloud deck, shrouded in acid mist. He wasn’t a fool. He loved them. They were here because family came first for him. Jean-Eudes was alive and happy and laughing with painted toes because family came first.
How many families would have chosen differently?
In all the history of la colonie, none. So Pa didn’t trust anyone else.
Faced with all the pressure the poor, fledgling government could muster, George-Étienne and Jeanne-Manse had still brought Jean-Eudes into the world. This wormhole, this cave in the wrinkled hide of Venus, was Marthe’s Jean-Eudes moment. The easy choice would be to say no, to go back to sixty-fifth rang and find some way to make a life. She could. She was good enough to find another job and maybe even make her way back onto l’Assemblée. She didn’t need to become a criminal. She didn’t need to put her reputation and freedom at risk.
But that wasn’t what George-Étienne would have chosen
. And it wasn’t what she would choose. She was George-Étienne’s daughter, all the way to her painted toes.
“Give a girl something to drink if she’s got to plot larceny,” she said slowly.
George-Étienne grinned over an elation that burst almost visibly from his chest. He went to the dispensary. Pascal was looking at her, smiling. She squeezed him close and kissed his forehead.
“You and Pa are crazy, you know that?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE WALLS OF the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs vibrated in sympathy with the storm outside. Acid pelted with big drops, drumming the outer envelope of their home as thunder rolled outside. They’d come up to forty-eighth rang to avoid a bad cell of turbulence in the sub-cloud haze. They’d still hit a storm, but a storm at forty-eighth was better than the hotter, thicker weather at forty-fourth.
Pascal swung in his hammock as updrafts and cross-winds ripped at them. The skin of their habitat vibrated with the heaving effort of the propeller above their living space. Lightning had struck them twice so far, filling the trawler’s electroplaques and charging all their batteries. Trawlers did most of their growing in the tail hours of storms, when fully fed and drenched with acid.
Marthe and Pa worked out on the gantry. In a storm like this they had to inspect everything every few hours. It would be Pascal’s turn in the early morning, so he’d been trying to get some sleep.
Storms midwived Venusian life, broke apart the budding colonies of blastulae, rosettes and trawlers, and churned lower atmosphere minerals up to the cloud-living bacteria. Storms affected humans more ambiguously. A storm had taken Chloé and Mathurin. Caught outside when it struck, they’d sheltered in one of the domesticated trawlers, but the storm had been bad. The D’Aquillon herd had been scattered far and wide. Half the herd was never seen again, nor Chloé and Mathurin, leaving Alexis an orphan.
But sometimes the storms brought new life to people, too. More than once, a terrifying storm had thrown them clinging and sick into steady air, only to find that Venus had taken thousands of trawlers and pushed them into the same eddy as the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. The family could rope and tag up to twenty trawlers in as many hours, which was subsistence and even wealth for a year. Sometimes the storms of the lower cloud deck punched so deep that they scooped up tons of metal-rich volcanic ash in their winds. And every so often, Venus did neither good nor bad, but just thrashed pointlessly at her new tenants, like tonight. Jean-Eudes groaned. He didn’t like storms. Pascal never got storm-sick. In the soft light, he was watching his toenails, shiny and red.
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