The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  His thoughts felt like the silt in the cave, obscuring, shaken about, needing time to settle. And Marthe was like a storm herself, never leaving anything untouched in her wake. She loved him, even if he didn’t love himself. The force of her was like a prop, giving him a tiny boost of courage, direction in the storm. He didn’t hate himself either, exactly. He hated his body. It was alien to him, distant, someone else’s. He could avoid mirrors, shave his face clean every morning, shave his whole body, and yet not escape the oppressive weight of wrongness. Except the once, when he’d snuck into his father’s room and put on maman’s dress. In that one moment, in that single frame of a movie of his entire life, it was like he’d finally seen something right. He’d seen himself.

  Like a storm, Marthe created and destroyed. She’d invented a painful, terrifying hope, even as she seemed to have stared right through to the center of him. He didn’t want anyone looking at him. No one could understand what it was to stand in front of people, pretending to belong to the world, and feeling like a liar and a fraud. In the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, he could pretend forever, with his father and Jean-Eudes. They loved him without reserve, but couldn’t see him, couldn’t see the unhappiness and in-turned acid and corrosive hopelessness of pretending.

  Yet the only thing worse than pretending was being seen.

  The disturbed silt in his mind hinted at a cloudy idea that terrified him.

  What if Pascal were really a girl? What would that knowledge tell him? Tell her? He couldn’t reveal himself to the world. It was his secret. Her secret. Her secret to keep. It might not even be true. Pascal was sixteen. Hormones. He could be confused about lots of things. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, why he felt so bad about who he was, when even Jean-Eudes was so at ease with himself. The cloudy idea wasn’t getting clearer.

  The toes winked back at him, shining in the gloomy light. Pascal had that one image, the look of himself in the dress, looking back at him in the mirror. And he had stared through another piece of glass, through the layers of Venus, and found stars.

  What could Pascal do? What could Venus do? No one would ever see the stars. They would only look at Venus and see her deceiving clouds, her ugly, wrinkled hide, never see what she really contained. And this was Pascal’s body. He couldn’t leave it, just as Venus couldn’t leave hers.

  Jean-Eudes sat up, groaning. “What is it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you crying?”

  Pascal wiped at his cheeks and found tears.

  “Are you sad?” Jean-Eudes said, hopping from his hammock and lurching over on the shifting floor. He clung to Pascal’s hammock and brought his face very close. “Are you scared of the storm?”

  Jean-Eudes was good. Jean-Eudes was never going to engineer new machines for them, or even be able to maintain a habitat on his own. And yet Pascal admired his older brother intensely. Jean-Eudes knew he was different, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he couldn’t do everything his brothers and sisters could do. And Jean-Eudes was even getting used to being proud of his capable little nephew. Jean-Eudes just was, with an authenticity that was inspiring and terrifying. And Jean-Eudes loved Pascal without any reservation.

  “Yes, I’m sad.”

  “Why?” Jean-Eudes said, swaying over him.

  “Something’s not right with me, Jean-Eudes.”

  “Do you want water?”

  “You were born a boy. You feel like a boy.”

  “Yes,” Jean-Eudes said.

  “What you feel matches your body,” Pascal said.

  “I’m a boy.”

  “And Chloé felt like a girl. She had a girl’s body.”

  “And Marthe too. She feels like a girl. And she likes girls.”

  “I think I feel like a girl, Jean-Eudes.”

  His older brother stared down at him for a long time, his frown deepening. Then he suddenly burst out laughing. Pascal sat up in the swaying hammock.

  “You wore a dress!” Jean-Eudes said.

  Pascal wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. Not now, not this time. He waited for his brother to stop.

  “Jean-Eudes, what do you think it would be like if you felt like a girl, but had a boy’s body?”

  His brother’s face sobered. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  “I never look in the mirror, Jean-Eudes. My heart expects to see someone like Marthe or Chloé or maman, but what I see is a man. If I look too quick, my heart is surprised. When I look, parts of me are missing and parts of me are extra.”

  Jean-Eudes was frowning again. “I think you look good,” he said.

  “My brain knows that I’m supposed to look like this, but my heart says that this is wrong. That’s why I’m not happy.”

  “You would be happy if you were my sister?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you have this body,” Jean-Eudes said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you can’t change your body.”

  “Not really.”

  Jean-Eudes stared at him unnervingly for long moments, and then lurched forward and gave him a crushing hug.

  “You can be my sister.”

  Pascal wanted to shrivel and hide. Hope terrified more than despair. Pascal started crying, and Jean-Eudes held on.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MARTHE FLEW OUT of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs as soon as the storm broke. It had taken them a few hours of asking through the coureur network to find out where the Hudon habitat was. The coureurs des vents could survive in bioengineered trawlers anywhere in the middle and lower cloud decks or even, as the D’Aquillons occasionally did, in the sub-cloud haze.

  With less sunlight and smaller spaces, the coureurs were less independent than they said, and worked hard to live hand-to-mouth. They knew who produced what and had a laborious signaling system through their herds so they themselves couldn’t be tracked, but they could still find each other as the winds blew them. The Coureur des Tourbillons, the center of Marie-Pier Hudon’s calving operation, was about two hundred kilometers west of them, and about seven kilometers higher in the atmosphere, just beneath the layer of clear air of Les Plaines.

  That was a significant hike, and her father had sold the family’s homemade plane last year. So Marthe traveled the cheap way. They inflated a carbon-fiber balloon with oxygen, clipped her harness to it, and the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs slipped away beneath her, vanishing into the mist.

  She rose for an hour through acid rain, into the clear air of Les Plaines, up past the middle cloud deck, until her little balloon carried her into the enormous vista of Grande Allée. The west-to-east wind was faster at this altitude, and from here her wing-pack would have a glide path to the Coureur des Tourbillons.

  She unfurled her wings, hung herself upside down in her harness, and then unclipped. The exhilaration of flying seized her as she leveled out and followed the bottom of Grande Allée. The cloud tops of Grande Allée’s floor were beautiful, with none of the mountainous stacking of the upper cloud deck. Forces in the atmosphere stabilized the winds and clouds here to cut a path right around Venus, as if someone had plowed the air clean. The engine of her wing-pack keened, carrying her fast as her altitude slowly bled away and she skimmed meters above the misty cloud heads with only her thoughts.

  In the yellow-orange light, flying Grande Allée was a humbling experience. The cloud decks occupied a strange interstitial space, meaning different things to different people. To the coureurs who lived wrapped in clouds, the open skies were vast and vertiginous. To those living in the clear air beneath black sky and stars, the clouds induced a sense of drowning. Marthe could toggle between the two perspectives.

  Flying in the clouds was also solitary in the best possible way. No politicking or romantic positioning here, no hunt for advantage, no blocking of opponents or seeking of the high ground. This was just her, small in the vastness.

  She was worried about Pascal. She couldn’t walk his path for him, or help him much more with h
is reflections. This all seemed sudden to her, but she hadn’t been home in a year. He’d gone from fifteen to sixteen, with the confusion and awkwardness of adolescence, without even any hints of how to proceed. She ought to have been more present. Pa could teach Pascal how to run a herd of trawlers in the depths, but he couldn’t guide him through the questions he had.

  She worried about her Pa too. His patience was thinner than it had been. He’d been alone too long, struggling to keep them all alive. She saw him more clearly now, flaws, weaknesses and all. He had more flaws. He was quicker to anger. He carried more resentments and final words.

  It might have been the calcification of self that came with age. The other, more frightening possibility was that he’d always been this way, and that Marthe had grown past him. It was an unsettling thought, one that forced her to consider the past of the family in the context of the flawed man her father was today. How many of the D’Aquillon hardships had been born of his intransigence, if he’d always been this way?

  But those were hypotheticals, and she had more pragmatic concerns. She didn’t know if she could carry the whole family. She knew someday she would have to, but didn’t want it to be so soon. She couldn’t even fix Émile. George-Étienne D’Aquillon and Jeanne-Manse had both been only twenty-four when they’d emigrated to Venus. She couldn’t imagine making that kind of choice at this age. But Marthe wouldn’t be alone in what Pa was proposing.

  Pascal had come a long way in his self-studies as an engineer. He was fragile, but smarter than any of the family. His designs were sound and more inventive than anything she could have tried. And she herself was an able mechanic who knew tools and materials, as was Pa. But they needed something much more elaborate to turn engineering schematics into real structures.

  She knew a lot of the mechanics and engineers in la colonie. Many had the right tools and far more skill than she had, but they were also the ones living in the best habitats, and therefore closest to Gaschel’s party. She had an idea of someone who might be skilled enough, properly equipped, and who would have reason to help them commit a crime. But talking to him would be Pascal’s job.

  Marthe descended through the middle cloud deck and Les Plaines for three hours before her instruments told her she was close. Venus had some reasonable global positioning satellites; the problem was that everything kept shifting in the clouds, and weather fronts could interfere with positions. But she was in luck today. The positional transmitter in her helmet antenna picked up the intentionally weak signal of one of the herd of the Coureur des Tourbillons.

  Coureurs lived like shepherds in winds that wanted to scatter their sheep. The peak of each domesticated trawler was mounted with a short-range transmitter, antenna and small propellers. When they drifted too far from their habitat, the propeller brought them back. It didn’t always work. Coureurs lost their flocks to storms all the time.

  Yet few ever mounted stronger transmitters. They didn’t trust the government and preferred that the size of their flocks not be known. And to be honest, they didn’t always trust each other. Her father suspected a few of his peers of finding his lost trawlers and not returning them, or of stealing them outright. She wasn’t sure, but the fact of the matter was that it was difficult to know where a coureur was at any given time. And Marthe hadn’t found the Coureur de Tourbillons, only a transmitting trawler, dark and small. She circled it in the shadowless orange light, looking at the direction its propeller was pointing, and winging in that direction. After a few kilometers, she started to hear the faint signal of the Coureur des Tourbillons.

  The spraying acid of the clouds became a harder rain with fierce downdrafts. The engine on her wing-pack whined high and Marthe churned through the bright rain. Soon, a shadow loomed in the clouds. She was startled by its size. The bioengineered trawler was easily twice the diameter of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, maybe thirty meters across.

  A wide gantry hung underneath, around a tail cable much longer and thicker than anything Marthe had ever seen under a trawler. She circled it once, ducked beneath, then slowed and stalled onto the hanging nets. She caught her breath for a moment. She was out of practice. Living in the high flotilla was making her soft. She felt heavy climbing onto the gantry, where she shucked her wing-pack. There was a spray and brush for neutralizing equipment and she was careful to get all the acid off her pack before hanging it in the wing shed.

  “Coureur des Tourbillons,” she transmitted, “this is Marthe D’Aquillon. Permission to come aboard.”

  While she waited for the answer, she turned to wiping down her suit and neutralizing the acid with only half her attention. The other half admired the immensity of the habitat. The woody exterior was brownish-black, slick with the basic, hydrophobic slime that protected trawlers from sulfuric acid. Within the slime, little bubbles formed where tiny stomata pumped gases out of the outermost envelope to maintain the habitat’s buoyancy. The great tail cable flexed in the wind, at least one hundred meters long.

  “Marthe,” came the radio answer, although too staticky to identify the speaker, “come aboard.”

  Marthe climbed into the first chamber of the double airlock and applied another neutralizing spray to her suit. The inside and outside of the trawler were at about one atmosphere of pressure, so she cycled right away into the next chamber. From here, light flooded in from windows in the airlock doorways to both sides. The windows looked on the outer envelope of the trawler, filled with lamps and bright green thermophilic hydroponic crops, growing at fifty degrees in eighty percent humidity. It was a hothouse oasis in the clouds. She punched the button and this second chamber pumped out the carbon dioxide and hissed in nitrogen and oxygen.

  The inner light greened and she wheeled open the next door and stepped through into a brightly-lit, torus-shaped space with brown, oiled floors. Three bioreactor tanks, side-lit, grew algae for food.

  Standing before her with gloves, boots and a body apron was Marie-Pier, looking at her strangely. Two boys stood behind her, looking apprehensively. A man stood with crossed arms in the galley. He had Marie-Pier’s eyes.

  Marthe extended her arms and Marie-Pier wiped her down one last time with sodium bicarbonate, especially on her back and over her seals. When she was done, Marthe hissed open the seal on her neck and removed her helmet.

  “I didn’t expect you to visit personally, or for anyone to come so soon,” Marie-Pier said. She was pretty for a woman in her early forties, although she wasn’t exactly Marthe’s type. Marthe mostly knew dramatic girls on the edge of not being able to hold their shit together. Marie-Pier had a speckling of acid point scars on her left cheek, just beside her eye, under a ponytail of brown hair. She gave the impression of respectability, despite the fact that she was one of the savviest black marketeers.

  “I thought we might have some things to talk about,” Marthe said, popping the locks on her wrist seals.

  Marie-Pier stood back and let Marthe take off her own suit.

  “Maxime and Florian,” Marie-Pier said of the boys, who looked down shyly, “and my brother Marc.” Marthe had never met him, but knew of him as a bioengineering technologist, part of the family business.

  “Bonjour,” Marthe said, unsealing the front of her suit and peeling it down to step out. She hung it up, wiped her feet and stepped over the line. “Your home is beautiful. I’ve never seen a trawler this big.”

  Marie-Pier was a bioengineer who specialized in the weird genetic material of Venusian plant-life, playing with the metabolic pathways that controlled growth and maintenance. No doubt a lot of her attempts to build habitats out of trawlers had sunk into the atmosphere until incineration, but her successes were astonishing.

  “Merci. You’re not in the market for a trawler to replace the Causapscal-des-Vents, are you?” Marie-Pier asked.

  Marthe shook her head, admiring the arching lines of the veining in the ceiling. “Not exactly.” Brother and sister looked at her warily. “I was hoping to discuss political matters with you.�
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  Marc made a face, pushed himself off the table and walked back into an area that looked like a lab. Marie-Pier put two glasses and a green juice on the galley table. The boys disappeared into a room. Marie-Pier poured.

  “A bit shocking what happened in l’Assemblée, isn’t it?” Marthe asked.

  “You’re going to have to be clever,” Marie-Pier said.

  “Clever isn’t going to save me the Causapscal-des-Vents,” Marthe said. “I’m looking for options, though.”

  She sipped. It was a mint juice, close to a cold tea.

  “Do you have any?”

  “I might.”

  “And you came here,” Marie-Pier said. “You looking for a trawler?”

  Marthe looked in the direction of the lab and the boys’ room. She leaned across the table and spoke quietly.

  “I have a business opportunity, but it’s not the kind of opportunity I can talk about with many people.”

  Marie-Pier raised an eyebrow doubtfully.

  “The D’Aquillons have found something very, very valuable on the surface of Venus,” Marthe said. Marie-Pier regarded her patiently, the way she might wait out a barterer to see his opening price. “What we found could economically transform Venus, including our relationship with the Bank of Pallas.”

  “The Bank you’ve been criticizing for some time,” Marie-Pier said.

  “To be fair, I also criticize the government.”

  “You don’t worry that I might run off and carry this news to l’Assemblée?”

  “You don’t know what we’ve found or where it is, and Venus is big.”