Suddenly, the world brightened and expanded. Ocher clouds laid a thin drizzle of rain over the plastic around him. Every so often in the middle deck, gusting east winds pushed his balloon westward. The higher he climbed, the faster the winds would carry him. He marveled at the size of the rain drops. They ran fat rivulets over the survival sack, cloudy with the acidophilic Venusian bacteria. The clouds were alive up here.
He became disembodied, one with the storm and with the cooling of the air. Layers separated him from the world, so that he could imagine himself bodiless, a creature of thought and feeling, detached and peaceful. This feeling lasted for a long time, until he floated up, out of the middle cloud deck, and into the big openness of Grande Allée.
He’d never been this high before. The light was becoming strange. The polarized yellow became directional and bright. Light definitely came from above, from a single source. Holding one glove over another made a fuzzy shadow, like artificial indoor lights did. As he rose, the world took on an unnatural quality, an unreal focus. He felt like an explorer, like everything he saw would be strange. The slowly moving ceiling of Grande Allée held its breath as his expanding balloon drew him into the brightness.
A few minutes later, his radio crackled. “Pascal?”
Pascal scanned the too-bright clouds.
“Émile?” he said.
“Pascal!” a voice said through the static. “Got a fix on you. Be right there.”
Pascal’s heart thumped faster with nervous excitement. He’d been sneaking brief messages to Émile over the last year, but he’d gotten back little more than unsettling poems. Haunting genius soaked his brother’s poetry, a longing that frightened him by resonating with some unknown part of himself. But apart from that, he didn’t know his brother.
Pascal’s safe-bag lurched, rocked and began sinking. The ropes shook and feet stepped above his seat. Together, they sank. A knife came out, and the plastic ripped away and fell around him. Then the knife was gone and the sure feet slipped into footholds. A massive angel with great light wings grabbed Pascal.
“You got big!” Émile’s blue eyes glittered behind his faceplate, over a bearded face. Pascal smiled and nodded.
“Stay there a sec,” Émile said, letting him go and pulling something big from behind him. “You’ve never used upper-atmosphere wing-packs, eh?”
“No.”
Émile hooked an arm through the seat as they sank and sulfuric acid rain started speckling their suits. One-handed, Émile levered the second wing-pack to Pascal’s back. Émile was so big. He remembered Émile as a giant, but it was like Pascal was still a child compared to Émile. Pascal shrugged into the strange wing-pack, strapped it tight and plugged it into a pocket jack. A new dashboard appeared inside his faceplate.
“It’s almost like flying with the lower deck wing-packs,” Émile said, “but these are sensitive as anything. Steady hand. And they’re like parachutes in a cross-current or updraft.”
“I can do it,” Pascal said.
Émile clapped him on his chest, grinning.
“Of course you can, little brother! Go. I’ll follow to make sure the safe-bag doesn’t snag us.”
Pascal climbed up the ropes and freed his feet. The wings were huge. Furled, they went past his feet.
“Dive, straighten out, unfurl and then spin up your engine,” Émile said. “If you haven’t flown these before, you don’t want to dive backwards.”
Pascal leapt, trying not to shake Émile much. He plummeted through the cloud. Pascal had been flying for years and he oriented himself fast, opening his wings. They pulled him into level flight at once. The engine roared to life, thrusting him forward, climbing.
“Right behind you,” Émile said in his radio. “Be aggressive with the angle of attack. These things are hard to stall. If it gets bumpy, keep climbing. Getting above the turbulence of Les Rapides Plats will be choppy.”
Pascal felt strangely young. It had been a long time since Émile had taught him anything. Not that he’d ever taught Pascal anything useful. Marthe and Chloé and Pa taught him all he knew about living on Venus. Émile taught him to make fart noises with his armpit, how to make spit-balls, and how to burn holes in scrap metal when Pa and Chloé were out of the habitat. But Émile’s eager encouragement made the past touch the present, in a happy way.
Pascal got a feel for the wings, shifting his weight, testing the control surfaces before throttling up. The lift they produced was startling. And the air was so light around him. The wings from down home suddenly felt clumsy and poor.
But he wasn’t underestimating what was coming. He’d read that from the cloud tops, la colonie could look down upon a washer-board pattern of clouds, rowed tubes going on forever into the distance. The wind moved too slowly in the depths to form rolling convection cells the colonistes called Les Rapides Plats.
Pascal was coming at Les Rapides Plats from underneath and even before he’d come close, the turbulence vibrated his whole body. He kept his throttle on full, increased his angle of attack and, with a terrifying shudder in his wings, he was swept violently upward. The straps squeezed him, twisting, and his wing-pack creaked.
“Throttle to full!” Émile called.
He already had, but it was hard to pick the right angle of attack, or even stick to one. Every few moments, one wind or another tried to tip him. An updraft lifted him dizzyingly fast and at the crest of his rise, the wind tried to claw back at the tip of his port wing.
“Bank right!” Émile said.
The mist churned. It was almost easy to see some of its invisible movements, but he didn’t have an intuition for it. He banked right and exited the rolling convection cell at its peak. As he looked up, the clouds turned on themselves, vapor twisting into ghostly tubes, like a washer-board visible only against a certain angle of light. The upper winds blew so much faster that the next layer beneath acted like the rollers on a conveyor belt.
“Pick a cell,” Émile said, “get the direction right, and then get in at the bottom and ride the updraft! Go on! Don’t wait too long!”
Pascal timed it and flew straight into the bottom of a horizontal barrel of wind a kilometer in diameter, striated with filaments of cloud pulled into long, thin strings. A twisting wind wrenched him sideways. He struggled to level his flight. He swooped down, throttled and pulled up again, and winds buffeted him with no pattern. He was used to storms. He lived among them. But deep storms were immense things, with churning wind streams kilometers wide. For every meter he climbed here, the roaring, battering wind knocked him down half.
“Increase your angle of attack!” Émile said. “You just have to power through the turbulence.”
He did it. It was hard, but he did it. Over the next torturous fifteen minutes, Pascal climbed two kilometers, before finally emerging from the invisible mob of windy fists wrenching him around. He felt like he’d worked an hour running new cabling off a trawler. His brother was saying encouraging things in the radio, but Pascal was almost too tired to hear, and the stars were all around, winking through the last layers of clouds.
Pascal throttled full again and plunged into what he thought was the bottom of another air cell, intending to climb. He entered poorly, the lower edges of it far bigger than he was expecting, as was its speed. His engine keened and he pulled up, following the rise of the cell.
“Beautiful!” Émile said.
It was dizzying. Thrilling. His stomach left itself somewhere down in the bottom arc. He climbed and shot out the top and the air, while still unruly, became manageable. Venus stopped playing with him.
The clouds above glowed a searing white. His faceplate tried auto-darkening, but he overrode it, craning his neck to look sideways at the bright disk forming behind the clouds. It was too intense to look at straight on.
The sun. He was going to see the sun for the first time.
The clouds broke and a terrible, burning whiteness stared back at him. His eyes watered and finally he had to look away, blinkin
g at tears. The top of the upper cloud deck wasn’t regular and flattened like the floors of Les Plaines and Grande Allée. Its bright surface sloped up over cloudy hills, dove into wide valleys and through shadowed caverns of mist. Vaporous cumulus foothills rose into towering mountains of cumulonimbus. In some places, fingers of moisture reached over transparent hollows of air, while in others bursts of cyclonic fury funneled columns of yellow-white towards the black sky. This textured, aerial world bore no correspondence to Venus’s corrugated gray flesh below. It was enchanting and unsettlingly false.
“It’s your first time seeing the stars, isn’t it?” Émile asked.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Day or night, the stars are always shining.” Émile darted ahead on a steep climb. “Come on!”
Pascal followed. They made for a habitat shining green in the distance. As they neared, others came into view, dozens, hovering like tiny emeralds in the cloudscape. The strange dirigibles with bloated, transparent envelopes contained more green than he’d ever seen.
Accustomed as he was to the organic shapes and cobbled-together grafting of the living trawler habitats, there was something marvelous about the smooth, straight lines in the habitats, even those with obvious acid damage and missing paint and discolored panels. In the far, far distance, almost out of sight, other humans flew on wing-packs like his. Strangers. He knew almost no one outside of his family, and those he’d met were all visiting coureurs. The thought of talking to strangers excited him, with an edge of panic.
They came closer and closer to a habitat, and finally circled it once and then landed. Pascal flubbed the landing. The wing-pack was too sensitive. In the depths of forty-fifth rang, they had to land under the habitat by stalling just before hitting hanging nets. Here, at the sixty-fifth rang, he had to land on a flat surface. When he flared to kill his forward speed, he overdid it and flipped onto his back and hit the deck before sliding into the crash netting. He didn’t have time to sort himself out before strong hands lifted him entirely out of the netting.
“That was great, Pascal!” Émile said. “I’ve never seen anyone fly so well on their first time! You should have seen me when I first tried these stupid things, and I was older than you.”
Émile set him on his feet. It felt strange to have nothing above them but black starry sky and the sun. And Émile’s full size was apparent now. He was big, taller than Pascal by thirty or forty centimeters and much wider, heavily muscled under his suit. Émile was smiling down at him through the faceplate.
“Come here, little brother!” Émile said, hugging him close. “I missed you.”
“Me too,” Pascal said.
They got themselves out of the wing-packs, which wasn’t easy. Pascal’s wings were longer than he was tall and he had to bend over to furl them. After they neutralized and stowed the wing-packs, Émile put an arm around his shoulders and gestured wide.
“Welcome to the upper world,” he said. “The sun, the stars, all the habitats.” When Pascal couldn’t think of anything to say, Émile filled the silence again. “I’m really glad you came.”
“Me too,” was all Pascal could think to say.
Émile dropped his arm. “I’m sorry I left you with the old man,” he said. “I couldn’t live with him anymore. It was for the best.”
Pascal nodded.
“And I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help look for Chloé and Mathurin.”
“It wouldn’t have helped.”
He wanted to say something nice, about Émile’s poetry, but he didn’t understand where he fit into the verses. He didn’t know yet how to untangle the sadness in the poems, the sadness in missing his brother, and the sadness that throbbed in him.
“It’s good to see you!” Émile said, grabbing Pascal’s shoulders.
At the edge of the platform on top of the habitat, fenced by netting, was a set of stairs down the side. The view from them was dizzying for no reason at all. It wasn’t the faint sounds carried to his helmet on winds too thin to properly touch him. He’d lived his whole life on heights. But he’d never seen any of them. He’d lived in clouds without definition, life without shape, within a reddened darkness like a baby might have felt in a womb.
And now he was under the cold stars. The cloud tops reflected an eye-stinging white light, with no heat or pressure from Venus at all, like he was in a numb, deaf new world. He felt like crawling back into the gloom of the clouds. Pascal gripped the railing. It wasn’t far. Three meters down, out of the ghostly wind, was an airlock door. Émile spun the handle and they stepped in.
Pascal reached for his neutralizing pad and wiped. Émile laughed when he saw the fraying carbon-fiber rag embedded with sodium bicarbonate. Émile took it and looked at it.
“How long have you been carrying this around, Pascal? Was this Marthe’s or mine before you got it? Throw it away.”
He pulled plastic-wrapped pads out of a pouch and gave one to Pascal. Pascal put his old cloth back in his pocket and unwrapped the pad. It might not be new, but it was newer than anything he’d ever seen.
“Turn around,” Émile said, spinning Pascal with a big hand. The pressure of his brother’s hand ran on the top and back of his helmet, around the neck seals, over his whole back and shoulders and under his arms, neutralizing the sulfuric acid.
“Sapristi!” Émile said, sounding eerily like Pa. “This suit is a walking wreck. You need a new suit.”
“Jean-Eudes has been patching it for me,” Pascal said nervously.
The hand on his back stopped.
“He’s been doing a good job,” Émile said, as the hand moved to the lower back. “You know maman and I taught him how to patch suits, eh? Took the little bugger years to not burn his fingers with the sealant. He got frustrated and cried.” Émile’s hands worked at the backs of Pascal’s legs. “I taught him how to wash dishes so I wouldn’t have to. Lost cause though. Maman didn’t let me get away with it.”
Émile’s voice was distant, longing.
“I taught him and Alexis how to check the valves for leaks,” Pascal said. “He likes that too.”
“No shit! You’re a good brother.” Émile said, finishing the backs of Pascal’s legs and heels. “So is Jean-Eudes,” he said more quietly.
For a moment, awkward silence held them. Then Pascal turned and Émile turned his back and dutifully lifted his arms. Pascal had to reach for the top of Émile’s helmet. His suit was almost patch-free, new and shiny, with good pockets sealed against the acid. They wiped down their own fronts and sides, and then their seals again while the airlock finished hissing in new air.
Finally, Émile wheeled open the next door, revealing a long interior hallway filled with drawers and shelves. Windows opened onto the bright greenhouse layer. They cracked the neck seals on their helmets. The air was cool and thin. He breathed deeply. It was like inhaling nothing. The atmosphere was a ghost. Émile pulled off his helmet and grinned down at him from a tangled brown beard.
“I can’t believe how much you’ve grown up,” he said. “You’re a good-looking kid. We should show you to a nice girl.”
Pascal’s cheeks heated and he looked at his feet.
Émile laughed. “Oh, they’re going to love you.”
The lack of air felt suffocating. The heat in his cheeks. The cold air. His brother. The pressure of pretending. He took a deep breath.
“It’s so big,” Pascal said.
“This is just a work area. The living area is smaller.”
They followed narrow stairs down the inside of the envelope.
“Everything looks so clean and new,” Pascal said. “They’re really going to scrap it?”
“Oh, this isn’t the Causapscal-des-Vents,” Émile said. “We’re on l’Avant-Gardiste. A friend of mine is crashing here.”
“I need to get to the Marais-des-Nuages,” Pascal said, stopping.
“I know. This’ll take just a minute. I wanted you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
; “Thérèse. She’s special to me. I want her to know my family.”
“Hasn’t she met Marthe?” Pascal said.
A quick, furtive flinch darted over Émile’s face, but he put on a smile that Pascal wasn’t sure was real.
“Marthe is a handful sometimes. It wasn’t a great meeting. And you’re my little brother! I’m proud of you!” He slapped Pascal’s shoulder and Pascal felt himself smiling. “Marthe showed me all the engineering texts she got for you. You’re going to be somebody, one of the bosses who tells mechanics like me and Marthe what to do! Can you imagine? I can’t wait to grab my deck-buddies and say, ‘Look! Our boss is my little brother!’”
“I need to talk to Phocas,” Pascal said.
“This won’t take long. Come on!”
Émile led Pascal down the last stairs, through a single pressure door and into a small space that was kitchen, dining area and living area. No one was here, but Pascal marveled at the lines, the way everything fit together. Machine beautiful.
“She works night shifts mostly,” Émile whispered, “and crashes in friends’ hammocks when they’re not using them.”
Émile peeked around a curtain into a bedroom.
“What is it?” a woman’s voice said. Not sleepy at all.
“I have a visitor, ma chérie,” Émile said. “My little brother is here.”
“He can’t stay here.”
“No, bébé. I just wanted him to meet you.”
She sighed heavily.
“I don’t have to,” Pascal said as his stomach turned on itself again.
“No, it’s okay. She’s gonna love you.”
Émile pulled on his arm until they passed the curtain into a gloomy room. A thin, black-haired woman rocked on a hammock, cigarette between two lazy fingers. Her undershirt was sleeveless and ornate images ran up her arms and over bony ribs. She was beautiful, austere, stormy and utterly unselfconscious. A sadness crept upon him, a kind of mourning envy for the self-possession this woman had, that he couldn’t imagine ever having.
“He doesn’t look anything like you,” she said in a bored drawl.
The House of Styx Page 18