Émile laughed. “No? Lucky him, eh? I take after my Pa. Pascal looks like maman. And he’s smart. He’s burning his way through the engineering curriculum and he’s getting top marks.”
Émile stepped awkwardly to Thérèse and kissed her cheek.
“Pascal, this is Thérèse. She’s an artist, and my muse.”
“I... I’ve read Émile’s poetry,” Pascal said. “You must be a good muse.”
Thérèse looked at Émile, who looked sheepish and Pascal thought he’d said something wrong.
“It was really nice meeting your brother, Émile,” she said finally. She turned to Pascal. “It was very nice to meet you, Pascal.”
“Will I see you later?” Émile asked her.
“I’m working on a new piece,” she said impatiently.
The room was bare of anything artistic.
Émile kissed her cheek again, took a drag on her cigarette and handed it back to her. Then he was shepherding Pascal out the door, back through the pressure door and up the stairs.
“She’s an artist,” Émile said apologetically. “She has an artistic soul, you know? Her muse strikes when it strikes. I think she liked you. She’s great, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Pascal said.
“It’s hard to be with an artist.”
Pascal had to stop halfway up the stairs to catch his wheezing breath. Émile patted his shoulder.
“Happens to all of us, buddy,” he said. “You’ll get over it in about a month.”
Pascal didn’t say he wasn’t going to be here a month. Émile must have known that.
“Thanks for saying something nice about my poetry,” Émile said. “I might be getting better. You’re the only one I’ve ever shown it to.”
“Really? Why?”
“Poetry is something close, especially if it sucks,” Émile said, smiling easily. “Who else could I show it to? Marthe? Think I need her judging me more? Thérèse? I’m trying to impress her. Jean-Eudes wouldn’t understand. You’re the only one I can trust.”
He felt like hugging Émile. He felt for a moment like they were family. But he was a stranger too.
“It pisses off Thérèse that I don’t show her. She might even wonder if I’m actually writing anything. Around every beautiful artist, you’ll get a lot of guys who’ll just pretend, just to be around her. I fucking hate poseurs.”
Émile was still smiling, his eyes bright, his sheer faith in the conversation dragging it forward. But the last statement was true. Pascal saw it. Émile hated people who pretended to be what they weren’t. With a sinking feeling, Pascal turned, as if from a blow, and began trudging up the stairs. He slipped on his helmet, sealed it and turned the air to one and a half atmospheres.
THIRTY-ONE
PASCAL AND ÉMILE winged across the constellation of floating habitats. The Marais-des-Nuages, the Phocas habitat, was forty kilometers ahead and their wing-pack engines whined in the high, thin air. They climbed high enough that even the wayward white mists and snow clouds floated beneath them, with the habitats laid out like tumbled gems on yellow-white velvet. They flew among the stars now; stars extended in every direction, limited only by the gentle curve of Venus and the sun.
“Where’s the Earth?” Pascal asked.
“Behind the sun right now, I think,” Émile said. “We’ll catch up to it in a couple of weeks.”
Pascal was vaguely disappointed. He hadn’t realized until now that he’d wanted to see the Earth. He was Venusian. That was the only certainty he had about who he was. But even the Venusians had come from somewhere. His parents had been born in Québec. His blood came from Earth. If he went there, he would find cemeteries marking the passing of the people who had come before. Ancestors.
People left no mark on Venus. His mother left no mark, other than her children and her husband. No Venusian had a grave. The Earth would only have been a tiny disk, perhaps just a blue dot, but he felt that it would have been something, to see his roots. Something to ground him.
“When are you going to move up to sixty-fifth rang?” Émile asked. “We could spend time together. I could show you around. How to live up here. It’s weird and different, but so much better.”
His brother sounded lonely, but Pascal couldn’t see him. Émile was just a featureless winged figure ahead. Pascal wanted to bridge the gulf between them, but he didn’t know how.
“Jean-Eudes and I talk about you sometimes,” Pascal said, “when Pa isn’t listening. He’s going to want to hear everything about you.”
“You’re not going to come up?”
“Jean-Eudes and Alexis need me.”
“You don’t belong in the lower decks, Pascal. Pa has to take responsibility for Jean-Eudes. Bring Alexis with you.”
Émile began a slow glidepath, aiming towards a habitat ahead and below.
“Jean-Eudes would miss us,” Pascal said. “Like we miss you.”
Émile was silent for a long time. “I miss you too,” he said finally.
“Come back.”
“I can’t.”
“Make up with Pa,” Pascal said.
“I don’t belong in the lower decks.”
“Where do you belong, Émile?”
The habitat had resolved into a small dirigible, wrapped in black solar cells and a hydroponic greenhouse. It looked older than the Avant-Gardiste, patched like Pascal’s suit, with seam lines running awkwardly like scars. To his engineer’s eye, the lines recorded a history of failure and near-failure.
“I don’t know,” Émile said.
His older brother began spoiling his airflow, slowing, increasing his angle of attack and throttling down as he drifted lower and lower. Émile signaled him to approach first. It was hard to copy Émile’s expert flight exactly. Pascal wished he could have used his own wing-pack here, but it wasn’t designed for air this thin. Stall alarms kept going off in his helmet, despite what Émile had said. Clumsily, he swoop-flared, swoop-flared, and came down too fast on the platform roof, but did what he was supposed to: get feet and hands on the deck and furl his wings. He came close to the crash nets, but hadn’t needed them this time.
“Are you okay?” Émile called in his helmet, alighting gracefully on two feet beside him.
Pascal got his knees under him and tried to stand, but fell forward when the furled wingtips touched the deck.
“Whoa, little buddy,” Émile said, catching him with one arm on his chest and the other holding up his wing-pack. “Unstrap.”
Pascal popped the straps and walked free. Émile held his wing-pack in one hand, opening a long case in the floor to rack both sets.
“When I first got here,” Émile said, “my baby sister had to teach me how to use these things.”
Pascal laughed. The outer envelope of the dirigible and the port side of the habitat had the same type of stairs. Pascal cautiously stepped down.
“Do they know we’re coming?” Émile asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t call ahead?”
“From the lower cloud decks?” Pascal said. “Marthe and Pa want to keep this discreet.”
“What do you need from Phocas?” Émile asked.
“It’s... political, something I’m cooking up with Marthe.”
“You’re cooking up?”
Pascal faced his brother on the landing in front of the airlock.
“What is it?” Émile asked.
Pascal switched to a low frequency unused by the main habitats and reduced the wattage on his transmitter. He made the coureur hand-sign for switching to that frequency. Émile hadn’t been so long under the sun that he’d forgotten where he’d come from.
“What are you cooking?” Émile asked again on the new, quiet channel.
“I can’t tell you. And I need to talk to Phocas privately.”
“What?” Émile demanded, loud enough that Pascal heard him though the faint air. “I’m not good enough to listen to what concerns my family? I’m losing my home too!”
&nbs
p; “It’s not that, Émile,” Pascal said. “What we’re trying may be dangerous. The less you know, the safer you are.”
“I’m not afraid! If there’s danger, I want to be in on it.”
“Maybe,” Pascal said. “For now, we go this way. We’re probably going to need help in a few days. Weird help. I need to talk to Marthe.”
“Marthe and Pa?” Émile asked. “You can’t decide on your own? You can’t tell your own brother?”
Pascal stared up at Émile. His brother’s faceplate was fogging over his beard.
“You know what?” Émile threw up his hands. “Fuck it! Talk in private all you want. Fuck you! I’ll wait out here. And after this don’t ask for my help again!”
A sick feeling of regret welled in his stomach, like Venus herself was bleeding into him. Pascal had messed this up. He’d pissed off his brother because he didn’t have the right words, the right skills to deal with people the way Marthe could. Pascal wasn’t like maman. Pascal was like Pa.
Pascal turned to the airlock and spun the wheel. He stepped in and looked back at Émile, who had turned to stare up at the starred black sky. Pascal shut himself in. In one pocket, he had the neutralizing pad he’d gotten from Émile. In the other, his old scraggly one. He pulled out the old one and neutralized himself. When he had finished and air had hissed in, he cracked the seal around his neck and inhaled. Stale air. Cool, unnaturally so, like everything up above the clouds. He spun the wheel and passed into the habitat.
At the bottom of the stairs, he knocked on the big pressure door. He heard nothing behind it, and went to knock again when the wheel in the middle of the door started turning. He stepped back. After a moment, someone tugged on the door, needing a couple of tries to get it open. An old woman in a dress and a robe stood on the other side, looking up at him suspiciously.
“Eh... Bonjour, madame,” he said.“I’m looking for Gabriel-Antoine Phocas.”
She grunted and moved back to let him in. He stepped over the rim of the pressure door frame and looked about in some bewilderment. The walls of the Marais-des-Nuages were thin, as if layers of metal had been scraped off them. Machine pieces and tools lay everywhere. This was a scrap collector’s dream. An older man in pyjamas and robe sat in a carbon-weave swinging chair. He looked at Pascal but didn’t say anything.
“Bonjour, mon oncle,” Pascal said awkwardly, using the honorific one used with old people in the clouds. Two childish faces looked out from one bedroom, but apparently he wasn’t interesting and the faces disappeared.
An attractive man came out from a storage room. But behind him, Pascal saw that it wasn’t storage. It looked like a whole machine shop in there, filled with pieces of equipment he recognized, and others he didn’t.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Pascal unsealed his wrist, took off his glove and extended his hand. The man shook it.
“I’m Pascal D’Aquillon, the brother of Marthe D’Aquillon.”
The man made a doubtful face.
“I thought you were taller.”
“That’s my brother Émile. He’s waiting outside.”
The old woman sat in her own swinging chair and tsked.
“I didn’t want to intrude with many people,” Pascal said. “Are you Gabriel-Antoine Phocas?”
“What do you want, monsieur?”
“Could we talk in private?” Pascal asked.
“Are you from the government?”
“No. I’m coming on behalf of my sister Marthe. And my father. We’re coureurs.”
Phocas looked at him strangely for a moment, then moved back into his workshop. Pascal followed and Phocas closed the door—a real door, not just a curtain. Phocas’s arms were well-muscled, and pristine, without acid scars. He had other kinds of scars that looked like they came from cuts and heat burns, but Venus hadn’t touched him.
Pascal’s cheeks heated as he realized that he’d been staring.
“You don’t have any acid scars...” he said weakly.
Phocas looked at his hands. “I don’t go outside much.” He waved his hand to take in the workshop. “I have all this.”
“That’s why I’ve come.”
“The workshop? You can’t have it. The government’s been trying to take it away from me for years.”
Phocas didn’t look old enough to have been doing anything for years. Marthe’s description of a kind of nineteen-year-old engineering wünderkind was hard to reconcile with the physical presence of the man, his easy certainty.
“Why?” Pascal asked.
“The metal. Why else?”
“Don’t we need tools?”
“The government workers have tools. Mine are extra. A waste of metal. But I do good business fixing things on the black market because the government mechanics take forever. Always something higher-priority for them to do.”
“Oh,” Pascal said.
Phocas looked at him strangely again for a moment, and sat, evidently not taking him that seriously anymore. On the shortest wall, a rack of different wing-packs hung, four of them the long, light wings of the upper atmosphere. The positioning of ailerons and spoilers differed on each, and as he looked more closely, the same was true of camber and wing angle. The other two wing sets were more familiar, with the stubby, low-aspect-ratio shapes that were used in the depths. But the designs were still odd. The material was shiny, but not carbon filament.
“You’ve made the control surfaces on this one too big,” he said. “It’ll be too sensitive. It’ll be like the wings here. Not something to carry an awkward load.”
“I don’t want to carry a load,” Phocas said. “These are for aerobatics.”
Pascal regarded them more carefully, guessing at the way they’d maneuver at higher speeds, higher angles of attack. They would be sensitive, maybe stomach-lurchingly so.
“How low have you flown them?”
“Down to Grande Allée. Deep enough for you?”
Pascal nodded. “I’ve lived all my life below Les Plaines. Today is the first time I’ve ever seen the sun.”
Phocas whistled in appreciation and leaned back against a loaded workbench.
“What are you here for?”
“I came to see you.”
“I don’t get that line very often.” Pascal’s insides twisted as Phocas smirked. His face became hot. Even his ears. Phocas laughed, and Pascal wanted to shrivel away and hide.
“My sister and my father have a business deal they want to talk to you about. It’s kind of secret,” Pascal said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “It’s engineering. A big engineering job.”
“You got metal?”
“Maybe,” Pascal said. “Maybe a lot. We might need some help in getting it.”
“You offering me a cut?”
“Marthe and my father think you’ll be interested.”
“Is that why they sent you?”
Pascal felt his neck and cheeks heat again.
“I’m the engineer,” he said. “That’s why they sent me. I want to build something on the surface.”
Phocas arched an eyebrow. “What the hell for? Mining?”
“Something like that.”
“Why? Are you the next one to think you can find anything in the basalt while you’re cooking at four hundred and fifty degrees? How close you gonna get for remote working? Or have you made high-heat solid state chips? Take a whole lot of machine thinking to run a full mining operation. The asteroid miners found that out the hard way.”
Pascal felt a bit dumb, partly because he didn’t know anything about asteroid mining programming code, but also because Phocas wasn’t taking him seriously. He pulled a heat-resistant carbon weave bag out of his pocket, cracked the seal and gave it to Phocas.
Phocas looked inside, then poured the dust onto his work bench. He frowned, peering close at the shiny grinds, leavened with ceramic dust Pascal hadn’t been able to clean away in a hurry.
“Where’d you find copper?” Phocas asked.
Pascal said nothing. Phocas pulled an electromagnet out of a drawer and plugged in the battery. He passed it over the pile of dust, but only a fraction leapt up to it.
“There’s iron and nickel,” Phocas said. He looked closer. He saw the same bluish tinge that Pascal had first seen. “You found cobalt with the copper vein?” He took some from the magnet and rubbed it between thumb and fingers. “Some of this cobalt is refined, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Pascal said.
Phocas set down the electromagnet and turned his attention back to the remaining pile. He spilled the silvery grains between his fingers. “Platinum,” he said, “and lead sulfide. Are you scraping the frost off Maxwell Mons? They’ve done that before and gotten lead sulfide, but never anything better. You found a surface vein in the mountains?”
Pascal regarded Phocas silently. The conversational shoe was on the other foot now. Engineering and chemistry were easier to talk about.
“We don’t know exactly what we’ve found,” Pascal said. “We think we need someone like you to see what it is.”
“Doesn’t Gaschel have a say?” Phocas asked. “Why isn’t she coming to see me about this?”
Pascal met his eyes challengingly.
“I didn’t expect her to know,” Phocas continued. “But I expect to know.”
“Marthe and my father invite you to come down to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs to talk about it.”
“Where is it?”
“Probably eight hundred kilometers east of us already,” Pascal said. “Our next window will be in three days.”
Phocas’s lips quirked and he looked at the deep-cloud wing-packs.
“Unless we fly back,” he said.
“Eight hundred kilometers is going to feel like twelve hundred when you factor in winds,” Pascal said.
“These packs can do two hundred kilometers an hour,” Phocas said. “Want to fly with me? We deep dive to match wind speed and then fly for her. We’ll make up a lot of distance just on the glide path. Twenty kilometers is a big drop.”
Pascal was dubious. He wasn’t looking to run out of fuel and cook in the atmosphere. The coureurs respected Venus.
The House of Styx Page 19