The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “What do you think I made these things for if not to fly?” Phocas said. “And most people are too chicken to fly with me. You’re not chicken, are you?”

  Pascal wasn’t sure.

  Phocas came closer, pulling one of the wing-packs out of its rack. “Do you like flying?”

  Pascal nodded.

  “Ever flown with someone, just for fun?”

  “We don’t do a lot of things for fun below the lower deck,” Pascal said.

  Phocas laughed and shoved the pack into Pascal’s chest.

  “You’re going to start. I live for flying.”

  Pascal turned away while Phocas stripped to get into his survival suit. Increasingly uncomfortable, Pascal opened the door, slipped awkwardly out, and closed it behind him. Ma tante and mon oncle sat rocking in their swing chairs, looking out the glass, through the hydroponics and onto the cloudscape. Pascal held his helmet uncertainly, cleared his throat, and then said nothing. A girl of about twelve giggled at him from the doorway of her bedroom, made kissy sounds and then disappeared. Pascal’s cheeks heated again. Then the door to the workshop opened and Phocas strode out in a clean new suit, two heavy wing-packs slung over his shoulder.

  “Louise, I heard that,” Phocas said.

  The girl giggled, as did a little brother, although neither emerged.

  “Louise, I’m going on a trip. It might be a couple of days. You have to do the chores.”

  The girl sighed heavily from the room. That seemed to be answer enough for him.

  “I’m going out, grand-mère,” he said, kissing the old woman on the crown of her head. He did the same to the old man.

  “Those aren’t the right wings,” the old man said.

  “Every wing is the right wing, grand-papa,” he said loudly, as if the man was hard of hearing.

  Grand-papa Phocas tsked.

  Phocas spun the wheel and Pascal followed him onto the stairs, a bit numbly. He hadn’t actually thought that Phocas would give him the time of day. He hadn’t thought that he’d offend his own brother. He hadn’t had time to imagine any of the upper world. Not that it would have helped.

  They sealed their helmets and cycled through the airlock. Pascal tried not to look at Phocas, but the airlock wasn’t large. Phocas turned Pascal around and pushed the wing-pack onto his back. Pascal slid his arms in, strapped it closed and jacked in. A weird dashboard lit in his helmet. Fuel consumption he was used to, but he saw a fuel efficiency reading too, as well as solar cell input, internal engine pressure, and a number of other things Pascal had always thought standard and unadjustable.

  Phocas spun the outer door and bright sunlight cut into the airlock. Émile was on the roof of the envelope, staring at the cloudtops, arms crossed, apparently unaffected by the cold. Émile turned and saw the wing-packs.

  “Where are you guys going?” he said, a little testily.

  “This must be the big brother,” Phocas said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Monsieur Phocas is coming down to meet with Pa and Marthe,” Pascal said.

  Émile’s glare through the faceplate said all he couldn’t say in front of Phocas.

  “Well, you can’t go now,” he said finally. “You got two or three days until you’ve got a good glide path.”

  “We’ve got one now,” Phocas said.

  “What?”

  Phocas stepped to where the platform began to curve down, at the edge of the nets. He tapped his wing-pack. “I built these,” he said. “They can get us farther than your house.”

  “They cannot!” Émile said. “I’m not going to let you risk my little brother. Wait the three days and do a safe descent.”

  Phocas turned to Pascal. “What’s it going to be?” he said. “You believe me or the big brother? You either think my skills are great or you don’t. Are we flying or not?”

  Pascal’s heart thumped. Phocas and Émile both watched him. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to fly away just to stop them from looking at him. He didn’t know if Phocas’s wings would work. It seemed awfully far. He stepped closer.

  “Émile, it’ll be okay. I’m flying with Monsieur Phocas.”

  His brother’s jaw set behind the beard and faceplate. Pascal wanted to do something to reconnect them, but he couldn’t take the last three steps to his brother.

  “I’ll talk to Marthe, Émile.”

  “Yeah,” Émile said sourly. “Thanks.”

  Pascal turned so as not to have to face him and stood beside Phocas.

  “Follow me,” Phocas said. “Stay on channel twelve. I’ll help you. Don’t open your wings until I say so.”

  Pascal nodded. Phocas leapt high off the habitat, over the netting. Pascal took the same heart-lurching leap and plunged after.

  THIRTY-TWO

  IN THE FIFTH hour of flying, Pascal and Phocas came close enough to try pinging the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. If a radio check came from one of the family’s suits with the correct encryption, the habitat would signal back, using a directional antenna and only enough wattage to reach the traveling family member. George-Étienne was no more suspicious than any of the other coureurs, or at least not by much.

  Many in the upper habitats had interpreted the coureurs’ decision to live off-grid as a repudiation of the government. In the beginning it hadn’t been, but each group had begun circulating its own stories about the other. But contrary to what the upper cloud colonistes said, the coureurs followed no unified philosophy, and families established safeguards to hide not only from the government, but from each other.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Pascal said into his radio.

  Phocas was a hundred meters ahead and below, sweeping through the thin, featureless haze where raindrops almost boiled. He seemed to revel in the depths. They’d pirouetted through the orange grandeur of Grande Allée, and used Les Plaines like a great red-lit race-track at two hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Phocas had laughed as he buzzed a wild trawler so closely that arc discharges snaked off the hanging cable, to stroke his suit.

  “What’s the problem? You don’t really live down here?” Phocas joked.

  “I got a ping-back from the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. They’re not at forty-five kilometers, but forty. At that altitude the winds are even slower, so they’re another hundred kilometers east.”

  “We don’t have enough fuel,” Phocas said.

  “We still have enough to climb and blow our safe sacks.”

  “It’ll take us days to hop back to the Marais-de-Nuages on borrowed wing-packs.”

  Then they would still have to wait for another window, later than the one they could have taken in the first place. They didn’t have that much time, not if the government wanted to confiscate the Causapscal-des-Vents now. Marthe could delay, but they really needed their plan to be working already.

  “Are you willing to take a risk?” Pascal asked.

  “With you?”

  Pascal didn’t feel himself blush.

  “We’re off by about half an hour,” he said. “I can get us a half hour.”

  “How?”

  “Is your suit good?”

  “Of course.”

  “Follow and don’t talk,” Pascal said, putting the shoe on the other foot.

  He set a steeper glide descent to give them more airspeed, but not enough to make up the missing hundred kilometers. As he descended, he changed the frequency of his helmet radio to a band filled with static. He listened carefully while doing some buoyancy calculations in his head.

  Trawlers didn’t get all the electricity for their metabolism from lightning; that was just the most spectacular way they nursed on the clouds of Venus. Their cables were forty to sixty meters long, enough to bridge two close layers of clouds. Static built up naturally on clouds, and running the trawler’s long cable through the clouds could collect the charge. This steady feeding on static was actually ninety percent of the trawlers’ diet, and their feeding made a quiet noise, but not in a way ears could hear
.

  A nearby trawler feeding on static could squawk in the radio band. The only problem was that far-off lightning, natural cloud-to-cloud discharges, and other trawlers all made the same radio noises. It took good ears to find trawlers. Chloé had been a prodigy. His father could do it. So could Pascal.

  He cast a glance behind him. Phocas trailed him by a hundred and fifty meters, and didn’t give off any signs of panic, even though it was a hundred and twenty degrees Celsius and the pressure had climbed to almost three atmospheres. Their suits were rated to one hundred and fifty degrees. After that it was like wearing a cooking bag.

  There.

  A long, drawn-out squawk lifted above the white static on this band, like running nails along a wall. It was a very weak radio interference that only transmitted a few kilometers, and Pascal began to turn, following a circuitous flight pattern about five kilometers in diameter. Shoulder-checking, he made sure Phocas was still behind him. He listened for the sound, hearing it again and again, and after three circuits, he got a sense of direction and narrowed his search, still descending.

  Venus pressed harder and hotter, but this was home, and he was hidden in the haze, enshrouded, without body, touching nothing. Then he saw the obscure outline, a kilometer below, a dark circle in featureless orange haze. He switched back to the common channel.

  “How good are you at point landings with these wings?” Pascal asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever landed with them,” Phocas said, an edge of tension creeping into his voice. “How small is your home?”

  “We’re not landing on the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. We’re landing on a trawler.”

  “A wild one?”

  A hundred meters lower was a mid-sized trawler, about seven meters in diameter, with six lobes pressed against one another like fat orange slices. Its surface was overgrown with slimy black plants that threaded roots into a silty paste in the center pit on its top. Lank vines hung down the bulbous sides, looking like stringy hair.

  “You go first,” Pascal said. “Be ready to fly if you miss. I’ll catch you if you damage your wings.”

  Phocas’s labored breathing sounded in his helmet as if he was about to say something pithy or funny, but in the end, the seriousness of the situation seemed to have sunk in.

  “D’accord.”

  Phocas swooped lower, slowing his airspeed. The keening of his wing-pack dropped off every few seconds as he experimented with his approach. Finally, he slowed, swooped up beside the trawler, flaring into a stall. He splashed onto the muck of its peak, falling over, but clinging to the center pit, stopping his momentum before he went over the other side.

  “Brilliant!” Pascal said.

  It was astonishing that he’d done it on his first try. His weight was now sinking the trawler. That was the reason Pascal had wanted to go second. It was one thing to land on a relatively stationary target. It was another to juggle a landing swoop onto a sinking platform only seven meters wide.

  “Not very graceful,” Phocas replied.

  “Get down,” Pascal said, swooping in faster than Phocas had done.

  This wing-pack was more sensitive than his own, but he could do this maneuver injured or tired. He flared, bleeding away his airspeed, then swooped down, stalling and extending his spoilers, cutting his lift at the moment he was over the trawler. He surprised himself by landing shakily on his feet.

  Pascal sat and put both feet in the puddle of sulfuric acid in the hollow of the trawler roof. Trawlers and the epiphytes that grew on them secreted chemicals, forming a filmy membrane over the collected water that raised its pH and turned it into a gel with a much higher boiling point. The gel eventually overflowed over all of the trawler, protecting the hard, woody exterior from the harshest effects of sulfuric acid. Pascal wiped some of the slime off the surface of the trawler and spread it over his suit.

  “Scoop up the scum on the edges of the trawler,” Pascal said. “Put it on your feet and then put at least one foot in the middle to keep from slipping off.”

  Shadows hid much of Phocas’s expression behind the faceplate, but he ran his fingers over the mucus with distaste and wiped it off slowly as Pascal had done. Then, doubtfully, he dipped one foot into the puddle in the middle.

  The trawler sank more quickly, emerging into a hollow in the sub-cloud haze, a small clear space of maybe two hundred meters.

  “It’s hydrophobic and basic?” Phocas said, as if dredging up a memory.

  “When flying down, we covered our suits in acid, but at this depth water evaporates and concentrates the acid. The mucus won’t stop everything, but for now...”

  Phocas looked all around. The temperature was a hundred and forty degrees now, and close to three and a half atmospheres.

  “Remember to breathe deep,” Pascal said, “and keep at it.”

  “This is going to get us back a half hour?” Phocas said.

  “We’re deeper now than the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, so we’re riding slower winds. The habitat is approaching our position every minute, and we’re not using any fuel.”

  “Ow!” Phocas said, swatting at his thigh.

  A tiny hole had formed there. Phocas’s suit wasn’t as good as he’d thought. It wasn’t lasting as long as it should have in the sulfuric acid. Phocas pulled a kit out of a sealed pocket, broke it, and dabbed at the opening.

  He was doing it wrong, and not quickly enough. He was quick enough for the world above the clouds, but not here. Pascal’s hands moved fast, thought-free, swiping open his own old kit. He made one quick neutralizing wipe, goopy, a second wipe away with fingers, making certain the bicarbonate squished through the tear, before slapping a patch and sealing it quickly with epoxy. Ten seconds. Done.

  Phocas looked at him strangely.

  “What was that?” Phocas asked.

  “The pressure is thirty times what you’re used to, and it’s a hundred and seventy degrees hotter. Acid chemistry is different here. You can’t be slow. And I don’t even know that your kit is strong enough.”

  Phocas’s eyes widened as Pascal spoke.

  “You shouldn’t get your legs scarred up on account of a visit,” Pascal said awkwardly.

  “Thank you,” Phocas said after a moment. “Thank you.” Then he smiled.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t even ask you to play doctor with me yet.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Pascal said.

  Phocas looked at him strangely and Pascal wondered what he’d missed. He began wiping up more of the mucus off the surface of the trawler and spread it on Phocas.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t trust your suit,” Pascal said.

  “You’re going to put that goop all over me?”

  Pascal applied more and more until Phocas’s suit was shiny with slime.

  “It looks like somebody sneezed on me!” Phocas said.

  Pascal laughed and slimed his own suit. “You really haven’t done this much, have you?”

  Phocas shook his head. He prodded at the patch over his leg. “It still stings. Will it scar much?”

  “The acid is neutralized, but you still burned yourself. That’s just a small one, though.”

  “You do this a lot.”

  “Oui.”

  “You have scars?”

  “Lots.”

  The pressure was over five atmospheres now. Phocas looked like he wanted to say something, but he also looked a bit red-faced.

  “Breathe,” Pascal said. “Deep, slow breaths.”

  “I see something,” Phocas said, pointing down.

  The haze below them was thinning.

  “Wow,” Pascal said. Lumpy, dark shapes moved below, indistinct. “We shouldn’t be able to see this, not from thirty-fifth rang.”

  The haze thinned and melted, revealing the black and gray of Venus without her diaphanous mists, derailing whatever Phocas was going to say. Venus’s ugly hide wrinkled beneath them, like the planet herself had shrunk but kept the
same skin. Like a great sore, Maat Mons stared back at them, the volcano standing nine kilometers high on Atla Regio, a highland a thousand kilometers wide. The surface leaked with other volcanoes. To the west was the shriveled stub of Sapas Mons, and the other great volcanic peak Ozza Mons, standing over seven kilometers tall. To the north, the highlands narrowed and tumbled deeply, down to Ganis Chasma, with innumerable channels carved into the sides by lava.

  Phocas’s hand reached out and took Pascal’s. Pascal felt hot, like he himself was Venusian stone, radiating heat. But he didn’t pull his hand away. They’d lived all their lives in and over clouds. Solid rock was a strange, magical thing, hypnotic and deeply touching. Phocas leaned over, mouth gaping. Then he was smiling.

  “I’ve never seen the surface.”

  “And today was the first time I’d seen the sun,” Pascal said.

  “It’s kind of a special day.”

  They looked at each other, making Pascal awkward. He was going to slip, and probably needed to grab onto something, but wasn’t quite ready to let go of Phocas’s hand. Gabriel-Antoine’s hand. He had a beautiful name.

  “This is the true Venus,” Gabriel-Antoine said, as if sensing Pascal’s thumping heart.

  “This...” Pascal said, then, like an idiot, forgot what he wanted to say. His brain just shut off. “We shouldn’t be able to see it from here. The haze usually only clears at thirty-second rang. But sometimes it rises or even clears when the volcanoes are really active.”

  The words came out in a know-it-all tumble. He breathed deeply, feeling the warm air in his lungs in a way that he hadn’t felt the cool air of the habitats above the clouds. This was more than a lucky sighting of the surface. This was special.

  “This is... only a part of it. Venus hides important parts of herself from us.”

  “Poetic,” Phocas said.

  “My brother is the poet,” Pascal said quickly.

  “The big guy?”

  “The poems are beautiful.”

  “There are different kinds of poets,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “We can make poetry with machines. We can make poetry out of flying, turning it into dance.”

  “I’m not anything,” Pascal said.