The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “Across the plain are coronae,” Pascal pointed, showing raised, pancake-shaped plateaus: Khabuchi Corona and Nirmali Corona to the left, and ahead, the massive Atahensik Corona, its stone surface baked gray and black.

  “From a distance, Venus is beautiful and bright,” Pascal continued. “From space. From Earth. From Mars. But she doesn’t want to be touched. She knows she’s not beautiful, so she pushes us all away with heat and acid, because when we finally break through all that, we find out she’s not what we thought. She’s hideous and she doesn’t want to feel like we’re stuck with her.”

  “That’s a strange way of looking at Venus,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “At sixty-fifth rang, people say Venus hates us, hunts us.”

  “She doesn’t want to be seen like this because this isn’t who she is.”

  Gabriel-Antoine squeezed his hand through the gloves.

  “You’re not stuck with her,” he said. “You fly through the clouds like an angel.”

  “I pretend, like she does,” Pascal said, steering them westward, towards high Ceres Corona.

  “I’ve seen you,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “You’re beautiful.”

  Pascal sighed, wanly, wanting to believe, knowing that Gabriel-Antoine thought he spoke the truth. But Gabriel-Antoine hadn’t seen the inner Pascal. He moved his hand free to work the controls.

  They flew over Miralaidji Corona at only ten kilometers. The rough plateau was wrinkled like a popped blister, all sharp edges. The pressure outside the bathyscaphe had climbed to forty-eight atmospheres, and the temperature to almost three-hundred and ninety Celsius. The bathyscaphe creaked under the stresses. Gabriel-Antoine tried moving his head from side to side to get a better perspective on Miralaidji.

  “There are no shadows,” he said plaintively.

  “That’s part of crossing from her illusion to the body she wears,” Pascal said, continuing the gentle turn towards Ceres Corona, and the chasma that cut for hundreds of kilometers across its feet. “Nothing looks right in an in-between world.”

  “I’ve heard the mysticism that some people above the clouds have about Venus,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “Is that what this is?”

  Pascal shook his head in his helmet.

  “I’m not mystical about Venus,” he said. “Lots of coureurs are, though. Pa almost is, although he won’t admit it.”

  “What do you think, then?”

  “Venus isn’t just a mirror. She’s every mirror. We all see ourselves in her.”

  “Longing?” Gabriel-Antoine said. His tone was half question and half statement, like he might be longing too. Pascal dared not look at him. Gabriel-Antoine’s voice was potent, more powerful now that it was disconnected, whispering to him through an earpiece, so intimate that Pascal could hear his breathing.

  “Seeing something mystical in Venus isn’t incorrect,” Pascal said. “Marthe, Émile and I all grew up where the deep clouds play tricks on our senses. Sounds come from nowhere. The world casts no shadows. Shapes and lights emerge from the clouds and vanish. Storms swallow habitats and return them months later, like ghost ships. Some coureurs see the bioluminescent clouds and call the lower cloud deck a fairy world. Instead of calling themselves coureurs des vents, they call themselves coureurs des fées. Émile and I come from the same world, but I can only see some parts of Venus through his poetry because he sees something different in his mirror.”

  Pascal dared a glance. Gabriel-Antoine was smiling softly. Pascal’s heart turned to mush. He wished the survival suits weren’t between them, and yet he was glad they were.

  “He’s not the only poet,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “I think I would like to live in a world of magic and fairies.”

  Pascal was dripping sweat now and looked away. Despite all the insulation, the interior of the bathyscaphe had reached ninety degrees and the pressure had risen to four atmospheres. Their suits worked hard to keep their interiors below body temperature, but that wouldn’t last long.

  The regular wrinkles on the upper surface of Ceres Corona now appeared sharply defined, rows and rows and rows of broken stone, mounted by sharp, unweathered edges. The lead sulfide and bismuthinite clouds hovered at two kilometers, partly obscuring, partly silvered. Pascal spoiled their lift, but even on full spoil, they sank through the thick atmosphere as if through water.

  “Even if the fey existed, they would be in the clouds,” Pascal said. “They couldn’t survive where we are now. This is a world without wind, without rain, without life. There’s no erosion here, no marking of time except the volcanoes.”

  “And your cave,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “You’ve found the one place on the surface of Venus where something is happening.”

  “You believe me now?”

  “You’re showing it to me.”

  “Yes,” Pascal smiled.

  The flat slope running from the mountain peaks on the north canyon wall down to the base of Diana Chasma was clear ahead. The sense of overwhelming scale was difficult to put aside for two people who’d grown up in contained habitats. Certainly Gabriel-Antoine must have lived with wide skyscapes above the clouds, but a vast open space was not the same as a vast physical thing, like an unmoving stone of uncounted quadrillions of tons thrusting itself into this baking ocean. They both knew storms that towered kilometers high, but that was just acid and carbon dioxide. This was stone. They had no comparator. Those who worshipped Venus need build no monuments. Venus built her own.

  Gabriel-Antoine sighed lightly at the sight, and with the earpieces, it was as if he’d sighed next to Pascal’s ear. Pascal’s heart thumped faster. Gabriel-Antoine had something of the poet in him too, something that felt Venus.

  Pascal increased their descent angle. Diana Chasma itself was a monument as well. Serpentine, snaking for a thousand kilometers, the web of the chasma system was a hundred kilometers wide, each trench clawed two to three kilometers into the crust. The chasma walls seemed improbably steep, and all the more massive for that. The floor of the chasma was broken in some places, flat and even in others, littered with boulders and landslide rubble, which seemed sand-grain tiny from this altitude.

  “Can we see it yet?” Gabriel-Antoine asked in a small voice.

  “Almost,” Pascal said. “Another fifteen minutes.”

  “Until we get there?”

  “Until we come within sight of it,” Pascal smiled. “We’re descending at almost terminal velocity, which this close to Venus isn’t much.”

  “This thing has never had a leak?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “We don’t use it much,” Pascal said.

  Gabriel-Antoine looked at the outer and inner pressures. The difference was eighty atmospheres. If they did get a leak, it would be like an explosion inside the craft.

  “It’s never had a leak with me in it,” Pascal added.

  “You’re a good luck charm.”

  The brown and black edges of the chasma rose above them and they entered an even gloomier world, richer in grainy detail than the clouds they knew, vaster than their habitats, and spectral in the deceptively perspective-deadened shadow-free light. The thick air moaned outside the bathyscaphe, differently from the high, frantic whistle of wind over wing-packs and suits, or even the thrumming of storms outside habitats. Pascal had meant what he said. This was an underworld, lifeless even beneath the strangeness of Venusian cloud life and its human colonists. An underworld without ghosts.

  They slowed in an environment that had more in common with the sea floor than an atmosphere. Pascal turned their creaking bathyscaphe onto a final approach. On their last journey, Pascal and George-Étienne had decided to land farther from the cave mouth to be safer. Boulders on the smooth ground loomed only ten meters beneath them and Pascal spun the prop for a few moments to kill their descent speed. Then, they sank, meter by meter, second by second. Venus neared to give them a gritty, dry kiss. They bounced once, very gently, with a weird buoyancy so that the slow wind carried them forward. They stopped on the bathyscaphe’s wheels and
held their breaths.

  “Welcome to Venus,” Pascal said quietly.

  Gabriel-Antoine might not have trusted himself to speak, or perhaps he wanted another touch, because he took Pascal’s hand for long seconds as he craned his neck awkwardly to peer up through the fish-eye diamond porthole. Above them, gray clouds hid a yellow glow like a cooling ember. The walls of the Diana Chasma felt prison-like. The wind, perhaps five kilometers per hour, but powerful at ninety-three atmospheres of pressure, made a low hum around them.

  “It’s real,” Gabriel-Antoine whispered.

  “Venus?”

  Gabriel-Antoine was still peering up at the walls and the all-too-solid eighty-ton boulder about thirty meters away.

  “I’ve never touched a planet,” he said. “Before today I’d never even seen a planet this way, only in pictures.”

  “I never believed pictures, not in my heart,” Pascal said. “I don’t know that anyone born in the clouds can.”

  “Thank you for showing me this.”

  Gabriel-Antoine turned. He had a nervous smile replaced every few moments by an awe Pascal knew. Pascal was younger than Gabriel-Antoine, but here, he was the experienced one.

  “We’re probably effectively breathing five atmospheres, and heat exhaustion is going to hit us before the Stirling engines fail,” he said. “We’d better get cracking.”

  Gabriel-Antoine exhaled heavily. He was sweating as much as Pascal. He turned to the new control panel that they’d installed. The bathyscaphe vibrated as the tool bay door on the outer hull opened.

  In preparing for this descent, Pascal had been elated to have another engineering mind to throw ideas at, someone with whom he didn’t need to hold back any of his mathematical or geometric shorthand. In fact, Gabriel-Antoine sometimes had to slow down for Pascal, which was both embarrassing and exciting. Between them, they’d designed and 3D-printed a half-dozen torpedo-shaped drones, none longer than a half-meter. Made almost entirely of carbon nanotubes, the drones could move for hours on the surface of Venus like little submarines before the heat wore down their control mechanisms.

  Gabriel-Antoine activated all six, sending them on pre-programmed courses. They needed to measure the wind speed and direction in the three-dimensional volume around George-Étienne’s cave. The drones had simple course-correction software, which would collect data and give them a 3D map of the local winds.

  In the meantime, Pascal drove the bathyscaphe forward on its spindly carbon wire wheels to the boulder ahead of them. Their little craft rocked slightly and skidded sideways on the slow, heavy wind.

  “There’s a lot of wind,” Gabriel-Antoine said, looking up from his display. “Like a storm, but no clouds or anything in the air.”

  “It’s only a few kilometers per second.”

  “It’s a wind of super-critical carbon dioxide,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “I’m changing the routes of the drones. I just about lost one. What’s making that wind?”

  “The true heart of Venus,” Pascal said. “The stars.”

  Then they had to focus on their tasks. Despite the changes, one of Gabriel-Antoine’s drones couldn’t correct its course in time and was dashed onto rocks and swept into the cave mouth. Pascal tethered the bathyscaphe to the boulder and swung it around to the lee side so that they faced the cave. For long moments, they stared in wonder at its impossibility.

  They’d mounted a heat-resistant laser and linked it to a mapping program. Centimeter by centimeter, it scanned the ground, the rim of the cave and as far down the throat as it could. This would give them a detailed topographic model of the cave entrance. They had a radar they could have brought down, and software that could have analyzed the chaos of input within the cave, but radar waves bouncing up into the clouds would have been the quickest way to give away their location to la colonie, and to the Bank too.

  Pascal spooled out a cable with a small chemistry payload that they’d jury-rigged the night before. The rock was far too hard to sample with the tools they had, and any acids or reagents they had would have boiled at these temperatures. But decades of scientific prospectors had faced the same problem, and they had carried down two sulfur-silicon-oxygen powders in the little payload.

  Or, more correctly, they were solids at forty-fifth rang. Somewhere on the way down the two solids had melted in their containers. When mixed, they formed a high-temperature sulfuric acid variant. Pascal poured the hot acid onto the stone, and filmed it etching the surface. The wind blew blebs and drops of the acid-stone slurry into a collection container. Pascal zoomed the camera, photographing the morphology of the stone that had resisted the acid, and very carefully lowered the chemistry payload into the wind torrent running into the mouth of the cave, repeating the process inside twice.

  By the time he’d finished that and left a spidery drone clinging to a hollow of the cave wall, it had been ninety minutes and Gabriel-Antoine looked like he was succumbing to heat exhaustion. He’d lost two more of his drones. They landed the other three in the lee of larger boulders nearby, where they could be recovered.

  Pascal pulled in all the equipment, inflated their oxygen balloons and released their cable. The launch was rough, and frighteningly sideways at first, but within a second their buoyancy shot them up like a bar of soap from a fist. The bathyscaphe creaked and the surface shrank beneath them, Venus becoming once again the hideous, inscrutable, distant lover. Approaching Venus had burned them. Not just their souls. The bathyscaphe had not been able to keep the internal pressure below four atmospheres. It had barely held it at six. And the internal temperature had risen to one hundred and fifty degrees, the heat tolerances of their survival suits. But the decompression of the oxygen tanks had cooled the inside by two degrees already. They continued rising without any leaks.

  “You okay?” Pascal said.

  Gabriel-Antoine nodded weakly. He was dripping with sweat and had puked in his helmet.

  “Soon we’ll be high enough for me to deploy radiator vanes to cool us off faster,” Pascal said.

  “I don’t know...” Gabriel-Antoine said, “... how you do it... I come from the cold.”

  “I’m a coureur des vents.”

  Gabriel-Antoine sipped water listlessly from the straw stub in his helmet. The wind of their ascent hummed outside, already down to three hundred and ninety degrees Celsius. Pascal deployed the radiator vanes vertically along the hull.

  “Not a coureur,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “An angel.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  ÉMILE WATCHED THÉRÈSE kneel in the bay of the Baie-Comeau’s oxygen-cracking factory. Réjean, Mylène, and Anne-Claude sat on battery stacks. Cédric’s arms were draped over Anne-Claude’s shoulders. Bénoit knelt beside Thérèse, holding a breathing mask connected by tubing to one of the big atmospheric tanks. The factory was solar-powered, and during the forty-eight-hour day, it pumped atmospheric carbon dioxide into tanks to crack it into oxygen and carbon monoxide for life support and jet propellant. During the forty-eight-hour night, the factory idled, but the collecting tanks were still full of Venusian air.

  Bénoit was a dick from the Val-Bélair habitat on the other side of the planet, on a training course on the Baie-Comeau. He’d been sniffing around Thérèse since he got here. He put his face into the breathing mask and inhaled deeply. He kept it on, and his breath came faster and faster. It was just carbon dioxide.

  Idiot.

  Finally, he took it away, close to passing out. As he passed it to Thérèse, he stroked her back and she didn’t pull away. She put the mask to her face, and breathed for twenty, thirty seconds, her breaths turning into panting. Her face took on a bluish tinge.

  Émile pushed Bénoit out of the way, put his arm around her and tried to pull away the mask. She shrugged violently at his arm and elbowed his reaching hand. She closed her eyes again, and the blue tinge beneath her papery skin dropped to her neck.

  She swayed and he wanted to support her again, but didn’t. Anne-Claude and Cédric came close, watching her e
agerly. Thérèse dropped the mask and fell forward onto hands and knees, taking great gasping breaths. She groaned. He put his arm on her shoulder, and she flung it off again. She gathered enough strength to sit up, then glared at him and kicked him. Her bony heel didn’t hurt, but he felt the heat of flushing on his face.

  “What?” he said softly.

  “Stop getting between me and Venus!”

  “I’m not! I thought you needed help.”

  “There is no help with Venus! I do this. I choose.”

  He took the mask off the floor. “I want Venus too.” The plastic was warm against his face, moist with exhaled breath. Hers. Bénoit’s. A primal panic raced from lungs suddenly heavy with carbon dioxide. His panting came quickly. To slow it, he held his breath, the carbon dioxide of Venus’s atmosphere. His heart thumped. Thérèse stared dubiously at him. He closed his eyes. He tasted the faint bitterness of sulfur. Exhaled. Breathed. Panic throbbed. Chest burned. Spit thickened in his mouth. He forced another breath, but instead of strong, it came quick and shaky, panting. The parched air of Venus tasted of unquenched thirst. Push out. Pull in. He just wanted to last longer than Bénoit.

  When his vision was more black spots than plastic floor, he dropped the mask and inhaled. Even breathing real air wasn’t enough. He needed to change all the air in his lungs. Venus—choking, killing, spiteful Venus—filled his chest like an ocean filling a drowning victim. He didn’t pass out, but it was close.

  Anne-Claude and Cédric took the mask and knelt in front of one another. Like he should have with Thérèse. He dragged his eyes to hers. She watched him, tight-lipped. Then her hand rested on his leg.

  “What are you doing, Émile?” she said. “Why are you even with me?”

  All the panic that had risen out of him splashed back in, washing away all the good things. He gripped her hand, held it there. He didn’t know how to answer in front of people, all watching.