The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “I want to be with you.” He felt the stumble.

  The palpable failure of his answer.

  “You don’t like the real me, Émile,” she said. “Humanity here needs a connection with Venus. I’m going to find how to reach her. What are you doing here?”

  “I want to be part of that,” he whispered.

  “If I wasn’t doing this, would you be here? Drinking of Venus’s oceans? Touching Venus’s skirts? Feeling her bite?” she said, not lowering her voice at all. Everyone was listening.

  “I’m running from one connection and looking for another,” he said quietly, leaning close to speak just in her ear, choosing his words. But like his poetry, none of them ever felt right. “I don’t know what will make me feel like I belong, but I think it will be through you.”

  “I thought you were a poet,” she said, “but you don’t make anything. I thought you wanted Venus, but you only go through the motions. You know what I like about you? You’re lost. Lost is the right start, but it’s only a start.”

  “You’re lost too,” he said, the first thing he could say with conviction.

  “I’m not lost,” she said, withdrawing her hands. “I know exactly where I want to be. I just don’t yet know how to get there. I’m questing. Purity of vision is what will get me there.”

  He swallowed down bitter spit. She rose, touching Anne-Claude and Cédric on the tops of their heads like a benediction. She sat with Mylène and Réjean on the battery stacks. Bénoit joined them and they shared a joint.

  FORTY

  DESPITE HAVING BEEN on the surface less than two hours, it took four hours to decompress as they rose to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs forty-five kilometers higher. Marthe and George-Étienne stowed the bathyscaphe while Marie-Pier brought Pascal and Gabriel-Antoine inside, and stripped their suits to let Jean-Eudes clean them. Jean-Eudes made a gagging face at the puke smell of Gabriel-Antoine’s suit, which sent Alexis into a giggling fit.

  Pascal was well enough once he’d wiped himself down and put on coveralls. This wasn’t the first time he’d overheated, but Gabriel-Antoine needed an hour of slowly sipping water while Marie-Pier sponged his torso under a fan. Pascal imagined sponging Gabriel-Antoine’s hard chest, and resented that everyone else was here, that Marie-Pier was taking care of him. If they’d been alone—if they’d flown to some other habitat, just the two of them—it would have been Pascal’s responsibility.

  The outer door of the airlock to the garden torus slammed. Jean-Eudes and Alexis dropped the cleaning and repair of the suits and ran to wait at the line on the floor for Marthe to come through. Marie-Pier smiled as she observed this and shared a glance with Pascal. The dull carbon wheel spun and Marthe and George-Étienne stepped in.

  Both were careful and disciplined, the way all coureurs had to be with the acid and heat and pressure. They didn’t step past the line. They closed and locked the airlock door. They put down the equipment they’d been carrying, then checked each other’s suits, applied a bit more bicarbonate, and re-wiped the seals on their necks before removing their helmets. Jean-Eudes put on dark gloves, wiped the helmets diligently, and strapped them to the wall. Alexis, who normally left this to Jean-Eudes, begged to be allowed to help his aunt.

  Pascal came over, put on a pair of gloves and wiped down the packaging around the instruments they’d pulled out of the bathyscaphe. They were just cool enough to touch for a few seconds at a time. He brought the instruments to the table.

  “Ça va?” George-Étienne asked, jerking his chin to Gabriel-Antoine.

  “I’m good,” the engineer volunteered.

  George-Étienne stripped off his suit and handed it to Jean-Eudes.

  “You were down there a long time,” he said. “How did it go?”

  “It was incredible,” Gabriel-Antoine said wistfully.

  They stowed the suits, dressed and came to the table Pascal had folded down. He’d hooked the instruments to the computers and unrolled a screen. Pascal took the three solidified acid-dissolved rocks out first. They smelled of sulfur and were stained faintly yellow. They passed them around.

  “A sample,” Pascal said. “We expect that the rock is like most of the rest of Venus’s surface, basaltic with no water to speak of.”

  George-Étienne put his arm around Jean-Eudes, who stared at the ugly yellow-veined black blob in wonder. “Your brother brought you a real piece of Venus,” he said. “If Venus were a proper planet, we’d be walking on that stuff all day long.”

  The thought of standing on rock seemed so ridiculous to Jean-Eudes that he laughed. Alexis took the stone, weighing it in his palm.

  “Rock as far as we could see, going on forever,” Gabriel-Antoine said to Alexis. “No rain. No wind. Just heat.”

  “Can I go, grand-père?” Alexis said. George-Étienne shushed him.

  While they’d been talking, the computer had finished calculating a three-dimensional view from the laser topography data. The rock face, the cave mouth and about twenty meters of the floor of Diana Chasma were rendered in yellow lines on black. The detail was excellent. They could have probably shaped a cap to go over the mouth with just this study.

  “That’s going to take a lot of steel,” Marthe said.

  “And we’re going to have to have layers of caps,” Pascal said.

  “That isn’t the only channel, though,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “Did the wind map turn out?”

  Pascal changed the display, showing a three-dimensional volume where the drones had moved. At every meter, arrows of different sizes showed the wind direction and speed. There were gaps in their measurements, but the picture showed that the cave system was more complex than they’d thought.

  “I don’t know how to read this,” Marthe said.

  Pascal turned the display and hid all the vectors except those that pointed at the rock. This thinned the blizzard of arrows and showed at least six openings. The main cave mouth was the largest. About twenty meters rightward, the photograph of a small opening, barely large enough to fit a person crawling, matched to a series of arrows indicating wind speed. Photographs showed another opening twenty meters to the right, hidden behind a boulder, and smaller rocks that seemed to be held in place by the force of the wind. Far to the left, almost three hundred meters away and about forty meters off the floor of the chasma, was a cave opening under an overhang of rock. It was about two meters in diameter. The drone scans had found two other minuscule channels, also connected to the main channel.

  “I don’t understand how you can cap a cave in all that wind,” Marie-Pier said. “The pressure and wind force are stronger than anything we ever see in the cloud decks. Why isn’t the atmosphere of Venus emptying in all that?”

  “They say that five million years ago, it took a hundred thousand years for the Atlantic Ocean to fill in the Mediterranean Sea through the Straits of Gibraltar,” George-Étienne said. “This cave is tiny compared to the Straits, and the surface of Venus is far larger than many Atlantics.”

  “We’ve been working on different plans,” Pascal said. “With proper mapping of the tunnels, we can prepare caps for various parts of the cave, and either lower them in or assemble them in the caves. They’ll be hinged, and once they’re fixed into position, we can swing them into place, let the wind hold them there. That will stop the wind enough for us to work.”

  “But you’ll cook down there,” she said. “Do you have enough robots to do all that?”

  “As soon as we’ve got two or three caps in sequence,” Pascal said, “we’ll run high pressure atmosphere down to low pressure spaces, making electricity and cooling the interior, like a refrigeration unit.”

  “The rock will still be four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius,” Marthe said, “even if you can get the air down to a couple hundred degrees.”

  “We can get the air colder than that,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “We’re starting with a vacuum on one end of the cave. That will be the coolest area. The rest depends on the pressure drops and i
nsulation.”

  “You’ll need good insulation,” George-Étienne said.

  “Vacuum is a good insulator,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “It’ll take a lot of steel to double-jacket that whole cave,” George-Étienne said cautiously.

  “Or we play with the rock,” Pascal said. “We’ll have unlimited electricity and a vacuum. We could melt and reshape rock to have hollows. Air will insulate too.”

  Marie-Pier shook her head, doubtfully.

  “It’s an enormous undertaking, for what?” she said.

  “The heart of Venus,” Pascal said.

  “Independence,” George-Étienne said. “The stars.”

  Marthe regarded Marie-Pier. “Whatever is at the bottom of the cave, whatever it is that leads into a vacuum in some other solar system, nothing like it has ever been found before.”

  Marie-Pier waved her hand, not dismissively, but she seemed to be struggling with her argument.

  “If that really leads to another solar system—and I’m not disputing that—” she added quickly “—then it does have unique value. But none of us are eminent scientists. I’m an applied botanist. He’s an engineer. And we have no tools or instruments, not the kind needed to really discover anything. And even if we did, if we can’t tell anyone, then what?”

  “Understanding comes later,” George-Étienne said. “In cooled tunnels under Venus, we could mine, really mine. Pull our own ore out of the ground. We know what iron, aluminum, nickel, hydrogen, carbonates and minerals are worth.”

  “Metals, yes,” Marie-Pier said, “and then what? How do we explain where we came into tons of steel?”

  “We don’t need to trade more than a fraction of it,” Marthe said. “Only what we have to, for what we can’t make ourselves. We’ll build a sturdy habitat in the caves. Greenhouses. Bioreactors. Lots of space to live.”

  “And among the stars,” Pascal said. “We know how to build spacecraft. We know how to print solar panels and robots to go mine the asteroids in this new solar system. We know a lot of basic vacuum industry. We have energy. We have metals. We have a base to start from.”

  His enthusiasm was catching. He saw it catching among them. But Pa’s expression was becoming more sober.

  “Access to mining and space will change Venus, not just for us and all the coureurs,” he said. “It will eventually help even the people living above the clouds, being strangled by the Bank monopoly and an incompetent government. But it’s more than that. We’ve found a bridge to the stars like the ancients tried to build. We’ve found the Axis Mundi.”

  FORTY-ONE

  TÉTREAU HADN’T SEEN his girlfriend in days, and saw his family only before he slept. But this was the time in life to make a mark. He could get into l’Assemblée soon and still be one of the youngest members… but lots of members turned that step into nothing. He would show his dedication and talent and, although young, would be a prime candidate for a seat in the cabinet. And who knew, with enough supporters and favors owed, in a decade or two, maybe président?

  Labourière waved him in. Tétreau closed the door and sat.

  “We’ve got twenty aircraft in the upper cloud deck equipped with radiation detectors,” Tétreau said, “as well as eighty drone planes. We have more drones, but no more radiation detectors for them. Industry section is calling it a new wind-mapping exercise, as well as a test of new comms systems.”

  “What are the odds they actually find something?” the Chief-of-Staff asked.

  “It’s a big planet and the atmosphere is thick enough to scatter-blur even strong signals. We’re focusing on the equatorial band, which gives us overlapping sensors in a lot of places,” Tétreau said. “If something is in that strip, we’ll be able to triangulate on it.”

  “Then you can use radar.”

  “If we use radar now, we’ll just draw attention to ourselves,” Tétreau said.

  “And once we have a source pinpointed by radar, the constabulary can go down. Maybe even with some Bank guards.”

  “Really?”

  “Woodward wants to get to the bottom of this as badly as la présidente,” Labourière said.

  “I’m going to talk to Émile D’Aquillon again,” Tétreau said. “I’ve thought of a way to get in.”

  “How?”

  Tétreau explained his new idea.

  FORTY-TWO

  DIFFERENT FAMILIES ADAPTED to the close quarters of the habitats in different ways. Some yelled. Some shut down. Some developed body language cues to tell the others when they wanted privacy. Marthe had learned all the cues young. She’d always been curious about the unspoken, and when she’d moved up to the Causapscal-des-Vents at sixteen to be her father’s representative to l’Assemblée, she’d had to learn a whole lot more body languages fast. L’Assemblée was the watering hole of every upper habitat and even some of the coureur des vents families. And everyone reacted differently to conditions that would have made rats eat each other in behavioral experiments.

  Marie-Pier hadn’t said anything yet, but had stayed at the table, rerunning the video Pascal and George-Étienne had taken, the one that had revealed the cold vacuum beyond the hole in Venus. Marthe had watched Marie-Pier many times in debates in l’Assemblée, watched her expressive, space-consuming conversational gestures. And while she seemed intent, her body language wasn’t closing. She wasn’t afraid or defensive.

  Marthe sat across from her. She pulled out a dark, thin paper made of hammered trawler fiber and tapped in coarsely chopped tobacco. She licked, rolled and held it out to Marie-Pier. The older woman hesitated.

  “Anything good in it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t bring any with me.”

  Marie-Pier took the cigarette and the electric lighter. Marthe rolled herself another, lit and inhaled. Faintly sulfurous. Acrid. Satisfying. They smoked in silence, eyeing the little image. Finally Marthe rotated it. It didn’t make it less inscrutable or sharpen any of the blurred stars caught by the vagaries of focus.

  “I wish we had a better picture,” Marie-Pier said.

  “In a while, we’ll be able to build a telescope,” Marthe said, “to explore whatever is out there.”

  “Never thought of myself as an explorer.”

  “You weren’t born here, were you?”

  Marie-Pier shook her head. “I was born in Havre-Saint-Pierre,” she said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder as if pointing at Québec, “but I don’t remember it really. My parents brought me here when I was three.”

  “I was born at the base of the lower cloud deck, at forty-eighth rang, over Arianrod Fossae,” Marthe said. “Three trawler habitats ago.”

  “Tough primitive trawlers back then. Arianrod is north, isn’t it? Why so far north?”

  “The prop trains on the old trawlers weren’t as reliable. Pa followed the winds a lot more, steered a whole lot less.”

  “Fossae are named after war goddesses, right?”

  Marthe nodded.

  “That’s funny,” Marie-Pier said with a smile. “And very à propos.”

  Marthe smiled, shrugged and drew on her cigarette, making the end glow.

  “Tough life this deep,” Marie-Pier said.

  “It’s not an environment that encouraged us to look more than a few weeks, or months ahead,” Marthe said. “We don’t choose. We endure.”

  “But you went sunside,” she said, jerking a common thumbs-up that the coureurs used to indicate the main ships of la colonie.

  “Bright lights, pretty girls,” Marthe said. “And I was never in any control down here. Winds blow you where they want.”

  “Good life?”

  “I don’t carry Pa’s baggage about the Bank and the government,but I can see that la colonie is heading nowhere. We’re never going to get out from under these debts. The Bank will make sure of that. We’re never going to steer our own destinies.”

  “I have two young children,” Marie-Pier said. “I don’t have a lot, but we’re okay for now. They have to grow
up. I have to give them something certain.” Her hands shaped something, cupping whatever it was that she would give her children. Neither woman knew what it was.

  Marthe nodded slowly. “I’m not saying what we’re proposing isn’t risky.”

  “Very risky. Stealing a habitat, and a few of my trawlers.”

  “Those don’t belong to the government.”

  “The law says they do.”

  “We both know who writes the laws, and who’s funding them,” Marthe said. “We’re losing the Causapscal-des-Vents because the présidente doesn’t like us, and you’re losing trawlers you built and were going to sell because you don’t give gifts to the right people.”

  “It’s going to get worse when they find out that we sank a habitat on purpose. My kids need the same medicine, all the other things kids need.”

  “Did you like Jean-Eudes?” Marthe asked.

  “This isn’t about Jean-Eudes,” said Marie-Pier. “He’s sweet.”

  “The government would rather he didn’t exist.”

  “How did you grow up with no medicine or vitamins or any of the other food supplements you needed?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Marthe said. “I got sick a few times pretty bad. We all did.”

  “And you lost your mom.”

  Marthe dropped the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray, watching the coiling smoke.

  “Yeah. But she didn’t die because of our choices. Any coureur could have died just from being too far away from hospitals, including you. We were just too far from help.”

  Marie-Pier leaned forward. “My kids can’t lose their mother, or have their habitat confiscated.”

  Marthe turned the image again. The stars moved.

  “Playing it safe will probably get you, them and your habitats into the future, ten, fifteen years. Then what? They’ll be paying for debts they didn’t make, debts that weren’t fair to start with because the Banks stacked the deck.”

  Marie-Pier looked at the stars in the image.