The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  Her expression was earnest, a little overeager, but people were dumb in love. And Marthe would probably want to talk with her. He looked at the comms pack for a second, then did a quick calculation in his head.

  “I think even if I wanted to, I couldn’t connect you. The angle she contacted me at was about as horizontal as it gets. The Causapscal-des-Profondeurs is probably slipping behind the planet right now.”

  She looked at the time on her wrist display. “What rang are they in?”

  “I don’t know,” he said impatiently. “They don’t tell me and I don’t care. If there’s been lots of eruptions, they might be low. If they’re catching or calving, they might be higher. It’s wind, ostie.”

  She frowned. “I guess I... I was wondering when I could see her.”

  “Did Délia dump you again?”

  Noëlle pursed her lips tight and stepped back into the stairwell. “Tell her I came by,” she said, and then swung the airlock closed as hard as she could, which wasn’t hard, but still made noise. He found the stub of a joint crushed under a plate. He tapped it back into his dwindling supply, wiped his sweaty forehead and opened the blinds with his fingers again.

  He really had thought for a second that it was Thérèse coming down the stairs to see him. And maybe he understood, a tiny bit, why she hadn’t. The cloudscape drifted a kilometer beneath him, too bright, too clear, too cold.

  This wasn’t home. He could understand what Thérèse was trying to do. Seeking a home was all anybody ought to be doing. Who could feel at home in a tin can floating under a balloon? And he was slowing her down. He had been keeping her from making the clouds home. He kind of knew what home was. He’d had a home once, in the gloom of the cloud decks. He missed Chloé and Mathurin. He missed maman. He missed Pascal and Jean-Eudes and Alexis.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  PASCAL WASN’T SURE what to feel. Now that they’d agreed to do it, the job seemed too big to think about. And people were looking to him and Gabriel-Antoine to figure out how to turn their sacrifices into success. Bubbling excitement tickled inside his chest every few minutes. At other moments, weight left him, as if the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs were dipping in a downdraft.

  And he was going to work really closely with Gabriel-Antoine. The thought thrilled and terrified. His feeling of deep wrongness still loomed in his mind. Not about Gabriel-Antoine; he was wonderful. The black feeling of being wrong was about himself, of being something he was not, of being trapped. And even in this moment of elation, spurred by people believing in the true heart of Venus, that feeling was trying to crush him.

  By the galley table, Gabriel-Antoine talked animatedly with George-Étienne and Marie-Pier over the piece of hull. Alexis and Jean-Eudes had scooted close to the buzz. Marthe came over to Pascal and put an arm around his shoulders. She steered him away from the conversation. They walked slowly, wordlessly. She pushed aside the curtain to Pa’s room and they entered. She closed the curtain and smiled at him.

  “The House of Styx, eh?” she said.

  He smiled back uncertainly.

  “I like it,” she said. She winked at him. “You helped build the House of Styx. Gabriel-Antoine came over pretty enthusiastically.”

  He didn’t trust himself to speak. The thrilling soar and crushing doom warred inside.

  “Nice work,” she said, offering him her fist. “He seems into you.”

  His cheeks went hot, but he fist-bumped her with a sheepish smile.

  “You seem taken too,” she said. “First love is scary. I hope you do better than me.”

  “Why?”

  “I was sixteen, living without Pa for the first time, sitting in l’Assemblée, cocky as hell, and I met Ghislaine. Twenty. Gorgeous blonde. Folle, folle, folle en ostie,”she said, her moving hands punctuating: crazy, crazy, crazy as fuck. “I stayed with her on and off for two years. I was folle too, wound completely around her finger,” she laughed. “Don’t worry. Gabriel-Antoine seems to be a lot more stable.”

  He nodded uncertainly.

  “Hey,” she said, cupping his chin with her hand the way she had when he was just a boy and too shy to look at her. She ducked her head to look up at him. “It’s okay. I was just joking. Gabriel-Antoine really does seem decent, and there are worse things than having a cute, smart, decent guy wanting to know you better.”

  “There’s something wrong,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  He didn’t offer anything else. He didn’t have anything else. She rubbed his arm. “You don’t like guys? You like both?” she asked. “It’s all good. Swing any way you want. Or don’t swing at all.”

  “There’s something wrong with me,” he whispered.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Pascal. You’re wonderful.”

  He pulled away from her touch. She held her hands at her sides. The silence lengthened. The conversation outside broke into laughter, even Jean-Eudes’s deep, fast laughter.

  “I feel detached. Disconnected. I feel like I shouldn’t be here. Anywhere.” He swallowed. “I like when I get acid burns. Sometimes I let myself get burnt. On purpose.”

  She held out her left arm. Three parallel scars lay across the pale wrist. Too clean for acid scars. Too straight and narrow. Long faded.

  “Fifteen,” she said. “Before I left for the sixty-fifth rang. I didn’t know what the fuck we were doing down here. I didn’t know that any of us had a future. Pa and Émile fought all the time. Maman had just died. I thought that the best I could hope for, after all my struggles and living, would just be getting dissolved by Venus, like everything else. Nothing mattered.”

  He took a deep breath. This wasn’t coming out right.

  “I love Venus,” he said. “I love the clouds. The heat. The chaos. The shapelessness. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I don’t think I could live in the cold and bright of sixty-fifth rang. It’s me that’s wrong.”

  She took one cautious step forward, then put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Wearing maman’s dress wasn’t about missing her, was it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. His eyes were hot. He couldn’t look at her.

  “Are you a girl, Pascal?” she asked.

  He didn’t know what to answer. He didn’t know, and it ached. Tears dripped along his cheeks. His throat was painfully tight. He felt something about to break in him, something holding back a river.

  “Sometimes girls are born into bodies that don’t match,” she said, taking his hand.

  He felt a crushing hopelessness and an overwhelming relief. He nodded, although he didn’t know at what, and he wiped at his cheeks with the back of his hand. He didn’t pull away from Marthe. He squeezed her hand harder.

  “If it’s true I’m trapped here,” he said. “In a meat prison.”

  She hugged him. Then she wiped the tears from his face. She smiled.

  “Little sister?” she asked.

  His throat constricted, and more tears came, and he nodded... she nodded. Elation and despondency swirled like debris in a storm.

  “Don’t cry,” Marthe said. “I know who you are now.”

  Pascal knew too: free and trapped, eyes opened to the perfect curse. Marthe hugged him tight as he cried silently. After a time, the tears slowed and he wiped self-consciously.

  “Does knowing matter? I’m still trapped.”

  “We’re all going to help.”

  “There’s no help.”

  “There’s hormones.”

  His brain felt like it stopped. “What?”

  “You’re not the first, Pascal. If your body is producing the wrong hormones, we can give it the right ones.”

  His terrified heart expanded, unsure of what to do faced with hope. “Really?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  The tickle of hope squeezed in somehow, too deep to be taken seriously.

  “We can’t afford hormones.”

  “Black market.”

  “We can’t afford hormones.�
��

  “That’s not your problem, Pascal. Leave that to me.”

  He didn’t trust himself. He didn’t trust her. It was too big.

  “Turn me into a girl?”

  “Part way. The rest is more involved. I know somebody who changed.”

  Hope settled in his heart, like a weed that would be hard and painful to pull out. The stress of its growth made his soul creak to accommodate it. She sat them on Pa’s hammock and they checked encyclopedia entries on hormones. He’d had no idea. He felt so stupid for never having found out about any of this. He felt like he’d wasted so much time. After a while, she helped him clean his face, wiping away tears, letting the blotchy redness calm until it looked like he hadn’t been crying.

  Not he.

  Not he.

  She? What did it feel like to be she?

  Marthe opened the latches on the top drawer of Pa’s storage and found his tobacco. She rolled a cigarette and stood nearby while Pascal just thought. What was it like to be a she? He would love to be like Marthe. So comfortable in her skin. Insides and outsides matching.

  Part of it made so much sense, felt completely right. But the relief inside made how he... she was built so much worse. The full weight of... her prison was crushing. The hope now, with even a moment’s thought, seemed absurd. Ridiculous. How could anyone escape their own body?

  She’d shaved her chest and stomach and arms and face every day, twice sometimes, to find smooth skin, but that smooth skin was drawn tight over the muscles of a man. And dangling between her legs was... something strange, not entirely hers. Something had conspired to humiliate her, to make her unrecognizable to the world, a disguise that had covered her so completely that no one could see who she was, or even think to look. Marthe stood beside her and rubbed her back.

  “I’m Pascale,” she whispered with a weird, questioning realization. “Pascale with an E.”

  Marthe hopped back into the hammock, not easy with Pascale’s inches and weight over her. The hammock pressed them together. Marthe held out her hand.

  “I’m very happy to meet the real you, little sister.”

  A feeling of warmth, of impossible relief, washed through Pascale. The real Pascale. She held Marthe’s hand, callous to callous, scars to scars.

  “I’m so scared,” Pascale said. “I’m buried.”

  Marthe shook her head and smiled and Pascale began crying again.

  “We know where you are, little sister. You’re not lost anymore. We’ll come get you.”

  Marthe hugged her as she went through deeper tears with terrifying moments of sudden, irrational elation so big she thought her chest would burst.

  After a while, they emerged. Marthe rejoined the conversation, but Pascale went to her room. Her room. It was time to shave; she had the faintest of stubble, but she didn’t look at it with the same sense of hopelessness. She left the light on, and washed her face, looking in the mirror for real for the first time in a long time. The person looking back at her was still alien, disconnected. She combed her fingers through shoulder-length hair. She made a tentative smile, trying to see who she might be under this disguise of a sixteen-year-old man, all the way down to Pascale. Pascal was just the outside of Pascale. Pascale was in there, the Pascale who felt things, who reflected on herself and the world. It wasn’t Pascal all the way down. The relief in that simple realization was almost too much to hold inside.

  Yet even the relief wasn’t easy. It was one thing to find herself. It was another to find herself trapped in an impenetrable prison. Marthe wanted to help her, but how far could Marthe help? And what would Pa say? Or Gabriel-Antoine? Her stomach lurched in terror at the thought. What could she tell him?

  As if he’d heard her thinking, Gabriel-Antoine appeared in the parting curtains at the door. He smiled at her. Pascale let her hair go and wiped her hands self-consciously with a damp cloth. He stepped in.

  “Ça va?”he asked.

  “Oui.”

  “You looked upset when you came out of your talk with Marthe,” he said, leaning against the wall, crossing his arms.

  Pascale cleared her throat.

  “It’s a little overwhelming,” she said, “and fast. We’re really going to the stars.”

  “That’s not it,” he said.

  “It’s not?” Pascale said stupidly. Her heart thumped. Fear rose.

  He leaned closer. “You can’t hide it,” he said, smiling conspiratorially.

  “What?” she squeaked.

  “You’re worried about me being your step-daddy,” he smiled, running his fingers through her hair.

  Pascale huffed in relief, and then laughed in a way she was sure had an edge of hysteria in it. She pulled away, not sure what to do with her hands, not sure where to look. Gabriel-Antoine didn’t follow. He was still smiling. Like he didn’t know that what they had was about to be ripped apart, like a herd of trawlers in a storm. She didn’t have to make decisions yet. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to ruin this. His smile was fading, and his look became more penetrating. Pascale felt the shoe about to drop, and held her breath.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “of whether we want a hinged door at the opening, or whether we want an airlock. An airlock will take more steel, and will have a smaller opening, but it will be more stable.”

  Pascale smiled wide enough to feel the muscles of her face. It was relief. Things weren’t good yet. But at least Gabriel-Antoine was still here. Pascale got her note pad and showed Gabriel-Antoine that she’d already been thinking along those lines. It was easy to engineer, and fun, and they talked all morning in a way that felt like what she imagined dancing must feel like.

  FORTY-NINE

  NOËLLE CIRCLED THE Causapscal-des-Vents, bleeding off speed,cutting back the thrust. From the outside, the habitat looked abandoned. A third of the hydroponics bays were white behind opaque windows, growing nothing because of pressure leaks or missing piping. In other habitats, bright green leaves would show in the other outer cells, but here algae filmed the inner surfaces, obscuring whatever was growing there, giving the old habitat a sickly, blinded look.

  Nervousness tickled at her stomach as she flared and landed. She was self-consciously quiet about her steps and she looked around the sky to check if anyone had seen. No one was flying nearby, and the odds of someone watching her with a telescope were a bit silly to consider. Habitats tried not to approach each other closer than six or eight hundred meters, so only a handful were in naked eyeball range. She unstrapped her wing-pack quickly and went to the airlock.

  It was locked. She entered the code Marthe had shared with her once, when she’d been flying here in secret instead of visiting her mother like she’d told Délia. The same excitement and fear hit her now. The panel greened and she turned the airlock wheel. Cycling through, she crept down the stairs and through the lower airlock. She cracked the seal on her helmet.

  “Marthe?” she said softly. “Marthe?” She peeked around the airlock door. Sun shone through the blinds, warming the galley, but only the soft creaks of the gondola hanging under the envelope sounded, punctuated by different machines in the floor turning pumps and fans on and off. Dishes were everywhere. Old clothes. The remains of joints and cigarette paper.

  “Émile?” she said, stepping out of the airlock. “Marthe?” she said louder.

  Still nothing. The two rack rooms were quiet and unlit. She peeked into each one. No one was here. She went to the communication set and called up the call logs in the tiny display. She tried downloading the log, but it didn’t look like the comm set’s Wi-Fi still worked. She tsked in frustration.

  She took a picture of the display, then toggled through the whole log, taking a picture of each call, the direction of the antenna, the strength of the signal. She didn’t know if this would be useful, but she hoped it was.

  She snapped a few more general pictures of the galley, then moved to the rack rooms. She knew Marthe’s big hammock, the neatly netted clothes and bagged or boxed too
ls. She’d had more than a few pleasant trysts in here, with the excitement of the forbidden, and the rough, rugged beauty of Marthe, so different from Délia.

  Noëlle took pictures and opened small drawers. She found a few knick-knacks. Cheap nail polish. Some old datapads that wouldn’t power on. A stash of weed. Then, she pulled out a locket that might be silver. She’d never seen Marthe wear it. It was pretty.

  A tiny LCD inside the locket displayed different pictures every time it was opened: babies, old people, young adults, even pictures of people on Earth. She’d never seen real silver. The links of the chain were blackening. Maybe it wasn’t silver. It sparkled against the sunlight slipping past the gaps in the blinds.

  She unzipped her collar and slipped the necklace into an inner pocket of her suit.

  She took a picture and closed the drawers. She noticed the floor plates and lifted those up, exposing the drive shafts of the main propellers. Oily. Dirty. Nothing hidden there. She took pictures anyway, feeling a growing sense of urgency. Either of them could be back anytime. She looked under more floor plates. Just spare parts and tools.

  She took pictures before moving to Émile’s room. Piles of old clothes, a datapad and even some paper were everywhere, under old carbon-fiber jars that stank with the sour scent of dried bagosse. The paper wasn’t real paper. Nobody was rich enough on Venus for real paper. The colonistes made something filmy out of rosette envelopes and some people wrote on that with pencils made of fused atmospheric carbon or artisanal inks, but it was an affectation more than anything else. Everyone used datapads. Except Émile.

  The faux paper scraps were endless, with scribbled lines, crossed out, substituted, erased and rewritten pieces. She tried to read some, but it wasn’t complete sentences, just random thoughts. She hoped he didn’t show this to anyone. That would have been pathetic. She took a few pics anyway. The datapad worked and was filled with poems from Earth and Mars. A directory held a bunch of files that looked like poems written by Émile. They were cleaner than the handwritten things, but clumsy to her eye. Émile was at best a deckhand, when he even showed up for work. He was grasping, trying to be something he wasn’t.