The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  Then her eyes widened when she found pictures of gorgeous, naked Earth women. She wasn’t an innocent. She’d seen racy things, Venus-produced sex videos, amateur films and stills under gloomy lighting, or worse, blinding white light. Depressing more than anything, especially when she saw someone she knew. The women in these pictures from Earth were beautiful, well-fed, shapely, with flawless skin that had never felt the least touch of acid. They were photographed under soft lights or even daylight. Her mouth went dry looking at them.

  The pad was old, not Wi-Fi enabled, so she slipped it into her suit. She could download the pictures on her own habitat and then toss the pad into the clouds later. Her search of the galley was desultory. There was nothing here but old dishes. The floor plates in the galley didn’t show anything interesting.

  She took her helmet off the table and snapped it back into place. Being a spy was far less interesting than she’d thought.

  FIFTY

  ÉMILE’S POETRY NEVER came out the way he wanted. He had a vision in his head, the images he would evoke, the emotions that would rise in response, the truth he would wake in readers. He felt things, but how many hacks had written of clouds and winds, here and on Earth? How many second and third-rate poets had tried to describe moving to a new world?

  The poetry of other times and places gave him no guidance. The Chinese poetry of colonizing the asteroids was brisk and austere, like starshine on powdery regolith. The Arabic poetry of the colonization of Mars was lively and lonely, with tones of dislocation in the airless, sandy rustscapes. He read ancient Hmong refugee poetry, of dispossession and displacement in distant jungles. But the poems of Earth all felt remote, antiseptic, tangential to him and his experiences.

  He hadn’t heard from Thérèse, and he missed her. He thought she needed him. He needed her. He’d heard Thérèse was fucking Réjean. He’d fucked Hélène. Spite fucks were an acid with which to scar a lover’s heart, raising ropey red marks that never went away. He sent Hélène bits of his poetry, lines that he felt worked. No whole poem worked, but Hélène couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She would eventually mention his poetry to Thérèse and she would be jealous he’d never shared with her.

  A few days later, he was on shift, fixing a drive-shaft problem on the Plamondon, sent there by maintenance control, when he got a text from Thérèse. It was a line he’d written for his poem about the singing of the trawlers in the depths, and the singleness of each of their notes. She followed the line with a question mark.

  He texted back. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to go flying.”

  “Want company?” he messaged.

  “Are you still going to get in the way?”

  “No.”

  “I’m on l’Avant-Gardiste.”

  “Be right over.”

  He left Plamondon and his tools, jetting on the high winds, racing against itchy feelings and amorphous insights. The lumpy ocher cloudtops were like the rolling hills in Earth poems, but he felt like he was having trouble understanding solidity. He’d seen the skin of Venus, and he’d seen pictures of Earth, but never really understood either. The idea that anything would ever feel hard and unmoving was strange. Venus was the shapeless, vaporous possibility of being everything at once and nothing at all. And shapelessness infected everything.

  What was he? A D’Aquillon? Was he Thérèse’s former lover? Was he his shitty job? Or his shitty poetry? Or was he just a container into which Venus poured herself from time to time? She could empty him just as easily, the way she had emptied maman and Chloé.

  A single twitch of the controls could cut his wing-pack’s engine, plunging him into the acid clouds. If he descended long enough and far enough, Venus would accept his offering, his shape, all definition and selfhood. He would leave no more of a mark than anything else they’d done on a world that rejected shape and definition, on a world that went out of its way to erase them.

  He was questions without answers, existence without meaning, attempts without successes.

  L’Avant-Gardiste floated three kilometers ahead. The small dirigible was the home of Isolde Livernois, the only artist among their small crowd who was consistently recognized as talented. No one had to lie to appreciate her silent, screaming masks. L’Avant-Gardiste was bigger than the Causapscal-des-Vents, growing more food on its inner layers. The electricity from its solar panels cracked carbon dioxide into breathable, buoyant oxygen, and solid carbon used to grow carbon fibers. L’Avant-Gardiste could support a larger family and give carbon fiber to the rest of la colonie for building materials. In another life, in another shape, it might have been the D’Aquillon family living here.

  He slowed, circled more steeply, and swooped over the flat platform of the roof, alighting with only a few extra steps. He stowed his wing-pack and cycled into the habitat. When he found the storage room and spun the door, the smell of weed wafted out. Thérèse’s survival suit covered her legs, but her chest and arms were bare, pimpling in the cold. Her ribs showed, stretching her skin like a canvas.

  He stepped in and spun the wheel shut again. She eyed him languidly, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

  “Did you have trouble getting out of your shift?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I just left. They’ll figure it out.”

  He popped the gloves off his suit and took the joint from her mouth.

  “They’re going to be mad,” she said.

  He sucked and inhaled. Waited. Three. Five. Seven. He blew his smoke into the clouds of hers.

  “What are they going to do? Demote me?”

  She sat up, rubbing her hand against the chest of his suit. He stepped back.

  “I didn’t neutralize,” he said.

  Her look was pensive as she considered her open palm. She turned it back to him. “She didn’t hurt me.”

  “You might have gotten a burn,” he grumbled. He kicked listlessly at a storage crate. “Somebody’s offering me a better job, better place to live.”

  “Why aren’t you there?” she asked.

  “Hasn’t come through yet, but when it does, everything will be different. I’ll have space.”

  She smiled wanly and hmphed. “If you get a place, a bunch of girls’ll be looking to bunk with you,” she said coyly.

  He handed her back the joint. “Yeah,” he said.

  She turned it in her fingers, then squinted up, like she was looking for deception or irony. His gut tensed, waiting for the flare of fickleness, the shift of winds, the sign she was changing her mind again. Earth and Venus were written on her. Red scars formed leafy vines and the trawler on her left shoulder. Venus was written into the rows of knife-lines on the insides of her arms.

  “You’re a canvas upon which we paint Venus,” he said. “You’re the map showing us how to live here.”

  She pursed her lips pensively, then hooked her fingers into the neck of his suit to pull his lips to hers. They were hungry, aimlessly unsatisfied. She released him and shook her head.

  “I haven’t found it yet,” she said dreamily.

  He rubbed the raised outline of the trawler on her shoulder.

  “I wish I saw myself the way you see me,” she said.

  “So do I.”

  Her smile contained an infinity of exhaustion, like she’d seen something in her seeking that was too big to tell. She hopped off the hammock, slipped her arms into the sleeves of her survival suit, and sealed the long seam of the chest. “Come on,” she said. She led him back through the living areas, back to the ladder leading to the top of l’Avant-Gardiste.

  “Where are you flying?”

  She didn’t answer. They climbed the ladder and sealed their suits before emerging from the airlock onto the platform on top of the shiny habitat. Émile unracked her wing-pack and helped her into it. He shrugged into his, snapped in and plugged in the control feeds. Her unfolded wings stretched out two meters on either side of her. His extended three. She was grinning in her faceplate, and backed up to the downward curve
where the platform followed the far outline of the dirigible envelope.

  “I’m an angel,” she said in the crackling radio, leaping backwards off the platform.

  He leapt after her. Her fall followed the line of the envelope and then she was hurtling through the thin air, righting herself, starting the little jet on her back and swooping downward, away from l’Avant-Gardiste.

  They flew fast and his heart lifted. They were angels. A few times, he pressed the transmit button on his helmet radio, but said nothing. He didn’t know how not to ruin the moment. They soared onward, the sun bright and warm on their suits. A rare water cloud haze hung over the brown and yellow acid clouds, like a spattering of snow, or the dusting of an angel’s passing. Their world had a soul. It was inscrutable and strange, but it was here. He could feel it.

  He wanted to tell her, “Je t’aime. Je t’aime, ma muse.”

  And he did. He did love her. It wasn’t just the magic of this moment. He loved her.

  She laughed, something bright and cheerful and Venus-touched, like him.

  “I feel it,” he said. “I feel Venus. She has a soul. You were right.”

  The glaze of white over the clouds dropped behind them and she dipped. He followed. The cloud tops resolved into umber mountains and valleys speeding beneath them. As they descended, rounded, misty peaks loomed up beside them.

  “She’s all around us!” she said.

  Then he laughed, unable to contain himself.

  “I’ll show you the three cloud decks,” he promised, “all the way to the bottom of the lower deck, so you can see the surface of Venus yourself.”

  Her wings angled, and she spun and flew upside down, dropping as she waved at him. He was close enough to see her beaming at him in the full sunshine. He felt like flying loops. But he couldn’t stop looking at her. He was hypnotized.

  Then she was unsealing the front of her suit.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Let’s touch Venus for real!” she said. “Real aciding! We’re so close! We have to touch her, even if only for a minute.”

  She was descending faster and faster; flying upside down gave her no lift. The front of her suit flapped, exposing her upper chest and sternum and finally her navel. She’d unsealed her suit, exposing her pale skin to the icy, thin air of the upper clouds.

  “Come on!” she said, angling her wings to right herself, before plunging towards the acid clouds beneath.

  He dove after her, his heart thumping, finding himself thinking like Marthe or Pascal instead of like an artist. He knew how hot sulfuric acid worked at depth, but didn’t know how fast it might work in the chill above the clouds, or if she went into a cloud bank. Worse right now was probably the cold and lack of pressure. Her neck seal would only hold in so much air while her suit was unsealed. Yet her grace was perfect. She banked in lazy pirouettes around her wing tip to bleed away altitude. She touched Venus in a way no one else dared; jubilant, reveling.

  His hands twitched near the seals at his chest. No one else was here with her. Just him. She had contacted him to share a very different spiritual experience with her. If he didn’t open his seal, too, her communion with Venus would be a lonely, unshareable wisdom. He moved his hand to the seal at the top of his chest.

  But then she dove. Gravity and airspeed plunged her through the rolling convection tubes of Les Rapides Plats, where the slower wind swept her back, far behind. He furled his wings and plunged through the thickening air. Changing winds buffeted him. He unfurled his wings and pulled into level flight, his speed launching him after her, his wing-pack engine a high-pitched keening over the rush of wind.

  They’d dropped out of the faint haze and flew only dozens of meters above banks of yellow mist. The world felt dreamy and inchoate, chaos prior to definition, a vital soul without body, spirit waiting for the word. They all sought a word, the word, the language and rhyme that would bring this world to life for them. They quested for a first morning.

  Thérèse spread her arms wide and swooped down into a bank of lazy cirrostratus.

  Émile throttled hard behind her, plunging into the faux darkness of limited vision and spongy light. His suit would protect him from most of the acid, probably for half an hour or more at this altitude. The engines on their wing-packs weren’t meant for much acid, though. Tiny droplets formed on his faceplate, running sideways with the speed of his pursuit. Two hundred meters ahead, Thérèse rose, then swooped lower, wobbled, then pointed her arms downward and plunged deeper.

  “Thérèse!” he called on the radio. “Not so deep!”

  Maybe she heard him. Maybe her radio was off. Maybe she was flying her spiritual journey alone. Could angels really share anything with mortals? He found his hand at the seal at the top of his chest again. The spray of mist thickened into big drops that trembled sideways off his faceplate. Thérèse vanished into the lobe of a cloud bank, and he followed. The sunlight dimmed, and beyond, he found her, not flying straight, but bending, curling herself under her wings.

  “Thérèse! Straighten out! Start climbing!”

  But she didn’t. Her curled posture pitched her forward, dropping her altitude even more. He came above and behind her and grabbed the hand grip, usually used for racking the wings or tying them down in a storm. Pulling up with both hands as he flew, he corrected her angle of attack, but slowed his own flying. Their packs whined in the acid mist. He couldn’t see very well what she was doing.

  “Thérèse! Seal your suit. Can you seal your suit?”

  She didn’t answer. Her arms and legs dangled, jerking and bouncing with the buffeting of the wind.

  “Thérèse! Are you okay?”

  He angled up, using both their engines to climb slowly. They’d dropped about nineteen hundred meters in total. They had to climb back through Les Rapides Plats. A side wind gusted against them, ramming him into her. Their wings clattered together and the wind shear of her wing-pack exhaust tore his survival suit above the knee.

  He righted them with difficulty. Cold bit through the cloth covering his knee and he couldn’t tell if it was just cold and low pressure, or if the thin, vaporized sulfuric acid was getting to him. He couldn’t worry about that right now. Thérèse could be going into shock or be passed out because of hypothermia. The worst might be if somehow she’d run out of air. The neck sealed pretty well, but that didn’t mean the suit was meant to be run with the chest open.

  The buffeting worsened, knocking them side to side, and he wrenched his shoulder holding onto her. A downdraft plunged them hundreds of meters in seconds. He couldn’t steer them right out. The shear would fold their wings like sheet metal if he tried. They rode a side-cyclone, spinning like a roller on a conveyor belt.

  He’d grown up in vicious, thick currents, knew tricks to seeing their invisible movements. Some currents moved so fast that they created rows and sheets of low-pressure vortices in their wake, where unseen moisture became cloudy fingers. Along their rapid trajectory, faint edges of spinning white showed against the darker clouds below. He aimed them at the bottom of a big convection cell.

  He could see approximately where the wind turned back up, and he angled them towards that narrow steadiness in the turbulence. His wingtips trembled, and his arms ached from holding onto Thérèse while keeping his legs from catching in her pack exhaust. Why wouldn’t she say anything?

  The shaking became worse, tight vibrations resonating across his wingspan. He extended his spoilers, cutting his lift, but setting up a different vibration along his wings, breaking the resonances that would have torn them to pieces. Then he shot into the sheet of air that narrowed flat before turning upward.

  They rocketed up, propelled by the wind, gaining back their lost three hundred meters. But the wind began to slack and turn, to plunge back down again in the great eddy. Émile throttled his wing-pack to maximum, set a challenging climb angle, and using the momentum of the wind, broke out, through the next layer of turbulence, into the thinning air above. This upper wi
nd moved much faster from behind them and he struggled to keep them from stalling with their lost wind speed, until he could turn them into the wind without snapping off their wings.

  Their engine turbines shrieked as metal pieces scraped against one another. In the distance, a couple of habitats floated away from them. The Avant-Gardiste was one of the foremost habitats in the flock. Twisting his head in his helmet, he found five more habitats eastward, including the Baie-Comeau.

  He climbed, slowly accelerating to intercept the Baie-Comeau.

  The big habitat approached, looming bright emerald, its shiny, transparent plastic like a sheen over black solar cells, thick aerial greenhouses wrapping around. Émile struggled with shaking arms to hold Thérèse and steer her unguided wing-pack, ignoring the cold pain above his knee.

  It was so hard. It was so hard sometimes to live here. And the exuberant green of bursting life around the outside of the Baie-Comeau was philosophically shocking, as shocking as opening his eyes every morning and seeing clouds unmoored to any ground at all. Thérèse was hurt, maybe worse, because she’d sought to build a bridge across that dysphoric gulf, seeking a soul for her adopted world and for all of them, when everyone else built gardens in soap bubbles and didn’t even try to touch their new world.

  The Baie-Comeau neared, but not fast enough. The pain in his leg and arms tunneled his world down to that bloated bit of emerald. He listed downward, but caught himself. He was coming in too fast for a good landing, even if he had been the only one flying. On the top of the Baie-Comeau,people ran this way and that, clearing the landing platform. People, rescue workers maybe, shrugged into wing-packs. Around the roof edges, they unfolded struts, supporting nets. He couldn’t cut Thérèse’s power. He couldn’t reach her controls, nor did he have strength in his hands even if he could.

  They cleared the edge of the roof. He pulled one numb hand free and fumbled on his chest for the emergency shutoff. He was halfway across the landing platform before his clumsy hand found it and his weight dragged them both down, head first. The jet exhaust from her pack ripped at his legs again, but the drop of ten meters ended that as her wing-pack engine burst screeching into a spray of hot fragments. A webwork of cracks filled his faceplate and air hissed.