The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  People rushed to him to help. Pain seared his legs.

  Down in the wards, they gave him oxygen and x-rayed him and, after not too much waiting, had him in an emergency room. The bright lights and straight lines jarred his shocky thoughts.

  His suit was off. Big nurses bandaged his arm and worked on his leg. The pain was still excruciating, but they didn’t have painkillers. La colonie couldn’t afford to import many or produce many of their own. He would have killed for a joint right now. Or a drink.

  He smelled the characteristic odor of sulfur-burned skin, overlaid with the salty smell of neutralizing sodium bicarbonate paste. His knee was almost numb. For that much burn, the acid must have melted his nerves. His stomach lurched. Crisse. Please don’t make me lose my leg. No one would tell him. He grunted in pain as they did something else.

  Thérèse lay on a low gurney a few meters away, but no one was treating her. They’d taken off her suit. Her skin from collarbone to navel was badly burnt, dark over her sternum, lightening to ugly red-purple blisters away from that central line of chemical charring. The burns wept clear fluid and her body trembled.

  Émile pushed the nurse off him. His right arm was working. His left shoulder felt like dead weight. The skin at the base of his left thigh was abraded and covered with angry red swelling, but no black.

  “Stay still!” one of the nurses said. He was a bullet-headed man of fortyish with a bristle of sandy hair.

  “What about her?” Émile demanded, hobbling to his feet.

  “Nothing we can do for her,” he said. His face was sympathetic, although his eyes were not.

  “What do you mean?” Émile demanded.

  “Doctor said she’s over her health care limit,” the nurse said.

  A tall blonde woman looked up from another patient a few gurneys away. She pursed her lips and came to him.

  “Come on,” she said, hands on his shoulders, “down on the gurney. The nurses need to finish bandaging you. You got banged up pretty bad.”

  “She’s hurt worse than me!” Émile said, desperation clawing its way up from his stomach. “Fix her!”

  “Mademoiselle Jetté has used up her health care rations,” the doctor said sadly, shaking her head, “twice over.”

  “She’s dying!” he pleaded. “Look at her burns!”

  “Are you family?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes, kind of.”

  “I’m sorry, monsieur. Mademoiselle Jetté has a history of self-harm: cutting, acid. She’s been in a lot, and we’ve used a lot of drugs and bandages and even blood. Other people need those things to stay alive.”

  “That’s art,” Émile said. “She’s an artist. That’s her art.”

  The doctor leaned in and spoke more quietly. “We’ve also pulled her back from drug overdoses.”

  “Once!” he said. “And you didn’t even help!”

  “Four overdoses in the last two years,” the doctor continued. “Do you know the kind of meds we need to save someone’s life when we barely know what she might have OD’d on? There’s only so much medicine, and she’s been warned. More than once. I can’t take medicine from people trying to live to save someone who’s trying to kill herself.”

  Émile wiped at tears with the backs of his hands.

  “She has problems,” he whispered. “If she’s got a...” he waved his hands in the air helplessly “... mental disorder, you need to treat that.”

  The doctor’s expression didn’t soften.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  He was Émile. And he was George-Étienne. He was standing in his father’s shoes, twenty-eight years later. Had it been a blonde doctor telling George-Étienne to abort Jean-Eudes? His father could have said yes, and Jean-Eudes would never have been born. And then George-Étienne’s wife and daughter Chloé would both be alive today. And Émile would have grown up above the clouds, in the bright sun.

  Émile loved Thérèse. How much had George-Étienne loved an unborn Jean-Eudes?

  “We’ve done everything we could. There’s nothing we can do for her emotional problems. We ran out of medical rations for her,” the doctor said, waving her hand to take in the full emergency room.

  “Take my med rations,” he said.

  Émile hated his father. And he hated himself. George-Étienne should have listened to the doctor twenty-eight years ago.

  “That’s not how it works,” the doctor said.

  “That is how it works!” Émile shouted. “My brother was born and my family got shit for the rest of our lives! We used nothing. For twenty-eight years, we’ve used nothing. You owe me. You all owe me!”

  He was George-Étienne. Twenty-eight years ago, and now. A man could save his loved ones if he was willing to pay the costs. The doctor stepped back. Émile stepped towards her. The bristle-headed nurse was beside Émile, almost as big.

  “You owe the D’Aquillons,” Émile said. “Fix her.”

  The doctor took another step back, and Émile lunged. The big nurse grabbed his bad arm, and his shoulder wrenched. Pain fired up his arm and seared his shoulder. Émile turned, and punched the nurse in the eye, and the man went down. He spun. The other nurse was there, both fists ready. The man on the floor struggled, dazed.

  “Stop!” the doctor said. “Get out! Take your girlfriend with you. You’re cut off for now. Any more trouble and the Sûreté will be here to press charges.”

  Tears blurred his vision, but he couldn’t wipe them away. He had only one good fist. The nurse still faced him. Neither of them advanced.

  “Please just fix her.” His throat convulsed and he was sobbing. “I love her.”

  The second nurse put down his fists, offered a hand to his companion on the floor and pulled him up. Émile’s own fist sank. The bristle-headed nurse kicked Émile’s leg hard, on the burn, and Émile collapsed in agony.

  “Viens!” the second nurse said, pulling his companion away, following the doctor.

  Émile gasped. The kick had displaced his bandages, tearing the fragile, burnt skin, exposing the raw, weeping flesh beneath.

  “Émile,” a soft voice said.

  Gingerly, he shifted his burnt skin back into place and rewrapped his leg. Then he dragged himself across the floor to Thérèse’s gurney. He pulled himself up with his one good arm and his one good leg. She trembled. Cold and clammy. Shocky. In agony. The front of her was hard to look at. Clear fluid squeezed through cracks in her horrific burns.

  “You’re always fighting,” she whispered, putting a shaking hand over his. He leaned on the gurney and kissed her forehead. “I’m not worth fighting for.”

  “You are,” he said.

  “Stop trying to save me, Émile. I touched Venus.” She began to weep. “You keep stopping me. I’m empty and nothing will fill me.”

  “Let me fill you. I’ll give you my soul.”

  She turned away. Her hands shook with the agony of her burns.

  “You’re not enough, Émile,” she said. “No one is.”

  His throat tightened painfully and all breath left him. He was empty too.

  Her head turned to him and her eyes opened. She took a deep breath. “Leave.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  MARTHE AND MARIE-PIER stayed at the D’Aquillon habitat another thirty-six hours, conferring about the mechanics of stealing the Causapscal-des-Vents. Trawlers’ woody shells could withstand acid, heat, and pressure differentials, but their envelopes wouldn’t endure sharp lateral forces, like collisions. If they used four trawlers to hold up the Causapscal-des-Vents, the winds would knock them together until they cracked.

  Marthe had thought that they might get around this by having trawlers connected by different lengths of cabling, but Gabriel-Antoine pointed out that as soon as the winds twisted the cables, the forces would become unbalanced and unpredictable, like trying to fly tangled kites. So Pascale and Gabriel-Antoine had designed a set of four harnesses to keep the trawlers apart.

  They would probably need to build the harness
es out of cables they’d salvaged from older trawlers in their herd. They might even need to cannibalize their healthy trawlers. It wasn’t a pretty thought. If this didn’t work, the D’Aquillons would have nothing, no ability to produce oxygen and water, no ability to filter metals and minerals from the clouds. But they were all sacrificing. The whole House of Styx was. It felt strange to say it. And good. The House of Styx. A new family.

  But it was fragile yet. Marthe got George-Étienne in his room in a quiet moment while the rest of them were cooking. She and Pa were both a bit hungover and he offered her a cup of water. Despite his bleary-eyed exhaustion, he was almost bouncing on the balls of his feet, animated like she hadn’t seen him in years. He was a man with hope again. Marthe took the tough little cup carved out of trawler ribbing, and sat on Pa’s hammock and sipped. She made a face. She was no longer used to how much sulfur was in everything down here.

  “Émile,” she said finally.

  Pa’s face soured. “What about him?”

  “We need him.”

  “We have enough people.”

  She shook her head. “Extra hands, Pa. Even with Émile, it’s still a coin toss.”

  Pa drank his water, set down the cup and looked at her very deliberately. “I would rather pull in Marie-Pier’s brother, even though I don’t know him, or his loyalties. He can’t be worse than a con who couldn’t climb out of a bottle long enough to find his ass.”

  “You haven’t talked to him in five years, Pa.”

  “Is he drinking?”

  Marthe forced the water down.

  “He won’t fuck this up. This is about family, Pa. He’s your son. And he’s my brother.”

  “He turned his back on us.”

  “He never turned his back on me or Pascale or Jean-Eudes,” she said. “He’s a D’Aquillon.”

  “D’Aquillon is just a name to him.”

  His eyes were intense, daring her, but she wasn’t a girl anymore. She couldn’t be pushed around.

  “Why’d you send me up to Causapscal-des-Vents, Pa?”

  “You were right for the job, and you were ready, even at sixteen.”

  “Why didn’t you go up, Pa? Speak in l’Assemblée for yourself?”

  He smiled, but not with humor. Grim imaginings. “I don’t think either of us think that I have the patience for all their posturing and alliances and payoffs and smiling insults. They didn’t accept my son. That’s all I need to know about them or anyone else.”

  “Do you think I’m a bad person for holding my own in l’Assemblée?”

  “Non!” he said waving his hands a bit like Marie-Pier, catching his emphatic negative in the space they outlined. “Use their own tricks against them! You’re better than them, and you can beat them at their game.”

  “The difference between you and me is that I can let a grudge go,” she said. “Not every slight needs to be answered. Not every slight is even really a slight. Sometimes people are just idiots and they can’t help it.”

  “A slight?” he said, raising his voice. He darted a glance at the curtain between them and the galley and stepped closer to Marthe and lowered his voice. His frown deepened. “‘Jean-Eudes can’t live’ is a slight?”

  “Neither of us are talking about that anymore, Pa. You dealt with that in your own way. We left. We became coureurs. That’s not why you didn’t go deal with l’Assemblée yourself. You didn’t want to deal with every other friction that comes up, inevitably, between people.”

  “Hypocrites, you mean,” he said.

  “Sometimes people are stupid,” she said. “Sometimes people are fed up and explode. Sometimes people are tired.”

  “And that’s when they show their true colors!”

  “That’s when they fuck up,” she said. “That’s when they make a mistake they can’t take back.”

  “Telling me to kill my son is not a mistake anyone can take back!” he whispered violently.

  “I’m not talking about Jean-Eudes, ostie! He’s born! He’s here. He’s healthy and we love him. No one is coming for him. I’m talking about your other son.”

  “Pascal is just fine, thank you very much,” he said sarcastically.

  “Émile,” she said in a low voice. “This is what you haven’t dealt with, Pa. This is why you sent me up sunside to be in l’Assemblée. You love us, but you can’t let go of grudges.”

  “What I can’t do is forgive someone who crosses a line, who hurts my family,” he said.

  “Émile is family.”

  “He gave that away!” Pa looked at the curtained opening. The sounds of pots knocking and Jean-Eudes’s low voice laughing sounded outside. “He gave that away.”

  “Émile learned not to back down from his father,” she said. “To never give in. And one day, both of them got too angry.”

  “This is my house and my roof!”

  “And your son isn’t welcome?”

  “He’s never even tried, so we’ll never know,” Pa said.

  “He’s going to try now, because I’m going to get him to try,” she said. “I need him here. Pascale needs him here. Jean-Eudes needs him here.”

  “We’re good enough together,” Pa said. “I don’t need him teaching bad habits to any of the boys.”

  “We need him here because he’s a full-grown man. If this gamble with the House of Styx fails, we’ve got nothing. Not the Causapscal-des-Vents. Maybe not even the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. We need him here to improve our odds. This is your legacy and mine. What gets left to Pascale and Alexis will be decided in the next few months. Grudges are a luxury that you and Émile have to sacrifice.”

  George-Étienne gestured dismissively. “If he apologizes and stops drinking—”

  “There won’t be apologies,” Marthe said flatly.

  “What?”

  “Neither of you are capable,” she said. “If you can’t forgive, you just have to put things behind you.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” he said hotly.

  She rose from the hammock and put the cup on the table beside his. She paused at the door as his eyes followed her.

  “You said family comes first, Pa,” she said. “Now we get to see what’s more important to you: the future of Pascale, Jean-Eudes and Alexis, or you wanting to keep old hurts.” The muscles of his jaw were bunching tight beneath a beard more salt than pepper. “I love you, Pa. We all do.”

  She pressed past the curtain. They’d finished their cooking and Marie-Pier was packing a basket for her and Marthe to take in their plane-ride back up to the Coureur-des-Tourbillons. Jean-Eudes saw her emerge from Pa’s room and ran to hug her. He felt small. Muscled and older, yes, but needing her. Needing Pa. Needing Émile too.

  “Tell my grandparents I’m good,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “I’ll take care of them,” Marthe said, “and of your habitat. Émile will have to do more on the Causapscal-des-Vents, but we can handle two habitats.”

  “I’ll stop in too,” Marie-Pier said, “when I’m up for l’Assemblée.”

  “Maybe they’ll miss me in l’Assemblée?” Gabriel-Antoine mused. They would and wouldn’t. He’d never taken strong sides in any discussion, and his attendance was already spotty.

  George-Étienne passed them by, suited up to go outside to crank Marie-Pier’s plane up from under the gantry. He didn’t give her a look. Not a good sign. At Pa’s appearance, Jean-Eudes got back to work in the corner, doing final checks on everyone’s survival suits.

  Marthe shepherded Gabriel-Antoine to the wall on the other side of the habitat. She leaned. He leaned too, smirking, crossing his arms.

  “Is this what I think it is?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “Don’t hurt Pascal,” Marthe said in a low voice. “And don’t pressure him. He’s young. He’s never had a boyfriend.”

  “I want the opposite of hurting him,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “You’re a grown man.”

  “I’m only twenty-one.”

  “And he’s
sixteen. Do right by him.”

  “Threatening?”

  “If I thought you’d ever hurt him on purpose, yeah, you’d have to watch your back,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re that kind. Just don’t forget how young he is.”

  “You guys are good family,” he said.

  “We’re all family now.”

  “Say step-daddy.”

  “Eww!” Marthe punched his arm.

  He flinched and laughed. “I’ll bring him flowers every day.”

  Marthe left him there, crossed the habitat, hugged Pascale.

  “We’ll talk soon, just you and me,” Marthe whispered. “I’ll get the hormones.”

  Pascale nodded, forcing a smile. Marthe kissed Jean-Eudes on the top of his head before taking her suit from him. Marie-Pier was almost suited up. Her brother smiled and backed away as soon as she crossed the line to put on her suit. Alexis raced up and wanted a hug, but wouldn’t cross the line either. Marthe relented, crossed back, hugged them each once more and then suited up.

  The pressure and heat hit them in the outer torus and then ratcheted up again when they cycled through to the gantry. Marie-Pier’s plane hung nose-down, wings affixed. They floated in a high-pressure system today, a bubble of calm air in the spongy orange glow of Venusian night, so the plane barely swung on its cables.

  “Keep an eye out,” George-Étienne said, his tone giving no hint of the words they’d exchanged. “Word is going around that the government is acting funny. They’ve got lots of planes in the air. Drones too.”

  Marthe thought she must look just as puzzled as Marie-Pier.

  “Radar?” she asked.

  “No. Just silent flying. No one can figure out what they’re doing. Air Traffic says they’re testing comms and mapping sensors.”

  “That makes no sense,” Marthe said. “I’ll see what I can find out when I get back up.”