“You’re storm-free, all the way up to fiftieth rang,” George-Étienne said.
“Thanks, Pa,” Marthe said. “I’ll be back in a few weeks.”
“Merci, ma chère.”
“Merci, George-Étienne,” Marie-Pier said. “I’ll be back too.”
Her father made a brief, courteous bow to Marie-Pier, something Marthe had never seen him do before. She and Marie-Pier climbed down the rope ladder, opened the hatch and slid in. Marie-Pier started doing internal checks. Her father detached the cables from the wing tips. They hung from a cable loop by a single retractable hook. The propellers turned fitfully, ready to come to full power. The plane turned slowly with the breeze. This was the start of the roller-coaster. Marie-Pier pulled the hook release and they plunged into the clouds. Marie-Pier pulled up, turning their fall into forward airspeed, and started the propellers.
Marthe looked back at the gantry and the wide diameter of her family’s home. A bigger family now. And she felt a pang. She was returning to a cramped habitat that could have fit more, that could have felt more like a home, if there’d been more of Émile and less of Noëlle.
FIFTY-TWO
THE HABITAT WAS quiet and hot. Émile had left the windows unshuttered. The hydroponic bays had overgrown, and some of the produce would spoil soon. He flipped on the radiators and slumped in his hammock. Marthe’s cigarettes lay on the galley table. He’d smoked half of them, mostly laying around. The acid burns on his legs hadn’t infected and were healing. He vacillated between taking it easy and stiffly trying to suddenly do something.
He could use a cigarette, or something harder. He probably had some hash in his room. But the idea of getting high, or even getting another shot of nicotine, both called and repelled him. He wanted a drink, but the idea was distasteful, poisoned as if acid had leaked into his mind.
Thérèse had survived, barely. He hadn’t heard from her—Hélène had told him. Thérèse was with Anne-Claude and Cédric, recovering slowly. Her followers came to her with food, and some medicine they’d hoarded. And they apparently listened to her talk of touching the soul of Venus.
He rubbed his eyes. It was all meaningless. Venus had no soul. He had no soul. This was all there was. The creaking, slow-rolling habitats in the upper atmosphere, or the living, storm-thrown habitats in the lowest cloud deck. Farming in the heights or scavenging in the depths, choices no different from the ones facing the teeming, nameless billions who’d scraped the ground for most of Earth’s history, never walking more than thirty kilometers from where they’d been born. His parents had crossed hard vacuum to reach a world where most of them would be subsistence farmers. It didn’t matter if Émile existed or not.
He turned to writing again, putting words to paper with slow, halting difficulty, in ones and twos, without rhyme or elegance. He wrote of himself, in tones and words that seemed self-absorbed and petulant. He tried to write of Thérèse, toggling between heroism and folly, vaguely prophetic, but mostly as if he were Quixote’s dreaming, fractured descendant. She’d burnt like a Venusian Icarus and left him bitter and betrayed. She lived because of him and hated him for it. The words went on and on, transforming to everything he loved of her, and more, spilling from his fingers in crude images, repeated themes and amateur rhymes, until the sun had dropped from its noon height.
He set the paper aside. He trembled with a spiritual dampness like a larva emerging from its cocoon. Nothing felt right. Nothing he could do would take away the ache. His hands shook. He needed a drink. He really needed to be stupid drunk. And high.
Instead, he climbed stiffly into the steamy hydroponics chambers on the inner surface of the envelope. The air was thick with oxygen and water, dank with the smell of mold and algae he ought to have cleaned long ago. He harvested, chopped, cleaned, cut, and emptied whole rows of trays with carrots, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, beans and hemp.
He carried them mechanically below, sorting what they owed la colonie, setting aside the freshest for himself and Marthe. The vegetables that needed some ripening he set aside for Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, and what he’d left to ripen too long, he pickled, or cooked, or stewed. He cleared and planted more bays, cooked and stewed and pickled again, storing all that could be stored in the cold cellars below the gondola.
This was the life Thérèse was fleeing, the life they might have shared. At the thought of the two of them living some other set of choices, standing side by side, canning and cutting and pickling, he began to cry, like he hadn’t in the hospital. This was what he’d lost: all the possibilities, not just the exciting ones, but the shared drudgeries her presence might have transformed and hallowed. Here a muse might have bettered him, and he might have been her muse, or her rock, whatever she needed. But she didn’t want him. That’s what she meant by saying he wasn’t enough. He slumped to the floor, his fingers stained orange with carrot, but his thoughts and hopes inky black.
Marthe did not return until almost bright midnight. She came down the ladder and through the ceiling hatch. Her eyebrows rose slightly at the tremendous pile of vegetable waste to be shipped to a habitat with a bioreactor. The rows and rows of jars strapped into shelves also piqued her curiosity. She stood by the table, rolled herself a cigarette and lit it with a click of the electric lighter. She puffed silently, considering him.
“Thérèse dumped me,” he said finally. “Twice.”
“Oh.”
She sat down opposite him.
“She got a bad acid burn,” he said.
The corners of Marthe’s eyes crinkled and her lips pressed tighter.
“They wouldn’t give her medicine or treat her,” he said.
Real anger flickered on her face, an old anger they had all inherited, and then it was gone, washed away by a deep sadness. She put her hand on his. It was warm and small. Émile was always the biggest. Even the biggest scars. She was clumsy, but she’d always been more careful than he was. Smarter. But they were still born of the same crucible. He turned up his hand and held her fingers.
“Do you ever wonder what Pa must have thought?” Émile asked. “What maman must have thought, when they said they wouldn’t ever give medicine to Jean-Eudes?”
Marthe nodded.
“It’s not fair,” he said, “to live here. To have come here at all. Wouldn’t we have been better off to have been born in Québec?”
“We wouldn’t have been who we are,” she said. “We would have been different people. Pascal and I might not have even been born.”
He held her hand, waiting to feel a pulse, but his fingers weren’t that sensitive. Marthe was warm. Marthe was real. Like Pa, she never changed shape. She lent solidity to the world. If only he were ready to pay the price of assuming a single shape forever. At its core, that had been most of what he and Pa had fought over. Émile didn’t want to be just a coureur des vents, filtering ashes from the clouds. He wanted more than that. He didn’t know what more would look like, but he knew he could be more, and he couldn’t yet put his finger on his ineffable, aching faith.
FIFTY-THREE
MARTHE DIDN’T SLEEP. She didn’t need it. Everything felt electric. The alliance, a new house and new family. The possibility of changing all the rules. She liked unwritten rules, politics. Governing was a Byzantine game of trust and mistrust, sleight-of-hand and showman’s magic. And she saw the pathways she needed to lay down, the distractions to set up.
She squinted against the sunlight. The big sun would only redden in four hours, when the horizon of Venus had half-eclipsed it. In the meantime, hot white light shone closer and closer to a horizontal, and around them, the wispy clouds above sixty-fifth rang would glow ghostly yellow and white. The colonistes called the effect sunsight. Unless they deliberately shut it out, that sideways light felt all-penetrating, making the invisible visible, like being stared at. Sunsight was a time to shuck self-delusions. She was too pragmatic to entertain many. She was usually only fooled when she wanted to be fooled, like by Noëlle.
The windows darkened a bit more, the solar film absorbing more sunlight, but the great white eye still shone too bright. She lowered a second curtain over the first, making weird shadow patterns, putting off sunsight a little longer. She needed some of her illusions to be able to hope.
On her pad, she did four things.
First, she went fishing for hormones for Pascale. The med programs had already told her the different hormones and variants she could use, and gave dosages, treatment courses, with tutorials. The black markets ran on layered, anonymous, encrypted boards that shifted in location on the Venusian web. Most of it looked like herbs and handicrafts and other nonsense that people could produce and trade legally, as well as oxygen, which traded cheaply, and water, which traded for more, but was still legal to trade. But each of these actually represented something different. Mint sprigs might mean a rotor shaft. A child’s doll might be electrical cabling. The bartering language was very much like the encrypted signaling used by the coureurs, although the ciphers had diverged as time went on.
It was also certain that government inspectors and constables had posted some of the listings as sting operations. For every real listing, three false ones were posted, or out-of-date ones popped back online weeks or months later due to obfuscation viruses black marketeers had running on dozens of servers throughout the colonie.
Marthe knew the surface cues, and even some of the intermediate ones. She clicked on an innocuous expired listing, clicked on a logo, entered a password, and was through to the intermediate levels. Not all of them—she didn’t do enough trading to have deep access—but what she needed would be in this kind of Venusian dark net. This was where she unloaded a lot of the metals Pa’s herds filtered out of the atmosphere. Here, someone could find rarer parts, as well as nitrogen and hydrogen compounds for bioreactors, unauthorized bunk spaces, and off-record work the government preferred to regulate, like encryption, programming, illicit engineering and such. Deeper levels of trader interactions ran below this one, probably organ donations and drug production. She didn’t need those.
She found two listings that finally led her to sets of estrogens, progestogens and antiandrogens that the medical program confirmed could be combined into a hormone replacement therapy. The problem was that the person who had them wasn’t asking for anything she had. Acceptable payments were hydrogen or nitrogen compounds, which was no surprise; hydrogen and nitrogen were so in demand that they were almost a Venusian currency. The rest of the asks were for high-end electronic components, laser-grade optical fiber, and parts for x-ray diffraction devices. Nothing she had or could get. She wasn’t sure how much of this stuff the colonie even had. After a little more looking, she gave up and sent a private message to Marie-Pier about the hormones. Marie-Pier’s black market network was more extensive than Marthe’s.
Second, she voted in support of a bill sponsored by Marie-Pier in l’Assemblée. Right now, because no one actually mined the surface, or could go there in practice, the right to commercially exploit and own land was vague. Old treaties still made it sound as if the surface of Venus was international space, and yet the law was far from clear. No one had ever seemed to care before now. The House of Styx would work in secrecy, but if they were ever discovered, they wanted to have legal title to anything they developed.
Marthe had written the bill, but Marie-Pier had tabled it, because Marie-Pier wasn’t in anyone’s bad books. Pascale and Gabriel-Antoine had come up with an ostensible need for the new law: Gabriel-Antoine and Marie-Pier proposed producing carbon fliers that could descend to the peak of Maxwell Mons, scrape off the galena and bismuthinite snows, and float the metals back to the surface. The proposal envisioned a cycle of metal recovery fliers, but it depended on a business environment where they could keep their profits.
Third, Marthe resubmitted the replacement parts list for the Causapscal-des-Vents. She attached a note that told the parts committee how long she’d been waiting, that she was disputing the seizure of the habitat by the government,and that these parts had been urgently needed months ago, critically so now.
And fourth, she lodged a report with Air Traffic Control, indicating that the station-keeping prop on the Causapscal-des-Vents was acting up and requesting a trailing position in the flotilla. She wouldn’t act on anything today; no one was ready. But she wanted her distractions ready long in advance.
Émile padded in silently, ducking under the hatchway to his rack. He scratched at his shoulder, looked out at the sun through the layers, and took a carrot from the cold box.
“What’s on your arm?” she asked.
He looked self-conscious, like he’d completely forgotten about it, then touched the stretched skin.
“It’s like a tattoo,” he said, sitting.
She took his hard arm in her hands and made a face as she looked closer.
“You burned yourself with acid on purpose?” she said, holding up her scar-spotted hands. She didn’t touch his, which were far more roped with scars. “It’s a workplace hazard, not a cosmetic.”
“I like it.”
She huffed and moved to the cold box, found a few carrots. They didn’t get carrots often. They were hard to grow hydroponically. She crunched. “Thank you for all the crops,” she said. “I half-expected them to have turned on the vine while I was gone.”
He shrugged, then sat and rolled himself a cigarette. His hands shook a tiny bit.
“Got another one of those?” she asked.
He slid a small black case over the rough table.
“Gotta get in my butts before I’m with the two asthmatics on the Marais-des-Nuages,” she said.
“How long you staying over there?” he asked.
“It’s going to be a few weeks more at least.”
Émile was examining the smoke coiling up from his cigarette.
“That’s a lot of help Gabriel-Antoine is giving you. I went over to the Marais-des-Nuages with Pascal. He wouldn’t even tell me what they were doing. Little shit. Pa got to him good, didn’t he?”
“It’s not that,” Marthe said. She sucked a relieving rush from her cigarette. “Pascale loves you.”
“He didn’t show it. Pa can still go fuck himself, but Pascal and Jean-Eudes never stopped being my brothers.”
“They don’t need me down there either, Émile. We aren’t engineers.” She exhaled, working up some courage. “I may need you for other kinds of work.”
“Yes, boss,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m not fucking around, Émile. We’re close to losing the Causapscal-des-Vents. We have a plan to keep it. There are parts of my plan that only you and I can do.”
“What’s the plan?”
She took a long drag on her cigarette.
“It’s illegal.”
“You think I can’t keep a secret?”
“I don’t know, Émile. This is the first time I’ve seen you sober two days in a row in the last five years. You just burned a picture into your arm with acid. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“It’s not for you to judge me.”
“J’m’en câlisse, Émile! We’re not kids anymore. We’re both grown-ups, and one grown-up can tell another that he’s been acting like a jackass.”
“Mange d’la marde.”
Marthe leaned across the table, looking up to meet Émile’s eyes.
“I need you, Émile. We need you. Pa needs you. Pascale needs you. So do Alexis and Jean-Eudes. We’re doing this for them. I can try to make things right with Pa, but you need to get a go
ddamn grip and be patient. I’m not the one qui s’est emmerdé with Pa.”
Émile glared at her for a long time, and finally he looked away and butted out his cigarette. He rested his elbows on the small table, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples with his palms. His hands trembled.
“How long since you’ve had a drink?”
“Few days.”
“You quitting?” she asked.
“I don’t have a problem.” His hands still trembled.
“Don’t talk to Pa yet,” she said.
He regarded her, then looked away, very similar to her father’s habit when confronted with something he didn’t want to look at. But like Pa, this only lasted moments. Émile’s stare swiveled back to her.
“Still trying to play maman?” he said.
Marthe blew smoke above them.
“Maman wouldn’t have stolen the Causapscal-des-Vents.”
It took a moment for his face to go through all the possible expressions until he realized she wasn’t joking. “Are you crazy? You can’t steal the Causapscal. Where would you take it?”
She pointed down. Her brother’s eyebrows rose. Then rose again. “We’re sinking it.”
“Sabotage?” he said incredulously.
She explained the plan, to his utter stupefaction. She told him what Pa and Pascale had found on the surface of Venus, their Axis Mundi. She explained the new alliances and the creation of the House of Styx. She spoke at length, and Émile’s interruptions faltered by turns, until he was just staring, dumbfounded.
When she finished, he wiped his forehead. He checked his pockets for his tobacco case. She slid it back across the table to him.
“This is insane,” he said. Then he laughed grimly. “You know they offered to make me a constable, eh?”
“What?” she said with a queasy feeling that maybe she didn’t know her brother at all, and that she’d just told him everything.
“A D’Aquillon as a goddamn cop.”
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