The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  Her left arm barely lifted on its own. She had to stand in the foot straps to unclip herself with just her right hand. She’d wanted to step off properly, but a gust flung her away and then she was tumbling in the wind. The wing was there for a moment, and then rain erased it. Marthe spread her legs, dropping head first in the ocher mists. But something ground in the wing-pack machinery, over and over. Her wings wouldn’t unfurl. Tabarnak.

  She blew her personal emergency balloon. It took about half the oxygen in her breathing tanks to fill, and the fabric wasn’t made to survive a storm. She’d intended to fly out under her own power.

  Her descent slowed and stopped. She dangled in the pouring rain, swaying in the wind. With her good arm she drew the acid-proof sheet out of her survival pouch and pulled it over herself. Her left shoulder and arm hurt badly and her head ached. She smelled chlorine inside her helmet. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  The clouds of Venus had very little chlorine, and what there was of it was bound into the rain as hydrochloric acid. Something was hissing in her helmet. At the edge of her faceplate, hot little bubbles grew and popped inside the seal. Where her face had hit, there was a tiny web of cracks in the glass, bleeding in atmosphere. The wind swept her deeper into the storm.

  SIXTY

  TÉTREAU FLINCHED AS Présidente Gaschel threw a book across the office. It wasn’t at him, but he’d never seen her so angry. He shouldn’t have been here. Labourière should have been here. But the chief of staff was in meetings in a flotilla six thousand kilometers west of the Baie-Comeau. It would be hours before he made it back. Cécile Dauzat was standing, taking the brunt of Gaschel’s frustration.

  “This is not going to be my goddamn Matapédia!” Gaschel yelled.

  Fifty years ago, a big habitat, shipped from Montréal, had sunk into the clouds, taking with it colonie-crippling resources and twenty-two souls. The rest had escaped, but the economic and psychological blow to la colonie had been devastating. Dauzat murmured platitudes.

  “This is no one’s Matapédia, Madame la Présidente,” Tétreau finally said. “The Causapscal-des-Vents was a crumbling habitat owned by political enemies.”

  Gaschel’s warning finger came up, silencing him. “Habitats don’t just sink anymore. There are too many redundancies. Something massive would have to go wrong to sink a habitat now. What if this was sabotage?”

  Tétreau wasn’t sure if he should answer. His boss wasn’t answering. But Dauzat was too cautious. Tétreau could already see that. She was just an administrator.

  “If the D’Aquillons have a good motive, maybe,” Tétreau said. “If we find a motive, we can deal with saboteurs as criminals. What’s more likely, though, is that something big really did break on the Causapscal-des-Vents. If the brother and sister don’t survive, that’s tragic, but it’s also an irritation off the table. Even if they do survive, the story can turn positively for you. If the D’Aquillons had been more cooperative, the habitat might have been recycled for the good of all.”

  Gaschel breathed heavily, her face flushed.

  “You don’t understand anything,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how much political irritation they can cause! It’s not worth the forty-one tons of metal and electronics that are dropping into the clouds.” Her voice was low. “How the hell are we going to stop it? We can’t afford to replace the materials.”

  “Air Traffic Control is coordinating the rescue mission, Madame la Présidente,” Dauzat said.

  “They haven’t rescued it yet, have they?” she demanded. “They fell too far behind! Where the hell was Air Traffic?”

  A tone rang on the pad on Gaschel’s desk. Tétreau didn’t recognize it, but Gaschel and Dauzat obviously did, and they didn’t look happy. That could only mean one thing. Gaschel stalked back behind her desk, took a deep breath and schooled her features. When she touched the screen, Leah Woodward’s face appeared.

  “Leah. It’s good to see you, but your call has come at a bad time,” Gaschel said in rough English.

  “I saw,” the branch manager said in her correct but awkwardly-accented Parisien French. “I realize your teams are busy. Our mapping satellites use cloud-penetrating radar. Can I offer you extra sets of eyes?”

  Gaschel’s face was stiff, but polite. Tétreau had heard from Dauzat that Gaschel had never liked the idea of Bank owned and run satellites. She had little confidence in the Bank of Pallas’s charity or interest in scientific mapping. But la colonie hadn’t paid for the satellites, and they provided global positioning for the entire planet.

  “That would be very helpful,” Gaschel responded, still in English. “Perhaps I could send over Laurent Tétreau to liaise with you? He’s an aide to l’Assemblée.”

  “I’ll wait for him in the branch office,” Woodward said, finally switching back to English.

  “Thank you, Leah.”

  “We’ll save the Causapscal-des-Vents.”

  Gaschel nodded to the screen and terminated the call. Her face hardened.

  “She’s probably counting our losses now,” she said. “If we lose the Causapscal-des-Vents on top of everything, Woodward will have us in a corner.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  ÉMILE STOOD ON the envelope of the Causapscal-des-Vents. He bent his knees, rolling with the uneven descent. He hadn’t been this deep in years, since he’d left home. The heat pressing against him made him feel young again, excited, uncertain, strong, and fearful. The world had been hitting him in the heart for so long that the prospect of hiding in the depths had its charms. He wanted to see Jean-Eudes and Alexis. And Pascal.

  And he wanted to see this project. This bridge to the stars they’d found. What was it? Some truth that might finally make them whole? The word to bring Venus to life? Those were not exactly his goals. Or were they? Had he, despite being dumped by Thérèse, learned something important from her, that still stuck in his heart?

  He struggled with the feelings, tried to sort them into different piles. Words needed walls to distinguish one experience from another. That was fine for cups and plates but wasn’t the way feelings worked. Feelings throbbed like clouds, powerful, shapeless, resenting control or even definition. Clouds could be described by temperature, droplet size, pressure, and acidity, but those numbers got no closer to their essence than words did to emotion.

  A rage didn’t tower. A loss cast no shadow. A heart couldn’t ache.

  And yet they did. Words were all he had to touch another heart. Poetry was imprecise imagery, stilted form, artificial resonances, constantly overshooting the essence. It demonstrated, more than anything else, the depths of solitude separating one person from another. He was a brother, a son, and yet he was all alone, riding a piece of metal and plastic into the deeps of a world that didn’t want them, chasing his own grail. This was both true image and truth, and yet there was no way to give this to anyone else, no way to share.

  The habitat bucked in a cell of warm air. He adjusted the rudder and prop speed. Marthe’s radio chatter with Air Traffic Control was good. She was leading them away. He’d shut off everything else that could have given an EM signal. He accessed the habitat’s network and activated a small directional dish below the habitat’s gondola. He pointed the maser in the general direction of the rendezvous point and pinged with low wattage. He did this in a pattern they’d established beforehand. Four second gap. Six second gap. Two second gap. Moments later a maser touched the dish from below.

  Émile? appeared in his helmet.

  Oui, he wrote back.

  C’est Pascal.

  A weird excitement filled him. He wanted to say something to bridge the gulf left over from their last meeting, but he couldn’t. If the maser missed and was intercepted by a satellite, the game was over.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents kept its steady sinking rhythm. The carbon dioxide in its envelope gave it no buoyancy, but its bulk made its terminal velocity in the atmosphere of Venus slow.

  Five kilometers vertical, the maser signalled. Make fo
r heading one-nine-zero and increase speed to four kph.

  D’accord, he answered.

  The adjustments were so precise, they had to be coming from Pascal. He wasn’t sure what he’d say to Pa when they finally saw each other. Pa wasn’t the forgive and forget kind, and neither was Émile. But he was going home. He was going to see his brothers again. Laugh with them.

  They really did need an engineer for this. Catching this thing would be a bitch. It didn’t matter how much Pascal, Pa, and their partners had planned this out. Catching a habitat in mid-drop in the deep clouds was dangerous. Some of them might get injured or killed. The thought didn’t bother him for himself, or even for Pa or Marthe. They were grown adults who’d made their choices and bore their scars.

  His suit’s water recirc system switched to medium, taking the heat that had penetrated the insulation and running it through a small radiator on his wing-pack. The air outside was sixty degrees and the pressure had risen to almost one atmosphere. It almost felt normal, but not home. At home,he felt the heat and pressure in his bones.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents was assuming a new aspect. Gone was the shiny, transparent envelope over a metal gondola, filled with green plants, reflecting bright sunlight as it sailed above an endless sea of clouds with a fleet of ships that never touched Venus. Acid droplets etched the envelope, clouding it like cataracts. To approach Venus, even just her cloudy skirts, one left beauty behind, rendered it to Venus like a sacrifice. Some sacrifices were just scars, Venus marking her territory. Other communions with Venus cost everything, as they had with Chloé, Mathurin, and maman.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents was no longer of the high winds. She would never be shiny again, nor even elegant, and she’d never been beautiful. Veiling the Causapscal-des-Vents in the ghoulish detritus of Venusian life prepared her for a primal sacrifice. Sacrifices were all bargains with gods. Shaman-like, Thérèse had sought the way to Venus’s soul, failing over and over. She’d marked her body, breathed Venus’s air, looked upon her directly. Émile was no ancient priest or shaman, but here he was, a supplicant offering in Venus’s name, giving away one of their homes like a fatted bull, festooned in the fetishes of the goddess whose favor they sought. He was returning to the underworld he’d escaped in an effort to lift his family to the stars.

  The habitat shifted under him. Clouds rose all around, a counter-intuitive, magical image like gravity in reverse or entropy in retreat, something that couldn’t be felt in a quick parachute or on a speeding wing-pack. In this pilgrimage, the rules of the world were reversed.

  He found his cheeks were wet. He’d offered to take Thérèse to the depths. They could have made a home in the depths. They could have borrowed a habitat, and lived like Pa, Émile teaching Thérèse how to live like a coureur until they could trade enough to buy their own habitat. Or they could have learned how to grow their own habitats to trade to others. They could have kissed the real, savage scars they would have collected. The tears tickled, but he couldn’t wipe them away. This was his offering to Venus: the hopes he’d had with Thérèse, his dreaming futures.

  The pelting sulfuric acid relented. The clouds flexed with the pressure changes, then thinned and released him into the somber cavern of Les Plaines. The impression of vastness was overpowering, even more than when there was nothing above him but stars. He clung to a rope, peering over the fat, round edge of the envelope. Sulfuric acid dripped from the curtain of debris the Causapscal-des-Vents wore. The habitat was sinking fast. The tops of the browned clouds rose, swallowing him in a hotter rain.

  Three kilometers vertical, Pascal signalled again by maser. Make for two-zero-zero and increase speed to six kph.

  How far off course were they? After all this, were they going to miss? Winds were fickle, changing at different levels, rolling and twisting, following an aerial topography of pressure and temperature. Pa said you never knew what the winds above and below you were doing, only the winds you were in. Émile revved the props and adjusted the heading. Then he opened the top hatches and tied the emergency balloons to the cleats along the middle of the envelope’s back. The plan was to blow them all to slow the descent as soon as they got close, but it was going to be touchy. It would take all of them to catch the Causapscal-des-Vents.

  Marthe’s chatter with Baie-Comeau was sounding real. A little too real. How good an actress was she? He switched to the encrypted private channel the two of them used for Causapscal-des-Vents.

  “C’est beau, Marthe?”

  She didn’t answer for many seconds. Then Baie-Comeau warned about the storm. He was Venusian enough to know that a tower from fifty-third to fifty-eighth was no joke.

  Ostie! He knew he should have been the one to lead the wild goose chase with the clumsy wing. Then Marthe would have been the one to work closely with Pa and Pascal to catch the habitat. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been the one in danger.

  But he couldn’t have. Marthe was right. Too many people thought he was a fuck-up. They’d blame the loss of the Causapscal-des-Vents on him, rather than chalking it up to an accident brought on by too little maintenance support. Marthe was a thorn in the side of the government, but no one thought she was lazy. She was out there now because of him. And she still hadn’t answered.

  “Marthe! Ça va?” he said.

  “I’m here,” her voice crackled.

  “Correcte?”

  “No,” she answered weakly, sounding far away. “Wings busted. I think I broke a shoulder. I’m on an emergency balloon. I patched a crack in my faceplate, though, so I’m okay.”

  She wasn’t okay. That was the opposite of okay. An emergency balloon would carry her up to fifty-eighth or fifty-ninth, but it was less than even odds whether it would carry her safely through the turbulence of the Les Rapides Plats. Which meant that the flotilla would have to work hard not to be carried farther and farther from her in the high, fast winds. And personal balloons weren’t storm-worthy.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “Non! Mind the Causapscal-des-Vents!”

  Émile had a fair sense of where Pa and Pascal were waiting, from the course they’d laid out for him. He switched channels and sent a message down on low wattage.

  Pascal. Take over for me. I’m going to help Marthe.

  Émile checked the straps on his wing-pack. He was wearing his stubby-winged, low-atmosphere pack because the force of hot, high-pressure winds would have bent or ripped the wings used at sixty-fifth. The stubby wings would get him to Marthe but would be useless for high-atmosphere flying.

  We’re not ready, Pascal wrote back.

  Émile pulled out a spare personal balloon and checked his pockets for his patch kit. He had a worn kit made for fabric. The time it would take to dig something out for the glass of the faceplate wasn’t something he wanted to risk. And glass could only take so much patching. He wasn’t so worried about her faceplate in the depths. Leaks would bring in a bit of acid, but she’d still be able to breathe. When they got higher, though, her air would leak out into the low pressure of the upper atmosphere and she’d asphyxiate.

  Deal with it, he sent back to Pascal. Leaving now.

  He abandoned his sacrifice to Venus and throttled the engine of his wing-pack to a high whine.

  SIXTY-TWO

  TÉTREAU HAD BEEN aboard the Venusian Branch of the Bank of Pallas before, but never past the glass doors into Woodward’s offices. Woodward’s title, Branch Manager, was deceptive. The laws of the Earth didn’t work in the solar system; the distances were too great. A person could be charged with a crime, but if he was on the other side of the solar system from Earth and couldn’t be investigated—much less apprehended—for two or three years, in what sense were laws enforceable?

  Banks like the Lunar Bank, the Bank of Ceres, the Bank of Enceladus, and the Bank of Pallas, already major financial and industrial powers, had emerged in that legal vacuum. They’d incorporated in space, under the jurisdiction of no country, creating their own laws even as they
financed the growth of nations into space. They engaged in transport and trade, and even made and enforced law, much like the Hudson’s Bay Company founded to service early Canadian coureurs de bois. As Branch Manager, Woodward exercised the Bank’s authority on Venus, backed by the financial, trading, and even police powers of a solar-system-spanning company.

  The glass doors slid open. A financial secretary, Amélie d’Argenson, escorted him past Woodward’s office to a room neatly labelled Mapping Survey Office in English. Miss Woodward was already there, with a meteorologist Tétreau recognized as Mark Nasmith, one of the imported Bank staff.

  The wall screens projected a dizzying array of data. Several side screens, each a meter square, showed polar maps in false color at exquisite resolution. Mineral maps. The central screens had parallel views of low-wavelength radar images of clouds, along with fuzzy, largely empty images of the cloud columns.

  “Good afternoon, Monsieur Tétreau,” Woodward said in English, offering a hand.

  He felt a bit baffled by all he saw as he shook her hand. What were they doing with such detailed mineral maps? Most of Venus’s surface was basaltic, old magma, with the metals buried far below. Did the Bank have tech to exploit the surface?

  “Do you know a lot about mapping technology, Monsieur Tétreau?”

  He shook his head.

  Nasmith pointed at the topology of the cloud surface in one image.

  “Here we shoot high-frequency radar at the clouds,” he said. “Great for watching cloud formations and trying to figure out how weather works on Venus. Most of your habitats have something like this, but this is a bird’s eye view.”

  Tétreau had never seen a bird, and found this English expression odd.

  Nasmith’s finger pointed to the surface maps.

  “If we go with longer radar waves, we can see through the clouds to map the radar reflectivity and smoothness of the surface, but our resolution goes down,” he said.