The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  When putting them into their swinging hammocks for bed when they were young, his father had told them that the wind carried the voice of Venus. The wind had been howling outside their first trawler habitat that evening, the voice of Venus angry and edged with storm. Pa had been trying to be comforting but hadn’t done a good job. Jean-Eudes and Chloé had slept quick enough, but even then Émile had understood the anger of Venus. After a while, he’d carefully crept from his swaying hammock and climbed into Jean-Eudes’s, where he’d wrapped his older brother’s arm over himself.

  Venus howled at him now. He didn’t know how to satisfy her any more than he’d understood Thérèse. His arms trembled as he reached the last few centimeters and wrapped his legs around Marthe’s. Hugging her with an arm, he clipped his main strap to the balloons beside her. Only when he was sure everything was solid did he let his shaking arms lower.

  His shoulders burned. Their four booted feet dangled nervelessly beneath them, framing dark ocher clouds dumping torrents of rain only a kilometer below. Marthe’s breath continued to softly fog the front of her faceplate and her bloody forehead still rested against a web of cracks. Tiny bubbles of blood formed and popped on the outside of the cracks as her suit shed air to equilibrate with the lowering pressure of the clouds. He shook her gently. Said her name. But she didn’t respond.

  His weight hadn’t helped but dropping the wing-pack had. His suit said they’d risen to fifty-first rang. The balloons blocked his direct view, but the clouds brightened to a light brown, looking wispy. Then the clouds opened up to show him Les Plaines.

  It wasn’t the full view of the clear air going on forever with a floor and ceiling of clouds. The storm to the west had bulged up the floor of clouds like a distended mountain, so that it almost touched the ceiling a kilometer higher. The distortion had also dropped the floor of Les Plaines around him, so that nearly two kilometers of clear air separated him from the middle cloud deck. Wild trawlers floated, so distant that they looked like bits of dander.

  “Control. Can you hear me?” he said. “This is Émile D’Aquillon. In distress. At Les Plaines. I have my sister with me. She’s unconscious. We’re both on emergency balloons. Control?”

  Static filled the response. A storm could swamp weak radio signals.

  Their rise rate was clearer now that he had something to landmark against, but not fast enough. He unstrapped Marthe’s wing-pack and wrapped his legs around it. He didn’t need to look at the external diagnostics. Something hard had hit one of the wings and the mounting assembly. It would take a machine shop and replacement parts to bring it back to life.

  He pulled out the spare oxygen tank and hung it on his harness. Then he did the same to the main battery. It was good, but the cracked mounting had let sulfuric acid into the case of the emergency battery. Unsalvageable. He took a deep breath. He let the wing-pack go. It tumbled in the clear air, then vanished into the dark ocher clouds of the lower deck.

  “Another offering,” he said to Venus.

  He felt them rising faster now, as he and his sister rose into the orange-yellow of the middle deck and it began to rain. Clouds visibly dropped around them, inexorably. The balloons expanded as the pressure dropped. It was still one and a quarter atmospheres. When they got into the very low pressures the balloons would distend, sometimes dangerously. And when the pressure dropped still more, the cracks in Marthe’s faceplate would let her air hiss away until she didn’t have enough oxygen. She would pass out, maybe forever.

  They reached fifty-fourth rang. The sulfuric acid rain steadied now, like a summer shower. Very soon, they’d be at the magical fifty-fifth rang, where the temperature hovered around twenty-five centigrade and the pressure was not far under one atmosphere. He looked at his sister’s unconscious face. The skin was smooth, with a few marks where droplets of acid had touched her, as Venus caressed all of them at some point. In this false sleep, she was peaceful, vulnerable, not the ball-busting bitch she could be with him. But even when she was that bitch who was never pleased with anything he did, when she was their father given new shape, she was still his sister and he loved her. And truth be told, someday Pa wasn’t going to be there, and somebody needed to take care of Jean-Eudes and Alexis, and even Pascal a little bit, and Émile could see what everyone else saw: he was the last choice for that job and she was the first. She already took care of him in a strange way. This was his turn to take care of her.

  He pulled out a survival sheet and unrolled it. It was a light weave of silk-fine carbon fiber, waterproof and capable of surviving for hours outside in the fiftieth rang before the acid could gnaw holes in it. He put it over their heads so that the rain pattered off it. Inside this meager shelter, he pulled a bicarbonate pad out of one of his sealed pockets and began wiping her helmet and then the inside of the survival sheet where the acid from her helmet had touched. Then he neutralized her shoulders and the sheet around her. Then him. It was awkward work and he knew he wasn’t going to get everything. Her blood continued to make little bubbles over the cracks in her faceplate. They hissed when they touched the bicarbonate residue his wiping had left.

  His display showed the temperature was thirty degrees and the pressure about one atmosphere.

  He took a deep breath.

  Then he cracked the seal on his helmet and quickly took it off and hung it on his harness. He felt the tiny sting of acid burning on his scalp as the survival sheet touched it. He hadn’t gotten everything.

  He didn’t breathe. That wouldn’t help. It was all carbon dioxide, but the faint smell of chlorine tickled his nostrils. Then he cracked the seal on Marthe’s helmet and took it off.

  He hung it quickly from her harness as her head lolled. He tried to keep the sheet from touching her head and he gave a quick wipe of bicarbonate paste before putting his helmet on her head. He locked it into place and tightened the seal. Then he gave his scalp a quick wipe with the pad, wiped some of her blood off the inside and put on her helmet.

  He breathed big gulps of air, and the smell of sulfur and chlorine was bad, and he didn’t get any oxygen. It was still the atmospheric air. He dialed up the oxygen feed in his suit to full and panted as black encroached on the edges of his vision. He held tight to Marthe’s shoulders as he kept breathing, and the feeling of suffocation started to pass.

  He’d smelled Venus, directly again—but not like the amateurs had done, high up in the sunlight under the black sky full of stars, out of her reach. He’d revealed himself to Venus in her own domains. He didn’t know if he felt defiant before a spurning lover, or supplicating before a powerful liege. He ached inside. Not from his brief and impending suffocation, but in his heart.

  He was still a dispossessed man among a dispossessed people. He was beside Marthe, who could not answer, could not hear him. He had two brothers who no longer knew him. He had a father who rejected him. And he’d reached for Thérèse without ever making contact. All of them lived like the souls in Dante’s Inferno, beyond the touch of a god; incapable of touching each other.

  “Mayday. Mayday. Control, this is Émile D’Aquillon,” he said as the view from under their sheet turned from cloud to the brighter open sky of the second world-spanning layer of clear air. Above, he heard the boom of thunder, not so far off. “We’re at Grande Allée and rising. Marthe is still unconscious. One of our helmets is cracked. We’re on balloons and have no wing-packs. We need help.”

  Again, nothing but painful static came as reply as lightning hammered the clouds above and to the west. Of course. As they rose, the east wind accelerated. The storm was higher than he’d thought, and they were going back in.

  Câlisse.

  And he blinked at black spots in his vision.

  The pressure outside had dropped to a third of an atmosphere and the inside of his suit was down to half an atmosphere. His chest felt heavy, empty. The damage to Marthe’s helmet was more than he could fix with the little kit he’d brought. He dialed up the oxygen feed. He could operate on low pressure,
high oxygen for a while. But the time to empty on his tank had just gone from eighty minutes to thirty. He took deep breaths, calming his thumping heart. As they rose, the pressure would drop more, but if he stayed here, the chance of being rescued went down.

  The storm wind grabbed them both, the balloons catching the wind like a rope on a winch. Their harnesses yanked them into the heights of the storm. Lightning boomed and flashed around them, great bone-rattling cracks in the sky only a kilometer away. Warm, acid-laden clouds emptied torrents of spite over them. The wind whipped away their survival sheet.

  The sky above them, which before had seemed so close and bright, darkened. The pressure readings on the suit jumped around with the gusting, and the GPS signals became unreliable. He didn’t know if they were going up or down anymore. He wrapped his legs and arms around Marthe before the wind threw them together hard enough to knock them out or rip their suits.

  He yelled at Venus, maybe transmitting. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. She always ignored them.

  “Go back to hell, you bitch!”

  His throat was tight and his voice cracked.

  “You can’t have Marthe, and you can’t have me!”

  A sudden cross-current caught the balloons and swung them wildly, so hard that centrifugal force held them horizontal, staring up at curtains of dark falling acid. He held Marthe tight, like they were little children again.

  It wasn’t just that they’d been children. The D’Aquillon family had been childlike in its optimism. They thought they could keep Jean-Eudes and make their own way in the clouds, scrape by on hard work and trading and family. Pa and maman couldn’t know then what it would cost them. Émile’s bitterness was blacker because he’d been that innocent too once. It had once seemed okay to believe that things could turn out right.

  He didn’t know where things had gone wrong, didn’t know if Venus really was stalking them, or if it was their own fault. How could the world turn out like this? It wasn’t fair. And part of the anger he felt as he swung wildly on the end of a harness in the storm, perhaps most of it, was that, for all that he’d hardened, and all that he’d made mistakes, he still carried a flicker of optimism in his heart, still carried a terrible place where he could be hurt. He’d given the key to that place to Thérèse, and by extension, to Venus herself. He hurt now and he couldn’t make it stop. He was lonely, holding an unconscious little sister who had optimistically bought into Pa’s crazy new dream. He held her tighter.

  And in that moment, Venus pounced. The strap holding Marthe to the balloons had twisted over and over, and rubbed against the other cables, and frayed with the acid and heat. It snapped. All her weight was in his tired arms and legs. He was the only thing holding her from a sixty kilometer fall.

  The balloons readjusted their weight with a jerk. She slipped in his acid-wet arms. He tightened his legs around her and squeezed her so tight he worried that he might hurt her. Her face rolled against the inside of the faceplate, leaving little blood marks as the wind dropped them, trying to shake his grip. All the weight was on his harness now. And his vision started to blur again. His depleting oxygen was slowly suffocating him.

  He hyperventilated, trying to keep himself oxygenated and conscious as, one-handed, he tried to find the side-straps of his harness to clip her to himself. He didn’t have time to check the oxygen or dial it up or even use voice commands. He had to get the straps attached.

  The blackening of his vision started in sparks and bursts, expanding into clouds—the same way Venus swallowed objects and people, blurring the sharpness of things, infecting them with her chaos. Life couldn’t survive raw chaos.

  His chest worked and worked as his hand fumbled through gloves for a strap and a clip, but it felt like an anvil lay on his sternum. He tasted blood from his nose and in his mouth. He didn’t know what the pressure was now. He held tight as the blackness swallowed him, but he heard a clip snap closed.

  SEVENTY

  PASCALE HAD BEEN electrically shocked before. Everything in the clouds collected a static charge. Most of the time, the shocks were small. This time her muscles ached. They’d waited for the radar pings to get closer, but they’d gone west and south. She got up and descended to the habitat. And like a weight had been lifted, she scrambled over the Causapscal-des Vents like a child with a new toy. She’d never explored a habitat like this. The lines of the Causapscal-des-Vents were strange, inorganic, something wholly made by people. She’d spent her life inside another living thing, a bioengineered Venusian trawler, a creature of wood, electrical arteries and curving lines. This was so different, lifelessly elegant and cleverly creative.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents had been damaged on its way down, though. It wasn’t made for these pressures or acidities. Corrosion burns ran over its sides like rain tracks, rendering the plastic of the envelope greenhouses opaque. It had been a big job to move the radar-obscuring curtains of old trawler cabling out of the way, then to hang big acid-resistant sheets over the whole habitat before replacing the curtains. It would take weeks, months to remove the metal and retool it into the pieces they could use to cap the cave.

  In wonder, Pascale came down the inner walkway in the envelope, to the airlock to the gondola. Pa, Gabriel-Antoine and Marie-Pier inspected the condition of the gondola, pulling up the wall panels to see the wiring and support ribs. They measured and inventoried and planned.

  Gabriel-Antoine’s voice sounded as giddy as Pascale felt. They were going to try to see the true soul of Venus, questing like the knights of old French romances. A thousand things could go wrong. But if they succeeded, they might reach the stars.

  Impulsively, Pascale patted her father’s arm, then turned it into a one-armed hug that he returned. It was an awkward gesture in survival suits, but she felt her father through the layers, solid, real, seasoned by Venus. Yet Pascale was different from him, conceived here, raised here, still seeking her roots, her true self. She was closer now. She saw in herself what was hidden from the world.

  “Pi’?” Gabriel-Antoine said to her.

  She felt herself grinning. Gabriel-Antoine gave an awkward hand-signal to switch channels, trying to give the coureur one. It was adorably inept.

  “I’ll teach you how to signal properly,” Pascale teased, “when your hands aren’t in gloves.”

  “I can think of better things to do with my hands when they’re not in gloves,” he said.

  The gnawing dread—how to tell Gabriel-Antoine about the self emerging in her—was still distant enough that the euphoria of the moment could hold it away. She was happy. They were happy. She couldn’t wait for Marthe and Émile to get back here. They had all they needed to reach the stars.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  LIGHT CREAKED INTO Émile’s head through itchy, irritated eyes. His groan sounded hollow. He shifted an arm. He wasn’t wearing a suit. Sheets rubbed flesh. His eyes stung. LEDs shone too brightly on the ceiling over him. A big face mask covered his mouth and nose, hissing cold air. He reached and pulled it away on elastic straps.

  “Leave that on,” someone said. “You need the oxygen.”

  He raised himself up on his elbows and sharp pains shot through all his muscles, like every part of his body had run its own marathon. A nurse crossed the small bay between a dozen other sick beds. He was in the hospital on Baie-Comeau. She put a small hand on his chest and tried to push him back and replace the oxygen mask. She succeeded at neither.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “You’re really lucky, monsieur D’Aquillon,” she said. She was in her mid-forties, black-haired and dark-eyed. She indicated a hard-faced woman in a pilot’s suit leaning against one of the ward’s doorframes. “A rescue team found you around sixtieth rang. You almost suffocated. Your oxygen supply had run out. You also suffered from decompression.”

  “How’s Marthe?”

  “Who?”

  “My sister.”

  The woman in the pilot’s suit frowned and stepped closer.

  “
I found you, monsieur D’Aquillon,” she said. “There was no one with you.”

  Cold terror leapt into his stomach. “She was with me!” he said, sitting up fully despite the nurse’s pushing hand. Pain lanced every muscle but the horror in his chest was worse. “I strapped her to me!”

  A growing sort of horror and loss crept into the pilot’s expression.

  “I’m sorry, monsieur D’Aquillon,” the pilot said. “You were alone. Unconscious. It was lucky that we found you at all. The transceiver in your suit was almost out of power. I didn’t see anyone else.”

  “She was with me!” he said.

  The pilot’s shoulders slumped slightly. “I’m very sorry, monsieur D’Aquillon.” Then she backed out of the room altogether.

  The nurse was teary eyed and her small hand pressed again on his chest.

  “You need oxygen, monsieur D’Aquillon,” she said in a quiet voice.

  She stopped trying to push him back and just put the mask over him again. He breathed, numbly. The nurse backed away too. He stared at his sheet-covered toes, rubbing every so often at watering eyes. But soon, rubbing didn’t help anymore. Tears spilled down his cheeks, around the mask.

  He’d been holding Marthe. They’d been strapped together. He’d found her in time. He’d traded helmets with her so that she could breathe. She’d been breathing. He’d been holding her.

  His throat tightened painfully over silent weeping.

  Marthe had been with him. He’d had her! They’d side-stepped most of the storm.

  He slumped onto his side. Every part of his body ached in resonance with the throbbing in his heart. This wasn’t a death like Thérèse had nearly had. Marthe hadn’t been looking for it. She’d been doing her job, living. A storm had taken her, with the predatory zeal of a shark. Venus had consumed her.

  His body shook. Tears ran faster.