The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  His little sister was gone, the chop-haired little girl who’d wanted to keep up with him and Jean-Eudes around the habitat. The one who’d gotten spanked for hitting him with a piece of cable, and who had come to him for comfort. The girl who’d become a hard-ass and had started to run the family. Marthe was gone, blown away like a leaf. He’d loved her. His tears were volcanic, drops of acid from the depths he’d been raised in, radiating stinging pain.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  THE AUTHORITIES DIDN’T show up to bother Émile. The Causapscal-des-Vents was lost. Investigators could draw their own conclusions from the initial information. They would interview him soon enough. His suit was beat up but had no leaks. He traded in Marthe’s old cracked helmet for a used one and signed out an upper-atmosphere wing-pack until Ressources could get him a new one.

  He flew from the busy landing deck of the Baie-Comeau at night. His arms and legs ached as he stretched them out. Everything felt unreal. The air was too thin, the stars too bright. The clouds felt like they ought to be surrounding him with menace, but instead lay somber beneath him, partly lit by sunshine scattered through the atmosphere from the other side of the planet.

  He had no place to go—really no place—so he went to the Phocas habitat. The old lady and the old man had lots of questions about the loss of the Causapscal-des-Vents. He got away quick enough on the excuse of getting the Marais-des-Nuages back to top shape. It seemed remarkable that he’d only been gone eighty hours. The two kids, especially Louise, had been doing the routine work. And he needed a drink. Or better yet, two. He had left some of his own stuff but found Gabriel-Antoine’s too. It felt good, but after a time, he ended up crying instead.

  He was waiting not just for the Phocas family to go to bed, but for the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs to come into maser range. The flotilla and the Marais-des-Nuages had nearly circled the planet in eighty hours, while down at forty-fifth, the family’s two habitats plodded along on their two-week cycle. When the Phocas family was all asleep, he went out the airlock on the roof of the envelope and patched himself into the maser comms system.

  “Marais-des-Nuages to Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” he said.

  After a few moments, Pascal’s voice came on.

  “Causapscal-des-Profondeurs here.”

  “Are you all okay?” Émile asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Put Pa on.”

  Silence. Long. Maybe awkward. He hadn’t spoken to his father in five years. Amid the crackling, Pa’s voice finally came on.

  “You sober?” Pa grunted.

  “Marthe is dead, you bastard.”

  Crackling was all he heard on the radio. The tears spilled again.

  “Quoi?” Pa said. The single syllable was pinched, like he’d sprung a leak and was deflating.

  “You killed her. You got greedy. You were only thinking about you again, and someone else we loved paid for it.”

  Émile blinked at the stinging tears. He couldn’t wipe them away in his helmet. The crackling continued for so long that he wondered if Pa was going to answer.

  “What happened?” Pa said. His voice cracked.

  Out of spite, Émile briefly considered not telling him. But it would probably hurt more if he knew.

  “A storm caught her, shook her up bad,” he said. “Cracked her faceplate and her wing-pack. I got to her. We were rising on emergency balloons. I traded helmets with her so she’d have enough oxygen. She never woke up and the storm caught us again. Snapped her harness.”

  The maser line was all crackle now.

  “Marais-des-Nuages out,” he said after a minute.

  He shut off the comms and stood on the gently swaying roof of the habitat, above the entire world, out of reach of Venus, under naked stars he could not reach either. His little sister was gone. Her goddamn, pain-in-the-ass, nagging voice was gone. Her judging, no-bullshit stare was gone. And her tough caring for every stupid person around her was gone. He had no more family, not really. Pascal was in Pa’s pocket. Jean-Eudes would be too. Émile’s knees folded and he was kneeling, and then crying like he’d never cried before.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  TÉTREAU CAME WITH the bad news, but Gaschel had already heard it. Dauzat was with her, sitting on the other side of the big desk. At first Tétreau almost retreated. They were sitting so still, he thought he’d interrupted an argument. No one signalled him in, but finally, he entered, closed the door, and sat beside Dauzat.

  “Monsieur Labourière isn’t here, so I drafted a statement for you, Madame la Présidente,” he said.

  Gaschel’s eyes locked on him from the first word. She checked her pad, where the draft was already in her files. As she read it, Dauzat looked at him inscrutably. The statement lamented the loss of life and the valued advice of Marthe D’Aquillon in l’Assemblée. It also minimized the loss of the Causapscal-des-Vents, an old habitat that had already been slated for recycling.

  “It’s fine,” Gaschel said. She put down her pad. “Not true, but it’s fine.”

  “The Causapscal-des-Vents?” he said.

  “More than forty tons of materials,” she said. “And Marthe gave no valued advice. Ever. She never understood the decisions that needed to be made for four thousand people.”

  “At least it wasn’t sabotage,” he said after screwing up his courage.

  “You know something we don’t?” Gaschel said in irritation.

  “Marthe D’Aquillon wasn’t stupid. She was trying to save it until the end, long after she should have given up. And she died for her trying. That’s not the sign of someone committing sabotage.”

  Gaschel regarded him for a few moments, and he thought he’d overstepped. Then she waved her hand.

  “And the radioisotopes,” she said. “Woodward probably already reported the radiation to her superiors. They’ll be pressuring her for answers and closure.”

  “The radioisotopes are really strange,” he said. “Uranium and thorium, along with decay products like polonium and radium, but all of them as salts and oxides. They haven’t been refined at all, or even purified. The different radioisotopes have been pressed together in a jumble.”

  Gaschel frowned. “That doesn’t sound like anything a Bank would provide.”

  “It sounds like what someone might have found on the surface or in a mine,” Tétreau said.

  “Against the odds, someone found a vein of radioactives in the crust and has been mining it,” Gaschel said. She looked into the distance, at the cloudtops. “That’s good news for our credit rating with the Bank. Now we have to find our busy little miners. Get to it, Tétreau.”

  His chair scraped on the floor. “Oui, madame.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Pa wasn’t talking anymore. Just staring. Was Émile still talking? Pascale had a bad feeling. She stopped shifting the camouflage netting with Gabriel-Antoine on top of the Causapscal-des-Vents. The roof was treacherous now with uneven and slippery knotted cable fragments and she stumbled twice reaching Pa.

  “Pa?” she said, touching his shoulder.

  He turned his face her way. The dim light of the HUD reflected in tear lines. He was speaking but she couldn’t hear anything. She made the hand sign for channel switch. Pa came onto their common channel. His breathing was uneven.

  “What is it, Pa?”

  George-Étienne took her shoulders and hugged her tight.

  “I’m sorry, Pascal. I’m so sorry.”

  “What?” Pascale said desperately. “What is it?”

  The habitat beneath them shifted, up, then down, as it rode over the turbulence of a pressure cell.

  “Marthe is gone,” he said in a cracking voice. “Venus took her.”

  The words stabbed deep in her chest, injecting a profound, spreading ache. Someone gasped on their family channel. Pascale wanted to move, to look to see the truth in Pa’s face, but he held her too tight.

  “What?”

  “A storm took her.”

  The light a
round them became more polarized, colors shifting out of perception. The sound of the wind vibrating the cables around them hollowed, becoming watery and distant, not matching the sight of them before her eyes.

  “When?” she said. He still wouldn’t let her go. Pa was shaking. Pascale’s eyes stung.

  “I don’t know.” His voice shook like his body.

  An hour? Less? More? Her body might still be falling. Terminal velocity got slower and slower near the surface. But that didn’t matter. If she was deep enough for terminal velocity to slow, she’d be cooked through already. It was a stupid thing to think about now.

  Marthe had helped find the real Pascale. Marthe had been going to rescue her. And now she was gone, tumbling through the clouds, the haze, and the terrible open space over jagged basalt. Marthe was carbonizing now, blackening and boiling in a suit flaking away with heat, incinerating. Marthe would never touch the ground. Only some of the metal weave of her suit and the faceplate and her bones would arrive, blackened beyond recognition, added to the blasted ugliness of Venus’s surface.

  Pascale’s eyes were wet. She stood straight. Pa let her go. Behind his faceplate, his beard was wet and steaming where its wiry volume pressed against the faceplate. Marie-Pier was behind him.

  “I’m sorry, Pa.”

  He nodded and sat abruptly. Marie-Pier sat beside him and put her arm around his shoulders as a speckling of sulfuric acid rain began falling around them.

  “How do I tell Jean-Eudes and Alexis?” Pa whispered hoarsely.

  “I’ll help you,” Marie-Pier said.

  Marie-Pier’s children had no father. Had she told them their father was gone? The way Pa had told her and Jean-Eudes that Chloé and Mathurin were gone? Pascale turned. She couldn’t look anymore. She stumbled on the netting and Gabriel-Antoine caught her.

  She must look like a mess. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t really be together, could they? Gabriel-Antoine wanted a boy. Pascale was a girl, just in disguise. Her eyes were wet, but the world prickled, pregnant with a rain much harder than what fell around them now. Her thoughts flitted everywhere. To the habitat they would disassemble. To the nervous kisses she’d given Gabriel-Antoine. To seeing the sun above the clouds, hostile and overbright. To seeing the stars within Venus. Thinking of everything but Marthe.

  Gabriel-Antoine signed to change channels. She did. He took her hands.

  “I’m so sorry, Pascal. I don’t know what to say.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  The wind swayed them.

  “She told me to be gentle with you,” he said.

  The stabbing in Pascale’s chest deepened and her eyes burned. “She did?”

  “She threatened me if I ever hurt you.”

  A lonely sob slipped out of her like a hiccup. Pascale tried to pull one hand away.

  “She made me promise to take care of your heart.”

  “Why?” Pascale said. The question sounded like a whine in her ears. Tears spilled fast.

  “She loved you.”

  Another sob emerged. She yanked her hands free. “I don’t want this now! This isn’t what I want to hear.”

  She stumbled around him, stepping high over the debris and the cables and wires. Pumps emptied the carbon dioxide from the habitat, giving it buoyancy again to take the strain off the support cables and the trawlers above. How long? She and Gabriel-Antoine had rough ideas of how to cut apart the Causapscal-des-Vents, Marthe’s home, but they would need to crawl around its inside and measure and weigh and take everything out. It was stupid. It was all stupid and useless.

  Pascale took a wrench out of her tool belt, to check the torque on the nuts holding in the cleats along the roof of the Causapscal-des-Vents, but the wrench was too small. The metal of the cleats and the plates around them were already beginning to corrode. The acid down here was harsher, more concentrated and hotter than anything the Causapscal-des-Vents ever saw under the bright sun. Pascale knelt, not sure what to do with the corrosion.

  Gabriel-Antoine knelt beside her. His hand was on her shoulder. Her shoulder. Marthe had helped find her as if Pascale had been trapped like a fairy-tale princess under a spell. And now Marthe the questing knight was gone. Burnt up. Pascale was crying now, so much she couldn’t see the corrosion, couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Gabriel-Antoine’s arms were around her, pulling her to sit on his lap.

  “Come on, cher,” he said.

  She clung to his arms through glove and suit as she shook and sniffled and cried. Gabriel rocked her.

  “She brought you and me together,” he said quietly. “She brought all of us together. She invented the House of Styx. She made us a family so we could live your dream of the stars. What she gave us will change Venus.”

  Spongy orange clouds were slowly darkening to red around them as the wind carried them away from the sun.

  “She won’t get any of what she made.”

  “She would want us to enjoy it though,” he said. “She would want us to reach the stars on the other side.”

  Pascale slumped against Gabriel-Antoine’s chest. When Pascale was little, Marthe and she had talked favorite colors. Pascale had been choosing between green and blue. Marthe had described a particular purple that existed nowhere except in the vaporous haze at forty-sixth rang, a product of the low angle of sunset light scattered through two atmospheres of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide. Marthe’s favorite had struck Pascale as a kind of proof of magic all around them, on the edges, hidden in common things. Pascale had found the color, after looking for it. She couldn’t remember it anymore, and in the reddening vapors around them, it was like the memory of that happy wonder had dissolved.

  “I don’t feel like enjoying anything right now.”

  “Me neither, cher.”

  Epilogue

  PA WAS GOOD with a welder. Pascale had never seen him welding like this before, but in Québec he’d been a tradesman and his trade ticket had gotten him to Venus all those year ago. Beside him, harnessed to the structure of the half-disassembled habitat was Alexis in a cut-down survival suit. He didn’t have a wing pack. He was too young to fly, but wore an emergency balloon on his back in case.

  Even though Marie-Pier was scandalized that they’d brought a ten year old onto a dangerous work site, she’d probably learned to navigate the clouds young, even if not this young. But Alexis needed to learn and Pa needed to teach him. It made both of them feel good.

  Pascale tied off two more balloons to the steel struts she’d cut free and inflated them until the beam floated. A small set of propellers started driving it towards the forge Gabriel-Antoine had built beneath the tool gantry of the old habitat. She paused to watch it and drink from the helmet straw. They were six to eight weeks of hard work before they could even begin transporting down any of the materials, but already the forge was making frames and sheets to hold back the hot fury of Venus, to dam the river of self-hate that led down to the goddess’ heart.

  Gabriel-Antoine flitted from the old habitat to the Causapscal-des-Vents, about a kilometer off in the mist. Even on little jumps he pirouetted and looped in the haze, like a fish reveling at its strength in a river. Despite the heat, they’d slept in the same hammock each night this week.

  Gabriel-Antoine’s landings on the Causapscal-des-Vents still made noise enough that Jean-Eudes would hear, but despite her brother’s excitement, he would respect their new radio quiet. This was Jean-Eudes’ first time utterly alone in the habitat and Pa was teaching him about station-keeping in the wind. Jean-Eudes didn’t have to do much, but her brother had nervously embraced the chance to prove himself, to be more useful.

  They all tested themselves against Venus, each according to their gifts, all in the process of becoming something else, something better. They might die. They each had lost loved ones to the clouds. And although Venus would resist them, although Venus herself did not know she was beautiful, they would show her.

  The End

  Acknowledgements


  THANK YOU TO Greg Kumpula, Nick Carter, Bill Dicke and Mark Nasmith for aeronautical advice and storm-chaser Mark Robinson for meteorological advice, and for taking an early draft of this novel into a volcano.

  Thank you to Emmanuelle Arsenault, Marie Bilodeau, Stephanie Arsenault for help with French grammar and filling in my gaps in Quebecois swearing. I owe an additional thank you to Marie for an early critique of this novel.

  Thank you to editors Michael Rowley, Trevor Quachri, Kate Coe and Emily Hockaday at Solaris Books and Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

  I also greatly appreciated Talia C. Johnson’s sensitivity editing advice. If you feel you need someone to advise you on portraying autistic, queer or trans characters, I highly recommend her and you can find her at taliacjohnson.ca.

  And as always, thank you to my agent Kim-Mei Kirtland. She not only identified many early draft improvements to The House of Styx, but negotiated contracts, shepherded the novel through the interacting publishing schedules, chased editing notes and led me through tax treaty fun. Because Kim-Mei is looking out for me, I can sleep soundly at night, focus on writing, and take my son for celebratory feasts.

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