Marie-Claude rode her magic carpet to the bottom of the clear air and sank into the thick cloud of the middle deck. Like a drowning swimmer, Marie-Claude looked upward as the darkness swallowed. The repair drone broke out of the upper clouds a kilometer above, and then everything was out of sight.
A new rain of sulfuric acid fell as her oxygen display began winking yellow.
There was no oxygen recharging station around, and perhaps she would never see one again. She had to take what she needed. She was an engineer, but like everyone she’d read the ecological papers produced by the colony’s part-time researchers.
The clouds, filled with dust, were a perfect crucible for Venusian life, cycling between low pressure and high, sunlit and dark, concentrated and dilute acidity, evaporation and condensation. Whole classes of acidophiles, psychrophiles, and thermophiles had life cycles the colonistes hadn’t had the time to study. The microbes captured the wavelengths of light penetrating the middle and upper cloud decks within cell walls hardened to maintain buoyant gas pressures. Presumably, some of these autotrophs had evolved into floating mats that inflated and deflated as needed, and then, over millions of years, into hardened wooden balls, and finally, in an accident of tissue innovation rivaled by the Cambrian explosion on Earth, the balls had clustered into rosettes, and the cloud trawlers that lived in the deeper atmosphere.
The six chambers of the rosette beneath her feet were filled with oxygen, a byproduct of photosynthesis. Oxygen was buoyant in Venus’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, but Marie-Claude couldn’t take any of it without jeopardizing her foothold. She needed some of the spherical plants, or blastulae, that she’d seen.
She looked for a long time before she spotted a cluster floating perhaps a kilometer below, moving almost in parallel to the rosette she rode as she sank. Rosettes drifted with the wind, partly driven by their high fronds. Marie-Claude set her feet into the sludge at the base of the frond and tugged and pulled and leaned until the frond, like a small sail, angled to the wind so that slowly, her rosette began drifting leftward.
The rosettes were not easy to steer, but slowly, over some thirty minutes, she moved it across the wind, approaching the cluster of blastulae that contained an adult form—several buds and a pair of adults still connected by sticky ooze. Marie-Claude threw her parachute over the cluster and hauled it in.
The blastulae had nothing to do with embryos, but reminded many of the hollow-ball-of-cells phase of embryonic development, and no one had time to find a better name. They were hollow, woody balls that reproduced by budding. Adult blastulae floated with crowns of smaller buds, which grew to adult size and then detached when the difference in buoyancy between parent and offspring overcame the stickiness of the mucus gluing them together.
Her oxygen tanks had emergency hand pumps that could be fitted to the hoses in case the power failed in the habitats. The hoses contained anhydrous crystalline filters to neutralize sulfuric acid. She set up her pump and pulled one of the blastulae from the parachute.
Her helmet light revealed a brown skin pigmented to absorb the yellowed light reaching these depths. Transparent mucus slicked the blastula, beading off the raining acid.
Suddenly, the blastula hissed around six stomata. The carbon dioxide of the Venusian atmosphere flowed inward, and the blastula lost its buoyancy. Marie-Claude turned it over, and it hissed again, letting in more carbon dioxide.
Photoreactivity. Why? If an updraft carried a blastula into the upper atmosphere, sunlight would burn it. Its stomata must have dilated to allow heavy carbon dioxide in, to lower its buoyancy. Her lamp had tricked the stomata.
She let the blastula go. It tumbled slowly over the edge of the rosette. At some point, it would reach a depth where it would float. Then, further photosynthesis would create oxygen which would buoy it more. In extremis, blastulae had been observed to pump out some air from their cavities to correct their buoyancy more abruptly.
Marie-Claude switched off her helmet light and let her eyes adjust to the gloom of a rainy sundown. Then she pulled out one of the immature blastulae. She traced with her gloved fingertips until she found the stomata, tiny closed mouths, six of them, ringing the underside.
She cleared away the mucus and placed the hose against a stoma. With the other hand, she took a small hand light and lit just that part of the blastula. The stoma relaxed and Marie-Claude inserted the hose into the plant before too much carbon dioxide could rush in. She pumped the oxygen from the blastula into her tank. When she finally pulled free the hose and released it, it bobbed up and away, carried up like a cork in water.
She repeated her vampiric feast on all the blastulae in her parachute, watching each one shudder up into the clouds upon release, like bubbles rising in deep water. Seven of the woody balloons disappeared into the sky before her oxygen display edged into yellow-green. She had some oxygen, but she needed more.
But, as she stowed her equipment, she realized that acid had rasped the fabric of her parachute raw.
Les colonistes did not design their equipment to operate in the heavily acidic environment below the super-rotating winds, but something could be refitted in that time. The food paste in her suit had the calories, and the water recycler might keep her hydrated. Sweat dripped in her eyes. The temperature had topped fifty degrees and now hugged her with a full atmosphere of pressure.
A light shone in the distance above her. A machine whined. The drone was not designed to operate so deep. The steels used to build drones were more vulnerable to hot acids than her suit of fiber-reinforced plastics. If she could survive four days, they might be able to rescue her.
Marie-Claude’s mother had also come to a new world, in one of the waves of Haitian refugees to Québec. Her mother had married un Québécois pur laine, pure wool, a man whose family counted French, or at least European blood, for generations. Her parents bequeathed to her two identities, one of belonging by blood, another of alienness by color of skin.
So, from birth, her country was both hers and not hers. The new nation of Québec consumed its children with politics of identity and place, self-referential and pastward-looking. Québec offered no place free of the acidity of the cultural insecurity. So Marie-Claude had come to Venus for the freedom and even-handedness of ground without footprints.
She might have immigrated to Mars or the asteroids for a frontier life, but as much as the Québécois infuriated her, she was Québécoise herself, by blood and language. Le grand geste seemed perfect for a time, but it turned out not to have been the frontier. Les colonistes had carried with them the panels and studies, the committees and language laws. Instead of thinking new thoughts, they argued over resource budgets, work schedules, and culture by proposing motions and agendas in committees. Marie-Claude liked engineering problems. Calculations of force and pressure and resistance and pH were simple things, an escape from politics that seemed to materialize wherever two people met. Marie-Claude’s competent, forceful plain-speak led inevitably to her election as the chair of the engineering union.
Marie-Claude was not the only one restless for something they could not articulate. No one knew yet where they were going, but never a people to stop at one poorly conceived grand geste, les colonistes surviving in the clouds of Venus quickly began to speak of their own state. A country of our own. Un pays pour nous. And so, les séparatistes were born, even though les colonistes needed Québec to foot the bills for metals and volatiles.
A greater gift could not have been offered to the new nation of Québec. Québec did not have the budget to sustain the colony. They derived no benefit from it, not even respect. One might admire Quixote, but one did not respect him. Despite being faced with so convenient an escape from its responsibilities as the mother country, it surprised no one that l’Assemblée denounced any talk of secession. And so were born les nationalistes. The factions on the habitats spun webs of arguments for une Vénus indépendente or une Vénus coloniale.
Marie-Claude considered both ideas criminally i
mpractical. Whether the colony declared its independence from Québec or not, Venus intended to kill them. Tempers burned, sometimes into open violence. Renaud Lanoix, the séparatiste leader, dreamed of a new nation, and saw Marie-Claude, chair of the powerful Engineering Union, as the key to unlocking it. He’d been waiting for her to choose her side. Someone else had not.
—From Persephone’s Descent: The Biography of Marie-Claude Duvieusart
Marie-Claude sailed her rosette with the wind, slowly sinking. The atmosphere thickened, but the rosette was still not able to support her weight. After several hours, the Stygian clouds broke again, into the kilometer of clear air beneath the middle cloud deck.
This great cavern in the clouds was somber. Other rosettes floated in the distance, like dark specks, failing to give perspective to the vastness and too far away to help her with buoyancy or oxygen.
She must be only fifty kilometers above the surface now, almost twenty kilometers below the Laurentide and the other habitats. No one would be able to come this far down to rescue her.
Marie-Claude sank through the hot air and into the lower clouds of Venus, a thick yellow haze of sulfuric acid, veined with lines of brown and green mineral dust and chlorine. Few photosynthesizers would survive at these depths, leaving the clouds open to webs of chemotrophs, living off what volcanoes and storms churned upward.
A rain of hot acid fell, until, through the cloud, she spotted a cluster of blastulae beneath her, directly in her downward path. But her two-edged luck persisted; the blastulae were full of oxygen, but they were gummed to the side of a trawler.
Trawlers were shaped like rosettes, darker in color, radially symmetric, with six buoyancy chambers, but were much larger, serving as the platform for many kinds of life. Blastulae sometimes stuck parasitically to the great trawlers, absorbing nutrients from the rain they were not large enough to collect on their own.
Trawlers were not photosynthesizers. They occupied a more dramatic ecological niche. A conducting carbon filament hundreds of meters long hung beneath the trawler, ending in a bob. As the trawler drifted with the wind, the conductor joined clouds of different static charges and altitudes, drawing an electrical current along its length. More dangerously, trawlers were lightning rods in the storms of the middle and lower cloud decks. It was not healthy to be near a trawler.
But she needed the oxygen. The trawler and its crown of blastulae floated half a kilometer beneath her.
Marie-Claude’s battery display suddenly flashed, edging from yellow to orange. The suit’s heat exchanger shifted to a power-saver setting, and the suit’s radio antenna turned off.
Merde.
She slipped her battery out of its pack behind her. The hand light trembled.
Merde, merde, merde.
Grainy acid leaked out of the fiber-reinforced plastic on one side of the battery. Its lifetime was measured in minutes, hours if she was lucky.
This shouldn’t have happened. These plastics were hardened to survive in the Venusian atmosphere. Not exactly true. The fiber-reinforced plastics were resistant to the low concentrations of sulfuric acid at the cooler temperatures sixty and seventy kilometers above the surface. They reacted very differently to higher concentrations of sulfuric acid.
Over the beating rain, a regular machine sound thrummed. With the increasing pressure, sound warbled and direction deceived. She spun. The drone closed from only a few hundred meters away, scarred by patches of acid corrosion. Marie-Claude had nothing with which to damage it. And now she would cook far sooner than the drone would dissolve.
It neared.
She was trapped.
She couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters through the rain. No sign of a storm. No thunder.
The drone was fifty meters away now.
She slipped the battery back into its pocket, switched her helmet light to its brightest, and shone it on the rosette, along with both hand lamps. The rosette opened all six of its stomata, flooding its buoyancy chambers with heavy carbon dioxide.
Marie-Claude’s footing shuddered as the rosette tipped and sank. She held the frond tightly as the sludge on the rosette poured into clouds. Marie-Claude’s feet slipped off and then there was nothing beneath them. One of her flashlights spun into the gloom below. She and the rosette fell sideways toward the trawler.
When the top of the trawler was fifteen meters below her, the rosette began drifting with the wind. She was going to miss her landing. And after the trawler, nothing separated her from the surface of Venus except forty-eight kilometers of crushing, hyper-acidic, broiling atmosphere.
She let go of the frond.
She spread her arms and legs. She hit the top of the trawler hard, the blow accompanied by a powerful static shock. She splashed in the pooled acid and organics, and bounced, nearly to the edge. Venusian epiphytes had colonized the trawler thickly, clutching with stringy roots or sticky mucus. They slowed her slide. She let her flashlight and parachute go and pulled free a pair of screwdrivers. She scraped the points along the top of the trawler until she stopped.
Slowly, she pulled herself away from the edge.
She ached all over.
The rosette she had ridden all the way down to the lower clouds ascended lazily past the circling drone. The gloom pressed in. Even though it had only been a further half kilometer down, she could have sworn that the temperature had risen, and that the atmosphere pressed tighter against her suit.
The trawler was not evolved to carry an extra ninety kilos of rider and survival gear. It began sinking, but more slowly than the rosette had. The lower cloud deck thinned around her, and she descended into a dark, yellow haze. The temperature outside her suit had risen almost to the boiling point of water. She was now beneath the upper, middle and lower cloud decks. The browned, cooked bellies of the lowest clouds on Venus lay above her head. This sub-cloud haze was a zone of thermal dissociation.
She took the blastulae stuck to the trawler, one by one, and pumped the oxygen into her tank until it was fully in the green. Her battery icon still blinked orange-red.
Something stung her leg, like a wasp sting. She jerked and patted at her leg. The sulfuric acid, at this heat and pressure, had bored a hole through the fiber-reinforced plastic of her suit.
The spite of Venus.
She huddled under the remains of her parachute and pulled the suit repair kit out of a pocket. She neutralized the acid, cleaned the hole, applied the adhesive and slapped the patch on. It was a drilled movement, automatic, thoughtless. It was now natural. What had her stupid plan been? Would she have one day taught children how to thwart the lashing of a chemically predatory planet? That was no birthright. The séparatistes and the nationalistes could have the whole damned place.
The last part of the drill was to get to shelter to replace the suit. Leaks bloomed in clusters, just like blastulae. She inspected the parts of her suit she could see. Patches of discoloration showed that her suit would not last even one day more in the hot rain. The acid delighted in dissolving all the cleverness of people. It might not matter. The heat would kill her soon if she didn’t fix her battery.
The Hadean rain poured again as she sank. It jumped and spattered the surface of the pool in the depression in center of the trawler’s platform, and overflowed the depression, running over the edge and out of sight, to fall until it evaporated, long before it ever came close to the surface of Venus.
She ran a finger through the slime on the surface of the trawler. Murky organic strands shot through its translucence. It repelled water, and probably contained bases to neutralize any acids that penetrated it. That was how an engineer would have designed a plant on Venus.
Marie-Claude scooped a handful of the slime and rubbed it on her suit and the parachute. If she guessed wrong and it was just a viscous acid, it would be a terrible way to die. It didn’t seem to be hurting her suit, so she applied more, and soon, she looked like she’d been dipped in egg white. But the rain no longer touched her suit.
The battery reading flashed red. She needed to run the heat exchanger on full refrigeration. She had to do something.
She pulled a pair of needle-nosed pliers from her tool pouch and cut her parachute cables, tying them together to make a cable about forty meters long. With nothing to act as a piton, she rammed the pliers into the woody shell of the trawler and hammered them deep into the thick wood near the trawler’s axis with her boot. She tied the cable around it, tested her weight, and then slipped over the edge.
The surface of Venus baked forty-three kilometers below her boots. But it would never get a chance to kill her. Too much of the rest of the planet wanted to try first. As did the repair drone. A light shone into the rain high above, and the sounds of a propeller working carried. The drone relentlessly descended, as if it were necessary for it to finish the job.
The long cable grown of carbon and wood and slime hung below the bulk of the trawler like a plumb line. Thick as her whole body, it flexed, resonating with the constant wind to form standing waves that hummed in her bones. Other winds would find different resonances, and many others would find only discordance. She imagined ageless flocks of trawlers moving through the lower cloud deck, playing eerie, subsonic hymns to Venus as she bathed them in poison.
She lowered herself and swung, trying to reach the lower side of one of the buoyancy chambers. She didn’t know how long her pliers would survive as a makeshift piton. She found one of the trawler’s six stomata on the lower curve of the buoyancy chamber. It was larger than the stomata on the rosette. She shone her helmet light on full. Its faltering light ought to have opened the stoma, but the vegetable lip remained shut. On the rosette, her helmet lamp had been enough to open a single stoma, but the trawler was bigger and far more complex. It probably opened all its stomata in unison, triggered by photoreceptors. She couldn’t trigger them all from here.
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