in midair, snatching at the space around them with vein-bulging arms or choking to death through bloated throats. He hadn’t wished Lady Prittany ill. In fact, under other circumstances he may have even taken her for his wife. But she had wished ill on his family and their caste. Sir Thomas had no category for this, and so his gas masked filled with the steady stream of his tears and the fog of his tears until the floating bodies and the swirling poisonous gas faded beyond the glass visor of his mask, faded into an impressionists’ pastel painting of Venusian clouds.
Soon, the clouds began to leak back out the hole and a clearer air leaked back inside. The fog cleared in his mask as the temperatures balanced out. Sir Thomas noticed how many of the surfs, in spite of their masters, were using the lifeless naked bodies like platforms in some prehistoric videogame, jumping from one to another until they made it to a handhold in the wall and strapped themselves in for the ride. Thomas followed suit, first jumping off of the body of his former Master Father Senator Holdgirth, then Senator Hart’s, The Speaker’s, and finally Lady Pritanny’s, moving through the weightless freefall to the edge of the environ, barefoot and flying. He had no rope, but he wasn’t so far from his father, who walked along the handholds of the blimp’s bowside wall. There with his hand on a hold in the zero gravity air, the old surf strapped his son tightly in and smiled.
Then the bottom of the floor gave out as the blimp hit solid ground.
Thom’s real father shot downward to his death, his white robe like a cascading party ribbon, cast down in the blood among the bouncing nudes.
Thomas shouted into his mask, but the wall of the blimp was crumbling, a nanometal fabric made for holding well under pressure but not a hard landing. It shattered as empty egg shells will shatter on the sharp end of a skillet, some of the pieces falling like great curved sleds, rocking back and forth until they held purchase on the something solid.
When he came to, Thomas found himself untethered and a surf, a young woman, attending a wound in his side, softly singing one of the old hymns:
And notwithstondyng al his suffisaunce
His gentil herte is of so gret humblesse
To me in word, in werk, in contenaunce,
And me to serve is all his besynesse,
That I am set in very silkernesse.
Thus oghte I blesse wel myna venture
Sith that him list me serven and honoure
For every wight preiseth his gentilesse.
He rose and she followed after. Whatever she had done made the pain manageable.
He picked his way through the wreckage. It was clear that the whole blimp had landed on one of the sharper Venusian peaks, the one with the landing platform cut into it. It had cracked the blimp like an egg, sending large pieces of it sliding down into The Gray below where it had crushed subblimpan houses filled with occupants who had, like Thomas’ family, bred for years to sire a son or daughter worth of the heavens.
Sir Thomas came to his father’s body in the wreckage and carnage and lifted it up onto his shoulder. He carried it through the shattered remains of the hull to the path, then down the mountain. The subblimpan population emerged out of their homes all along the cold lavaflows of the mountainside and began pilfering the blimp of its survival systems — particularly the oxygen generators.
Thomas didn’t know what to do. He’d been too young when he’d left home to know where to go, hadn’t even know how to find a gene testing facility. But seeing the houses and the way the poor lived down here — actually seeing them — he thought he could learn to get along with them. Assuming they figured out a way to make their own oxygen with the broken machines.
That or suffocate.
But the young woman who had healed him beckoned with her finger. There was something in it that wasn’t… sexual? Yes. Almost beckoning like a friend beckons. Like one child will beckon another to come and see, to take and read. Like Venus herself might have beckoned before she brought Eros to bear upon the worlds. She hopped down the mountainside, prancing almost, careless about the damage or the risks of hitting a rock, almost as if the only naked thing on her, her feet, knew the sacred way. It seemed foolish to Sir Thomas — sure their bodies had adapted to the pressure, sure the planet had cooled when it had been knocked further from the sun into the habitable zone. But why test his luck in moving closer to the core?
She beckoned.
So he followed her and listened to the hymn as her mask amplified her soft singing into his ears:
Herte, to the hit oughte ynogh suffise
That Love so high a grace to the sente
To chese the worthieste in alle wise
And most agreeable unto myn entente
Seche no ferthe neythir wey ne wente,
Sith I have suffisaunce unto my pay.
Thus wol I ende this compleynt or this lay;
To love hym best ne shal I never repente.
The cold lava flows began to show signs of natural water.
Then of plant life.
Trees.
Crops.
The further down they went, the more he understood that the clouds surrounding the blimp had served as little more than an overcast flavor of weather rather than a death sentence. Would not lightning and lack of oxygen also kill men in Earth’s upper atmosphere, poison or no?
But she kept on cavorting down the hillside.
The light came cleaner, he saw farther, and though he began to get tired with his true father’s body and those bloodied white robes, she walked ahead and so he followed.
Until she turned and took off her gas mask.
He screamed at her, dropped his father, and ran to her side.
She breathed in and out with labor, showing him how she did. Consciously belaboring her breathing. Showing him how to breathe, how to let his first screams or laughs resound into the Venusian hill country. She was fine. She was not poisoned.
She reached up and gently brushed his face en route to the straps. What an innocent touch. Had he ever been touched by the women above this way? Had they ever been tender with him in their planned, practical, eugenic couplings?
She undid the straps of the mask.
“No, no, no,” he said. “No, please, I’ve never…”
She removed the straps and then his mask.
The atmosphere smacked him, and he thought to cry as a newborn cries. But then he took it in and . . .
. . . it was the freshest, most dewey air he’d tasted. He laughed instead.
“How?” he asked.
“How?”
“How can I breathe?”
“Well it helped when the planet cooled. But after centuries of creating oxygen from the raw mass of the planet and sending it down to us… well the human body doesn’t use all of that, you know. Atmosphere is mostly about pressure.”
He shook his head: his own words, used against him. “How do you know this?”
“Oh Sir Thomas, whatever they teach you in the highlands and the blimps, every lowland surf knows the old story about the coming of the first ær. When our first generation removed their masks and became their truest selves.”
It made sense — with enough generations creating oxygen, eventually the entire ecosystem would change to accommodate them. The planet would cool as plants sucked carbon dioxide out of the air. The air would grow breathable. There might even be lakes again.
He lifted his father again and they came down the foothills of the old mountain, which he now saw faded from its black peak down to a lush, moss-covered basin. A cabin made out of strange, dark green logs lay ahead. Animals were moving below.
The young girl skipped down the moss.
He carried his father. He carried him.
Closer to the house, he saw they were not animals, but children. Dozens and dozens of children and in the distance, more houses. What was that statistic he’d read about the old world? Something about how on earth, the monogamous mating rituals of the old religions had brought about the highest rate
s of both fertility and orgasm… Something about courtly love: how the damsel’s distress was not over some evil maniac who held her captive, but over her own integrity and libido — the same distress that the knight himself had felt.
He saw the children again. All of them. Some of them with deformities. Some of them blind. Some of them sick. All of them playing and helping one another if one should stumble and fall to the earth.
The door opened. The young woman bounded inside, and a man stepped out. A dark man with long dark hair quite unlike Sir Thomas’ blond locks that had been tipped blue per custom. The man walked toward Sir Thomas.
Also by Lancelot:
Writing Rules, Revised
Carry Cannons By Our Sides
Wilderness
When Timbers Start
The Encounter Stories
A.R.C.
Wombrovers
Photonovels:
Cold Brewed
The Joplin Undercurrent
Stay in touch at https://lanceschaubert.org/ and shoot me your best email so I can send you more of my best work.
The Blimps of Venus Page 5