The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  One hundred and fifty-four degrees in the bathyscaphe.

  Pascal throttled forward the propellers and released one of the ends of their anchoring rope. They lifted, the flow dragging them towards the cave mouth, but then the buoyancy and propellers boosted them out of the main current and high above the ground. The bathyscaphe shuddered and jerked, with the cage dangling beneath them and the camera rope tugging and tugging.

  Suddenly, Pascal whooped.

  The view from the camera showed a straight view down at the receding ground. The cable hadn’t broken! There was a fogginess in the image—the lens might have cracked or even shattered—but they’d retrieved its data!

  “We got it, Pa!”

  George-Étienne’s tired breathing gave a laugh. And then they quieted. Their water packs were empty and if they passed out from heat exhaustion they might not wake back up. Mountain peaks receded beneath them. The bathyscaphe creaked and protested the pressure changes, but the Stirling engines soon got the temperature inside down to one hundred and thirty-eight. Pascal blinked the sweat out of his eyes and was happy. Indescribably happy.

  At forty kilometers above the surface, deep in the sub-cloud haze, Pascal and George-Étienne unsealed the bathyscaphe and got outside to tie their haul more securely and cover it against sulfuric acid rain, which would come as they rose higher.

  The bathyscaphe propellers sped them toward the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, which they found only a few kilometers off from where it was supposed to be. It was a remarkable bit of cloud sailing by Alexis for his first time, and his relief was palpable in the radio, as was Jean-Eudes’s elation.

  They moored beneath the Causapscal, recovered the oxygen from the inflated bags, and used pulleys to raise the cage up onto the gantry. There was no way to bring the four-meter-long probe into the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. No airlock was big enough.

  It took another hour for them to secure the bathyscaphe properly beneath the youngest and most buoyant of their trawler herd about two kilometers away. Pascal and George-Étienne had been in their suits for twelve hours before they finally covered the probe and resigned themselves to examining it tomorrow.

  Jean-Eudes and Alexis waited with restless-footed impatience at the line in the floor as Pascal and his father did their second acid wipe-down and unsuited. The boys chattered excitedly about their adventure as soon as Pascal cracked the seal on his helmet. It sounded like an adventure, like Alexis had actually had to navigate more than they’d expected, but Pascal couldn’t do more than smile appreciatively. He felt like he’d been scooped clean with a big spoon, experienced something that had hollowed him out.

  Pascal smelled food. Alexis had even made supper. It didn’t smell wonderful, but most suppers didn’t. He stripped off his suit, threw one arm around Jean-Eudes and another around Alexis.

  “Water. Then tell me over supper,” he said.

  He and George-Étienne listened to the story of a rogue wind that had blown the habitat off course and how he and Jean-Eudes had needed to change altitude to find a new wind direction and then pick a whole new course to get to their rendezvous point. George-Étienne, effusive and proud, eventually sent Alexis and Jean-Eudes to bed.

  “Going to take us days to find all the herd back,” George-Étienne said when son and grandson were in their rooms.

  “More for you to teach Alexis,” Pascal said.

  George-Étienne smiled thoughtfully and nodded.

  Pascal slumped into the bench and slid his pad into the middle of the table, followed by the camera and radio receiver that they’d used on the surface. Both were dented and sand-scoured. The lens of the camera was a web of fractured diamond, some pieces of which had fallen right out. But the tiny CPUs functioned, displaying their data on his pad. George-Étienne sat closer.

  Pascal slow-played the darkness at the end of the tunnel. The first section wasn’t completely dark. Faint light flashed, almost like the bioluminescence they found in nightside clouds, but he couldn’t be sure. The camera had been moving fast and the light from the lamp might just have been reflecting from something.

  Then came the darkness where they saw no walls at all. And then, stars. No sun nearby. Just stars. Both of them looked for a long time, rotating the pad, but neither could match the starfield to constellations in their encyclopedias. They didn’t have any software to help identify them, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t make any sense. There shouldn’t have been stars at all.

  “What’s the chance that we just found some kind of sophisticated visual projection?” Pascal asked. “Some sort of message, with information stored in a holographic image?”

  George-Étienne looked at him dubiously. “Why would someone put a picture of stars under the surface of Venus?”

  “Or the radio signal. It was so strong, and it’s coded with something,” Pascal said. “It could carry more than enough information to plant a virus or computer program in the operating system of the camera, and access the antenna feed directly, substituting in this star map.”

  “Why?”

  “The star map is important,” Pascal guessed. “Maybe it’s a location, or maybe there’s more information buried in the signal.”

  “So important that they buried it in one of the most inaccessible places in the solar system,” George-Étienne said doubtfully.

  “There’s no way stars can be underground, Pa!”

  He felt the elusive epiphany slipping away, pushed aside by doubts. He’d found something beautiful and mysterious under Venus, but it didn’t mean that what he’d seen was true.

  “Occam’s razor, Pascal,” George-Étienne said. “We have film footage of stars,” he continued, tapping one finger. “We have multiple measurements of some kind of pressure sink below the surface of Venus, where there should be nothing but increasing pressure.” He tapped the second finger. “We even followed the flow down and observed the drop in temperature and pressure, which match what we’d see in the neck of a balloon with escaping air. And we have a strong, coded radio signal,” he said, tapping a third finger. “We don’t know why such a strong signal should be coming from within the crust of Venus, but it’s a lot easier to swallow if it’s out in space, like a satellite, a habitat or a ship.”

  “That’s not Occam’s razor!” Pascal said. “Space can’t be inside a planet. Some human group—maybe covert and secretive, but human—put this tech down there or lost it down there. They sent probes after it, following its distress signal. It’s trying to send up some of its information, maybe as a program or a hologram, something where the information is buried graphically. But whoever sent all those probes down has stopped. Maybe they couldn’t afford to send any more. Maybe they got what they wanted. Or maybe they’re dead, and their secrets died with them. There was a lot of dust on all these probes.”

  George-Étienne’s expression turned guarded, uncharacteristically cautious, as if reluctant to say something out loud that wanted to be out. He even looked away a bit shyly for a moment, making Pascal feel awkward.

  “We could see the stars below the surface of Venus if there was a wormhole,” George-Étienne said quietly.

  “Nobody’s ever made a wormhole,” Pascal said with a sourceless frustration. “Nobody knows how to make a wormhole. They may be impossible.”

  His father shrugged. “We don’t know if anyone knows how to make a wormhole. If a Bank learned how, do you think they would publicize it? Or would they build some first and try to get across the solar system with stock news before radio signals could make it? Insider trading. They could make millions. This was an early success. Or failure.”

  “Why would anyone leave a wormhole here?” Pascal asked.

  “Maybe they built it in orbit, closer to the sun, and it was a success, but they hadn’t figured out how to manipulate it and it fell?” George-Étienne mused. “They tried to recover it with the probes, but couldn’t. Maybe they even buried it, but in the last decade the debris around it fell through, and I found the storm it c
auses.”

  “Occam’s razor is supposed to make things simple, Pa.”

  “Mine’s more simple than supposing lost holographic data.”

  Pascal brushed back his hair with both hands, unable to fully hold all of this in, feeling as if an epiphany danced at the edges of his awareness. He pulled his hands away when his palms met twelve hours of stubble. He shivered. His father eyed him sympathetically and then stared off into the distance for a while.

  “Pascal, it may not matter what’s down there. We may never know. But depending on what we find inside the probe we brought up, we might have it made. The D’Aquillons could be totally independent and live well, trading off the metal and parts in the probes. You and I could salvage all of them. It’s like a gold mine.”

  Pascal nodded.

  “Get some sleep,” his father said. “Tomorrow we’ll see what the probe’s got in it.”

  George-Étienne went to his hammock, but Pascal didn’t follow suit. He drank more water, trying to rehydrate himself while he watched the playback of the camera entering the cave system, all the way to the end, to the stars themselves. Or to the pictures of the stars.

  If he was right and the radio signal had planted a program or virus or data directly into the camera software, he should be able to find it. He linked the camera to his pad and started looking through the processor logs in the camera. Everything the temperature-hardened chip had done in the last day was in the log. He went through all the lines of operations. Very soon, he was able to skip vast sections of operations he recognized. He got to others that gave him a bit of pause until he saw where they fit. He went through the entire list this way until he got to the bottom.

  No virus or strange program ran on the camera operating system or anywhere in the memory. But he wasn’t as sanguine as his father about the possibility of an astronomical phenomena under a planetary crust. He didn’t know how to figure out if an image was holographic, and the encyclopedia and teaching texts on the Causapscal-des-Vents probably didn’t have anything that advanced. He sat quietly, listening to the radio playback for a while. It was pretty boring: every point two-two-three seconds, a tight radio burst. The same message over and over. A sped-up distress call, maybe? But from whom? What message was encrypted in the bursts, and how would they ever decode it? Pascal was training to be an engineer, not a cryptographer.

  On a hunch, he opened the encyclopedia on his pad and read an article twice before turning things over in his head. The camera had seen stars, but no sun. Granted, it might have been pointed the wrong way, but seeing no sun was a soft data point. The radio signal was a hard data point. High wattage. Very strong. An identical signal repeated over and over.

  Then he realized what it was.

  FIFTEEN

  PASCAL RAN HIS hand over the ceramic. The triangular wing was three hundred and seventy centimeters from the lens at its nose to the row of little jet nozzles along its trailing edge. From tip to tip, its trailing edge was two and a half meters across, but it was only forty centimeters from dorsal to ventral surfaces, and these were flat, not aerodynamic. He sprayed compressed carbon dioxide to clean out pock-marks or dents that had collected silt. Some of the divots looked like fresh burns, artifacts of sulfuric acid exposure on the way up to the habitat. Other marks looked more like the scouring of wind erosion. Others were completely foreign to him: tiny burn marks or chipped hollows all along the leading edge of the wings that were absent on the trailing edges. What had it flown through?

  “This is some pretty advanced material science,” he said. “It survived atmospheric entry, the descent from one atmosphere of pressure to ninety, and all the chemical attacks. And somehow it maneuvered through the cave, in that wind, without getting smashed to pieces. We have a lot to learn about whatever this is. Maybe it’s a good building material for la colonie.”

  But it was more than building materials. Pascal had gone to George-Étienne with his discovery before breakfast.

  “It’s not a message, Pa,” he’d said. “It’s a pulsar.”

  George-Étienne had paused with one sock on and one sock off. Maybe all his arguing for a wormhole last night had been just words. Or maybe it was too strange. Pascal sat beside him on the hammock and showed the encyclopedia entry on neutron stars that emitted radio waves and x-rays. There weren’t any nearby; the nearest one was almost 200 light-years away, and had a different period. This signal had to be coming from far away.

  Faced with support for his wormhole theory, Pa had grown pale, like they’d found a magical doorway in a wardrobe instead of a powerful, tightly-repeating radio signal.

  “It’ll make your children rich for sure,” George-Étienne had said, “but I’ve got to think about giving my children food right now. I want to see what’s inside the probe. That at least we can sell.”

  And so they came out this morning to examine their treasure.

  “Do you still have the Geiger counter?” Pascal asked.

  “Somewhere, I guess.”

  Wrapped in thick clouds, solar radiation wasn’t a problem for the coureurs, but at flotilla altitude, they had to be careful of solar radiation. Pa found their counter in one of the sealed tool boxes on the gantry. He dusted it with compressed carbon dioxide and handed it to Pascal. When he switched on the counter, it started registering little ticks. At the access port, the ticking shot up.

  “Ha!” George-Étienne said. “Fissionables! Jackpot!”

  It was a fair bit of radiation, enough that whatever was inside would eventually make them sick. The difference in ticking from inside to outside hinted that the ceramic was a strong radiation shield.

  “We’re going to need put the fissionables under the storage trawler so we don’t get sick,” Pascal said.

  He would look up radiation in his textbooks later. With a bit of work, he put a rod-mounted mirror through the narrow port and into the low, hollow interior. He shone his light in and stared in stunned silence.

  “What is it?” George-Étienne demanded.

  Pascal handed him the light and held the mirror for him. His father shone the light on the mirror and moved his head around.

  “Sapristi,” he swore. “Do you see gold?”

  “I think I saw gold, copper, what could be platinum, silver or iridium,” Pascal said.

  Fine lines of bright metals had been laid into the ceramic in curving, overlapping lines.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s like a circuit board, one big computer chip,” Pascal said.

  “It doesn’t look anything like a circuit board. It looks like art.”

  Pascal took a deep breath, tried to collect his thoughts. The vastness of what he was thinking was like a piece of food too big to swallow.

  “We make circuit boards with straight lines and angles so we don’t get mixed up,” Pascal said. “But there’s nothing to say that solid state circuits can’t be built with curving lines of conductors. It’s the connections that matter. The makers of this thing deposited layers of ceramic, then layers of wiring with different materials, and then more non-conducting ceramic, then more circuit pathways. It might be one big chip.”

  “Calvaire,” George-Étienne swore, peering closer. “Who the hell built like this fifty or eighty years ago? It doesn’t look American. Or Russian. Maybe it’s Chinese?”

  “I don’t think any human built this, Pa.”

  His father started, looked at him strangely. “What?”

  “I may have grown up sheltered on Venus, but I know that no one on Earth or the colonies could build this thing. This isn’t the way anyone on Earth builds circuits. There’s a different kind of thinking behind this. It’s all one piece. I think it’s sintered, which means it was probably made in space, someplace like the moon or an asteroid.”

  “Little green men making probes?”

  “Pa, I don’t think this thing ever saw the upper cloud decks. It isn’t shaped like an airfoil to generate lift by moving through the air.” Pascal breathed. “I think it
came from the other side. It came through that... wormhole… and found itself in an environment it wasn’t built for—the Venusian atmosphere.”

  Pascal had to lean in to see his father’s expression through the two faceplates. It was pensive. Calculating. His father had been poor all his life. That was part of why he’d come to Venus; on Earth, he had nothing to lose. And here, circumstance had forced him to choose between descending into subsistence in the lower cloud decks, or changing the kind of person he was. He’d worked all of Pascal’s life, all of Jean-Eudes’s life, looking for the lucky strike that might give his family some ease, to not be scrambling for their next meal. He’d lost a wife, a daughter and a son-in-law.

  The wormhole—if it was a wormhole—was part of that lucky strike. This probe was part of that lucky strike. If this ceramic triangular thing was alien rather than human, its value was incalculable. And all those parts together made a strike too big for one man. Pascal had never seen a dog or a car, but his Pa’s story of the chasing dog who catches the car was not lost on him. What could they do that wouldn’t mean losing their one and only stroke of luck?

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” George-Étienne said. “Doesn’t change our choices.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we cut this thing up and sell the pieces, including the radioactives.”

  “Pa! You can’t scrap it! This is world-historical.”

  “Maybe so. I don’t fault your idealism, cher, but I’ll tell you one thing: the government is weak. They’ll sell out to anyone with two dollars to wave around. And the Bank of Pallas has a branch manager up in our clouds who’s looking to build her career. If word of this gets out, do you really believe that any real scientists will come down here, excavating and studying for the benefit of all humanity, much less compensating the D’Aquillons? Gaschel will sell access to any bidder, at under market cost, for a kickback no doubt, and our independent Venus suddenly becomes an armed protectorate or territory of the Americans or the Chinese or even the Bank of Pallas.”