The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  Woodward hadn’t noticed. She rose, hot eyes on Gaschel. “Let me tell you what my directors will think,” she said, walking around the table in a wide, predatory circle. “Either the Government of Venus is playing dumb with us while playing footsie with one of the other Banks, or one of your coureurs is working behind both our backs.”

  Gaschel had to turn her chair to keep facing the branch manager. A coureur des vents going to one of the Banks without her knowing? How? What would they trade to the Bank? Political power? Regime change? Resources on the surface that needed huge engineering investments to reach? Venus had little of value. That was their problem. The maybes and perhapses could spin for days. She didn’t deal in maybes.

  “Neither narrative makes you look good,” Woodward said.

  “You think a coureur des vents bought radioactives from your competitors?” Gaschel said, trying to keep the heat from her voice.

  “Or you did.”

  “The Bank of Pallas is my only partner!” Gaschel stood angrily.

  They faced each other across the office. Woodward wasn’t tall, but she wasn’t relying on height for menace.

  “If it turns out I believe you, my directors will be gratified to hear that we can continue to count on this friendship. But the questions remain: why would your people be acquiring radioactives, and are you able to handle it?”

  “If it turns out I believe you,” Gaschel retorted, “I can only guess that they’re starting their own industries.”

  “Or you’re naive and they’re making some messy weapons.”

  Gaschel’s hands went cold.

  “If that’s the case, is the Government of Venus interested in buying weapons or police supplies?” Woodward asked neutrally.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Gaschel said. “Send me copies of your observations right away.”

  Woodward moved to a side table and picked up a small pad. She handed it to Gaschel. “Uncertainty makes business environments expensive,” she said. “For both our sakes, I expect this uncertainty to be clarified very shortly.”

  NINETEEN

  IT WAS ON waking that Pascal felt the worst. In dreams he was never himself. In his dreams, he played the parts of men. He played the parts of women. He played the parts of things. And sometimes he was no one at all, just a cloudy façade, surrounded by firmament-bright clouds. Inevitably, he woke, and he became prickling flesh again, sweaty, hairy, and rough. Ugly.

  He rose quietly, pissed without touching himself, and shaved in the dark. The only places he did touch himself were his scars. Wormy lines radiated up from the top of his left hand like a misshapen spider. Fine lines in parallel rows etched the inside of his right forearm. Scars spotted his neck where seals had failed and no beard would grow. The rippled welts inside and over his thighs were still healing.

  He padded out into the main space of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. In his room, Pa was speaking quietly into the radio. Pascal walked to the galley and made enough noise for Pa to hear. George-Étienne’s conversation resumed, even more quietly, and Pascal shut the oven door on a scattering of blastula chips. His father joined him shortly, sitting without looking at him.

  “What is it?” Pascal asked. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Marthe.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  George-Étienne shook his head. “Fuckers,” he said after a few moments.

  “Is Marthe okay?” Pascal demanded. “Is Émile?”

  “Marthe is fine. Émile is probably drunk.” He finally looked at Pascal. “The fuckers are taking away the Causapscal-des-Vents.”

  “What? Who?”

  “The fucking government. Fucking Gaschel.”

  Gaschel’s name was not spoken in their home. If she had to be referred to at all, she was called the fucking mayor, the fucking bitch, or the fucking doctor.

  “Why?” Pascal said. Where would Marthe and Émile live?

  George-Étienne waved his hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. The bitch is sticking it to us again. Surely she hates Marthe’s guts as much as mine.”

  “But why?”

  “Because Marthe is smarter than her and the fucking bitch couldn’t get her way in l’Assemblée, I bet you. We’ll find out soon. I asked Marthe to come down.”

  “Here?” Pascal said, suddenly elated. “She’s coming here? When?”

  “The Causapscal-des-Vents will be positioned to give her a good glide path in about four hours. I want to talk to her about what the hell we do with what we’ve found. The grinding is good—Jean-Eudes is good at it—but it feels small-scale. I’m trying to think about how to be more ambitious. Marthe will have ideas.”

  “What do you mean, ambitious?”

  “How do we barter away all those probes?” George-Étienne said. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. Some of them are worth more whole, but we’ve got no access to anyone who could buy them, or bid on them.”

  His mood was black and the silence throbbed with frustration.

  “I stayed up last night trying to figure out more of the probe,” Pascal said. “You want to see?”

  George-Étienne finally nodded. Pascal expanded the view on his pad of an engineering image he’d made.

  “I’ve found its main thrusters and attitude jets,” Pascal said, pointing to the lumps at the back and those on the underside, sides and top. “They’re fed from a single tube system from...” he altered the view to show a small hollow just aft of the dorsal access port “...this tank.”

  “The tubes from the tank,” he said, expanding that view of it, “run over the radioactive source. Solid reaction mass probably melts in the tank, boils and shoots through the jet valves.”

  “That wouldn’t work in the atmosphere of Venus,” George-Étienne said.

  “Not at all,” Pascal said. “But if this thing spent a lot of time in a vacuum, that’s another story. Among asteroids, they could harvest water ice, or dry ice, or liquid nitrogen as a reaction mass for propulsion.”

  “This boosts your alien theory,” his father said.

  “It is alien!”

  George-Étienne smiled at him and patted his arm. “I know, Pascal. Good work. You figured out it runs on fission.”

  “Not really,” Pascal said. “The propulsion system is simple, with the fissionables used only to heat the reaction mass. I don’t know what the rest of it ran on. Maybe the power plant was lost when it crashed in the cave.”

  “From the other side.”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad we can’t go down there,” George-Étienne said. “I’d like to get the rest of those probes and explore the eddies to see what other high-tech debris might come out.”

  Pascal took a deep breath.

  “We might be able to, Pa.”

  “Better probes?”

  Pascal shook his head and leaned close.

  “Air going from high pressure to low expands and cools,” he said. “We could set up a cooling system in the caves by setting up dams at several points. If we let air through in a controlled way, it would cool. We could even generate electricity with turbines.”

  George-Étienne’s brow lowered as Pascal spoke.

  “It’s brilliant,” he said after a moment. “You’re talking about building a base down there. Someplace to live. A way to explore that cave system and even the other side.”

  Pascal felt himself grinning to match his father’s smile. But then it faltered.

  “But how?”

  George-Étienne patted his arm again.

  “You eat, Pascal, and keep thinking. Start making plans. Don’t worry about what it costs yet.” He opened the oven and pulled out the hot tray of blastula chips. “Eat.” He even gave Pascal a wondering laugh.

  “Why are you happy, papa?” Jean-Eudes said sleepily as he emerged from their room.

  George-Étienne hugged his eldest and then laughed.

  “Be proud, Jean-Eudes! I think your little brother is a genius.”

  Jean-Eudes
grinned and Pascal’s cheeks heated.

  “And Marthe is coming for a visit,” George-Étienne said.

  “Marthe is coming!” Jean-Eudes exclaimed. “Pascal! Marthe is coming home!”

  Then Pascal laughed, realizing that he, too, was happy.

  TWENTY

  MARTHE WAS LEAVING Émile responsible for the Causapscal-des-Vents, whatever that meant now, and whatever that meant to him. He needed to keep it running and producing, if only for her pride and to spite Gaschel. She left him the same message in the habitat, on his suit comms, and in his inter-colonie inbox. Then, she leapt from the roof of the Causapscal-des-Vents.

  She didn’t wear the expansive, light, highly-curved wings used for flitting about the upper atmosphere. They would snap like matchsticks in the dense winds below, and they didn’t have the acid-resistance of the wings she’d grown up with. She wore a wing-pack she’d built herself, modeled off the wing-pack her mother had used. She’d made the parts herself out of volcanic metals, the atmospheric carbon she’d turned into nanotubes in the depths, and the scrap around the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs.

  The stubby deep-cloud wings had a low camber to account for the greater lift that even a little airspeed could give at two atmospheres of pressure. They were tougher, too, the kinds of wings that could carry a flyer and their load even through hard turbulence if need be, and still resist the sulfuric acid until they could be cleaned.

  She didn’t unfurl them yet. Their design was next to useless in the tenth of an atmosphere of pressure at the flotilla altitude of sixty-five kilometers. And passage through the super-rotating winds of the upper atmosphere to the slower winds of the upper cloud deck could be violent. No need to wear a small sail through it.

  So she descended, faceplate down, arms back, legs canted outward, in free fall. The wind hissed. Wispy yellow-white half-clouds, patches of condensed water or sulfuric acid, whipped past her. She judged the distance to the super-rotating winds and the next layer by looking kilometers away to see where the winds caught at the peaks of high clouds, tearing the tops away. Normally, rolling convection cells clouded, making a washer-board pattern that looked like river rapids from far above, but the weather was clear and what they called Les Rapides Plats weren’t visible today.

  She tucked herself into a ball. Seconds later, contrary winds buffeted her, slowed her, pushed her sideways, and spun her. Her free fall speed was such that after twenty seconds she’d punched through the turbulence. She straightened out as she plummeted into the upper cloud decks. Behind her, the flotilla of colonie habitats raced away from her, west-to-east. They would circle the whole planet on the high super-rotating winds in just four days. She was entering the more sedately blowing world of thick, bright clouds filled with yellowing and reddening light. Droplets of sulfuric acid speckled her faceplate and beaded away in the wind.

  At fifty-eight kilometers above the surface, she burst through the upper cloud deck into the clear space called Grande Allée. It was a transparent cushion of air a kilometer thick between the upper and middle cloud decks. In free fall she was past its beauty in about fifteen seconds.

  After plunging ten kilometers, the temperature rose to about twenty-five Celsius, and the pressure was over half an atmosphere. It was starting to feel like home. The light became more diffuse, the visibility more restricted.

  She extended her wings, but didn’t switch to glide flight. She was at altitudes where rosettes and trawlers naturally floated. Hitting one of them, while highly improbable, would be lethal at terminal velocity. The clouds thinned and the light oranged further, giving the eerie impression of brightening below. At fifty-two kilometers, almost the bottom of the middle cloud deck, she turned her free fall into a steep glide. The buffeting wind, thicker than the air at sixty-fifth rang was exhilarating, renewing.

  The clouds whipped past until she entered the second vast, clear volume of sky: Les Plaines. She pulled into level flight, speeding along the transparent immensity sandwiched between two sheets of yellow clouds. She raced past a flock of wild trawlers, nice mature ones with long tails and heavy bobs under them. Everything began to feel more real. Things were alive here.

  The yellow-brown ceiling of the middle deck receded above her as she plunged into the ocher tops of the lower cloud deck. Beads of sulfuric acid rain whipped across her faceplate, and a small storm bucked and shoved her. Her suit pressed closer to her skin, and its cooling system activated.

  The Causapscal-des-Profondeurs would be over the volcano Maat Mons at midnight, at an altitude around forty-fourth rang. She was at the fifty-first rang, nearly over the immense unseen shield volcano, having already bled off much of her falling speed. She swooped sideways, and dove joyfully into the lower cloud deck, her former nursery and her home.

  The light took on a dreamy, polarized quality in the lower decks. The midnight sun, hidden by twelve kilometers of clouds, was apparent now only in the particular reddish-yellow color of the light. Each level of the clouds reddened sunlight differently: a product of the kinds of clouds and the concentration of sulfuric acid. So home had a set of colors, as did homesickness.

  There was nothing like the heat of her first suit walk, the weightlessness of her first wing-pack flight, the triumph of her first collaring of a wild trawler, the pain of her first burn. Deep thunder rolled, a visceral boom that the upper atmosphere couldn’t carry. Her heart thumped faster and she dove. Fine lines of sulfuric acid trembled on her faceplate.

  The temperature outside her suit climbed to the boiling point of water, just as the lower cloud deck began to dissolve into a fine haze. At forty-eighth rang, it was now too hot for clouds, and the vaporized acid looked the same dark yellow in all directions. This sub-cloud haze was the shapeless chaos of home.

  This deep, the timbre of sound changed again. An atmosphere and a half of pressure and increasing heat made sound faster. Sound felt omnidirectional and made the world closer and smaller in anti-intuitive ways.

  She was now close enough to pick up the weak locator signal that Pa had turned on for her. He was a suspicious man and normally ran the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs in the radio quiet preferred by the coureurs des vents. Her home floated fifteen kilometers east and several kilometers lower. She angled into the wind and glided downward though a browned haze so hot that sulfuric acid was breaking down into water vapor and sulfur dioxide.

  Soon, a single trawler began to resolve, at first just a fuzzy vertical line, hanging gray and still. She dialed up the zoom on her faceplate, and as she neared, made out the distended, over-sized bulb that could only come from bioengineering. This was one of the herd with a transmitter-repeater mounted on its crown. The engine of her wing-pack keened in an excitement she shared. She dialed down the wattage on her helmet radio so that her transmission would only carry a few kilometers.

  “Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, this is Marthe. Come in.”

  Static sounded for a while, lightning echoes and cloud static of the kind that fed the trawlers.

  “Marthe! Marthe! It’s Jean-Eudes!” she heard, and smiled. “You’re coming home!”

  Her heart grew bigger, but she waited until she could hear static again. Jean-Eudes sometimes left his thumb on the transmit button.

  “I’ll be home soon, Jean-Eudes. Wait for me.”

  “I know! I will! Marthe!” Then came the sound of her older brother whooping.

  She throttled up, speeding herself along the last few kilometers, spotting in the distance a couple of trawlers from the family herd. Their slow propellers churned, keeping them close to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. One was unusually close, the old habitat they’d used to live in, the one they used mostly for storage. Curious.

  The temperature had risen to a hundred and twenty degrees and the pressure to over two atmospheres. Her wings were sensitive now, reacting to her every movement. She circled the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs twice. On the gantry, under the wide head of the habitat proper, a figure stood in a survival suit. Her father. She was twe
nty-four and didn’t need someone spotting her every take-off and landing, but here he was, watching her. She swooped, then angled up to the gantry, cutting her thrust so that she landed gently on the hanging nets, as if it hadn’t been a year since she’d last done it. She folded her wings, clambered up and her father hugged her.

  “Beautiful landing,” he said as if she were fifteen.

  “Careful,” she said. “I’m soaked. I passed through a lot of rain on the way down.”

  “It’s just acid,” he said gruffly, but he helped her shrug out of the wing-pack and then they neutralized each other and her wings. They entered the airlock, wiped again, and then repeated one last time inside while Jean-Eudes and Alexis waited at the line, with Pascal waiting a little farther back, smiling. When she’d unsuited and crossed the line, Jean-Eudes and Alexis hugged her together.

  “You’re so big!” she said to Alexis. “What have you been feeding him, Jean-Eudes?”

  Brother and nephew grinned and let her go.

  “Ostie! You’re bigger too, Pascal!” she said.

  He hugged her shyly. He was ten centimeters taller, and his muscles had started filling out. He looked good with his hair grown out, too. They made small talk, asked awkward questions, laughed, and gave her food and drink. Her two brothers and her nephew stared at her.

  “This is a better welcome than I ever get on the Baie-Comeau,” she said.

  “What’s the Baie-Comeau?” Jean-Eudes asked.

  “Is it big?” Alexis asked.

  “Two hundred people live on it,” she said.

  “Whoa,” Alexis said.

  “Enemies all,” George-Étienne said flatly.

  “Enemies?” Alexis asked.

  “Not all enemies,” Marthe said. “Political opponents, some allies, and some people who don’t even know who we are.”

  “The important ones are enemies,” George-Étienne said.

  “What’s happening with the Causapscal-des-Vents?” Pascal asked.

  The green of his eyes was very clear, not a Venusian color.