“What’s happening to the Causapscal-des-Vents?” Alexis repeated, looking from one adult to the other. George-Étienne shushed him with a gesture.
“The government wants to take it, basically for scrap,” she said to Pascal and her father.
“Can they do that?” Pascal asked.
Marthe shrugged. “We don’t own it. No one owns anything.”
“The D’Aquillons own the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” her father said bitterly. “We own our trawlers.”
“They’re leaning on the Hudon family for a bioengineered trawler or two,” she added. “Maybe they’re going to encourage some people to move deeper, go off the grid.”
“The Hudons don’t have to give shit,” George-Étienne said.
“They might have to,” Marthe said, “just like we might have to.”
“Are you kidding me?” George-Étienne said. “It was always a lousy class of habitat and we were never given anything to repair it with. And now they’re kicking us out?”
“Where are they going to live?” Jean-Eudes asked. “Marthe, come live with us. You can have my hammock.”
She squeezed Jean-Eudes’s hand.
“Their argument isn’t dumb,” Marthe said.
“You agree with them?” George-Étienne demanded.
“Nobody’s going to think their political argument is a crazy idea.”
“Are they likely to win in l’Assemblée?”
“Eventually.”
“How long can you hold them off?” George-Étienne asked.
“Using all my tricks? Weeks. If they’re stupid, maybe months, but they’re not stupid.”
“You’ll have a place to live?” Pascal said. He looked at his father and added, “… and Émile.”
“Émile and I will have some place to live,” she said, “and so will you if you want to come up.”
“Pascal isn’t leaving!” Jean-Eudes said.
Pascal reddened.
“He’s not leaving now, Jean-Eudes, but he’s sixteen,” she said. “At some point, he’ll want to see other habitats, see different jobs. If he wants to be an engineer, he’ll have to work with real engineers for a while.”
“I don’t want Pascal to go,” Jean-Eudes said.
“Me neither!” Alexis said.
“The real effect of this is that the présidente is taking me off the table politically,” she said. “I’ve been playing the part of loyal opposition and it looks like Gaschel got tired of it. Without a habitat, I’m no delegate.”
“You can be our delegate from the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” Pascal said.
Marthe shrugged. “No one cares what the coureurs think. They only care what people in artificial habitats think.”
“That’s bullshit,” Alexis said.
“Watch your mouth!” Marthe and George-Étienne said together. Alexis flinched.
“Pa,” she said, looking at him meaningfully, “you can’t watch your mouth around Alexis?”
“Why does she want you off the table?” George-Étienne said.
“I’ve been opposing her debt strategy for years. She’s trying to dig us deeper. She’s negotiated a big new loan with the Bank to buy 3554 Amun.”
“An asteroid?” George-Étienne scoffed.
“It’s a good idea,” Pascal said. “Venus needs a lot of metal.”
“We shouldn’t have to pay for an asteroid at all,” George-Étienne said. “The asteroids don’t belong to the Banks just because they landed robots on them. Nobody asked them to go squat forever on a claim. We should be able to go out and pick any one. They’re not using them.”
“Let’s just take one,” Alexis said sullenly.
“If you touch a Bank’s stuff, they can see that your equipment fails,” Marthe said, “or they can call in the money you owe them.”
“That’s not fair!” Jean-Eudes said.
“It’s the way things are,” George-Étienne said.
“I hate the Banks,” Alexis said.
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” Jean-Eudes said. “We would still have the Causapscal. You shouldn’t have made them mad.”
George-Étienne clasped Jean-Eudes’s shoulder. “Your sister did the right thing.”
“It’s not fair,” Jean-Eudes said.
“I may end up visiting you more,” Marthe said.
Her older brother smiled.
“Alexis, Jean-Eudes,” she said, “in the inner pocket of my suit, you may find a data sliver with some new music and movies I brought you.”
Brother and nephew went for her suit, found the data sliver triumphantly, and then went into George-Étienne’s bedroom where there was a reader. George-Étienne smiled appreciatively.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.
“You said you were quitting.”
She put away a small bag of tobacco and paper.
“So what’s your plan?” George-Étienne asked. “Use all the procedures to delay?”
She shrugged. “I can’t turn enough opinion to stop this.”
“So the Causapscal-des-Vents will be lost,” he said, without the anger she’d expected.
Pa had a strange look. From his room, the sounds of a movie playing emerged.
“Tell,” she said. “There’s something.”
George-Étienne signaled Pascal, went to the cupboard and pulled out something square and blocky. Pascal scooted closer. The first image on his pad was a close-up of a chasma, from maybe only ten kilometers up.
“Artemis? Devana?” she asked.
“Diana,” George-Étienne said, sitting on the other side of her. “Remember I told you I’ve been tracking a weird storm system there?” He put the block in front of her. It was about thirty centimeters by thirty centimeters, perhaps another eight or ten thick. She held it up. She didn’t recognize the color. It was a weird mix of granular reds and blacks.
“This isn’t a surface sample,” she said. “Something you made?”
She adjusted the angle and light reflected from the ends of thousands of metallic filaments running through the material.
“We sent a probe to the surface,” her father said. “We found a cave at the base of Diana Chasma. Wind was blowing into the cave.”
“Into?”
“Show her the first recording, Pascal.”
His pad showed grainy images from the surface, but possibly worth a bit on the black market all the same. And then things got strange. They’d found a cave. Not so strange. Venus was covered with the fragments of lava tubes. But then he showed a video of pebbles and stones flying into the cave, dislodged by the camera itself, on what was obviously a dense wind. It was astonishing. Its possible value was going up in her calculations. And the video became increasingly strange. The turbulence and wild swings made understanding harder, but the silt and wind made it look like pictures from underwater. The rock faces were inexplicably smooth. And then, the last images showed a triangular shape.
“Wind can’t go into a cave, Pa,” she said finally.
Pascal took back the pad, the image frozen on the triangular thing. His fingers raced over the pad, and he opened another set of images, of a big triangular shape on the gantry under the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Pictures of Pascal sawing into it, making square sections. She felt her eyes widening.
“You brought it up?” she said, peering harder at the section. “What is it?” The new, clear pictures made it look like some sort of... she didn’t know what. Satellite? Plane? Drone?
“We thought it was a probe sent by the Russians or the Americans,” George-Étienne said.
“What’s it made of?”
George-Étienne tapped the thick plate she held.
“This is it. Some kid of ceramic,” Pascal volunteered. “The metal inside is circuitry, I think. The whole thing is one giant processing chip.”
“Sapristi,” she cursed. “Who the hell builds drones like this? Who the hell is that far ahead of us?”
“Whoever it was, they were this advan
ced a long time ago. It spent a long time down there. We got it out by going down ourselves,” George-Étienne said.
“What? You went down?” she said, staring at him. “You both went down?”
Pa didn’t answer, feeling the heat in her tone. She slammed down the ceramic plate.
“Not in Duvieusart’s old bathyscaphe? You put Pascal in danger and left the boys on the Causapscal by themselves?”
“We’re coureurs, Marthe. It isn’t as easy as up at sixty-fifth.”
“This isn’t about easy or hard, Pa! Do you know how dangerous that was for both of you? And Jean-Eudes and Alexis alone with the whole herd?”
The sound of the video from George-Étienne’s room quieted. Pa didn’t seem to care that they eavesdropped.
“They looked after themselves,” George-Étienne said. “Alexis is ten.”
“Câlisse, Pa! The world isn’t the way it used to be. What if something had happened to you? How long would it have been before I could have gotten to them?”
“Nothing happened, and Alexis held the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs over the RV point for two hours. He’s as good as Chloé was at that age. He’s better than you were at that age.”
“And Venus took away Chloé as a full-grown woman, Pa!”
“Nothing bad happened to Alexis and Jean-Eudes,” Pascal said gently. “Both of them were very proud of themselves.”
“You both shouldn’t be,” she snapped.
“We got the probe,” Pascal said. “Look at what else we saw when we got the camera deeper into the cave.”
She still couldn’t believe they’d left Alexis and Jean-Eudes alone, but she huffed and turned her attention back to the pad. Pascal zoomed in on another picture. In an eddy deep in the cave lay a dusted graveyard of shipwrecks, twelve or more wrecked drones.
“How many of these probes did you find?” she asked. “Who would send so many down in one place?”
“Pascal thinks the tech is alien,” George-Étienne said, baiting her.
There was still no sound from Pa’s room.
“You’d better be watching those movies or I’m putting them back in my suit!” she yelled. The sound of a movie restarted, louder than before. She squinted at the images, then lowered her voice.
“Crisse,” she said. “You can’t be serious! Little green men?”
Pascal slid the ceramic block to her. “No one uses this tech on Earth or on Venus.”
“That we know of,” she said.
“Look at this.”
He swiped through the images, each one showing the dark of the cave with tiny circles of light from their lamp. Then, a starscape.
“What is this?”
“This is what we found at three hundred and twenty meters into the cave,” Pascal said.
She looked at her father. He was poker-faced. This was a joke. She tossed the pad on the table. She didn’t like these kinds of jokes. Pascal and George-Étienne watched her earnestly.
“At the bottom of the cave, we found a wormhole,” George-Étienne said in a low voice.
A shiver of goose-flesh rose to her neck. “Wormholes don’t exist.”
“We don’t know how it works,” Pa continued. “We don’t know why it’s stable. We don’t know why it’s there. But it’s been there for a while, and blowing carbon dioxide into space. We found a tunnel to another place, Marthe.”
“I think it’s around a pulsar,” Pascal added. “We got repeating radio signals all the way down. We thought it was a distress call, or a coded message, but the wormhole opens onto a system with no star, just a pulsar.”
She shoved at her father and he got up in surprise. She rose impatiently and walked to the galley, stood stiffly for long moments. What the hell? They believed it!
They both believed it. And while her home was being confiscated, they were making up stories. No. Not exactly stories. Not to them. They believed. They had photographic, radio and physical evidence.
They weren’t stupid. Either one of them. Even though Pa sometimes edged close to conspiracy thinking about the government. She took a deep breath. She faced them. They were looking at her as if awaiting a sentence. They needed her to believe them.
She leaned back, pulled out her tobacco and paper, and looked at her father, daring. He said nothing. She slowly filled the paper, rolled and licked it. She came to the table, struck the match on the section of ceramic hull, and inhaled.
“Get me a drink and show me everything again from step one,” she said, sitting back down.
TWENTY-ONE
GASCHEL’S SUITES IN the Baie-Comeau were less expansive than Woodward’s, although her view was higher. Her office looked down on the yellowed clouds and the white hazes as if from the tower of a great ship. Blobs and specks of green far ahead and to the side marked the positions of other habitats. La colonie’s main flotilla was spread across a circle thirty kilometers off the Baie-Comeau. Smaller flocks of a few dozen habitats lay thousands of kilometers away, following the west-to-east winds over the top of Venus’s clouds, so that every seven to eight thousand kilometers was a human flotilla.
Most of her closest aides lived on the Baie-Comeau or in attendant habitats. They met today in her office. Claude Babin, the colonie’s treasurer, was standing. His news hadn’t been good. They already had a trade deficit with the asteroidal corporations, as well as a sizeable debt, and they’d just gone through the list of what the colonie would and wouldn’t import this quarter.
They’d again put off buying updated vaccines, as well as some cancer therapies, so that they could get some basic metals that had no substitutes. They’d also added a shipment of water and ammonia, because their closed habitat systems kept leaking away hydrogen and nitrogen, which were difficult to replace on Venus. And, with too much hesitation, she’d decided to acquire a set of higher-grade solar cells that would increase the colonie’s industrial production of carbon nanofibers, which were durable enough to substitute for metals and cladding in some places. But they’d be paying for it for a while.
“Merci, Claude,” she said, dismissing him. “I need the rest of you for a moment.”
She was left with a small group of people. François-Xavier Labourière was the chief of her political and administrative staff. He’d been with Gaschel since the beginning of her political career. Thomas Bacquet was the fidgety, efficient Deputy Chief-of-Staff. Cécile Dauzat managed la colonie’s industrial works, and Laurent Tétreau was a politically-minded Junior Engineer in industrial works who’d been doing more and more political work for Labourière. She sat. They did too.
“I need the locations of the coureurs des vents,” she said.
Labourière looked to Dauzat.
“All of them?” Dauzat asked warily.
“There aren’t that many,” Gaschel said.
The manager of industrial works wriggled in her seat. “It’s almost a hundred families, maybe more, madame, floating at many changing altitudes, across dozens of latitudes.”
“Forty-five kilometers is the altitude,” Gaschel said. “The latitude is the Atla Regio region. The time is four days ago.”
“We don’t track the coureurs, madame. They don’t even track themselves,” Dauzat said.
“You can narrow it down with this information,” Gaschel insisted.
“Maybe,” Dauzat said. “Historically, maybe. The coureurs do share meteorological reporting. We might be able to build up profiles based on where they tend to report from.”
“What kind of a problem are we dealing with, Madame la Présidente?” Labourière asked.
Gaschel looked at each one.
“Just this room?” she asked.
They nodded.
“Someone down there is floating around with some hot radioisotopes,” she said.
“One of the mom-and-pop operations found some on the surface and brought it up?” Dauzat asked.
“The signal was too hot for raw ore. And no one on Venus has the capacity to refine it,” Gaschel said. Some of the
faces, especially Tétreau’s and Labourière’s, started to show dawning realization. “The Bank of Pallas thinks that someone down there is cutting a deal with another Bank.”
She let that sink in.
“Is this Marthe D’Aquillon? Or her father?” Labourière asked.
“Narrow it down,” she said, with a finality that caused the four of them to stand, pay their respects and get moving.
TWENTY-TWO
PA AND PASCAL showed Marthe everything they’d learned or guessed or filmed or measured. It took an hour. She stopped them, made them back up, interrogating every observation. Pascal didn’t drink, but she and Pa downed a quarter-bottle of his good bagosse. They hung on her expressions, and at the end, they watched her smoke as she considered it all.
She swore very deliberately “Maudit câlisse de tabarnak de gros problème, papa.”
Pa began to grin, his eyes defiantly alight.
“It’s ours, Marthe! No one knows we’ve got it. We’ve got a tunnel to the stars ourselves. The government and the Bank can fuck themselves.”
She rested her head against the wall, staring at the ceiling, blowing smoke in a cloud.
“What do you think?” George-Étienne asked.
“I’m having a hard time believing any of it. And what do you do with a wormhole in the ground? Who could we tell?”
“We don’t tell anyone!” George-Étienne said vehemently. “So no one takes it away.”
“We can’t do this alone, Pa.”
“Family first.”
“I never forgot, Pa,” she said, putting the cigarette back to her lips. With her eyes, she traced the rib lines of the trawler in the ceiling. There was something spiritually comforting about being inside another living thing. Protected. Enwombed.
“I thought I was coming down here to plan how to keep the fight alive with no seat in l’Assemblée. Not this. Stars inside Venus,” she said wonderingly.
And it was a wonder. A road to hidden stars. A little nuts. A lot nuts.
“A seat in l’Assemblée might not be so important in the future,” George-Étienne said, “but for now, we need you there.”
“Why?”
“Pascal had an idea. Show her, Pascal.”
The House of Styx Page 13
