The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “I saw the way you looked at my wing-packs,” Gabriel-Antoine said, moving a bit closer. Even in the gloom and even shuttered by the faceplate, his eyes were a piercing pale blue. “I saw the way you flew in the depths, the way your body moves like you belong down here, like you’re seeing things I can’t see and adding them to some cloud dance.”

  Pascal looked away, but left his hand in Gabriel-Antoine’s. The words were beautiful, and Pascal couldn’t believe that Gabriel-Antoine was saying them. Here. Standing on a cloud creature above Venus in recline, a sight that only a few hundred people in all of history had ever seen with their own eyes.

  Gabriel-Antoine edged closer uncertainly, and almost slipped. Pascal grabbed him with both arms and steadied him. Gingerly, Gabriel-Antoine stilled in his grasp. Pascal swallowed.

  “Nothing on a trawler is flat,” Pascal said weakly. “It takes practice. I’m surprised you haven’t fallen yet.”

  “Maybe I’m close,” Gabriel-Antoine said. Pascal’s stomach lurched, but Gabriel-Antoine’s flashing grin was looking over the wrinkled hide of the goddess of love, not at him.

  “What does she hide from us?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “I’ll show you at Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” Pascal said, and reddened when he realized how suggestive that sounded.

  “It takes someone who has something hidden to see what’s hidden,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “Will you show me what you hide?”

  Pascal went cold. “Do you hide things?”

  Gabriel-Antoine smiled behind the faceplate of his helmet. Then he shook his head. “I rarely hide anything, and even if I do, it isn’t for long.”

  Pascal swallowed nervously, as if Gabriel-Antoine had thrown the ball back to him, launching a challenge: Be brave. How brave was he? Did he even know what to be brave about?

  The trawler wouldn’t sink much more. The atmospheric pressure was so thick that buoyancy was double or triple what it would be at fifty-fifth rang. Trawlers didn’t like being this low and this hot. Valves under the hard, woody skins would already be pumping gasses from the interior, lightening the load. The whole world seemed to hold its breath. The haze hung in stillness around them. The ground was unmoving far below. And the pair of them froze in place, in nervous, exciting confusion, at least until the faster winds above them blew the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs nearer.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MARIE-PIER HAD A small carbon nano-fiber airplane, its fuselage printed from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere over the course of months. Marthe and Marie-Pier pulled it out of its storage case, fueled it, and locked the wings into flight position. Marthe knew the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs’s course and despite the cluster of storms raging fifty kilometers above Aphrodite Terra, she could lead them to it.

  The flight was bumpy. Immense bolts of lightning punctuated fierce, sudden updrafts, pockets of downdrafts, and showers of sulfuric acid. It took them an hour to get out of the storm and into a slow, steamy rain, and another two hours before Marthe received the chirping family response from the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. They finally, with some exhaustion, got close enough to begin circling the big family trawler, looking for a good approach. Marie-Pier was a good pilot, even for the depths, but Marthe would almost always have preferred something that depended on buoyancy rather than airspeed, or better yet, just to fly with her own wing-pack.

  The hot winds buffeted the plane far more than anything they might have felt in the frigid heights above the clouds. And matching airspeeds to the habitat was not easily done in the depths. Their home floated and bobbed, occasionally running a few small propellers to change bands and avoid distant storms. But it was no runway.

  Marie-Pier climbed a little bit, slowed almost to stall speed, and set herself on a tangential path to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Then she punched the emergency inflators on four big oxygen balloons, two over the wings, one over the tail, and one just behind the cockpit. As the engine idled, the drag cut their airspeed and they were suddenly floating. The black bags strained upwards, slicking immediately with sulfuric acid rain. The plane began to sink and Marie-Pier gave each of the bags a bit more oxygen. A hazy half-kilometer separated them from the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs—in other words, a pin-point ‘landing.’

  Sulfuric acid speckled the glass, becoming rivulets. Marie-Pier turned on wipers and gunned the props to give them a bit of forward movement.

  “A welcoming committee?” Marie-Pier asked, pointing into the light rain.

  Marthe squinted. Two shadows resolved into fuzzy shapes: people on wing-packs.

  “I don’t recognize the wings,” she said. “The smaller one flies like my little brother.”

  Running lights over the D’Aquillon home and spotlights underneath illuminated the gantry. The two figures on wing-packs flew by at high speed. Marie-Pier watched them go.

  “I haven’t seen wing-packs that fast,” Marthe said.

  Marie-Pier slowly maneuvered the plane beneath the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs as the pair of flyers alighted on the gantry. One of them—Pascal, by his suit—slid carefully down a cable and stepped onto the wobbling plane, locking the hook at the end of the cable into a ring on the tail. By the time Marthe and Marie-Pier exited the plane from the cockpit floor hatch, Pascal was already done tying ropes to the four balloons.

  Marthe touched both sides of her faceplate to both sides of his in greeting. Marie-Pier did the same.

  “Marie-Pier, this is my brother Pascal. He’ll take care of the balloons and cover the plane with a tarp.”

  She led Marie-Pier up a rope ladder to get out of the spitting rain. On the gantry, her father was out, applying bicarbonate to what had to be Gabriel-Antoine Phocas’s suit.

  Marthe didn’t start any more introductions. Courtesy was courtesy and acid was acid, as the expression went. Venus always came first. Marthe spread a bicarbonate solution on her guest, head to toe, and felt the heat where it neutralized pockets of acid. She held out the container and extended her arms so that Marie-Pier could do the same. By the time she was done, Pascal had finished removing the four balloons from the plane. It hung, nose down, under a waterproof tarp.

  George-Étienne would have neutralized Pascal, but Gabriel-Antoine seemed to be getting into the deep rituals and took the container to apply the bicarbonate to her brother. Marthe watched him work and led his hands back where he had missed spots. It was funny how upper-clouders could look so helpless in the depths. As funny as it was to be a coureur making all sorts of errors of manners in sunlight.

  They made light introductions and cycled in through the airlock. Marthe was sensitive enough to those who lived above the clouds to know, even before she saw their expressions, that the D’Aquillons were going to look like country bumpkins or very poor cousins to their visitors. Marie-Pier was not wealthy, but her bioengineered trawlers were popular on the black market. And Marie-Pier’s were newer and bigger, not beaten and worn like the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. She didn’t know what it was to live this deep in the clouds.

  Gabriel-Antoine’s expression was unexpected. At first, it was simple surprise, perhaps that anyone lived under such rustic and improvised conditions. While Pascal tended to a small acid burn on his thigh, Gabriel-Antoine examined the walls with eyes and fingers, tracing the ribs, finding the tiny pumping valves in the trawler shells. He whispered questions to Pascal in wondering tones.

  And then Jean-Eudes came out with Alexis, both pasty-faced with unfinished sleep, and an underlying, infectious eagerness. At least, she hoped it was infectious. Neither Marie-Pier nor Gabriel-Antoine would have ever met anyone with trisomy-21.

  George-Étienne clapped Jean-Eudes on the back, then shook his shoulder. “This one is my eldest, Jean-Eudes,” he said, smiling, inviting, but with an expression of holding his breath. “And my grandson, Alexis.”

  Marie-Pier kissed Jean-Eudes on both cheeks. “A pleasure to meet you, mon grand,” she said. “Et toi aussi,” she said to Alexis.

  This seemed to
satisfy her father. And Marthe too.

  Gabriel-Antoine looked away from the walls distractedly. “Jean-Eudes?” he said, shaking her brother’s hand. “Pascal told me you keep the pressure right in here.”

  Jean-Eudes brightened, stood a bit straighter. “Alexis helps.”

  Gabriel-Antoine gravely shook hands with her nephew, who was equally serious.

  George-Étienne gripped Gabriel-Antoine on the arm. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  Marthe’s brief tour of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs ended around the galley table. Gabriel-Antoine had never been on a living habitat, and he had many questions that Marie-Pier, George-Étienne, and Pascal answered in turn.

  It was late, and after a time, George-Étienne shooed the protesting Alexis and Jean-Eudes back to bed. The rest of them remained around the table with homemade bagosse that Marthe poured into small, lumpy glasses. If neutralized with enough base, the wood fibers from some parts of trawler envelopes could be fermented and distilled into a stinging bagosse. George-Étienne screwed together two more worn carbon stools and set them down for himself and Pascal.

  “Santé,” Marthe said, toasting.

  They drank. Pascal sputtered. Gabriel-Antoine complimented the still-maker. The conversation finally flagged.

  “Thank you for joining us,” Marthe said after smacking her lips at another sip. “We’re looking for some help.”

  “Engineering help,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  Marie-Pier regarded her and her father silently.

  “A few kinds of help,” Marthe said. “But to talk about it, I need your word that whatever we discuss tonight, it stays here.”

  “You’d trust our word?” Gabriel-Antoine said, smirking. Her father looked uncomfortable.

  “I know you both from a distance,” Marthe said. “Everything I’ve seen leads me to believe that both of you are honest. Enough that I would trust my family’s secrets to you.”

  Marie-Pier lifted her glass and toasted her.

  “And you’re no friends of the government,” George-Étienne said grimly.

  Marie-Pier arched an eyebrow at her. “Rebellion?” she joked.

  George-Étienne made a derisive sound. “The government isn’t legitimate,” he said. “This isn’t what we founded. This is government by Bank puppets.”

  Marie-Pier didn’t look convinced. Gabriel-Antoine was slowly turning his shot glass, looking at the misshapen bubbles and yellowed impurities frozen within.

  “The D’Aquillon family’s old disagreements with the government are not what this is about,” Marthe said quietly. “Because of those disagreements, we’ve chosen to work the lower cloud decks, and even occasionally the surface, for things to barter. Now we’ve found something valuable. We don’t want the government or the Bank to take it away. But we need help exploiting it.”

  “And what is it?” Marie-Pier asked dryly.

  “Your word, please,” Marthe said.

  Marie-Pier considered the bagosse and fished out flakes of blackened wood fiber. “I promise to keep whatever is discussed tonight a secret, whether we decide to work together or not.”

  “If it’s criminal and we don’t do anything or say anything, doesn’t that make us accomplices?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “If it ever came up, you could say you didn’t believe us.”

  Gabriel-Antoine shrugged. “I promise,” he said, waving a hand carelessly.

  Marthe looked meaningfully at her father, urging him silently to keep his peace and take them at their word. This wasn’t his strength, and she wasn’t sure what he’d finally do. He held her stare a long time, then cleared his throat.

  “Some parts of this are going to be hard to believe,” George-Étienne said. “Some weeks ago, I found a cave on the surface, a really strange cave. Wind on the surface was going into it.”

  “Are you joking?” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “Pascal and I sent a probe down.”

  “Your probe survived the surface of Venus?” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  Pascal activated his pad, played the video from the remote probe, and turned the pad to Marie-Pier and Gabriel-Antoine. They both frowned. Gabriel-Antoine magnified the view, tapping the screen, looking for more data.

  “What’s the scale?” he asked.

  “The cave mouth is twenty meters across,” Pascal said.

  “I’ve never heard of any wind like that on the surface,” Marie-Pier said. “But this isn’t valuable.”

  “We sent in the sensors as far as we could,” George-Étienne said. “The cave went deep. And the wind went as far as we could see.”

  The video kept on rolling. Marie-Pier and Gabriel-Antoine, and even Marthe, leaned close to each other to frown into the screen.

  “You tied a camera to a light to a rope and just hoped it would hold in that wind?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “He improvised,” George-Étienne said, clasping Pascal’s shoulder, missing Gabriel-Antoine’s tone. The engineer was impressed. More.

  Gabriel-Antoine paused the video near the end, when the image had settled fuzzily on the triangular shape. “What’s that?”

  “We couldn’t tell from the video,” George-Étienne said. “Pascal and I needed to get a better look, so we went down ourselves.”

  “You went to the surface?” Gabriel-Antoine said in astonishment. “How?”

  “Duvieusart’s old bathyscaphe,” George-Étienne said. “I acquired it some time ago.”

  “I thought it was lost,” Marie-Pier said.

  “Or scrapped,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “It’s gone from coureur to coureur,” George-Étienne said simply. “We’ve modified it over time. Pascal and I went down in it.”

  “To the surface,” Gabriel-Antoine said wonderingly.

  Pascal took the pad back from them and switched to the video they’d taken when he and Pa had gone down. He turned it back to them. They watched it as minutes went on, with Pascal providing technical comments.

  “What’s the cage?” Marie-Pier asked.

  The video showed their cage spinning wildly in the current of supercritical carbon dioxide.

  “Sample return container,” George-Étienne said.

  Gabriel-Antoine and Marie-Pier watched in rapt silence. The video’s sound was low, but it still moaned in the subsonic, like listening to a hurricane. The operation to crate the triangular ship entranced the newcomers.

  “They’re a spacecraft of some kind?” Marie-Pier asked.

  “We don’t know,” George-Étienne said. “Russian? Egyptian? Chinese? American? It doesn’t make sense that any of those powers would have sent so many down without ever having told anyone about it, or colonizing Venus themselves. No one has staked a claim to this.”

  “To what?” Gabriel-Antoine asked.

  “Watch,” Pascal said.

  The camera followed the current deeper. Marthe watched Marie-Pier and Gabriel-Antoine see the part that gave her shivers every time she saw it.

  Stars. Clear as any picture they could have taken from sixty-fifth rang.

  “What the hell?” Marie-Pier exclaimed.

  “This video has been spliced together with some starscape,” Gabriel-Antoine said peevishly. “Poorly.”

  “Look at the star patterns,” George-Étienne said. “Tell me where in the clouds of Venus, or even in the solar system, we could have filmed those stars.”

  Gabriel-Antoine squinted at the screen, moving the video backwards and forwards, zooming.

  “In the solar system?” Marie-Pier asked.

  George-Étienne nodded.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Our best guess right now,” George-Étienne said, “is that under the surface of Venus is a wormhole to somewhere outside the solar system.”

  Gabriel-Antoine looked up doubtfully.

  “I think it might not even be a real solar system,” Pascal added. “It may be a pulsar system.”

  Marie-Pier looked at Marthe again.

  �
�A pressure sink under the surface of Venus,” Marie-Pier said, “and a picture of stars deep underground.”

  “And a bunch of probes whose technology we don’t understand,” Marthe said. “Vas-y, Pascal.”

  Pascal pulled a carbon-weave bag from the shelf and pulled out the thirty-centimeter section of probe hull. He dropped it on the table with a thud.

  “Here’s a piece of it,” Marthe said as Gabriel-Antoine lifted it and eyed it from different angles.

  Marie-Pier slid her glass across the galley table. Marthe refilled it.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE TABLE WAS quiet but for the moaning of the wind in the video, but Pascal felt electrified, buzzing. Marthe was giving him a cautioning look. She touched his arm.

  “Why don’t you make some coffee, Pascal?” she said. “Let’s take a break to absorb things a bit?” she added to the others.

  He stood. Marthe always knew what to do. She stood too. Gabriel-Antoine was still frowning at the hull section. Marie-Pier met Pascal’s eyes and he felt suddenly shy. She smiled.

  “You went to the surface, Pascal?” she said, rising too.

  He nodded and moved to the galley.

  “Do you have anything more than video?” Gabriel-Antoine asked. He’d set down the hull piece and was replaying the video. “And the unedited video? This stars-under-the-surface is a hoax.”

  “Never mind. I’ll make the coffee,” Marthe said. “Pascal, can you take Gabriel-Antoine to see the sample we retrieved?”

  Pascal turned. Marthe took the press from him and smiled. Butterflies fluttered in his stomach, but Gabriel-Antoine was still frowning, his teasing manner gone.

  “Outside?” he asked.

  “He’s asking a fair question. Show him the proof.”

  The young engineer was silent as they suited up and cycled into the slow, sweltering hundred-degree wind. The electric lights under the habitat shone on the gantry, making the clouds seem somber.

  “Come on,” he said to Gabriel-Antoine, leading him around the ring of platforms and railings woven of tough carbon nanotubes. Pieces of equipment and piles of supplies were lashed down against the weather. Almost at the other side of the gantry from the airlock was a long triangle shape under an acid-proof carbon tarp. He undid the lashings and pulled the tarp away.