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 twenty-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.

“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 advanced 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.