TWENTY-SEVEN

 

 

THE WALLS OF the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs vibrated in sympathy with the storm outside. Acid pelted with big drops, drumming the outer envelope of their home as thunder rolled outside. They’d come up to forty-eighth rang to avoid a bad cell of turbulence in the sub-cloud haze. They’d still hit a storm, but a storm at forty-eighth was better than the hotter, thicker weather at forty-fourth.

Pascal swung in his hammock as updrafts and cross-winds ripped at them. The skin of their habitat vibrated with the heaving effort of the propeller above their living space. Lightning had struck them twice so far, filling the trawler’s electroplaques and charging all their batteries. Trawlers did most of their growing in the tail hours of storms, when fully fed and drenched with acid.

Marthe and Pa worked out on the gantry. In a storm like this they had to inspect everything every few hours. It would be Pascal’s turn in the early morning, so he’d been trying to get some sleep.

Storms midwived Venusian life, broke apart the budding colonies of blastulae, rosettes and trawlers, and churned lower atmosphere minerals up to the cloud-living bacteria. Storms affected humans more ambiguously. A storm had taken Chloé and Mathurin. Caught outside when it struck, they’d sheltered in one of the domesticated trawlers, but the storm had been bad. The D’Aquillon herd had been scattered far and wide. Half the herd was never seen again, nor Chloé and Mathurin, leaving Alexis an orphan.

But sometimes the storms brought new life to people, too. More than once, a terrifying storm had thrown them clinging and sick into steady air, only to find that Venus had taken thousands of trawlers and pushed them into the same eddy as the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. The family could rope and tag up to twenty trawlers in as many hours, which was subsistence and even wealth for a year. Sometimes the storms of the lower cloud deck punched so deep that they scooped up tons of metal-rich volcanic ash in their winds. And every so often, Venus did neither good nor bad, but just thrashed pointlessly at her new tenants, like tonight. Jean-Eudes groaned. He didn’t like storms. Pascal never got storm-sick. In the soft light, he was watching his toenails, shiny and red.

His thoughts felt like the silt in the cave, obscuring, shaken about, needing time to settle. And Marthe was like a storm herself, never leaving anything untouched in her wake. She loved him, even if he didn’t love himself. The force of her was like a prop, giving him a tiny boost of courage, direction in the storm. He didn’t hate himself either, exactly. He hated his body. It was alien to him, distant, someone else’s. He could avoid mirrors, shave his face clean every morning, shave his whole body, and yet not escape the oppressive weight of wrongness. Except the once, when he’d snuck into his father’s room and put on maman’s dress. In that one moment, in that single frame of a movie of his entire life, it was like he’d finally seen something right. He’d seen himself.

Like a storm, Marthe created and destroyed. She’d invented a painful, terrifying hope, even as she seemed to have stared right through to the center of him. He didn’t want anyone looking at him. No one could understand what it was to stand in front of people, pretending to belong to the world, and feeling like a liar and a fraud. In the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, he could pretend forever, with his father and Jean-Eudes. They loved him without reserve, but couldn’t see him, couldn’t see the unhappiness and in-turned acid and corrosive hopelessness of pretending.

Yet the only thing worse than pretending was being seen.

The disturbed silt in his mind hinted at a cloudy idea that terrified him.

What if Pascal were really a girl? What would that knowledge tell him? Tell her? He couldn’t reveal himself to the world. It was his secret. Her secret. Her secret to keep. It might not even be true. Pascal was sixteen. Hormones. He could be confused about lots of things. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, why he felt so bad about who he was, when even Jean-Eudes was so at ease with himself. The cloudy idea wasn’t getting clearer.

The toes winked back at him, shining in the gloomy light. Pascal had that one image, the look of himself in the dress, looking back at him in the mirror. And he had stared through another piece of glass, through the layers of Venus, and found stars.

What could Pascal do? What could Venus do? No one would ever see the stars. They would only look at Venus and see her deceiving clouds, her ugly, wrinkled hide, never see what she really contained. And this was Pascal’s body. He couldn’t leave it, just as Venus couldn’t leave hers.

Jean-Eudes sat up, groaning. “What is it?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you crying?”

Pascal wiped at his cheeks and found tears.

“Are you sad?” Jean-Eudes said, hopping from his hammock and lurching over on the shifting floor. He clung to Pascal’s hammock and brought his face very close. “Are you scared of the storm?”

Jean-Eudes was good. Jean-Eudes was never going to engineer new machines for them, or even be able to maintain a habitat on his own. And yet Pascal admired his older brother intensely. Jean-Eudes knew he was different, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he couldn’t do everything his brothers and sisters could do. And Jean-Eudes was even getting used to being proud of his capable little nephew. Jean-Eudes just was, with an authenticity that was inspiring and terrifying. And Jean-Eudes loved Pascal without any reservation.

“Yes, I’m sad.”

“Why?” Jean-Eudes said, swaying over him.

“Something’s not right with me, Jean-Eudes.”

“Do you want water?”

“You were born a boy. You feel like a boy.”

“Yes,” Jean-Eudes said.

“What you feel matches your body,” Pascal said.

“I’m a boy.”

“And Chloé felt like a girl. She had a girl’s body.”

“And Marthe too. She feels like a girl. And she likes girls.”

“I think I feel like a girl, Jean-Eudes.”

His older brother stared down at him for a long time, his frown deepening. Then he suddenly burst out laughing. Pascal sat up in the swaying hammock.

“You wore a dress!” Jean-Eudes said.

Pascal wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. Not now, not this time. He waited for his brother to stop.

“Jean-Eudes, what do you think it would be like if you felt like a girl, but had a boy’s body?”

His brother’s face sobered. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“I never look in the mirror, Jean-Eudes. My heart expects to see someone like Marthe or Chloé or maman, but what I see is a man. If I look too quick, my heart is surprised. When I look, parts of me are missing and parts of me are extra.”

Jean-Eudes was frowning again. “I think you look good,” he said.

“My brain knows that I’m supposed to look like this, but my heart says that this is wrong. That’s why I’m not happy.”

“You would be happy if you were my sister?”

“Maybe.”

“But you have this body,” Jean-Eudes said.

“Yes.”

“And you can’t change your body.”

“Not really.”

Jean-Eudes stared at him unnervingly for long moments, and then lurched forward and gave him a crushing hug.

“You can be my sister.”

Pascal wanted to shrivel and hide. Hope terrified more than despair. Pascal started crying, and Jean-Eudes held on.