THREE

 

 

THE HABITAT BUCKED on the edge of an eddy, then resumed its creaking sway. In the other hammock, Jean-Eudes snored softly. Remnants of sunlight, attenuated by kilometers of clouds, still pushed through the woody chambers, outlining shadowy veins flowing with acidic sap. Scratchy eyes open, staring blankly ahead, Pascal couldn’t summon the energy to move.

If he didn’t move, he could feel like part of the habitat—serviceable, elegantly functional, if ugly and meaningless. His body felt as if it were at a remove, strange and alien. Tough stubble caught on his pillow, and the feeling worsened. He didn’t want to get up. But he couldn’t leave anything on his face. He couldn’t think about it.

He swung out of his hammock. The woody floor was warm. He opened a flap and pissed into a tiny urinal made of the same tough plant fiber as the rest of Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Water was valuable, and so was nitrogen; the filtration system would reclaim it.

He moved to the sink without turning on a light. A tiny mirror hung above it, but he’d learned not to look into it. He mixed a bit of water with paste to make a lather and steeled himself to rub it onto his face. Touching his... the stubble... was strange, disorienting. He did it quickly. Every day, the hair seemed to be so thick he couldn’t stand it, even though it was still only a fuzz compared to Jean-Eudes’s beard.

Pascal closed his eyes, guiding the straight razor by touch, taking his mind elsewhere, as if touching someone else’s face. The scraping tugs made him queasy, but he’d gotten faster every day since his father had taught him to shave. He rinsed the razor in the bit of water in the sink, flushed it and dried himself.

A child’s voice sounded outside, followed by a squeal. Pascal quietly pulled aside the curtain, woven of old plant fiber. The main room of the habitat, a toroidal space about twelve meters across, centered on the trunk of the great Venusian plant they lived in. The woody walls sloped, worn smooth by feet and bumps and the living of day-to-day. Light chairs and uneven brown tables gave shape to an eating and living space. Near the thick trunk, big batteries, compressed air, and radio and radar equipment rested on platforms over tangles of wires. In the floor, the main pumps, a small field of muscular valves, slowly pushed carbon dioxide out of the habitat into the two atmospheres of pressure outside.

His father crept around the big room with exaggerated steps. Alexis hid under the table, staring at Pascal with wide, excited eyes. Then George-Étienne swept down and tickled him. The ten-year old squealed.

“Careful, Alexis,” Pascal said, “you’ll use up all the oxygen.”

The boy paid him no mind and rolled on the floor, listening to his voice change as his chest and back thumped on the wood. George-Étienne hugged Pascal and then continued his game with Alexis, which turned into a wrestling struggle on the floor. Alexis always wanted to roughhouse and Pascal never did. He sometimes felt like a bad uncle, but tried squashing those feelings as much as he could. Everyone felt out of place sometimes.

A picture of his mother hung on the wall over the table. Pascal barely remembered her. He’d been very young when she’d been injured. They’d been too deep to get her to the doctors twenty kilometers up. And even if they hadn’t been, la colonie had been on the other side of the planet at the time. Her absence outlined a weird gap in his life, a shape whose contours he could neither understand nor ignore. An itch.

He knew that she’d loved him, all of them, and that she’d loved Venus as much as he did. A rust-spotted mirror hung beside her picture, so that any of the children could look at themselves and at her at the same time, to see her in themselves.

He saw bits of her in Jean-Eudes, and bits of his father. His precise memories of Marthe and Émile were fading. Marthe hadn’t been down in a year, and Émile had left five years ago. But they too looked like both their parents. Pascal only looked at his reflection beside his mother’s picture. He’d been growing out his hair for some time. Sometimes, when he pulled it the way she wore hers in the picture, he could see her in him, and the gap faded.

“She was beautiful, eh?” George-Étienne said from under a struggling Alexis.

Pascal nodded. “Oui.”

“No sleep?”

Pascal shook his head.

“Me neither,” George-Étienne said. “I was always jealous of your mother. She could sleep through anything, anywhere, anytime. You should have taken after her.”

The Causapscal-des-Profondeurs rocked, and the thrum of propellers vibrated low in his feet.

“Close to full speed?” Pascal said curiously.

“The volcanoes of Atla Regio are rumbling.”

Pascal felt the slow rock of the habitat like a sailor on Earth might have known his ship and the ocean around it. The deep clouds of Venus felt natural. He’d lived his whole life wrapped in them. The thrum of the props wasn’t the only vibration; thunder shook the atmosphere, a long way off, maybe a couple of days.

Venus’s rages could be astonishing. Some of her volcanoes blew metal-rich ash dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere, where storms might swirl the dust even higher, to where filmy plant membranes could catch it. And they could collect those plants and that dust in the depths. It was still impractical to mine the surface for metals on an industrial scale, so la colonie was desperate for metal and had to import it from asteroidal colonies. In good months, the D’Aquillon family could trade a dozen kilos of iron, lead and silicates on the black market, or to the government.

But that wasn’t why his father had them heading south, past Atla Regio.

Pascal padded to the navigational screen. Their course had changed sharply overnight, tracing a southerly path over the volcanically inactive plains of Rusalka Planitia to intersect, eventually, with the Diana Chasma, the deepest place on the surface of Venus. Pascal knew where that would take them.

“You really want to do this?” he asked.

“I finished fixing the old probe,” George-Étienne said.

“The bathyscaphe? I thought it didn’t work.”

“Non, the old probe with the bad Stirling engines. I dropped it about an hour ago.”

When Pascal was ten years old, George-Étienne had made a really, really good trade with another coureur who happened to be the son of Marie-Claude Duvieusart, the first coureur des vents and the first person ever to reach the surface of Venus. The bathyscaphe she’d used was six hundred kilos of steel and, even then, overengineered and antique. The government had never found out that the D’Aquillon family owned it, and didn’t even know it still existed. It was so secret that Pa had never shown Émile, Jean-Eudes, or Alexis, although Marthe knew about it. George-Étienne had resisted all occasions to scrap and sell it, and he’d even gone to the surface twice himself.

But sending down the probe made more sense. Despite the odds of losing a hundred kilos of metal in a probe, they sometimes sent them all the way down to the surface to salvage easy-to-reach metal, or even to drop off mining equipment whose components could survive a few days at those depths.

“How long?”

“We’ll be there this afternoon,” George-Étienne said.

They breakfasted on vat-grown algae and on a desulfurized stew of Venusian plants before Pascal went to the daily work of maintaining the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Very little automation was possible in the clouds of Venus. La colonie already had few metals, and the acid of the clouds attacked them relentlessly.

For forty years, la colonie had been bioengineering the Venusian cloud-living plants, exploiting their buoyancy, their ability to harness electricity from the clouds, and the parasitic plants that clung to them. But even the toughest plant habitats occasionally burst from pressure or temperature differences, or succumbed to acids or parasites. So every day, the woody valves and seals and pumps had to be checked, neutralized, the batteries changed, the new water flushed into long-term storage tanks, and so on. The inner mechanical parts, like the computers and communications equipment, needed to be inspected and re-protected from acid, and the ones on the outside likewise.

Pascal loved Venus, felt safe in the layered, pressure-resistant habitats in the middle and lower cloud decks. A few times, he and his father had taken trawlers deeper into the atmosphere, all the way to the base of the sub-cloud haze, breaking through into the clear air that began at about thirty-three kilometers.

He’d seen the face of majestic Venus herself: vast plains of corrugated basalt, low mountains, flat, circular plateaus, high mountains and volcanoes. Before him, George-Étienne had taken Pascal’s older sister Chloé, his brother Émile, and his next sister Marthe. Only a handful of the Venusian colonistes had ever seen naked Venus. It was an experience of awe for George-Étienne, a rite of passage he needed to share with his children.

Only Jean-Eudes had not been able to go. It was too dangerous for anyone who couldn’t handle all the equipment themselves. Pascal, the youngest, had gone down several times now that most of his brothers and sisters lived elsewhere. It had been a year since the last time, and Venus called him again. With Chloé gone, George-Étienne and Pascal were raising Alexis, so they’d hesitated to go again in person, but sending a probe was the next best thing. Pascal found himself itching by the controls at the trunk, waiting for the probe to break through the clouds.

Jean-Eudes came up behind his chair and put a warm hand on his shoulder. “Is it scary?”

The monitor showed the yellow mist of the lower cloud deck whipping past the cameras of the descending probe. Thirty-one kilometers. Two hundred degrees Celsius. Nine atmospheres of pressure.

“Not for the probe,” Pascal said. “It’s been built to survive all the way down to the surface.”

“And the acid!” Alexis said helpfully.

His nephew had grown bored of the images of the descent. He’d seen recordings of other probes and even some of the ones George-Étienne had made on his own journeys. He lay on his back, rolling a ball up the rounding floor, seeing how high he could get it before it rolled back. Alexis’s body was new-born perfect, unblemished; Venus had never touched him.

Jean-Eudes turned his palms up, then down. The same lines and spots of red wrinkled scar tissue that every Venusian eventually carried marked his hands too. Acid frightened Jean-Eudes. Pascal took his brother’s hands in his fingers. His own bore their generous share of ropey scars.

“The metal is coated with carbon. Soon, it will be so hot outside the probe that it can’t even rain. No rain means no acid.”

“Were you scared when you went?” Jean-Eudes asked.

Thirty kilometers.

“A little bit,” he said. “Pa took care of me. Do you want to go someday? With me?”

Jean-Eudes looked unconvinced. “Look!” he said, pointing at the monitor.

“What? What?” Alexis shrieked, coming close.

The mist had cleared and the yawning darkness of Venus’s surface loomed below, lit a diffuse yellow. In a few spots, ember-like orange glowed at the base of towers of black smoke. That wasn’t so normal. The volcanoes were busy. The sub-cloud haze still surrounded the probe, but in patches, none of which obstructed the view. He pulled Alexis onto his lap and pointed at the screen.

“Look. See that’s Atahensik Corona, and—”

“That means crown!” Alexis said.

“—and on one side is the Dali Chasma, a long trench. And there’s Ceres Corona—”

“Like the Bank!” Alexis interrupted again.

“And right there, that long line is Diana Chasma, the deepest place in all of Venus.”

“The deepest?” Alexis asked.

“That’s where papa keeps his storm,” Jean-Eudes said.