THIRTY-SEVEN

 

 

PASCAL HAD SET his alarm to vibrate on his wrist and he crept to the floor. Gabriel-Antoine was snoring in Jean-Eudes’s hammock. Pascal’s eyes were scratchy from lack of sleep and his lips felt raw from kissing. He ran through his dark rituals nearly silently, scraping himself smooth again.

In the galley, he found Jean-Eudes and Alexis trying to whisper. They were excited at all the guests and wanted to hear everything they’d talked about. Pascal made them a quiet breakfast, but his mind was elsewhere, not just on Gabriel-Antoine. They were about sixteen hours from a point where he and Gabriel-Antoine could conceivably drop to Diana Chasma. Their next window wouldn’t be for eleven or twelve days, and if Gabriel-Antoine still didn’t believe them, by the time they could prove anything to him, the Causapscal-des-Vents might already be confiscated. The bathyscaphe would need about six hours of hard work to prepare, and they’d have to change course, too.

By the time Gabriel-Antoine got up, everyone else had risen and they were all talking in the galley. Gabriel-Antoine and Marie-Pier were slick with sweat, and even Marthe was wilting in a tank top and shorts. Her time above the clouds had made her forget the heat of home.

“You still want to see the stars?” George-Étienne asked Gabriel-Antoine. Marthe handed him a coffee.

Gabriel-Antoine had the pattern of the hammock pressed into his face, and Pascal had the urge to massage the marks away.

“I see stars all the time,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “How safe is the old bathyscaphe?”

George-Étienne shrugged. “It’s overengineered. You can help Pascal prepare it and see for yourself.”

Pascal felt himself flush when Gabriel-Antoine smiled at him. He caught Marthe eyeing him and smiling knowingly, but he didn’t know if anyone else had seen the strange, brief smile.

Marthe had gotten her hands on some spices. Over a spare but tasty breakfast, they discussed the descent to the surface. They hadn’t been planning another one, but two engineers, or at least an engineer and a student, could do a lot. They debated objectives and the equipment they would need. They dug out old lasers and checked the ratings to see whether they would survive the surface. Pascal and his father laid hands on another few hundred meters of carbon cabling to see how far they could send the camera. Gabriel-Antoine had ideas on how to mount a better motor onto the camera frame to get more controlled vision. He also had far better ideas about how to program the camera instructions once it was out of radio range, and how to stabilize it in the wind.

Jean-Eudes took to the task of looking over Gabriel-Antoine’s suit, and tsked loudly about how it wouldn’t do, even though it was smooth and largely unblemished and unpatched. They had a spare survival suit, one of the hand-me-downs that Émile had outgrown, but Pascal hadn’t yet grown into. Gabriel-Antoine tried it on and Jean-Eudes cleaned, tested and patched it while the rest of them made plans. Alexis watched all the busyness from the safety of Marthe’s lap.

By mid-morning, Pascal, Gabriel-Antoine and George-Étienne were winging over to the supply trawler about two kilometers off. Pascal felt safe in the clouds, safe in his suit, as masked and unidentifiable as anyone. In the hand-me-down suit, Gabriel-Antoine was now looking as rumpled as any coureur.

The clouds glowed spongy orange and brown, the last remnants of bright sun attenuated by twenty kilometers of mist and rain. Gabriel-Antoine rolled in the thick atmosphere, testing the performance of his wings. The supply trawler wasn’t much of a sight. Black and brown tendrils overgrew its roof and outer walls. Broken tools, salvage and spare equipment were stored on a small gantry in a ring circling the trawler’s head. Poles and winch arms projected off the top in four directions and carbon-fiber nets hung. Epiphytic growth festooned them: slimes, black-leaved vines, roots and molds.

“You used to live here?” Gabriel-Antoine said in the radio as they flew closer.

“Until ten years ago,” Pascal said. “The woody layers and valves can’t sustain the temperature gradients anymore, but it’s still buoyant enough. We gather electricity on it and crack oxygen and water out of the rain. And store stuff.”

“All that growing stuff is Venusian plants,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “Gross.”

“That’s our garden. Some of it can be made into food,” Pascal said.

“Blech!” Gabriel-Antoine said.

“It gets better when enough sulfur is taken out,” Pascal said, wanting to impress him with something, but not sure what to say. After what he’d seen at sixty-fifth rang, everything down here looked suddenly poor. “We use everything. Chunks of Venusian plants go into our bioreactors, or we bake the plants to ash to get water and nitrogen and some heavy metals.”

“That’s pretty rough,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

“La colonie turned its back on us,” Pascal said, “so we turned our back on la colonie. All the coureurs did.” He didn’t know why he’d said that. It wasn’t a political conversation, and yet nervousness drew his father’s words out of him.

They alighted on the gantry, three close, accurate landings. Gabriel-Antoine was an excellent flier and was adapting quickly to the new depth and pressure. In response, the trawler started slowly sinking. Pascal uncovered the bathyscaphe.

“Wow,” Gabriel-Antoine said, running a hand along the beaten, dented, acid-scarred surface “This is it.”

“Oui,” George-Étienne said proudly. “It would have been recycled long ago, or confiscated by the government for some nonsense. A lot of the coureurs thought it belonged down here with the people who actually followed Duvieusart into the wild.”

“It looks so primitive,” Gabriel-Antoine said. “How depth-worthy is it?”

George-Étienne slapped it. “I’ve been to the surface four times in it. Pascal once. If you go, you’ll join a club of less than a dozen people who have ever made it all the way down.”

“We believe enough in the equipment to go down, but you never know,” Pascal added.

Gabriel-Antoine looked at him with a silent thanks a lot expression.

“You would never know,” George-Étienne said. “If something went wrong at those pressures, you’d be dead before you could feel it.”

George-Étienne opened the hatch and pulled out the metal box in which they’d been storing the radioactives they’d pulled from the probe. Pa had already traded some away for metals, batteries and chips Pascal thought they would need to dismantle the Causapscal-des-Vents. He stowed the radioactives in the middle of a stack of old batteries. It wasn’t a lead-lined container, but the batteries had enough lead to block most of the radiation for now. If the clouds didn’t cooperate, it was possible that the radioactivity would be detectable at a higher altitude, so neither of them wanted to leave it too long out of the bathyscaphe, which blocked the particles better.Pascal handed Gabriel-Antoine a multi-spectrum light and various filters to hold. “Pa and I maintain the bathyscaphe pretty well,” Pascal said, “but you probably want to check it.”

Gabriel-Antoine found far more than its depth-worthiness to check. The centimeter-thick steel seemed strong enough to him to withstand the ninety atmospheres of pressure, although he doubted the Stirling engines. He tutted at the backwardness of the software, the limitations of the hardware, and started making lists of upgrades he would make.

“Don’t think too fancy,” George-Étienne said at one point. “Few things work right at four-hundred and eight degrees. It’s primitive on purpose.”

“It’s primitive because it was built of leftovers thirty-five years ago,” Gabriel-Antoine shot back. “I’ve built pretty good deep-dive chips and processors for rescue and salvage drones. They want to automate mining of the surface. But they haven’t got enough capital to launch something self-sustaining. And as far as I know, no one has found any likely mining sites in the basalt, so I doubt they’re in a hurry.”

“They can have the sun and sky,” George-Étienne said finally. “This is for us.”

Pascal rechecked the manipulator arms, spooled on the additional carbon cabling, mounted the camera and lights onto small motorized platforms of Gabriel-Antoine’s design. The engineer argued with George-Étienne about software fixes. In a moment of quiet common industry, Pascal came to his father and signaled for him to switch to the family frequency.

“Pa, are you trying to annoy him?” Pascal asked softly.

“We don’t have to change everything!” George-Étienne said. Pascal shushed him. Loud enough voices carried through the helmets and travelled without radio.

“Pa, he’s a really good engineer,” Pascal said. “I’m learning a lot just by seeing what he asks about.”

“You’re good, Pascal.”

“I can’t do it all, and there are lots of things I can’t do at all,” Pascal said. “And he knows a lot of the new engineering and programming they’re doing above the clouds. We’re offering Gabriel-Antoine a partnership and he obviously doesn’t trust us. Arguing doesn’t make it better. We have to show him.”

“I don’t want anyone around I can’t trust,” George-Étienne said. “And if he isn’t ready to trust me, why should I trust him?”

“He’s only known us for a day, Pa. He’s not a coureur, but I think Marthe got us the right person.”

George-Étienne hmphed. He could be worn down eventually, but using Marthe’s name was a bit of a rhetorical shortcut, an appeal to authority that sometimes ended debates. In the end, they didn’t change any of the software anyway, not because George-Étienne didn’t want it, but because they didn’t have time for the inevitable debugging. They had to be ready by the time they reached the drop window.