FOUR

 

 

ÉMILE D’AQUILLON CYCLED into the airlock in the base of the Baie-Comeau, the largest floating habitat in the entire colonie. Twelve floors of shiny metal and plastic housed the government, some key manufacturing efforts, meetings of l’Assemblée, and apartments for some two hundred people. It was the future. They’d learned enough about Venus that someday, dirigibles of this size would house whole villages of people, and even bigger ones would be possible.

Thérèse leaned against him, survival suit to survival suit, distant intimacy. He stroked her arm through their suits nonetheless. Her hand pressed against his crotch, through layers of padding and insulation and acid-resistant films. He wanted to respond. The airlock finished cycling, and the door opened into the lower engineering areas of the Baie-Comeau. Thérèse sometimes worked down here. It was quiet and empty, if a little chilly. A good place to get romantic. He hissed open the seal on his helmet and took it off. Émile reached for the seals on the front of his suit, but she stilled his hand as she pulled off her helmet.

“Patience, Roméo,” she said.

She pulled a flask from a suit pocket and took a swallow before passing it to him. He groaned. He’d been aching for a drink. He tipped it back and coughed before swallowing. She laughed at him as it scoured on the way down.

“Whose bagosse is it?” he wheezed.

“Ninety-six proof,” she said.

He coughed again, sniffed at the neck of the flask and took another swallow. The burning down his throat settled in his stomach like a weight. He’d needed this badly. His own stock had run dry a day ago.

“It kicks harder than anything I’ve ever made,” he said.

She took back the flask and took three swallows.

Everyone made bagosse, although it was lightly illegal. Using corn and grain rations to make alcohol wasted needed calories. Even diverting compostable food waste to ferment bitter chasse-cousin was against the law. He’d gone hungry himself a few times as a child during food shortages in la colonie. Not that the rations for the D’Aquillon family were ever of the highest quality, or on time.

Thérèse spun the wheel on a big steel door. It was beautiful: clean, uncorroded, almost shiny. She stepped into a larger bay where nine people in survival suits already milled around, flasks in hand. On the front was a wall-to-floor-to-ceiling door, so that larger objects like small planes and drones could be winched into the Baie-Comeau.

Thérèse was greeted with hugs and kisses, some kisses more deep and long-lasting than Émile liked. He knew most of them. Some of these artists and sculptors and poets were good. Some still sought their voices, like him. They toasted each other. Émile started to feel a slight buzz. Thérèse took his hand and leaned against him.

“Do you trust me?” she whispered.

Émile nodded, emptying her flask. “What is this?” he asked playfully. “A performance? A reading? An orgy?”

“Worship,” she said, “of Venus.”

She planted a kiss on his cheek, then spun away, moving to the bay door, trailed by gloved clapping and last-minute swills from flasks. She bowed theatrically with her hand on the bay door controls, then held up her helmet in one hand as her eyes narrowed. Her ennui was knowing, like the weight of ennui had stamped her with secret, exhausting truth. Her smile, beneath that exhaustion, was courageous, a stab at the darkness. She was so powerful, so real, a human truth.

“On n’est pas chez nous,” Thérèse said. “We are not home. We live in boxes of metal and plastic. We never touch the wind. We never touch the rain. We see the stars and sun only through glass.”

Her eyes became dreamy, staring into a distance that could not be contained by the bay.

“We can’t find our souls like this,” she said, “hidden away in houses in the skies, cut off from one another and from nature. We wither. We drink.”

A woman beside Émile hooted. A deep-voiced man said solemnly, “We drink.”

“We cut,” Thérèse said, stroking her raised forearm, buried beneath layers of survival suit. “We acid,” she said, touching the tiny scars on her face with glove tips. “We fuck.”

“We fuck,” someone behind Émile repeated.

“All this just to feel not-dead, because we have no souls,” Thérèse said. “We create poetry, murals, sculptures—striving, reaching ephemera, trying to show we exist—but we can’t mean anything. The rat in a lab has no soul.”

“No soul,” Émile whispered.

“I’m the rat in the lab,” Thérèse said, with a crack in her voice. “The Earth is dead to me, a fantasy, a vision. I’ve never seen it. And I’ve never taken Venus into my heart. I don’t belong here because Venus hasn’t embraced me. I’ve never courted her as she deserves, never worshipped her sunrise with authenticity in my heart.”

Émile’s thoughts followed her languidly. The bagosse was hitting him harder.

“Venus is a lover who takes us only with pain,” she said, “not because she’s cruel. She’s alien, unknowable, unfathomable, but her price is the same price as any goddess: she wants to be embraced.”

“Embrace her,” the man beside Émile whispered.

“I’m going to embrace her,” Thérèse said. “I will touch her with my lungs. I will look upon her with my naked eyes. We seek to make ourselves whole.”

“Whole,” Émile whispered. He felt it, deeply. He wanted to mean something.

“No one need come with me,” Thérèse said. “This is my quest.”

Thérèse put her helmet back on and Émile’s heart thumped to bursting with wanting her, to be important to her, to be part of her life. The others were putting on their helmets. Émile snapped his on and sealed it with automatic movements. He looked at the world through glass again, felt the world through gloves, heard the world through speakers. He was alone, cut off from everyone, from the world itself.

A red light flashed on the wall. A hiss sounded briefly, then quieted, as if noise itself were being bleached of meaning. When the pumps had removed enough of the air, vents opened on the bay door and the last breath puffed away in a gasp.

The flashing became more insistent, and the bay door lifted, hinged along the top, revealing at first a flat beam of sunlight reflected off yellow clouds. The light widened into a blade that cut across the ceiling, lowering and expanding until the cloudshine of Venus kissed their foreheads. Émile squinted at the brightness.

The bay door finished opening, leaving before them a square of blinding light. They stood still in shadows, hidden from direct sun and from Venus, while puffy fields of sulfuric acid stretched away into infinity. They could sail these airy seas forever and never come to shore. Venus had no shore. That was a truth of Venus the human heart couldn’t grasp. She told them stories they couldn’t understand.

Émile swayed on his feet, the bagosse making his hearing and movements indistinct, blurry. He swayed around the people, to Thérèse.

Her gloved hand went to the neck of her helmet. Her faceplate fogged with her rapid breathing and then her heroic exhalation. She popped the seals and her eyes widened. She took off her helmet and blinked in the bitter cold. Her face and eyes reddened in an atmosphere only a tenth of what she’d just been breathing. And she stared out onto the clouds with her naked eyes, struggling to take the raw carbon dioxide into her lungs.

Of its own volition, Émile’s hand rose and snapped open the seals at his neck. Even drunk, he knew his training. He exhaled and exhaled and exhaled until his chest ached and black spots peppered his vision. He took off his helmet.

Venus touched him with the coldest and most ghostly of fingers. He couldn’t take a breath, not a real one, but he could taste Venus, smacking his lips around the gasping atmosphere she offered. Her parched clouds tasted of bitter sulfur, biting salt, and a stale sterility, drier than anything he’d ever felt.

No one had worshipped her before. The trawlers and rosettes and blastulae and all the microscopic organisms in the clouds could not. No one had loved the love goddess, and Venus had no soul because no one loved her. And les colonistes had no souls because they had no world.

He stepped closer to the edge as his vision narrowed.

Venus didn’t want blood. How many colonistes had she killed? Dozens? Hundreds? His mother. His sister. His brother-in-law. Venus drank blood aplenty. Venus wanted a breath of life. Venus wanted to be loved, as they did. This was their sacrifice. His helmet slipped from his fingers and rolled backward. Émile stretched out his arms. Thérèse, as naked to Venus as he, took his hand.

He collapsed to his knees, his joints on fire with pain. Thérèse collapsed beside him, soundlessly. Heavy footfalls vibrated and someone must have pressed the emergency close panel. The big door, the eyelid for this miraculous vision, began to close.