FORTY-TWO

 

 

DIFFERENT FAMILIES ADAPTED to the close quarters of the habitats in different ways. Some yelled. Some shut down. Some developed body language cues to tell the others when they wanted privacy. Marthe had learned all the cues young. She’d always been curious about the unspoken, and when she’d moved up to the Causapscal-des-Vents at sixteen to be her father’s representative to l’Assemblée, she’d had to learn a whole lot more body languages fast. L’Assemblée was the watering hole of every upper habitat and even some of the coureur des vents families. And everyone reacted differently to conditions that would have made rats eat each other in behavioral experiments.

Marie-Pier hadn’t said anything yet, but had stayed at the table, rerunning the video Pascal and George-Étienne had taken, the one that had revealed the cold vacuum beyond the hole in Venus. Marthe had watched Marie-Pier many times in debates in l’Assemblée, watched her expressive, space-consuming conversational gestures. And while she seemed intent, her body language wasn’t closing. She wasn’t afraid or defensive.

Marthe sat across from her. She pulled out a dark, thin paper made of hammered trawler fiber and tapped in coarsely chopped tobacco. She licked, rolled and held it out to Marie-Pier. The older woman hesitated.

“Anything good in it?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring any with me.”

Marie-Pier took the cigarette and the electric lighter. Marthe rolled herself another, lit and inhaled. Faintly sulfurous. Acrid. Satisfying. They smoked in silence, eyeing the little image. Finally Marthe rotated it. It didn’t make it less inscrutable or sharpen any of the blurred stars caught by the vagaries of focus.

“I wish we had a better picture,” Marie-Pier said.

“In a while, we’ll be able to build a telescope,” Marthe said, “to explore whatever is out there.”

“Never thought of myself as an explorer.”

“You weren’t born here, were you?”

Marie-Pier shook her head. “I was born in Havre-Saint-Pierre,” she said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder as if pointing at Québec, “but I don’t remember it really. My parents brought me here when I was three.”

“I was born at the base of the lower cloud deck, at forty-eighth rang, over Arianrod Fossae,” Marthe said. “Three trawler habitats ago.”

“Tough primitive trawlers back then. Arianrod is north, isn’t it? Why so far north?”

“The prop trains on the old trawlers weren’t as reliable. Pa followed the winds a lot more, steered a whole lot less.”

“Fossae are named after war goddesses, right?”

Marthe nodded.

“That’s funny,” Marie-Pier said with a smile. “And very à propos.”

Marthe smiled, shrugged and drew on her cigarette, making the end glow.

“Tough life this deep,” Marie-Pier said.

“It’s not an environment that encouraged us to look more than a few weeks, or months ahead,” Marthe said. “We don’t choose. We endure.”

“But you went sunside,” she said, jerking a common thumbs-up that the coureurs used to indicate the main ships of la colonie.

“Bright lights, pretty girls,” Marthe said. “And I was never in any control down here. Winds blow you where they want.”

“Good life?”

“I don’t carry Pa’s baggage about the Bank and the government,but I can see that la colonie is heading nowhere. We’re never going to get out from under these debts. The Bank will make sure of that. We’re never going to steer our own destinies.”

“I have two young children,” Marie-Pier said. “I don’t have a lot, but we’re okay for now. They have to grow up. I have to give them something certain.” Her hands shaped something, cupping whatever it was that she would give her children. Neither woman knew what it was.

Marthe nodded slowly. “I’m not saying what we’re proposing isn’t risky.”

“Very risky. Stealing a habitat, and a few of my trawlers.”

“Those don’t belong to the government.”

“The law says they do.”

“We both know who writes the laws, and who’s funding them,” Marthe said. “We’re losing the Causapscal-des-Vents because the présidente doesn’t like us, and you’re losing trawlers you built and were going to sell because you don’t give gifts to the right people.”

“It’s going to get worse when they find out that we sank a habitat on purpose. My kids need the same medicine, all the other things kids need.”

“Did you like Jean-Eudes?” Marthe asked.

“This isn’t about Jean-Eudes,” said Marie-Pier. “He’s sweet.”

“The government would rather he didn’t exist.”

“How did you grow up with no medicine or vitamins or any of the other food supplements you needed?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Marthe said. “I got sick a few times pretty bad. We all did.”

“And you lost your mom.”

Marthe dropped the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray, watching the coiling smoke.

“Yeah. But she didn’t die because of our choices. Any coureur could have died just from being too far away from hospitals, including you. We were just too far from help.”

Marie-Pier leaned forward. “My kids can’t lose their mother, or have their habitat confiscated.”

Marthe turned the image again. The stars moved.

“Playing it safe will probably get you, them and your habitats into the future, ten, fifteen years. Then what? They’ll be paying for debts they didn’t make, debts that weren’t fair to start with because the Banks stacked the deck.”

Marie-Pier looked at the stars in the image.

“They’ll be alive and probably healthy, but they’ll be trapped in the clouds forever,” Marthe said, “just like Pascal, you, me and Alexis. Can we go where we want? To Earth or the other colonies? We’ll never be able to afford to leave. La colonie will have less and less habitats, and more and more families will be forced into living subsistence lives in trawlers. That’s for your children and your grandchildren.”

Marthe tapped the display.

“This is scary. This is risky. But I have a chance to offer Pascal and Alexis and even myself the stars,” Marthe said. “The wealth of the asteroids with the safety of a planet means we could turn Venus into a paradise. Towns and cities in the clouds. Space for us to live and thrive.”

Marie-Pier had pursed her lips.

“But I’m scared,” Marthe said, “not just of succeeding. I’m scared that we will find out, after all we’ve thought and planned—that we can’t do it. That would kill me more than anything Venus could offer.”

“Hope is terrible sometimes,” Marie-Pier said.