FIFTY-TWO

 

 

THE HABITAT WAS quiet and hot. Émile had left the windows unshuttered. The hydroponic bays had overgrown, and some of the produce would spoil soon. He flipped on the radiators and slumped in his hammock. Marthe’s cigarettes lay on the galley table. He’d smoked half of them, mostly laying around. The acid burns on his legs hadn’t infected and were healing. He vacillated between taking it easy and stiffly trying to suddenly do something.

He could use a cigarette, or something harder. He probably had some hash in his room. But the idea of getting high, or even getting another shot of nicotine, both called and repelled him. He wanted a drink, but the idea was distasteful, poisoned as if acid had leaked into his mind.

Thérèse had survived, barely. He hadn’t heard from her—Hélène had told him. Thérèse was with Anne-Claude and Cédric, recovering slowly. Her followers came to her with food, and some medicine they’d hoarded. And they apparently listened to her talk of touching the soul of Venus.

He rubbed his eyes. It was all meaningless. Venus had no soul. He had no soul. This was all there was. The creaking, slow-rolling habitats in the upper atmosphere, or the living, storm-thrown habitats in the lowest cloud deck. Farming in the heights or scavenging in the depths, choices no different from the ones facing the teeming, nameless billions who’d scraped the ground for most of Earth’s history, never walking more than thirty kilometers from where they’d been born. His parents had crossed hard vacuum to reach a world where most of them would be subsistence farmers. It didn’t matter if Émile existed or not.

He turned to writing again, putting words to paper with slow, halting difficulty, in ones and twos, without rhyme or elegance. He wrote of himself, in tones and words that seemed self-absorbed and petulant. He tried to write of Thérèse, toggling between heroism and folly, vaguely prophetic, but mostly as if he were Quixote’s dreaming, fractured descendant. She’d burnt like a Venusian Icarus and left him bitter and betrayed. She lived because of him and hated him for it. The words went on and on, transforming to everything he loved of her, and more, spilling from his fingers in crude images, repeated themes and amateur rhymes, until the sun had dropped from its noon height.

He set the paper aside. He trembled with a spiritual dampness like a larva emerging from its cocoon. Nothing felt right. Nothing he could do would take away the ache. His hands shook. He needed a drink. He really needed to be stupid drunk. And high.

Instead, he climbed stiffly into the steamy hydroponics chambers on the inner surface of the envelope. The air was thick with oxygen and water, dank with the smell of mold and algae he ought to have cleaned long ago. He harvested, chopped, cleaned, cut, and emptied whole rows of trays with carrots, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, beans and hemp.

He carried them mechanically below, sorting what they owed la colonie, setting aside the freshest for himself and Marthe. The vegetables that needed some ripening he set aside for Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, and what he’d left to ripen too long, he pickled, or cooked, or stewed. He cleared and planted more bays, cooked and stewed and pickled again, storing all that could be stored in the cold cellars below the gondola.

This was the life Thérèse was fleeing, the life they might have shared. At the thought of the two of them living some other set of choices, standing side by side, canning and cutting and pickling, he began to cry, like he hadn’t in the hospital. This was what he’d lost: all the possibilities, not just the exciting ones, but the shared drudgeries her presence might have transformed and hallowed. Here a muse might have bettered him, and he might have been her muse, or her rock, whatever she needed. But she didn’t want him. That’s what she meant by saying he wasn’t enough. He slumped to the floor, his fingers stained orange with carrot, but his thoughts and hopes inky black.

Marthe did not return until almost bright midnight. She came down the ladder and through the ceiling hatch. Her eyebrows rose slightly at the tremendous pile of vegetable waste to be shipped to a habitat with a bioreactor. The rows and rows of jars strapped into shelves also piqued her curiosity. She stood by the table, rolled herself a cigarette and lit it with a click of the electric lighter. She puffed silently, considering him.

“Thérèse dumped me,” he said finally. “Twice.”

“Oh.”

She sat down opposite him.

“She got a bad acid burn,” he said.

The corners of Marthe’s eyes crinkled and her lips pressed tighter.

“They wouldn’t give her medicine or treat her,” he said.

Real anger flickered on her face, an old anger they had all inherited, and then it was gone, washed away by a deep sadness. She put her hand on his. It was warm and small. Émile was always the biggest. Even the biggest scars. She was clumsy, but she’d always been more careful than he was. Smarter. But they were still born of the same crucible. He turned up his hand and held her fingers.

“Do you ever wonder what Pa must have thought?” Émile asked. “What maman must have thought, when they said they wouldn’t ever give medicine to Jean-Eudes?”

Marthe nodded.

“It’s not fair,” he said, “to live here. To have come here at all. Wouldn’t we have been better off to have been born in Québec?”

“We wouldn’t have been who we are,” she said. “We would have been different people. Pascal and I might not have even been born.”

He held her hand, waiting to feel a pulse, but his fingers weren’t that sensitive. Marthe was warm. Marthe was real. Like Pa, she never changed shape. She lent solidity to the world. If only he were ready to pay the price of assuming a single shape forever. At its core, that had been most of what he and Pa had fought over. Émile didn’t want to be just a coureur des vents, filtering ashes from the clouds. He wanted more than that. He didn’t know what more would look like, but he knew he could be more, and he couldn’t yet put his finger on his ineffable, aching faith.