SEVEN

 

 

ÉMILE PULLED THÉRÈSE close, playfully pulled the joint from her lips, took a drag and then replaced it. They lay naked under a blanket in one of the cargo bays. Music played, too low for the kind of angry yelling in the song. It was a hard-bitten album of rock rage, heavy percussion, but playing quietly, making of the music an echo of anger.

Other couples who had communed with Venus snuggled there too, under their own blankets, or stretched out on boxes, speaking in hushed voices. All mellow. No one had refused to remove their helmet. Every one of them had looked upon Venus with naked eyes, breathing her breath, as they would on Earth. It was empowering, overwhelming and humbling. Émile didn’t know quite what to do with the feelings he couldn’t name.

He was high. And drunk. And sore, like he had been punched over and over. He’d gotten off easier than Thérèse. The low pressure had given her two black eyes, and the white of one of them had filled with blood. His joints ached. His bones ached. But he felt like he’d done something enormous.

Across the storeroom, someone gasped in pain and stamped their foot over and over, swearing.

“Mmm,” Thérèse said. “Hélène is aciding.”

Émile didn’t try to see. He’d heard of aciding. Hélène and her friends used acid-resistant stencils to paint new, artful scars onto their bodies. They baptized themselves with sulfuric acid, consenting to be marked by their new home, and making of the baptism works of art. Émile had seen dozens of such marks, but the idea of intentionally burning his skin with acid was still alien to him. He had too much of the coureur des vents in him. He’d been painfully touched by Venus many times. Before now, he’d never understood their meaning. A naked, brown-haired man about his age came across the room.

“You guys want to acid too?” he asked, crouching. A spray of five tear-shaped acid scars marked each cheek symmetrically. Old acid.

Émile shook his head. He wanted to consecrate this moment, but maybe not with acid, and not yet. He ached too much already.

“I don’t want to mess with the buzz, Réjean,” Thérèse said.

“You don’t need it, n’est-ce pas?” Réjean said to Émile. “Your hands are covered. Were you in an accident?”

Émile lifted his arms out of the blanket and considered them. His muscles ran deep. Raised red spots speckled them. Snaking, wormy lines of raised scar flesh made inscrutable patterns. Deep divots showed where acid had melted his muscle before he could stop it.

“Just years in the lower decks,” Émile said.

“The lower cloud decks?” Réjean said. “No shit! Just the hands?”

“All over,” Thérèse said with a satisfied grin as she snuggled close to Émile.

Réjean’s face twitched, then he smiled.

“What’s your name?”

“Émile.”

“D’Aquillon,” Thérèse added.

“D’Aquillon. Aren’t you the one with the retarded brother?” Réjean laughed.

Émile shrugged off Thérèse and stood. Réjean was of a size with Émile, which made him pretty big, but Émile punched him so hard that he fell back over a protesting couple, spraying blood from his lips and nose. Émile stomped over to him and grabbed his hair, his fist cocked back for another go.

“Don’t ever call my brother retarded!” Émile said, shaking the man’s head.

Réjean flinched, waiting for another blow. Blood painted his chin. Émile’s heart thumped. He was within an ace of clocking the colon again. Who the crisse was he to call Jean-Eudes anything?

Thérèse tugged softly on his arm. She stood pale and naked beside him.

“He got it,” she said. “Come on, fighter-boy. Bring your scars back under the covers.” She pulled more insistently. “Come on. Less fighting, more loving. This is Venus.”

Émile released Réjean’s hair and stood straight, then let himself be led back by the hand to their little nest. Réjean swore in the gloom, and the others watched him slink back to the far end where he’d been aciding Hélène. Under their inadequate blanket, on their sides, nose to nose, he and Thérèse radiated warmth. Thérèse smiled.

“How drunk are you?” she whispered.

“Half?”

“How high are you?”

“The other half.”

“Are you always this violent when you’re drunk?” she said softly.

He shook his head.

“What’s your brother like?”

He examined her face, her one blue eye, her one eye filled with bright blood, her raised brows, the thin nose and parted lips. She wasn’t making fun of him. She wasn’t playing for anything. She was present. She was always present. The only thing that ever shifted was the target of her attention.

“Jean-Eudes is older than me by two years,” Émile said slowly. “The doctors found out he had Down Syndrome and told Pa and maman to abort. Pa told them to fuck off. They told Pa that la colonie couldn’t afford to support people like Jean-Eudes and that he’d never get rations or medicine.”

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“Maybe. Pa told them to fuck off again and got a deep trawler habitat. The rest of us were born at fiftieth rang.”

She traced the lines of his face with slow fingers.

“Tell me.”

“I’m not angry.”

Her expression was not wise or sympathetic. It was predatory, on the scent of a secret.

“You hate the government?”

He worried at the rough weave of their blanket. Pinched at it. Brushed at dirt and lint.

“No,” he said finally. “I agree with what they did.”

“They took away rations and medicine from your family!”

He shook his head fractionally.

“The government didn’t take away rations and medicine from all of us. Just Jean-Eudes. But my Pa said that if Jean-Eudes couldn’t get rations and medicine, none of the D’Aquillons would.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She never said. I guess she loved her son as much as Pa does.”

“I’m sorry,” she said after some thought.

“There’s only so much medicine,” he said, working at the fabric again, conscious of the heat of her eyes on his face. “There’s only so much food. La colonie needs every pair of hands to produce something, to earn their keep, to strap up their own suits. That wasn’t a secret to anyone, least of all my father when he emigrated here. If he’d been a man, he would have done the right thing.”

“Abort your brother?”

“Yup,” he said with a quiver in his voice. He cleared his throat. “Because of Pa’s choice, we had to move into the parts of Venus that are like Hell. My father wasn’t man enough to bear his own pain, so he spread it over his children. My mother died down there, too far away from medicine. My sister and her husband died down there, trying to make a living in the depths, and now my nephew Alexis is an orphan.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s my father.”

“You just punched Réjean.”

He traced the deep bruising around her eyes with his rough fingertips. She was fragile. He was fragile. And they huddled under a blanket, seeking animal warmth in high cold clouds.

“I don’t hate Jean-Eudes,” Émile said. “My big brother is the most innocent, gentle person I’ve ever known. I love him, but I hate myself for knowing my father picked the wrong path for all of us. He didn’t have the right to put a curse on our family.”

She stroked his chest. Her face had become pensive. The hunter of secrets had found something she didn’t know what to do with, and contemplated playing with her food.

“What would you choose now, for your brother?” she asked softly.

“I’d do anything to protect Jean-Eudes. I’d fight a hundred Réjeans. Pa exiled us, but taught us one thing that’s true: family always comes first.”

“That’s noble,” she said. “You don’t need to hate your own nobility.”

He chuckled and his joints hurt again. “That’s not nobility. Gangsters have the same values.”

She laughed delightedly and stroked his cheek. “I’m imagining you as a gangster,” she said, “standing on corners, getting protection money.” She smiled at her fairy tale. “How often do you see your father?”

“I saw him five years ago.”

Her eyes widened. “What happened?”

He flattened her hands between his. Both of them traced the ropey red lines of acid scars on his hands with their eyes. These scars weren’t artistic, just the terrible and inevitable injuries of living in the lower cloud decks. He’d survived his accidents by luck.

“I couldn’t respect a man for making children pay for his choice and he couldn’t see how he’d hurt his family. And he didn’t like my drinking or my getting high. He called me an alcoholic.”

She laughed delightedly. “Tabarnak, if there’s one place we need a drink, it’s Venus,” she said.

He grinned.

“Fifty kilometers down,” she said wonderingly. “You’ve lived wrapped in Venus. Literally. In Venusian life.”

He gave a short laugh. She took his hands and kissed all the raised acid scars, one by one.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

Her lips pressed against his, wet and hot.

“But you came up,” she said. “You came to the sun.”

“Yeah.”

“Why? If you could live deep.”

“Deep is shitty,” he said. “It’s not easy to stay alive down there, including your habitat. To keep someone alive, you have to hold up a seventy-degree temperature gradient across the inside and outside, and a half an atmosphere of pressure. For the trawler, you’ve got to keep parasites from latching on. You’ve got to graft in extra capacitors to take off the electrical strain, polish all the valves daily because they’re not evolved to work across a temperature gradient, and it goes on and on. And every few years, no matter what you do, something fails.”

“Could you maybe take me down?” she asked. “To visit?”

“If we can find a habitat to visit that isn’t my home. Pa also doesn’t approve of poets or artists.”

She laughed. “You’ve found the right crowd. We approve of poets and artists and fighter-boys with scarred hands. I want to see the depths.”

He traced the hard line of her collarbone with his fingertip. “I’ll show you any part of Venus you want.”

She laughed again. “You can’t show me the surface.”

“I’ve seen it.”

She rolled over him, putting her elbows on his chest so that her hair fell around them.

“What?”

“Pa brought me below all the clouds and hazes when I was fifteen. Thirty-first rang.”

“Ostie,” she whispered. Her eyes narrowed. “You saw it from thirty-one kilometers? I can’t even imagine.”

If he’d known any of this interested Thérèse, he would have brought it up a lot sooner. Most of his time in the flotilla at sixty-fifth rang, he felt like a country hick, disconnected from people who’d gone to school together, seen each other regularly, gone to the same festivals and parties. He’d run with a drinking, pot-smoking crowd for a while until he’d worked up the courage to call himself a poet and meet other artists. They didn’t exactly give him any better sense of belonging. He stopped taking it personally when he found out that no one felt like they belonged.

“What was it like?” she asked.

“A lot like the pictures. Hadean. Stygian. Blackened. Endless. Broken. Sterile. Nothing can survive beneath thirty-second rang, not even Venusian life. It’s the bottom of a living ocean and the top of a dead one.”

“But you’ve really seen her.”

He’d never thought about it in those terms. He’d seen Venus, but he hadn’t seen Venus in the momentous, experiential sense she meant. Could he see Venus again, in her way?

“I can show you other things,” he said. “The transparent layers at Les Plaines and Grande Allée. Between the cloud decks, you feel like you’re flying and you can see for kilometers, but all the world is sandwiched between two sheets of clouds. I can show you the storms where the thunder feels like it will break your bones and lightning feels like it will blind you.”

He wanted her to say yes. He could show her. And he could imagine some habitat for them at an easier depth, like fifty-second rang, where the two of them could herd trawlers and grow food and make art. Artists could visit and stay and create, in the clouds. The image in his mind grew clearer.

She pouted. “I made such a big deal of knowing Venus, and I hardly know it at all. I haven’t really touched it.”

“I would never have looked at it with my naked eyes if not for you,” Émile said.

“It was a high,” she said, squirming her naked body a little higher so that her nose was above his, and her voice quieted. “But I feel like I’ll never be close enough, no matter what I do, like I’ll never belong to Venus no matter how much I try. What did you feel?”

Her red, Venus-marked eye stared at him.

“I felt that you touched Venus,” he said, “that you belonged, and that through you, I belonged too.”

She softened, looked away shyly and then kissed him. The world narrowed in the same awe-inspiring, swept-up-on-the-winds feeling he’d had when he’d stared upon Venus’s clouds with naked eyes. Everything was more alive. A constant high.

Then someone kicked him in the back.

“Champion des épais!” a woman’s voice said behind him.

His heart sank.

Thérèse looked up, looking like it was her turn to punch someone. Émile held her hands.

“Who are you, conne?” Thérèse demanded.

Émile rolled her beside him, wrapping her tighter in the blanket.

“This is Marthe,” he said. “My little sister.”

“The Causapscal-des-Vents started venting today, colon,” Marthe said. She was red-faced angry, still in her survival suit, sans helmet, hands on her hips in tight fists.

“What?” he asked, sitting up.

“You’ve only got a couple of jobs, ostie d’con,” Marthe said. “Keep the habitat floating! Harvest the crops! You’re drunk or high most of the time, and I had to fix what you ought to have noticed weeks ago!”

“Ostie, who invited the buzzkill?” someone asked, rolling deeper under their blanket.

Marthe surveyed the storage room with the hard judgment he hated.

“Gang de caves! Why don’t you get to work?” she said, her voice echoing off the hard walls. “Thousands of people are working their asses off trying to keep us all alive and you’re just getting high and diddling around with acid.”

“Get started,” Réjean said sarcastically. “We’ll be along shortly.”

A few people snickered. It didn’t matter to Marthe. He could see it in her glare. Lazy people deserved only her contempt.

“Get your fucking ass to the Causapscal,” she said to Émile, “and go bow to stern and find every other wear spot, abrasion and piece that needs fixing, primping, or replacing and fix them.”

She glared at him for a few seconds, daring him to answer back. He felt his face going hot down to his chest, heat throbbing in his ears as everyone watched him.

“He’s not your slave, bitch,” someone said. “If there’s that much work, why don’t you do half?”

Marthe wasn’t tall, but she had a head of steam going and she was looking at these people the way Pa would have. She flipped them the bird. No one else said anything. Marthe spun, marched to the door and slammed it closed after herself.

Émile couldn’t read Thérèse’s expression. He didn’t know her well enough. His face was hot and his body felt cold. Wordlessly, he stood, grabbed his survival suit and helmet, and padded out naked.