The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (5 page)

Perhaps a kilometer below, in the brown-yellow gloom, a cluster of dark spots moved, backward relative to the wind that carried her. They were much bigger than the blastulae. She tugged at her control lines, turning to get a better view, and hard enough to spill some of the air from her parachute. Her horizontal speed picked up, and she dropped faster. And only because she had turned did she see that the repair drone had followed her.

Repair drones had not been designed specifically to survive in the cloud deck, but they were hardy. In the photochemical zone, it might have run forever on solar power, but it also cracked sulfuric acid into hydrogen and solid sulfur, which could be recombined later to work in shadow. It could follow her a long time if it could take on enough ballast to sink as fast as she, and if it could survive the heat and acid.

Marie-Claude gritted her teeth and spilled her parachute. She plummeted. Two hundred meters. Four hundred. Six hundred. She finally let the wires go, and the parachute unfurled. The murk of the burnt yellow clouds hid her from the repair drone.

And two hundred meters below floated a pod of thirty rosettes, large Venusian plants. Their bulbous ochre heads were composed of six radially symmetric gas-filled chambers, each one a meter across. Sulfuric acid and organic materials collected in the cup formed by the tops of the six chambers. From the center of this cup grew a large triangular frond, a fine black net with which to filter the photosynthesizing microbes from the atmosphere. Beneath the six chambers hung short, heavy trunks which stored nutrients and provided ballast. They hung like weird, rootless trees, orphaned in the vastness of an ocean of cloud.

Carefully, Marie-Claude matched her horizontal speed and descended, until with uncertain hands and unsteady feet, she landed on one of the rosettes, scrambling to grab its frond before she slipped. The round, woody platform was slimy with decomposing microbes slowly being absorbed by the skin of the rosette.

The rosette began to sink under her weight, although slower than she’d been descending in her parachute. But, as the pressure increased, so would the buoyancy of the rosette, until she finally stopped descending. And in the meantime, she could hide here from the repair drone. She shook acid rain from her parachute and laid it over herself like a tarp against the drizzling acid.

She sank into the somber clouds for a long time, as the rain stopped. In the enforced quiet, her arms tingled, as if she wanted to hit something, for a long time. She was going to die. She was sinking into the toxic atmosphere of Venus because someone had decided to kill her. Nervous, angry, baffled tears tickled hot lines onto her cheeks. She cursed the acid. She cursed the world and politics. And she cursed herself for coming to Venus.

The Americans, Australians, and British still raced against the Chinese for the industrial and economic dominance of Mars. Egypt and Saudi Arabia had taken Vesta and Ceres, and had staked claims on dozens of other asteroids with robotic prospectors. The Russians, perhaps for having lost the Moon to the Americans a century earlier, took it for their inheritance. The first wave of Solar System colonization was complete by the time Québec separated from Canada.

L’Assemblée nationale
decided to make their mark as an advanced nation by colonizing Venus. There was no money to be made on Venus, no resource it could provide to Earth or the rest of the Solar System that could not be gotten for cheaper from the Egyptians or the Saudis, but her clouds were of scientific value. Strange microbial extremophiles had been found, feeding a deep, inaccessible ecology. Basic scientific research would not finance the effort and colonization was not cheap, but the president had wanted
un grand geste
, a starward look for her new nation.

And it was a
grand geste
, approached with an earnest, prideful, counterproductive fervor. Little matter that the new republic had to launch Anglo hardware on Egyptian rockets, and that it trained its engineers in Houston.
La République du Québec
was colonizing Venus.

They ought to have started with robotic stations in the atmosphere, to prepare the way for astronauts, but
la République
had the romantic eagerness of a teenager, throwing waves of engineers, chemists, meteorologists, and doctors into space with cramped habitats, optimistic assumptions, and fickle support. They were part of
la grande histoire
, and dreams thrive in fields of willful blindness.

—From
Commentaries

on the Foundation of the Venusian State

The clouds thinned and broke beneath her, and a frisson of awe was born in Marie-Claude. She rode the rosette near the top of a kilometer of clear air between the yellow-brown upper cloud deck and the angry dark clouds of the middle deck. The cavernous space was empty, carved into all the stored acid and spite in the Solar System. She was tiny, a mite riding a bit of dander in a stadium. The vertigo that had trailed her all this time suddenly pounced, and she snaked her arms around the frond, as if she stood on a cliff. The rosette sank through the great cave in the clouds, and the puffy floor of the middle deck approached with the gentleness of a summer balloon ride. She was going to die. Venus would kill her, but had given her one last vision of wonder.

Marie-Claude rode her magic carpet to the bottom of the clear air and sank into the thick cloud of the middle deck. Like a drowning swimmer, Marie-Claude looked upward as the darkness swallowed. The repair drone broke out of the upper clouds a kilometer above, and then everything was out of sight.

A new rain of sulfuric acid fell as her oxygen display began winking yellow.

There was no oxygen recharging station around, and perhaps she would never see one again. She had to take what she needed. She was an engineer, but like everyone she’d read the ecological papers produced by the colony’s part-time researchers.

The clouds, filled with dust, were a perfect crucible for Venusian life, cycling between low pressure and high, sunlit and dark, concentrated and dilute acidity, evaporation and condensation. Whole classes of acidophiles, psychrophiles, and thermophiles had life cycles the
colonistes
hadn’t had the time to study. The microbes captured the wavelengths of light penetrating the middle and upper cloud decks within cell walls hardened to maintain buoyant gas pressures. Presumably, some of these autotrophs had evolved into floating mats that inflated and deflated as needed, and then, over millions of years, into hardened wooden balls, and finally, in an accident of tissue innovation rivaled by the Cambrian explosion on Earth, the balls had clustered into rosettes, and the cloud trawlers that lived in the deeper atmosphere.

The six chambers of the rosette beneath her feet were filled with oxygen, a byproduct of photosynthesis. Oxygen was buoyant in Venus’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, but Marie-Claude couldn’t take any of it without jeopardizing her foothold. She needed some of the spherical plants, or blastulae, that she’d seen.

She looked for a long time before she spotted a cluster floating perhaps a kilometer below, moving almost in parallel to the rosette she rode as she sank. Rosettes drifted with the wind, partly driven by their high fronds. Marie-Claude set her feet into the sludge at the base of the frond and tugged and pulled and leaned until the frond, like a small sail, angled to the wind so that slowly, her rosette began drifting leftward.

The rosettes were not easy to steer, but slowly, over some thirty minutes, she moved it across the wind, approaching the cluster of blastulae that contained an adult form—several buds and a pair of adults still connected by sticky ooze. Marie-Claude threw her parachute over the cluster and hauled it in.

The blastulae had nothing to do with embryos, but reminded many of the hollow-ball-of-cells phase of embryonic development, and no one had time to find a better name. They were hollow, woody balls that reproduced by budding. Adult blastulae floated with crowns of smaller buds, which grew to adult size and then detached when the difference in buoyancy between parent and offspring overcame the stickiness of the mucus gluing them together.

Her oxygen tanks had emergency hand pumps that could be fitted to the hoses in case the power failed in the habitats. The hoses contained anhydrous crystalline filters to neutralize sulfuric acid. She set up her pump and pulled one of the blastulae from the parachute.

Her helmet light revealed a brown skin pigmented to absorb the yellowed light reaching these depths. Transparent mucus slicked the blastula, beading off the raining acid.

Suddenly, the blastula hissed around six stomata. The carbon dioxide of the Venusian atmosphere flowed inward, and the blastula lost its buoyancy. Marie-Claude turned it over, and it hissed again, letting in more carbon dioxide.

Photoreactivity. Why? If an updraft carried a blastula into the upper atmosphere, sunlight would burn it. Its stomata must have dilated to allow heavy carbon dioxide in, to lower its buoyancy. Her lamp had tricked the stomata.

She let the blastula go. It tumbled slowly over the edge of the rosette. At some point, it would reach a depth where it would float. Then, further photosynthesis would create oxygen which would buoy it more.
In extremis
, blastulae had been observed to pump out some air from their cavities to correct their buoyancy more abruptly.

Marie-Claude switched off her helmet light and let her eyes adjust to the gloom of a rainy sundown. Then she pulled out one of the immature blastulae. She traced with her gloved fingertips until she found the stomata, tiny closed mouths, six of them, ringing the underside.

She cleared away the mucus and placed the hose against a stoma. With the other hand, she took a small hand light and lit just that part of the blastula. The stoma relaxed and Marie-Claude inserted the hose into the plant before too much carbon dioxide could rush in. She pumped the oxygen from the blastula into her tank. When she finally pulled free the hose and released it, it bobbed up and away, carried up like a cork in water.

She repeated her vampiric feast on all the blastulae in her parachute, watching each one shudder up into the clouds upon release, like bubbles rising in deep water. Seven of the woody balloons disappeared into the sky before her oxygen display edged into yellow-green. She had some oxygen, but she needed more.

But, as she stowed her equipment, she realized that acid had rasped the fabric of her parachute raw.

Les colonistes
did not design their equipment to operate in the heavily acidic environment below the super-rotating winds, but something could be refitted in that time. The food paste in her suit had the calories, and the water recycler might keep her hydrated. Sweat dripped in her eyes. The temperature had topped fifty degrees and now hugged her with a full atmosphere of pressure.

A light shone in the distance above her. A machine whined. The drone was not designed to operate so deep. The steels used to build drones were more vulnerable to hot acids than her suit of fiber-reinforced plastics. If she could survive four days, they might be able to rescue her.

Marie-Claude’s mother had also come to a new world, in one of the waves of Haitian refugees to Québec. Her mother had married
un Québécois pur laine
, pure wool, a man whose family counted French, or at least European blood, for generations. Her parents bequeathed to her two identities, one of belonging by blood, another of alienness by color of skin.

So, from birth, her country was both hers and not hers. The new nation of Québec consumed its children with politics of identity and place, self-referential and pastward-looking. Québec offered no place free of the acidity of the cultural insecurity. So Marie-Claude had come to Venus for the freedom and even-handedness of ground without footprints.

She might have immigrated to Mars or the asteroids for a frontier life, but as much as the Québécois infuriated her, she was Québécoise herself, by blood and language.
Le grand geste
seemed perfect for a time, but it turned out not to have been the frontier.
Les colonistes
had carried with them the panels and studies, the committees and language laws. Instead of thinking new thoughts, they argued over resource budgets, work schedules, and culture by proposing motions and agendas in committees. Marie-Claude liked engineering problems. Calculations of force and pressure and resistance and pH were simple things, an escape from politics that seemed to materialize wherever two people met. Marie-Claude’s competent, forceful plain-speak led inevitably to her election as the chair of the engineering union.

Marie-Claude was not the only one restless for something they could not articulate. No one knew yet where they were going, but never a people to stop at one poorly conceived
grand geste
,
les colonistes
surviving in the clouds of Venus quickly began to speak of their own state. A country of our own.
Un pays pour nous
. And so,
les séparatistes
were born, even though
les colonistes
needed Québec to foot the bills for metals and volatiles.

A greater gift could not have been offered to the new nation of Québec. Québec did not have the budget to sustain the colony. They derived no benefit from it, not even respect. One might admire Quixote, but one did not respect him. Despite being faced with so convenient an escape from its responsibilities as the mother country, it surprised no one that
l’Assemblée
denounced any talk of secession. And so were born
les nationalistes
. The factions on the habitats spun webs of arguments for
une Vénus indépendente
or
une Vénus coloniale
.

Marie-Claude considered both ideas criminally impractical. Whether the colony declared its independence from Québec or not, Venus intended to kill them. Tempers burned, sometimes into open violence. Renaud Lanoix, the
séparatiste
leader, dreamed of a new nation, and saw Marie-Claude, chair of the powerful Engineering Union, as the key to unlocking it. He’d been waiting for her to choose her side. Someone else had not.