A Venus Story

“When she is too loud, I simply say: ‘A lua está muito cheia esta noite.’ That seems to quiet her right — oh, now you’ve gone and done it. The devil has heard me speak her name, and thus, her horns grow! Have to switch over, Meu amigo, to her. No, I’ve got the maser set right, just as you — Olá, minha querida irmã! Can we talk fast? I’m still on a direct line, with…”

“Don’t ‘dear sister’ me, Bira! ‘The moon is much too full tonight’? That’s how a brother speaks to his little pals, about me, after I’ve come so far to see him?”

“Okay, let’s set aside the fact that I’m working right now, and that my shift supervisor, Broderick, is nobody’s ‘little’… anything. You didn’t come that far. Just from Earth.”

“So? That’s still, what, forty-five million kilometers or something? Wait, don’t help. Twenty-eight million miles?”

“Good that you can do the conversion without me. And yes, that’s around the corner, these days. We’re not stopping until we get to the whole solar —”

“Still seems like a long way to me. Have you ever tried walking that far, Bira?”

“Check the environmental controls, Jacira. Must be a gaseous outbreak in my apartment! Why would I ever need to walk, all the way from Belo Horizonte, when the G.S.O. was thoughtful enough to provide me with a rocket ride? I couldn’t resist their slogan: ‘Mais perto do Sol’. You must admit, you’re much closer to the sun now than you were back home, in Brazil.”

“Too close? Don’t be logical. Takes the fun out of a conversation. Look, I have to —”

“(Check surface tension: clear.) Did you catch that? I’m piloting my little ‘bees’— was there something in particular you wanted, Jaci?”

“Well, not that it matters to you, but yes, if you’re not too unhappy to be of any service to your littlest sister —”

“You’re seventeen. Not that ‘little’, either. Didn’t you eat enough snacks on the flight out? You must have packed on four kilos, just from unpacking.”

“ — who can only marvel at what a powerful man her brother has become — at the old age of twenty-five — and it’s only two kilos, idiot… well, you’ve got to help me. He’s gone.”

^^^^

“Who’s gone? Whom do you have a crush on today? Is it that icy boy, working the promenade in the Domestic Sector, named…?”

“He’s from Greenland, he’s not supposed to be a tropical flower, like me — no, it’s not him, idiot! Cauã is the one who’s gone missing. I thought at least one could count on my dogg, to stick by my side during this ordeal, but no — ”

“The Hawk? Can’t be. He’s not that easy to overlook. (Wait, you think this trip is an ordeal?) You’ve already looked in the apartment, I take it?”

“You do not occupy a palace. It’s not possible for him to hide in such a cozy… place, for more than a few minutes. Would I interrupt your all-important job if I had misplaced him ‘at home’?”

“Well, did you put out a general bulletin? It’s not like an Australian cattle dogg is a typical piece of city ‘equipment’. He’s bound to turn up, Jaci. Once hunger strikes — and it will — his enhanced senses will lead him straight ‘home’ to my place. Like they say: Genetic tailoring: it puts the extra ‘g’ in dogg.”

“They had better be right about that, and so had you. I wanted a nice vacation from school, with my family and my Cauã. Now, this drama.”

“Keep looking. I’ve got these 'sensor bees' to ride. We’ve almost finished a scan of the outer hull of the tertiary hub.”

“I’m not a gearhead, Ubirajara.”

“Course, you’re not. Excuse me. These ‘bees’ float around, outside of the city, and they sweep the shell of the habitat for leaks and damage. These winds are quite savage, this high above the surface. Not playful in the least.”

“I thought you told me that we needed all this savage wind to help keep the city afloat.”

“We’ll take whatever help we can get, yes, but it’s more complicated than that. This isn’t like Green Valley. They get to just build up from the Martian surface, like buildings are mostly made at home, but this is Venus. We can’t do that on a planet this hot. You’d be worried a lot less about a missing mutt if we were a melting lump of metal, down below, where it’s four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius on average, and the air pressure is equal to, what, the sea water almost a kilometer beneath the surface of the ocean—”

“Yes, needless to say, the flying-city approach really is the way to go, here on Venus. When we want a breath of fresh air, just throw open a window and let all that lovely, poisonous wind in here.”

“I’ll take that teen-aged sarcasm as evidence that you agreed with me, Jaci, but yes, it’s a lovely soup of C-oh-two and sulfuric acid, out there. Not like a beach holiday, in fact — what’s wrong now?”

“Oh, no, God, you don’t think — could my little Hawk have gotten sucked out? Into all of… that? Poor little dogg-y. It couldn’t happen. Could it? He never runs off in Belo Horizonte — ”

“I work here, so I know, Jace, the safety protocols on our airlocks — he’s a genius, our Cauã, but I would like to see him try to flip open one of those doors, on his stubby little legs. I think the odds against it are pretty high. One might call them astronomical. I did not intend to test it out. I’m not a monster, in actual fact. I love the Hawk, too.”

^^^^

“(You hear me right — I need just a burst of power for a few seconds, to give the tertiary hub a last once-over. I’m aware this means I’ll be able to see inside the habitat. Don’t worry, all of the privacy protocols will be in effect. Just trying a hunch, about… yes, that’s correct. Thanks, J.T., I owe you one. Okay, another one. Okay, several hundred — let me get to it! All right, then, thanks.)…”

“…So, brother, are you going to meet me up at the Evening Star Cafe? If we eat quickly, we can maybe look around for Cauã. I know someone is just bound to see him, if we look immed — ”

“I like that place. It’s when I met Kate. She was working there, covering for her friend, Astrud. Or maybe, it was the other way around?”

“I’ve got no time to worry about your thousands of girlfriends right now, Bira!”

“Shame, I was hoping to farm the job out to someone hard-working — also, trusty. (Say, that’s not too shabby. That will do nicely.) All right, I’m about to leave. Think something just went ‘ping’.”

“It annoys me, you know. When you (talk very softly, like this), it… makes me think you’re hiding something from me. That some Global Space Org thing?”

“Oh, no, that’s just, you know, my professional-whisper voice, for when I have to talk to the other remote operators, on the flight deck. Besides — would I lie to you, baby sister?…”

“I don’t feel as bloated as I thought I would. That was a big dessert, I admit. I’m glad the gravity is lower on Venus. Even this far above the ground.”

“Well, it’s not much lower, around ninety percent of a gee, but in general, yes, if you want to lose weight, or at least, feel like you’ve lost weight, a space trip is most effective for achieving that. Looks like we’re just about… no, we turn to the left here, my mistake. Here we go.”

“Why did we come here, Bira? This is a cryogenic facility.”

“Well, you said you wanted to find Cauã — yes, over here, that’s right! That was one successful hunch.”

“Whatever are you muttering about? I swear, Ubirajara, sometimes I think some of the carbon dioxide and sulfuric gas might be leaking into your — what’s this? It’s a miracle! Cauã, you absurd little sweetheart, I was beyond worried! How did you know he was here?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny any unauthorized off-the-books usage of the maser scanner for personal gain, nor be inclined to acknowledge this activity, were it, in fact, to… come to light. Of course, I’ll be in trouble for this.”

“Okay, fine — don’t tell me. Let me hug you, you sloppy dogg. I am just so grateful and happy to have found you, you beast! We come all this way, to the hottest planet in the whole Solar System, and leave it to you to find the coldest place above it!”

© Eric Wolf 2021.

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