The Blimps of Venus Read online

finally make up her mind to barge in and break the law her mother had penned. She darted toward him, but he was the quicker. He shut the door in her face and latched it. Then he walked through the hall of white noise to the second door, closed and latched it as well.

  And now he and his surf sat alone in the men’s lounge.

  “What do I do, dad?” Sir Thomas asked.

  The old surf rolled up his white sleeves and looked him up and down. “They really should let you wear your clothes, Tommy.”

  “What if I like living the life of a rich nudist?”

  “You know that clothes help intensify—“

  “Dad, you’re—“

  “Well not only that, the fertility of our devout—“

  “Dad! Answer my question: what if I like being rich and nude?”

  His father shrugged. “What is rich?”

  “I have no time for mind games.”

  “No game. What are the qualities of rich? Its accidentals?”

  Sir Thomas sighed. “I suppose it affects possession more than position.”

  “How so?”

  “A rich man may be anywhere, but he is one who has accumulated many things.”

  “Ha! You don’t look like you’ve accumulated a damn thing on this blimp.”

  And Sir Thomas stood there, naked. “I still like the nudist life.” He suddenly felt very small, as small as the only surfs that went around nude in public: their toddlers.

  “I guess you never really followed your older brothers. That one time you dropped your drawers in—“

  “What do I do, dad?”

  “Well, go in there and try to stop the ascending before it starts an hour from now. I’ll talk to the surfs.”

  “And tell them to do what?”

  “I don’t know, Tom, not yet. But get ready for anything.”

  “Just in case you decide to blow something up again?”

  “No. Just in case you decide to strip down and join the aristocracy against your mother’s best and deepest wishes and convictions.”

  “My and my brothers’ births are evidence that mom got naked plenty.”

  The old man blushed. “Can’t even see straight when you’re like this.”

  “You see me pretty clearly right now.” Thomas gyrated his hips in a way that drew attention to… what it drew attention to.

  The surf groaned. “Get to work, and so will I.”

  “But I’m working it now, pop.” The helicopter continued.

  The surf flicked it hard on the head.

  Thomas shouted out from the brilliance of the pain.

  The surf ignored him, went to the door, unlatched it and the door beyond, and bowed to the nude lady who was sitting, cross-legged, back straight, waiting. Hen-like.

  “Well?” she asked. “Is he still in there?”

  The surf bowed again and waved his hand towards the gentleman’s room.

  She got up to go inside.

  Sir Thomas burst out, pushed past her and moved further along the white hall.

  In the council chambers, the oldest Venusians — still clean-shaven from head-to-toe and still naked as Eden — debated the nuances of the term up. They were a people that liked the sound of things and wanted to make sure those things they liked the sound of harmonized with one another.

  Sir Thomas crashed into their chambers in the middle of Senator Holdgirth’s long discourse on the philosophical, rather than the topographical, connotation behind the word up. He had no time for this. He jumped up onto the platform and said, “Fellow Senators and lawmakers, I beg you, forgive my interruption.”

  “We may,” the Speaker said, “but Senator Holdgirth will of course need to finish this discourse on the nature of up-ness. Proceedings on your argumentation will follow the rest of the midrash subsets beholden to this particular line of thought. Your time, of course, will be awarded proportionally.”

  All of the men in the chamber looked straight at Sir Thomas’ manhood. It was of average size. And then there was the glaring consequence of his father’s flick.

  The rest standing were… let’s say it is no coincidence that the term “studbook” and the phrase “hung like a horse” are etymologically related. Senator Holdgirth led the herd, so to speak.

  Sir Thomas nodded slowly so as not to upset them and sat back down in his assigned seat. Senator Holdgirth galloped off again on the arcana of language.

  And the side door to the circular chambers squeaked open.

  Sir Thomas braved a glace over that direction and caught a glimpse of Lady Prittany edging in around the circumference of the debate arena, flushed and flustered. They named it The Arena, Thomas knew, because of its low sandy floor — a floor now covered in the dark brown of old blood. There senators grappled with one another during debate if their dialectics reached a standstill and logic had given way to ad hominem attack. Their rules of engagement read that, if an argument denigrated into one man working against another rather than one man building with another towards some coherent line of thought, then they might as well acknowledge the reality of the ad hominem attack and turn to martial combat. Suffice to say, as parliaments and congresses go, The Arena fell on the more brutal end of the spectrum. Naked old men, their goals opposed, their powers exposed, their blood hosing the ground below them. The Athenians and Spartans would both have been awed and both have been disgusted by The Arena, but for different reasons. Chesterton would have loved both sides, but the nudity would have made him fumble with his cape and his top hat.

  She sat down beside him on the bench.

  He crossed his legs so as to cover his proportionality and turned so that the slightest angle made it seem like he’d turned to cover the coldest side of his shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Sir Thomas,” she said, “but we never quite finished our discussion.”

  Sir Thomas kept both eyes forward. He knew as a representative, especially a junior one, that they would watch him carefully to see if he obeyed protocol. And he knew Lady Prittany didn’t quite remember this. As a woman, she would have the higher calling of writing and enforcing the law but not the lower calling of debating and haggling over jurisprudence for the sake of making judgment calls on specific instances. An executive and a legislator, not a judge. Scribes seldom interacted in the debate, leaving her ignorant of protocol.

  And so she continued on. “Sir Thomas? Did you hear me?”

  Senator Holdgirth seemed annoyed at the interruption and nodded towards them, mid-speech.

  Sir Thomas kept his eyes forward, nothing in his posture betraying any connection to the naked woman at his side.

  The Speaker took note in a logbook, marking on a different page than the one he’d used for Thomas’ earlier infraction. So it wasn’t put down to him

  Senator Holdgirth continued, “—if we chose then to travel up, then up will affect—“

  “Are you ignoring me?” she asked.

  “That is your third strike, Lady Prittany,” The Speaker said. “You have yielded the remainder of your time today to the rest of those present and will be escorted from the chambers until tomorrow, at which time you may again attempt to participate. Further infractions upon the morrow will compound the yielding of your time, potentially banning you from these chambers entirely.”

  “What? That’s absurd, you silly little man, I was only—“

  “Make it two and a half days,” the Speaker said.

  She went quiet after that and left with a bruiser on either arm who made sure she found the exit.

  Sir Thomas had not flinched.

  “Our apologies, Senator Holdgirth,” The Speaker said. “Please continue.”

  The man rambled for another hour. At the end of which, many in the chambers were asleep but had not left. A vote this important, you never left unless you couldn’t hold your water anymore. Something interesting would likely wake you up anyways.

  Such as Sir Thomas taking to the pit.

  He stood u
p tall. “I have a very simple counterpoint to Senator Holdgirth and those of you who support Lady Prittany’s rather eloquent bill. The problem with ascendancy is, of course, trade. Do we have a self-sustaining environ? We did en route to Venus as an early wombfaring civilization. As you all know, our forefathers came here by way of one of the great cylinders, crossed the expanse of the womb of the worlds and upon entering the stratosphere, they inflated the atmosphere of this and every other blimp.

  “But I call you to remember, we quickly ran out of supplies and sent down our working classes onto the surface, constantly resupplying them with oxygen. Temporary habitats became permanent, and long-term trade routes were established with a healthy rotation of descending rather than ascending blimps. Indeed, my knighthood itself is one result of those trades, as many of you know.”

  A senator raised his hand.

  “Yes, Senator Hart,” Sir Thomas said.

  “What is oxygen?”

  “It’s what we in the æristocracy refer to as atmosphere, but it is only one component of true atmosphere. Atmosphere is as much about pressure as it is about the content of the gases inside.”

  “Oh. Please continue.”

  “Thank you. This trade — the oxygen tanks through our local reclaimer — became the means by which we obtained the type of organics grown only on the surface by our servants, those savages who wear clothes.”

  Several of the old nudists chuckled, both because they’d agreed and because they’d brought this ambitious surf so far since Senator Holdgirth took him in as a child for what he could offer the gene pool.

  Sir Thomas hadn’t meant it, he’d simply used it to gain their ear. “Therefore without a connection