The Blimps of Venus Read online

to the surface, and without a chosen sister planet as our destination, we will quite simply run out of supplies as a satellite within a few short years. We won’t starve, per se, but our bodies will shrivel without some of the nutrients we obtain from below. You see, my friends, trade is not about delicacies or entertainment. Trade is about essences, about what is essential to our survival. Both the manpower and the things that manpower produces are fragilely threaded into our social contract with the poor surfs below. Pull that one hemline, and the whole fabric of our society unravels. In short, we need the poor as much as they need us. We have the means to ease their poverty. They have the means to ease our poverty of spirit. I yield the remainder of my time.”

  The words hung out there. For a while.

  Then Senator Trignom stood and The Speaker invited him to the floor.

  “I believe Sir Thomas brings up a rather sobering thought,” he said. ”Us wasting away above the planet that could feed us. Therefore I propose we share our great æristocracy with those who live back on planet Earth.”

  There were cries of huzzah.

  Sir Thomas hated himself for that word “remainder.” He could have asked for an intermission in his time to hear counter arguments, but in his passion, he had cornered himself and was now stuck. They would not starve if they returned to Earth, but neither would he be a few thousand feet above his family any more.

  Not to mention the whole part about Earth being uninhabitable for blimp environs.

  Or their thin walls — walls too thin for deep space. Walls that had not deployed until the cylinders had entered the stratosphere before moving on to another planet.

  Other speeches came and went. He didn’t listen. There was no point.

  He was already leaving as the unanimous vote to head toward Earth was recorded for posterity, assuming there would be one.

  “You know they would—“

  “You know?” Sir Thomas said to her just outside. “I’m quite tired right now, and require a nap. If it appeases you, I did not linger to cast my own vote, only to add a voice of reason.”

  “Reason! Well in any case . . . ” She batted her eyes and pushed her hip forward. “We could retire into my chambers.”

  No one stood in that posture except with intent to sire a child. An entire generation of his family born in the skies — he would truly improve their standing in the world with such a gesture. He could preserve his family’s line.

  Or he could preserve his family’s race.

  “I’ll consider it,” Sir Thomas said, but he’d already turned and started walking away.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked his biological father, the surf in white.

  The roomful of surfacers couldn’t help but to watch him wide-eyed. None of the æristocrats had ever entered their quarters. It was as scandalous to them as it would have been for Sir Thomas if any of his colleagues were to discover him. Several in the room seemed to notice his nakedness a bit more compared to when they worked near one another out in the Great Hall and other subsectors within the massive blimp complex.

  “Well?” he asked again.

  His father, one of the chief serfs, asked, “How did your legislating go?”

  “I’m no legislator, dad. The women—”

  They felt the floor shift beneath them as if the entire complex were an elevator. The blimp began ascending towards the stratosphere and the womb that wove the worlds.

  “That bad, eh?” his father asked.

  Sir Thomas spat.

  “They do realize they’ll starve without a connection to the surface?”

  “Yes,” Sir Thomas said, “which is why we’re headed to Earth.”

  Several surfants gasped. Others cried out — they would have no more leave to go down during holidays. Holidays that the capitalists who ruled the æristocracy gave them one day at a time, more so that they could prepare for more work, more to recoup their bodies than their minds. But without a holiday, they wouldn’t have their families returned to them. Their bodies wouldn’t rest. And their minds still wouldn’t have room to think — the heavens forbid they think through their lot and discover a creative solution.

  Which they now began to do.

  Discussions splintered out from Sir Thomas’ declaration, coalescing into one great din.

  “I am not leaving my wife and your brothers behind,” the chief surf said.

  “I know, dad,” Sir Thomas said. “I don’t want to either.”

  “Not so great now, is it, your quest for fame and power by way of lucky genes?”

  “Rub it in later. We’ve got other things to think about.”

  “All of your geneticists up here talk about perfecting a race, and they forget the one flaw in their stinking thinking: they don’t get to pick their own genes.”

  “You’ve made your point, and I accept my proper place as your son. Now, what’s the plan?”

  His father pulled an eight-year-old forward. “This is Thermal.”

  Thomas recognized the boy from the market.

  “Thermal’s a little genius, he is. Been tinkering with a thing called a ‘blowtorch’ down on the surface and figured out a way to make one up here while he’s been waiting for his assignment from you. Had plenty of spare time while you’ve been getting busy.”

  Several surfs sniggered.

  “I haven’t been—“

  “And these… what are these called, Thermal?”

  “Carabineers,” Thermal said. “It’s an ancient form of climbing gear.”

  “Climbing gear,” Thom’s father said. “I guess they’re left over from the first generation and still good. Go to the Great Hall, Thom. They’ll need you for presenting their new edict. Do they often implement law before announcing it?”

  “They always implement it. They seldom announce it. What Venus doesn’t know, hurts her.”

  A long line of naked old men stood before a Great Hall filled with the who’s-who of the æristocracy. More moaning than usual echoed out of the errotatoriums. The Gestatuaries had emptied, and the early mothers lined the hall with their papers and pens, bellies heavy with the fruit of a “final” race, one that had already fifty years prior given itself permission to beat the broken and injure the infirm who dwelled on the surface. Dozen of the surfs Sir Thomas had just inspired moved around the room offering appetizers to everyone — plates of raw-cut fish, faces of little monkeys with poisonous eyes that would be discarded as garnish, chicken legs, cuts of the rigger snake, dreeoon wood still on the bark. No one else paid attention to the surfs, but Sir Thomas saw. His father had taught him to see when he had been a squire on the subblimpan world below, that most of life is out there for the observant if only you’d take a look. From his place in the chorus line of nude old men and younger men like himself, Sir Thomas looked out and saw large protrusions on the back of every serf, as if something hid beneath the outer robes of each. No one else saw because no one else cared to look.

  The feeling of an elevator ascending underfoot.

  The announcement of the new edict, the one that had already been enacted by the navigation room much earlier.

  The movement high above that drew the eyes of all below. An eight-year-old had somehow maneuvered behind the towering structure of the wet bar and had begun using climbing spikes to scale the soft, egg-like curvature of the blimp, moving higher and higher until he dangled from the peak of the main room’s hundred-foot vault. Most of the upper level of the blimp included the cloud observatory that lined the edges of the great hall and a hall leading to the ante chambers and elevators leading down to the senatorial rooms, the thousands of bedrooms, and so on. But the upper level of the blimp? It worked like a penthouse, really, the soft Venusian clouds passing by.

  Many of the elders began yelling at the well-clothed child.

  Many of the bewombed women also yelled.

  Thermal lit the lighter he’d nicked from Lady Prittany’s fannypack and ignited his handmade torch.

 
Which, despite of remarkable craft for an eight-year-old combustion engineering savant, still owed both its power to trinkets the kid had found lying around the blimpan habitat. Therefore, it had no regulator.

  And therefore, it exploded.

  And since they had already entered into the stratosphere, therefore the oxygen within the blimp caught flame and turned the entire habitat into one great billowing rocket engine, the heated and pressurized atmosphere blasting out of that four-foot hole, which had now turned into a makeshift nozzle.

  The body of that child named Thermal hung loosely on a climbing spike that had not detatched from the wall.

  People screamed as the Great Hall depressurized. Once it reentered the atmosphere, it grew even heavier, having no lift left, and it began to fall. Sir Thomas felt someone grab him. It was his father.

  The surfs? Thom noticed that they all now had on gas masks — the very masks the surface dwellers always wore when bartering with the æristocracy below, the very masks that depended on the æristocracy’s oxygen, the very masks that had made the blimp environ a monopoly thousands of years prior.

  His father handed him one and then, with free-fall speed achieved, the people in the Great Hall began to float.

  Then the blimp repressurized, filling up with the sexiest colors imaginable: pink and turquoise and violet, all the colors of a surf woman’s lingerie drawer. But this was not silk and lace. It was instead the clouds of Venus, great poisonous things that burn through human lungs in mere minutes. Nude æristocrats passed one another