The Sultan of the Clouds

The Sultan of the Clouds

By Geoffrey A. Landis

The pilot-monk rolled the barque back, and then pointed, forward and slightly to the right. “There. See it?”

I didn`t know what to see. “What?”

“There”.

I saw it know, a tiny point glistening in the distance. “What is it?”

“Hypatia. The jewel of the clouds”.

As we coasted closer, the city grew. It was an odd sight. The city was a dome, or, rather, a dozen glistening domes melted haphazardly together, each one faceted with a million panels of glass. The domes were huge, the smallest nearly a kilometer across, and as the barque glided across the sky, the facets caught the sunlight and sparked with reflected light. Below the domes, a slender pencil of rough black stretched down toward the cloudbase like taffy, delicate as spun glass, terminating in an absurdly tiny bulb of rock that seemed far too small to counterbalance the domes.

A Sultan of the Clouds. Painting by Elena

“Beautiful, you think, yes?” Like the wonderful jellyfishes or your blue planet`s oceans. Can you belief that half a million people live here?”

The pilot brought us around the city in a grand sweep, showing off, not even bothering to talk. Inside the transparent domes, chains of lakes glittered in green ribbons between boulevards and delicate pavilions. At last, he slowed to a stop, and then slowly leaked atmosphere into the vacuum vessel that provided the buoyancy. The barque settled down gradually, wallowing from side to side now that the stability given by its forward momentum was gone. Now it floated slightly lower than the counterweight. The counterweight no longer looked small, but loomed above us, a rock the size of Gibraltar. Tiny fliers affixed tow-ropes to hard-points on the surface of the barque, and slowly we were winched into a hard-dock.

“Welcome to Venus”, said the monk.

The surface of Venus is a place of crushing pressure and hellish temperature. Rise above it though, and the pressure eases, the temperature cools. Fifty kilometres above the surface, at the base of the clouds, the temperature is tropical, and the pressure the same as Earth normal. Twenty kilometres above that, the air is thin and polar cold.