by Ian Stewart
He realized Uhlirach-Bengtsen had said something to him. He apologized and asked for it to be repeated. The undersecretary did so.
Oh, shit. "Me? I come in? How?"
"Charles, we're putting together an expedition. The Jovian Task Force. We're collecting the best brains and the best equipment that we and the Buddhist Belters can come up with, and we're sending them out to Jupiter. Their task will be to locate the aliens, make contact with them, and talk them into fixing the problem. Since the aliens can rearrange Jupiter's moons at will, they can damn well re-arrange them to send their comet somewhere else.
"There will be biologists and linguists and computer engineers and xenologists and sociologists and mathematicians and chemists and skilled negotiators and whatever else we can think of. You want lap-dancers, we'll give you the sexiest and most sinuous that the clubs can provide, no questions asked. You want diamonds, we'll give you a mine. But we need someone who can knit all of those disciplines into a team, Charles, and we've decided that you are that person."
This was awful. His worst nightmare didn't come close. And there was no way out of it. Nobody selected for that expedition was going to get a serious chance to turn the dubious honor down.
"You're probably wondering why we want an archaeologist. Well, to be honest, we don't, not as such. But it's a very interdisciplinary subject, and ancient civilizations may be as close as we can get to alien ones. As a bonus, it's an area that is well used to deciphering unknown inscriptions, so you can help the linguists with the aliens' language. Mostly, though, we want you for your organizational skills and worldwide reputation. Charles, the human race needs you!"
Charles essayed a weak smile. "Peter, it's a—a great. . . honor." At that moment, though, the only thought running through his mind was that the last thing he needed right now was the human race.
Twelve years is not long to prepare for a cometary impact, especially when the best that the Earth's assorted governments can come up with is to go and ask whoever is throwing it at them to change their minds, pretty please.
The prospect does wonders for international cooperation, though.
There were, of course, the usual coterie of doomsayers and millennial cultists, of religious fundamentalists whose strength of belief outweighed mere material facts, and political pressure groups that sensed an opportunity (while discounting its cause as propaganda), but most of them had the sense to bide their time, suspecting that better opportunities would not be far away. Ignoring them, every resource that the planet possessed was potentially available to Sir Charles and his burgeoning empire. Even the neo-Zen Buddhists of the Way of the Wholesome seemed to waken from their self-imposed inscrutable obsession with a different dimension.
Only the Democratic Republic of Free China remained aloof, its borders as tightly shut as they had ever been, its leadership—if there was one—so entangled in its own internal politics that it was unable to react to the relentless tightening of the cosmic thumbscrew . . .
It took Sir Charles the best part of a year to put his expedition together. He would have preferred longer—he would have preferred not to have been involved at all—but celestial mechanics was a hard taskmaster. Joshua might have commanded the sun to stand still; Immanuel Velikovsky's wild comet spawned by Jupiter might have undergone a change of personality and settled down as sedate Venus; but those options were not available in the universe that Charles inhabited.
During the first few weeks, he had paced endlessly up and down his plush new Washington office, staring across the park-lands of the Mall at the ivy-strewn ruins of the Old Capitol, trying to make up his mind about the main strategic options. Should there be just one expedition, or several? A single giant ship of a kind never yet built, or a flotilla of more conventional ships? His biggest headache was the impossibility of anticipating what conditions would be like in the Jovian system, and what equipment and personnel would be needed.
All of his plans had to be contingency plans.
Sir Charles's team of advisers, drawn from every corner of the globe (save China) and chosen for that subtle mix of imagination and practicality that drives true innovation, settled inevitably on a compromise. One expedition must be put together quickly, but not too quickly, since it would always be their best shot: it would be counterproductive to divert resources into a series of expeditions. However, small supplementary missions might be needed later, so manpower and money would be switched to those projects, on a contingency basis, as soon as the main expedition no longer needed them. The resources of the planet would form the most extensive support structure ever assembled for a single project.
The expedition would center around one ship—large, but not overambitiously engineered. Assembled in orbit with considerable Belter assistance, this ramshackle vessel would resemble a floating scrapyard—modules of many shapes and origins glued and bolted to a frame of carbon-nanofiber girders, linked by tunnels of aluminum and plastic, wrapped in foil. The price Earth had to pay for the assistance of the neo-Zen Buddhists was the name of the ship: Skylark. In the By a chos, the lark's contribution began: For those who dwell in a state of woe, pleasures turn sour. It plummeted ever further into the depths of despair, culminating in the inspiring phrase: Seeing the corpses interred beneath the ground, the pleasures of pride in this citadel of the body turn sour It then embarked upon an equally gloomy commentary upon the sad state of affairs so far outlined: ten lines of free verse, each beginning with the formula What use . . . applied variously to sons, friends, possessions, religious talk, and moral rules; and it ended with the inspiring admonition: What use, therefore, all these things — useless indeed are they! For some reason that nobody else could understand, the Way of the Wholesome considered the lark's speech to be so appropriate to the mission that they insisted that it should be painted on the vessel's side in letters a foot high. Most commentators felt that a less frivolous name, and a more upbeat message, would have been an improvement; but to the Buddhists there were few birds less frivolous than the lugubrious lark, and the Zen monks saw nothing upbeat in the situation, and no reason to pretend otherwise. Since they who pay for the skylark call the tune, the name was agreed on without much public argument.
Skylark would be accompanied by a dozen smaller vessels, the best that could be found among Earth's ragtag-and-bobtail interplanetary fleet. All vessels would carry at least two regular OWL ground/orbit shuttle craft, and the large vessel would have nine. Skylark would have laboratories, machine shops, lasers, communications equipment of all kinds, computer banks ... It would be laden with every resource, from balls of string to portable nuclear reactors.
It was to be a cross between a top-flight university and a wholesale hardware store.
There were no lap-dancers, and no military personnel. Sir Charles had nothing against the military, many were trained in useful skills, but he had a horrible feeling that they'd mostly be there to grab the reins if he screwed up. Or even if he didn't. So he fought tooth and nail to keep them excluded, and won the argument when the Belters backed him up. Uhlirach-Bengtsen hadn't exactly been overjoyed, but he'd agreed. Privately, he recognized that there were other ways to ensure adequate security.
Sir Charles had been the victim of his own cunning. He could not risk being seen to give the expedition anything less than every atom of his being, every picosecond of his time. Because he really was a superb organizational politician, he could not avoid becoming ever more essential to the project: within a month there was no prospect of anybody replacing him. But the implication—which he had seen clearly from the very beginning, with growing horror, transfixed by unfolding events— was that his role would not end when Skylark slipped ponderously out of low Earth orbit on its two-year rendezvous with destiny
When Skylark went to Jupiter, it would carry Sir Charles Dunsmoore with it.
Fortunately, he was so busy organizing his own doom that he hardly ever had time to worry about it.
10
Caligald Chaos, 221
3
Socks. Shirts. Underwear.
Music chip—everything from Antheil, George (composer, twentieth century classical) to Zoo-Zoom Zero (web-entity/collective, twenty-second century razz).
A small, low-resolution flatscreen.
A worn deck of cards.
The minutiae of a human life, the banal mix of personal necessities and trivia that people choose to take with them on lengthy voyages when storage space is limited . . . Clothing, entertainments. Tellingly, no holos of family, friends, or lovers— not even of a cat or a hamster.
Sir Charles Dunsmoore unpacked his belongings and marveled that when he put something down on a surface, it stayed there. His legs ached, even though Europa's surface gravity was only one-seventh that of Earth, even though he had conscientiously exercised for four hours out of every twenty-four for the past two years. He never wanted to see an exercise bicycle again, and he was trying hard not to think about the return voyage.
It had been wonderful to see Europa looming ahead at last, smooth as a pool ball, blue-gray ice covered in russet doodles which on closer inspection turned out to be moon-girdling cracks. Sir Charles, like most of the task forces members, positively itched to get his feet back on firm ground again, even if it was the frozen terrain of an alien moon. Anything was better than the tedium of interplanetary spaceflight. At times, he'd hoped the Skylark would explode or collide with a meteorite— anything to break the routine.
He'd been unable to take his eyes off the screen display as the moon slowly grew closer. It was a young landscape—too young. The ice must have melted, flowed, refrozen, obliterating the craters that otherwise would have to be visible. It looked as if the ice layer were thin, floating—the concentric flattened rings of Tire Macula, one of the rare large craters, were just what you'd expect if something had smashed through the ice and left it to refreeze; the moon's weird polygonal terrain resembled Earth's Antarctic ice sheets. And then there were the flexi— Sidon Plexus, Delphi Plexus, Cilicia Plexus . . . linear markings thousands of miles long, formed from series of sixty-mile arcs, cycloids . . . Evidence, the xenologists thought, of tidal cracking, propagating at one arc per Europan day. Imagine being around while they were forming.
And now they were there, thank God. Compared to Skylark's spartan, cramped quarters, Europa Base was a luxury hotel, even though it was incomplete. It had been assembled by the expedition of 2145, one of the first big post-Pause science jaunts and pretty much the last, as the first step in an ambitious program to search for alien life. Por a short time, Ecotopia had started to look outward again, with Belter help—but it hadn't lasted. The expedition's long-term objective had been to drill through the satellite's miles-thick coat of solid ice to the liquid ocean that, according to all the evidence, was concealed beneath. Just as Jupiter's gravitational clasp squeezed lo relentlessly, heating its interior and fueling its sulfurous volcanoes, so the giant planet's tidal grip had melted Europa's silicate core. The tidal effect was only a tenth of that on lo, but it had heated the core enough to create a thick underground layer of liquid water buried deep beneath the cracked, dirt-strewn crust. The surface remained frozen as it radiated heat into the vacuum of space—the crazed orange-brown shell of a cosmic egg with a yolk of liquid rock. Between yolk and shell was the white of the egg, a relatively warm ocean that contained at least as much water as all of Earths oceans put together. Its average depth was ten times that of the Earth's deepest underwater trenches; it formed a layer of water sixty miles thick, laden with salts dissolved from the core.
No light had penetrated those alien seas in the four billion years of their existence, but there had been heat energy in abundance, and plenty of time for evolution to take hold. So Eu-ropa had long been seen as the most likely habitat, within the Solar System, for extraterrestrial life. Perhaps colonies of thermophilic bacteria gathered around hot vents in the crushing depths where the water gave way to molten rock, separated by a thin layer of solidified silicate magma that buckled and contorted into a million fantastic shapes . . . Perhaps shoals of unearthly fishes glided through the tropical seas of the middle layers . . . But the expedition of 2145 placed its hopes on the convoluted zone of semi-frozen slush that formed the interface between the Europan ocean and its fragile shell of solid ice, because that was all they could explore. The slushy water was known to be rich in salts and dissolved organics. There, even the most pessimistic of Earth's exobologists held high hopes that there would be bacterial-grade organisms. Others speculated about rubbery pipes hundreds of yards long, stony spheres of various sizes, and a pulverized creature that would be all teeth, claws, spines, and glowing eyes—but whose menace was mitigated by the prediction that it would be only two inches long.
The Europa expedition was code-named Challenger after a ship that had mapped the deep seas of Earth and drilled cores in their beds, though many Xphiles thought it was named after an obscure literary character who had drilled a hole in the Earth and discovered that the planet was alive. It had been a carefully planned attempt to "drill" through Europa's shell of dirty ice using a probe with a nuclear-powered heating device that would melt its way downward. Although the ice would freeze behind it, it was possible to ensure that a narrow channel remained open, and through this channel would run fiber-optic cables connecting the probes battery of holovision cameras and other instruments to the surface. Once through the solid ice and into the layer of slush, the probe would switch on its nuclear-powered spotlights and the hunt for Europan life-forms could begin.
That was the plan . . . and while the probe was being designed and assembled on Earth, a flotilla of spaceships hauled lightweight materials to the distant satellite and put together a habitable base in a relatively flat area at the edge of Caligula Chaos, a region of cracked ice plates, crevasses, and cliffs adjoining the gigantic crack Adonis Linea. The site, named by a classically minded geophysicist on the initial survey project, had been chosen for two reasons. From there, thanks to Europa's synchronous rotation, Jupiter was always in view in the same part of the sky, making it possible to study the gas giant from close up without interruption. More importantly, the gulleys and clefts that disfigured the landscape were probably the uppermost parts of ancient cracks in the ice layer that at one time had penetrated all the way to the ocean beneath—a place where semi-liquid slush had welled up under tidal pressures, smashed the overlying layers of ice, and pushed them brusquely aside. There might be signs of life preserved in the frozen surface slush, and the cracks might be a weak point in the ice crust, a good place to start "drilling."
From a landing spacecraft, Caligula Chaos was a patchwork of angular, polygonal ice rafts, frost patterns on a windowpane that had been repeatedly shattered and reassembled. In places you could observe tiny craters, formed not by impacting meteorites but by giant blocks of ice hurled casually aside by the meteorites that had created nearby impact structures. From lower altitudes, the fragmented ice plates appeared to be scattered like pieces of broken eggshell, forming patchy expanses of washboardlike corrugations hundreds of yards high, terminating in precipitous scalloped cliffs. Blocky debris sprawled in heaps along the bottom of the cliffs, and in the moon's near-vacuum everything looked like a black-and-white photograph, with tinges of sepia from contaminating minerals.
Challenge's project designers had anticipated virtually any contingency on Europa and during the voyage to the Jovian system, but what they had not anticipated was a last-minute legal challenge by a pressure group that temporarily succeeded in getting the Oceanic Environmental Protection Act of 2130 extended to the entire Solar System. It was hard to argue that anybody could realistically have seen it coming, but heads rolled anyway. Challengers planners and managers had been aware of the danger of contaminating any hypothetical Europan ecology with terrestrial organisms. Although such contamination was very unlikely—earthly life had not evolved to survive in a Europan environment—they took the possibility very seriously. If "alien" life-forms such as terrestrial bacteria ever gai
ned a toehold on Europa, they would replicate, spreading no one knew where, or to what effect, and that was a clear no-no. So the managers had taken elaborate precautions to avoid such contamination—in particular, specifying a rigorous sterilization procedure for the probe.
They had also worried about possible harm to Europan life-forms caused by the probes nuclear materials. The task of "drilling" through the ice of a Jovian moon was severe enough: to do it in a way that would permit recovery of the probe was essentially impossible. So they designed the reactor to use shortlived radioactive isotopes, which would decay into stable matter before the probe corroded enough to release them into the ocean. There would also be a small amount of radioactivity where the materials of the probe had become irradiated, but the likely damage caused by these materials would be localized and negligible. Perhaps a few Europan bacteria or whatever would be killed, but that was a very different matter from introducing terrestrial organisms and making irreversible changes to the entire Europan ecosystem.
As it happened, the Oceanic Environmental Protection Act embodied a series of laws whose intention was to prevent any dumping of nuclear waste—however minor or short-lived—in the Earths oceans. The lawmakers who framed the act were aware that isolated discharges of small amounts of radioactive waste into the sea would cause little long-term damage—but they were also aware that if such incidents were to be repeated many times worldwide, the cumulative consequences could be severe. So they reasoned that if they left even a tiny loophole, it might be exploited on a global scale, and they therefore drew up draconian legislation to eliminate any conceivable loophole— so draconian that the Save Our Solar System movement was able to convince an international court that the provisions of the act were not restricted to the home planet. In fact their counsel argued that it applied throughout the entire universe, but the court drew back from such an extensive ruling because it was uncertain of its jurisdiction. It did, however, deem the act to be valid throughout the entire Solar System.