by Ian Stewart
As they got nearer, it became apparent that one of the Chinese autogiros had crashed. The other seemed wrecked. On the ground, everything was unnervingly still. It was difficult to make out just what they were seeing, but it was a big mess. The pilot weighed the options and the risks, but nobody was shooting at them and nothing down there was moving. He opted for a rapid descent, away to one side, and a quick but wary advance on foot.
What they found was baffling.
One autogiro still burned, the blackened bodies of its occupants occasionally visible amid the smoke and flames. Clouds of bees circled it at a safe distance. Charred bees littered the ground around it.
The other was scarcely recognizable. Its panels were disfigured with huge dents and holes you could put a flst through. The windows were shattered, and the landing gear was bent and broken. The machine was lurching to one side, nose down, its tail unit nearly broken off.
Corpses lay everywhere.
The ground was a maze of animal tracks—a confusing muddle of pits and furrows in the sandy soil. Several corpses had been smashed to pulp where they lay across the furrows. Another was little more than a pile of bloody rags attached to its unraveled intestines.
Over some of the corpses, a carpet of bees crawled. Others had obviously been hit by bullets, their brains or chests blown away Two, on close inspection, had suffered snakebites: their ankles were already swollen and purple. A dead puff adder, cut in two by a hail of rounds from a machine gun, lay nearby.
Quite a few of the corpses had their necks broken.
In the middle of the mayhem sat a young boy, calm and composed on his rock.
As they approached, Moses got up and walked toward them. He allowed them to hurry him to the small yellow 'giro and lift him in. Inside was a woman that he recognized as his true mother, sobbing, screaming, overcome by emotions so powerful that for the first time that morning, Moses was afraid.
The woman flung herself at him and wrapped him in her arms. She kept kissing him and weeping.
As the autogiro soared into the air, one of the men separated them, while another tried to calm the woman down. The first man grabbed Moses by the shoulders. "What happenedT
Moses gave him an inscrutable look. "Any context conceals within it the means of advancing one's own desires."
14
Callisto Trajectory, 2220
Jonas had learned just how spacers passed the interminable voyages between the stars. Prudence had been an accomplished tutor, and it had been a lot of fun to begin with . . . But two years was an awfully long time, and by the end of it his attentions had started to wander. Like the others, he had experimented with many different pastimes—some legal on Earth, some not. One of the rules was that whatever happened during a voyage, you never talked about it after the voyage was over. That way you could all go quietly nuts, indulge your favorite perversions—in between the tedious hours on the exercise machines, unless those were your favorite perversions—and as long as your insanity inflicted no lasting damage on anybody else, nobody would try to stop you. In the cramped environment of a deep-space cruiser, arguments were something you tried very hard to avoid. Even so, most voyages involved sundry acts of mayhem, overindulgence, and emotional breakdown. It was like being a member of the cast of a traveling theatrical road show, piled on top of your fellows twenty-four hours a day, tied to them emotionally and having to find ways to live with them because you either hung together or you'd hang separately. This voyage had included nothing that the medical database couldn't tell them how to fix, and by spacer standards that meant it had been an uneventful trip.
Now Prudence was busy, nudging Tiglath-Pileser in toward the shining half-moon of Callisto, and Jonas and the rest of the W team were filming their arrival. She knew that the Jovian Task Force had established a base on Europa, on the side that tidal forces kept facing the giant striped planet. It was foolish to imagine that the task force hadn't spotted her coming— Sir Charles would have been told of her every move, and he would know that she knew that. . . Her plan was to land an OWL far enough from the wheeler burial site to offer no useful clues, even if a task force probe chanced upon their drop zone. It would be easy to camouflage the lander with the netting she had brought. Sir Charles would discover their location soon enough, but by then they'd have the rest of the wheelers on board. With luck.
Angle and Charity were sitting on the veranda of the Gooma Zoodiversity Facility, watching a pride of lionesses stalking a herd of Thompson's gazelles. Zebras and giraffes were intermingled with the spindly, russet-colored, white-tailed deer. To the lionesses it must have seemed like a sweet shop—warm fudge, stripey mint taffies, long-necked candy canes. But these candies had legs, and used them with astonishing effectiveness to avoid being eaten. Through binoculars the sisters could see a baffled lioness staring at half a dozen young gazelles bounding randomly into the air on all four legs—a type of movement known as "pronking" that had evolved to disorient a predator.
Judging by the look on the nearest lioness's face, it was working.
"All kids change when they grow up, honey," said Angle. "You shouldn't blame yourself. He's had a hard time—no wonder the poor kid doesn't want to talk about any of it. Wait, it'll come."
"I know it will," said Charity. "But that doesn't make it any easier waiting. He's grown up, and I missed it! I wasn't there for him when he needed me . . . Nobody was there for him! Can you imagine what it must have been like?"
Angle could, all too vividly. She had hired a firm of private investigators, and they'd managed to piece together a fragmentary version of Moses' activities since his disappearance. His death had—obviously—been faked: he'd been kidnapped. They now knew he'd been running with the street kids in Free China, because some of the women of the Village had told them, and the Chinese connection suggested Hunters. Angle had a rather accurate idea of what kind of life that must have been . . . little of which she had passed on to Charity, and that only by way of euphemisms. The poor woman was suffering enough without being forced to face up to the full horror of Moses' early childhood, and it wouldn't improve her state of mind to open up the catalogue of casual rape, disease, murder, starvation, and cannibalism that characterized the anarchic world of the street child.
They also knew a little about Deng and Silent Snowflake. But even Angle's wealth had not dug out Xi Ming-Kuo or the story of the murdered Hunter, and Moses wasn't telling.
Today, as most days, he was helping the Ntuli twins with the animals. Charity was astonished at how his precocious talent with wild creatures had flowered. Now he would calm a distressed, injured animal in a few minutes. Even the most antisocial of their animals, like that obstreperous old bull wildebeest with part of a leg missing—relic of a battle with a crocodile—would eat out of his hand. He spent hours feeding ants to the aardvarks, and you got the impression that the ants were lining up for the privilege. The aardvarks simply adored him.
With people, though, it was a very different story. Moses much preferred his own company. He found it impossible to relate to children of his own age—he was fifteen now, but seldom acted like it—and Charity had quickly given up trying to force the issue. He tolerated the Ntuli brothers, Jomo and Yambe, ten years his elder—no doubt because they were his main route to the animals. She was sure that her son still felt an attachment to her, even a degree of affection . . . but if so, he hardly ever did or said anything to show it. She often wondered if she was fooling herself and all residual affection had long since died. Just occasionally, though, she would glance out of the corner of her eye and catch him staring at her with a wistful look on his face, but he always turned away when he noticed she was watching.
"It's been very hard, you know. Angle." Charity put down the binoculars. The lionesses had just caught a young gazelle and suffocated it with a bite to the throat, and while she normally accepted this as an unremarkable event in the nonstop savanna soap opera, today she was feeling a bit sensitive to the difference between winners and
losers. "You see, I'd always been convinced he was alive, despite all the apparent evidence. I just jell that he had to be. But I knew that mothers always think that when their child goes missing, and it feels just as certain when you're wrong . . .
"I'd all but given up hope, but I never dared admit it, not even to myself."
Angle nodded in sympathy but offered no comforting words—Charity wanted to be listened to, not comforted with empty platitudes. Being there was the most useful thing she could do.
"Then, when they told me he was not only alive but had been less than a thousand miles away for the last seven years— I just can't describe how that felt. I was happy, I was angry at how close he'd been all along ... I felt cheated and elated all at the same time!"
"Sure, honey, I understand," said Angie. "Can't feel it like you do, but I can see why someone in your shoes would feel that way Life mostly tugs us in contradictory directions, so I've observed. The trick is not to get torn apart."
"Yes . . . Now it's—well, 'anticlimax' is the wrong word . . . When I first saw him again—he's such a good-looking young man, much more so than his father ever was, you know . . . Did I ever tell you about Jerry?"
"No."
"Jeremiah, his full name was. He had a way with animals, too—Moses must have inherited it, only with him it's even stronger. One of the rhinos was sick and we were keeping it in a concrete pen. Jerry used to rub its back with a broom. One day he got between the rhino and the wall, and the rhino leaned on him. That's all, just a friendly nudge.
"Jerry died in the hospital a week later. I was seven months pregnant at the time, with Moses."
"That's awful. Yet you still work with animals?"
"It wasn't the rhino's fault."
Angie waited for the faraway look to fade, and for Charity's attention to revert to the present. "You were talking about Moses."
"Oh—yes. To touch him, to hold him close again—nobody could ever know how I felt at that moment! I came alive again, you see. And I still feel so amazingly fortunate ... I have my lost child back. But—oh, Angie, he's not the child I'd been imagining!"
The tears were starting again. They had to be cried out, painfully, repeatedly, until the hurt was dulled by time and familiarity: Angie knew there was no way to stop them.
In fact . . .
The two women wrapped their arms around each other, and their tears mingled as they ran down their faces.
What neither of them realized was that in his own peculiar way Moses was happy. There were so many animals, so many different kinds of animals. He could feel what they were thinking, what they wanted, what they feared, what they were going to do. How to help them. It was like being a talented composer and knowing what a page of musical notation would sound like without having to play it. Even when animals lied, which was seldom, it was obvious to Moses what truth the lie was intended to conceal. A harmless fly with yellow and black bands was a living lie, pretending to be an unpalatable wasp with a painful sting. A stick insect was a lie—the same lie. I'm not edible.
People were different. They lied all the time. "Don't he frightened, kid —I won't harm you." with a big toothy Hunter's smile . . . But the Hunter had wanted to hurt Moses, and had taken him away from everything he loved and made his childhood a living hell. It wasn't that Moses couldn't recognize the lie—a friendly smile felt friendly, a stick-on smile felt phony. The mismatch between the spoken word and the body language was jarring—but he couldn't work out what the motive was. He couldn't understand what the lies were for. So he was extremely wary when it came to people. Considering what people had done to him, this was hardly a surprise.
He was slowly beginning to accept that some people were different from the rest. Charity, for instance: she hardly ever lied to him, though, and even when she did, he dimly recognized that there was a motive, and it was friendly. They were kind lies—lies to protect him from unpalatable truths.
Now he was among friends, and as the weeks passed, Moses began to emerge from his shell. Like a nervous animal, he was easily spooked, but he became that tiny bit more human with every passing day.
Charity began to dare to hope. Why, only the other afternoon, Moses had touched her arm—shyly, almost as if by accident, and only for a moment. But he had reached out deliberately, without being prompted.
That had to be a good sign, surely?
The comet loomed ever closer—two years to impact. In a ramshackle building on a moon made of ice. Sir Charles Dunsmoore reflected sourly on the machinations of fate. He had been advised by the best brains on Earth . . . pity he hadn't had the wit to listen to them. Not the endless teams of highly trained experts that Uhlirach-Bengtsen had set up to advise him— Harris and Clementine. The old cliché of trash novels, the clever amateurs who out thought the professionals . . . except, he belatedly recognized, Harris and Clementine weren't amateurs. They were just professionals in a field he hadn't valued enough.
Jupiter. The aliens were on Jupiter. On. The. Planet.
Even now, after several years of frenzied redesign of equipment and a complete revision of the mission plans, he still found it hard to believe. An atmosphere of unbreathable gas, winds that made earthly hurricanes seem like a gentle breeze, high gravity, extremes of cold and pressure beyond human comprehension, and worst of all, no solid landmasses . . . Ridiculous. But there was no reason to doubt the observations. The "tame" wheeler sat inside the base, chattering away in wheelerese to whatever and wherever . . . Eventually they'd devised a method to find out where its tightly beamed squirts of modulated squark wavepackets were aimed, and where the replies were coming from. The evidence had been conclusive: whatever the wheelers were communicating with, it was on Jupiter.
Fortunately they had not been totally unprepared for this eventuality. They had tried to plan for even the most unlikely contingencies. His tame experts had possessed enough imagination to contemplate the possibility that the aliens were living on the main planet rather than one of its attendant moons, and they had provided appropriate equipment. They just hadn't given it much priority. So some of his peeved scientists had been assigned grunt duties, manning OWLs, donning suits, and pulling out layer upon layer of crates and boxes of things that Earth's masterminds had deemed to be more important than the treasures that had been squirreled away inside Skylark's spaceborne warehouse of supplies and equipment.
Paramount among them were six vacuum-balloons—thin, hght, and immensely strong spheres containing the lightest material there is—nothing. They were fashioned from fullerene nanoplates, nested sheets of pure carbon cross-linked by stabilizing atoms of rare-earth metals. When assembled, vacuum-balloons looked rather like large watermelons—round, pale green, split into segments by indentations.
Getting them down into the upper layers of Jupiter's atmosphere was easy: release them and let them fall. There was no way to get them back.
As well as the main flotation sphere, each vacuum-balloon had valves and pumps that could adjust its buoyancy by pumping some of the planet's air into or out of the cavity, and attitude thrusters that could propel it sideways. Suspended beneath, like a gondola on a hot-air balloon but much more firmly mounted, was a standard probe package—electronic eyes and ears, plus (a key feature) a detachable communications module which could be presented to any suitably receptive alien. The designers had reasoned that since the main aim of the probes was to initiate a dialogue with aliens, it would be a good idea to make the communicator portable.
Everything was set up so that a team aboard Skylark or any of its attendant vessels could control the balloons remotely. Because of Jupiter's rapid rotation and the planet's incessant winds, communications often had to be relayed through a series of slave units dumped into jovi-stationary orbit—the height at which the unit would rotate around Jupiter in the same time that the planet took to revolve on its axis, roughly a hundred thousand miles from the planet's center. At that distance they were farther out than Metis and Adrastea, the two innermost moons, but c
loser than the third, Amalthea. Launching the necessary equipment into the correct orbit was a routine but tedious task, so when Sir Charles finally authorized the deployment of a balloon probe it was several months before Skylark could drop the first one and Europa Base could receive its observations. The signals from the probe's eyes and ears could be sent to virtual reality headsets for use by the remote controllers, and stored in memory banks for further analysis. Earth, as always, got copies of everything.
As it sank through the tenuous outer layers of Jupiter's atmosphere, already buffeted by wild winds, the probe relayed a steady stream of scientific data—magnetic and meteorological, physical and biochemical, numerical and pictorial. Much of it confirmed what they already expected—for example, the structure of Jupiter's atmosphere.
In a sense, a planet's atmosphere never ends—like an old soldier, it only fades away. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between regions no denser than the interplanetary vacuum and those that are ten or a hundred times as dense. So it was generally agreed that Jupiter's atmosphere first became worthy of the name about five thousand miles above the cloud layer. This is the thermosphere, so called because it is warmer than some of the deeper layers, thanks to incoming heat from the Sun. "Warm" is a relative term, and the temperature is well below zero degrees Celsius. Within the thermosphere is the ionosphere, a thick layer of electrically charged particles that can reflect radio waves, just like the Earth's ionosphere. Lower down is the cooler mesosphere, and then the stratosphere, where the temperature drops dramatically to a mere one hundred degrees Kelvin—rather warmer than the boiling point of nitrogen at normal terrestrial pressure. At this depth, some twenty miles above the cloud tops, the temperature gradient abruptly reverses, thanks to internal heat rising from Jupiter's depths, and the troposphere begins. Although Jupiter's atmosphere is vast, the pressure at this level is low— less than it is at the summit of Earth's highest mountain.