by Ian Stewart
Her current position was toward the left side of the trailing edge of the city known as Sparkling Spires of the Colder Deep. Nineteen miles below and a hundred and sixty to leeward, deep in Secondhomes northern tropospheric current, drifted the drop-zone city—Whispering Volve of Late Morning. Her prompter informed Halfholder that there were no new changes to the drop zone's flight plan. Still steady, level flight.
As long as it stayed that way, she might have a chance of survival.
"Lovely," said Prudence. "Like stealing tortilla chips from a chihuahila." The probe was falling fast, as Jonas relived his hacker past, charming his way past its software defenses and sending it diving into the nether regions of the Jovian atmosphere at the same speed as a freely falling body with the same cross-section and mass . . . The sooner it was a lot lower down, the happier they'd all be . . .
"Maybe," said Jonas. "I'm still a bit rusty. They may guess what happened, and who did it. I had to wing it with the temperature readings—not enough time to simulate them properly, the damned security system nearly caught me—"
Prudence wasn't worried. "From their point of view there was an explosion inside the flotation chamber. No reason why anything should work correctly after that."
"Mmmm . . . depends what questions they ask. They could look at the numbers I fed them and see if Benford's Law holds good ... Do my numbers have the correct distribution of initial digits? I tried my best . . . I'm sure I got more ones than twos and more twos than anything el—"
"Jonas, what the devil are you rambling on about?"
"Didn't realize you were listening, Bailey. Uh—there's a surprising statistical regularity about the numbers that turn up in real observations . . . the frequency distribution has to have logarithmic differences, and—"
"Oh, that," said Bailey dismissively. He had no idea what Jonas was talking about, but a producer never admitted ignorance. "Not a problem, surely?"
Prudence stepped in. "I think Jonas was warning us that there are lots of ways to investigate phony data and deduce that they're phony, Bailey. But I'm still pretty sure we've gotten away with it. Charles will go for the direct, obvious investigation, nothing subtle. His main aim will be to dump the blame on some subordinate—find a convenient scapegoat."
Cashew wasn't convinced. "How can you be so sure? Why would he behave like that when he needs the support of his whole team to get the comet diverted?"
Prudence gave a hollow laugh. "Cash, believe me, I know the animal and it can't change its stripes. Faced with the imminent end of the universe, Charles's main objective would be to make sure nobody managed to pin it on him."
An age dragged past—actually less than a minute. Then . . ."Cloud cover coming up," said Jonas.
"Okay, Jonas, time for me to take over." Once into the clouds, there would be no way for Skylark to train its telescopes on where the wreckage of the probe ought to be, and discover that it wasn't. She licked her lips, a sign that she was more nervous than appearances might indicate, and wrapped her hands around the two remote pilot grips that Jonas had rigged for her. She could have used voice control, but she preferred to fly the thing like a ship.
A flatfilm screen showed the stolen probe's instrument readouts and secondary controls panel, with a slowly drifting scene of distant cloud tops in one corner. Jonas had hacked his way into everything. The vacuum-balloon's entire control system was theirs, body and soul. Tiglath-Pileser had acquired itself a Jupiter probe and was going exploring. Maybe Sir Charles Dunsmoore was too chicken to go hunting aliens where aliens had to be, but now someone with balls was taking charge. With a whoop of pure joy. Prudence opened the gas valves, and Montgolfier swooped down among the swirling orange clouds.
15
Secondhome, 2221
Nervous beyond all precedent, now that the moment had come, Halfholder hesitated, continuing to scan the deserted streets for the slightest sign of motion. What she was about to do was contrary to age-old law: if she was caught, the penalty would be the horror of ritual deflation.
A flicker of movement caught her far-eyes, and she tensed— but it was only a subsentient cycler, snuffling aimlessly along a side street in search of waste. There was no prospect of that, not so near the Edge, but the ancient routines remained true to their evolutionary programs, a sign of the Elders' ludicrous reluctance to change the old ways. The cyclers ridged wheels made a mechanical clicking sound as it rolled across the living scaly surface of the floating city With relief she saw that it had no gravities and no pseudo-eye. Harmless. Nevertheless, she took refuge in the shadow of the dome's lip until the cycler had pottered away behind a cluster of dormant buildings.
The fringemass shimmered in the city's turbulent wash . . . beckoning, threatening—promising.
Halfholder secured her beltbag more tightly, excreted a touch more liftgas into her buoyancy bubbles, and floated free of the dome.
* * *
An awed silence had descended on Tiglath-Pileser. The probe had made a safe entrance into the thicker layers of Jupiter's atmosphere and was now sinking slowly deeper, buoyed up by its nanoshell vacuum-balloon.
There was more light down here than they'd expected. It must be bouncing off the clouds, trickling down the fractal shafts between one cloud and the next ... Or maybe there was some kind of bioluminescence at work ... To the unaided eye the lighting was gloomy and sepulchral, but a simple CCD photo-multiplier revealed the scenery in vivid color and brilliant contrast. The infrared images were especially striking—shimmery, iridescent shapes with softly luminous edges like a painting by El Greco . . .
Sir Charles, true to form, had been concentrating on establishing communications with the Jovians on their favored squark waveband. Exploring the Jovian atmosphere was more of a displacement activity; his heart hadn't really been in it ... In Sir Charles's view, if he had to encounter aliens, he preferred to do so when they weren't present.
It was now becoming evident what he had been missing by not dispatching balloon probes into the clouds. This wasn't just some crummy quasi-bacteria, pseudoalgae, and giant seaweed.
"Life," said Cashew. "Everywhere, life. It's a jungle."
"More like an ocean," said Jonas. "Earth's deep trenches."
" 'Life turns up everywhere it can,'" Bailey quoted." 'Life turns up everywhere it can't.'"
"It certainly turns up where nobody expects it," said Prudence. "Most of these creatures seem to be some kind of gasbag."
"Got to be," said Jonas. "Look how they're hovering. And look at the bulbous shapes of the things!"
"So ... to them, Jupiter's atmosphere is really one gigantic ocean, and they're floating in it?"
"Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Alien fishes, the lot of them."
Their eyes remained glued to the screen as an endless succession of strange creatures drifted past. There were gasbags with tendrils and gasbags with weird protuberances whose function was a total mystery . . . there were enormous gasbags and medium ones and tiny, tiny ones . . . there were flocks of clumsy birdlike creatures . . . there were things that looked like oversized pancakes, things that looked like orange marrows, and things that looked like nothing any human being had ever seen before. Were they animals or plants? Did such a distinction make any sense?
A new creature swam into sight, emerging into dim silhouette from the murky distance. Long tendrils dangled below an upper body like a slab of torn styrofoam. The outline of the top edge was a complex series of sharp angles and elaborate curlicues . . . Prudence pinged it with the sonar to find out how far away it was.
The echo took forever to return.
"Hey, everyone: look at that!" The sonar must be on the blink— it reckons that thing is twelve miles away! But that would make it absolutely gigantic^
Jonas had run an instant diagnostic. "It is absolutely gigantic, Pru. A hundred miles long if it's an inch. Why not? Jupiter is vast —the cloud layer has a hundred and twenty times the surface area of the Earth, and the atmosphere is forty thousand miles deep!
Why shouldn't there be creatures here that make our whales and giant squid look like plankton?"
"Good point. It's just hard to take in." She paused to collect her thoughts. "Hmm, there's a faint echo of another of the things, even farther down. I'll move the probe over to the nearer one, and we'll take a closer look."
The probe drifted sideways for a moment, buffeted by the ever-present winds, and began to dive.
* * *
It was the rumors that had first attracted Halfholder's attention—the quiet, excited whispers, the hooded glances. There were pheromones of intrigue in the air, concentrating in unlikely corners, tantalizing her jaded, cloistered senses.
There was a word: the Instrumentality. It hinted at novelty, at subversion, at unauthorized conclaves of free-thinking blimps . . .
Cautiously she asked indirect questions, their meaning hidden under layers of metaphor. She began to frequent disreputable quarters of the city, until her patient search paid off. It was true: the Instrumentality existed, secret groups spread across innumerable cities. As proof, the forbidden sport had once more been revived—illicit, delicious.
Skydiving!
Free-fall between cities, plunging without restraint through the untamed skies, prohibited because of ancient abuses and the Elders' pathological fear of personal danger. The penalties were severe—permanent monitoring, restricted estivation rights, recalcitrance tattoos ... in extreme cases, deflation. But the rewards outweighed the risks, for Halfholder craved excitement, and skydiving offered that and more—intense and undiluted. And there was a political dimension that proved even more irresistible. The skydivers were actively trying to further the Policy of Benign Neglect. They had offcast a new kind of wheeler, a rogue, externally unremarkable but equipped with a different kind of mind. The Instrumentality had infiltrated hundreds of rogue wheelers into the Diversion Engines on the Inner Moons, and one day they would strike! If the plan succeeded, no longer would snowstones rain destruction on the innocent faces of the lesser worlds.
It appealed to her sense of cosmic unity
She climbed the ranks of the subversive organization—first neophyte, then novice. She trained, in secret, and rose to initiate-designate. And what an initiation it was to be! Only one dive in ten thousand amounted to more than symbolic defiance. But the Instrumentality had taken note of her unusual political commitment and had blessed her with high honor.
Her initiation would further the Cause by direct action.
At first even Halfholder was wracked with doubt. The action demanded seemed too extreme, a crime that went far beyond harmless insubordination. The Effectuators of the Instrumentality became more ardent, more persuasive. The Elders are weak and lazy. Strike hut once, and they will fall. Charmed, flattered, aroused, entranced, bewildered, she became a willing accessory to her own moral seduction. To experience the ecstasy of skydiving, she would risk all. She had never wanted anything so much in her entire life. She existed in a suppressed frenzy of anticipation, intoxicated beyond endurance by the prospect of ultimate freedom.
The Effectuators promised her an emotional experience beyond all imagination. They promised that her actions would be celebrated forever in song and legend.
She believed them.
Halfholder rocked in the freshening winds, near-paralyzed by terror, as the scaly flatness of the city slab fell away. A random eddy caught her. In a burst of manic energy she fought against it. This was a time to fly low, not yet a time to soar.
With an effort, she trailed her tentacles, locked their brace-ring muscles rigid with a quick, instinctive pressure grip, and exhaled a small quantity of liftgas. Her sensitive tips brushed the outermost fronds of the barrier, only for her to blunder immediately into a wild flurry of vortex filaments. Cursing herself for making so elementary an error despite all her training, Halfholder tumbled end over end, crashing through the feathery strands of airweed, ripping branches out so that dark, rubbery sap began to well from the severed roots, plunging out of control between a dozen pulsating trunks, any of which could have ruptured her brain case with its terrible spines. Before she could feel the fear, she was free, buffeted by the city's wash.
The fringemass loomed. She caught a quick glimpse of the flailing tendrils at the city's stern, each as thick as a large building and as long as Main Avenue, propelling it faster than the ever-present current, but in the same general direction. Only then, when she was comparatively safe, did the fear hit her— and she found herself floundering, close to panic.
She was saved by a flock of rippling pancake birds, which scattered in alarm at the unprecedented intruder as she flopped, out of control, from one rubbery disk to another. The humor of the situation swept the fear away. As the shy creatures slopped clumsily to right and left, she emitted a high-pitched whistle. At once the birds shot skyward, as they always did when panicked. Then Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam remembered her training, excreted a large bubble of liftgas, and fell.
Suddenly, wilder than she had ever imagined, the rush hit her, and she was wheeling through Secondhome's thick atmosphere, riding the thermals, swerving to right and left, finally free. Free of care, free of hope, free of any emotion save the delicious joy of being at one with the air and the planet. Now she felt right to the core of her lifesoul. She knew, beyond any shadow of any doubt, that the Elders were wrong. Too long in control, they had allowed their respect for cosmic wisdom to atrophy. Too hidebound, their rigid minds were unable to encompass the utter strangeness of the universe, of its multitude of beings— some so unimaginable that even she. Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam, at one with the Lifesoul Cherisher, could not fathom them. Too tentative, too frightened, so that for tens of millions of years the Elders had pursued their insane bombardment of every nearby solid body—tiny Meltball, shrouded Acidglobe, the double planets Poisonblue and Ruggedrock, enigmatic Reddust, deceptive Manyrings, the Fartheroutworlds . . .
It was warfare on a cosmic scale, waged against the innocent— a perversion of the artistry of the Lifesoul Cherisher.
It was wrong.
Despite herself, though, she had to admit that the error was understandable. Throughout much of blimp evolution, and before, Firsthome had suffered the terrors of snowstrike. The Elders had learned to control it—and had belatedly learned the error of redirecting incoming snowstones at their own star. This apparently harmless act, continued over a billion years, had done incalculable damage to their parent star. Only the dismal Exodus to Secondhome, a desperate interstellar voyage on domesticated magnetotori, had saved them—but at a terrible cost.
So, when Secondhome's gravipulsor engines were being installed on its four major moons, the Elders adopted a different strategy. There were two choices. One was to redirect the snow-stones into random orbits. Blimp technology could easily impart enough energy to fling them out of the system altogether, but there was an ethical obstacle: A loose snowstone in the interstellar depths might one day encounter some other gas giant civilization and collide with its planet or its star. The blimps were terrified of loose snowstones themselves and were constitutionally incapable of creating more, however small the risk might be.
Which left only the second option: redirect the snowstones to collide with the lesser worlds.
The Elders had convinced themselves that this was the only safe course. It would be vandalism on a cosmic scale, leaving those worlds scarred and unable ever to support life—but that was a small price to pay, and in any case none of them, not even Manyrings, possessed life-sustaining atmospheres. Manyrings had the right gases, but it was too cold.
The skydivers took a different view, the Policy of Benign Neglect. The lesser worlds, lifeless as they must be, danced to the rhythms of the Lifesoul Cherisher. Their artistry deserved respect, not cosmic vandalism. And there was more. Terrified by even the faintest prospect of snowstrike, the Elders had robbed their own ecosystem of its most precious tutor—the random hand of chaos. For—so the sky divers believed—the cities needed the de
vastation of snowstrike, of occasional massive impacts in the upper atmosphere, to disturb the planetary ecosystem and favor the growth of diversity It made sense to Halfholder: she remembered how the aeroplankton had increased after the fireworks.
Halfholder suddenly saw just how strange the universe could be. Why, even now, even in the corrosive nitrox atmosphere of Poisonblue, there might be some rudimentary form of pseudo-life, struggling to maintain a precarious existence against all the chemical odds . . . The wheelers said that Poisonblue's nitrox was unbalanced. What was pumping it? Fivemoonlike vulcanism? In her near-madness she imagined exotic collections of tightly knit molecules, perhaps so improbably designed that they actually made use of the poison to power their alien metabolism. Over aeons, those molecules might evolve into huge, lumbering creatures, staggering across the blistering rock, sloshing feebly in the seething oceans of molten ice . . . How else could the planets atmosphere remain so far from equilibrium, be so poisonous?
Her rational self would have rejected such thoughts instantly, for they were against all the teaching, all the accumulated knowledge of her species. But here, soaring unencumbered on the primal winds of Secondhome, her mind escaped its accustomed bounds and began to imagine not just the improbable, but the blatantly impossible. For in such a state of mind, nothing could be impossible.
Why, even the overthrow of the Elders was conceivable. And with it, the first, tentative steps toward the salvation of this wrecked, maltreated Solar System. And the resumed evolution of the floating cities, and the start of the long path back to spiritual health and genetic renewal. Even as the Elders protected their world, they were slowly bringing about its ruination. They had to be stopped.