Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  "But couldn't these have been made artificially, like the other ones you found and said were native Europan?"

  Jon grimaced. "Don't remind me. But I'm sure that these are not constructs. Even if it could be done—which I don't believe—it wouldn't make any sense. Wilsa and I visited a place on the Europan seabed where no one had ever been. No one would normally go there. Why put something where the chances are it wouldn't be found for decades?"

  Cyrus Mobarak stood up suddenly. "Outmaneuvered—by Nature. Winners and losers, eh? Damnation. Was it Margaret Fuller who said, 'I accept the universe'? Well, so do I."

  Nell looked at him and marveled at the resilience of the man. It would be easy to believe that Cyrus Mobarak was blessed naturally with the super nervous system that Hilda Brandt had sought to create. In the past hour he had seen years of planning apparently succeed and then, in just a few minutes, seen it thwarted—by the very person he himself had brought to Europa to help him win.

  Yet already Mobarak was recovering. There was no sign on his face of defeat or resignation. Like Hilda Brandt, he would take endless shocks and still come up for another round.

  "I think we must assume that the Europan fusion project will have to be put on hold," Mobarak went on briskly. "That affects you, Camille, and you too, David, at least as much as it affects me. Naturally, I hope that both of you will go on working with me. But if you want to accept other positions—"

  "I want to go back to DOS," Camille blurted. "I want you to arrange it and get me observing time."

  She could see that Mobarak was surprised and David was hurt. And she wasn't really ready, either, but Mobarak himself had said that it was the time for revelations. If Jon Perry were willing to stick his neck out, so was she.

  Camille waved a puny slip of printout. It was all she had to show. "This is from my DOS experiment—the one I left running in background mode when we came to the Jovian system. Results started to come in just before I left Abacus. But I couldn't understand them, and I didn't have my computer models available. Now, after Blowhole and the Moby, that doesn't seem to matter so much. I think I know what I'm seeing, even without my computer to confirm it. But I still need the best images that DOS can give me . . . because if I'm right, seven billion light-years out, halfway to infinite red shift, there's a uniform thermally radiating surface bigger than a galaxy."

  Her words had no effect on Cyrus Mobarak, she could see that. But they certainly did on David.

  "My God. A Stapledon! You think you're seeing evidence of a Stapledon-Dyson construct?" He turned to Mobarak. "Camille's saying that DOS has located an artificial structure, a monstrous one, surrounding a whole galaxy to capture its energy. That can only mean an intelligent civilization."

  Still it produced no reaction from Mobarak. "Seven billion light-years," he said slowly. "So whatever you saw, it happened seven billion years ago. Before the solar system even existed. If it was there, it must be long gone by now. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't strike me as being very important—not compared with modifying the surface of Europa, or sending Tristan off on Starseed to explore the Oort Cloud." He paused, until Bat prompted him with a curious throat-clearing sound. "But maybe I'm wrong. David, you understand this better than I do. And I trust your judgment. If you tell me that you want to leave here and go back to DOS with Camille, and follow up on what she's found . . . I'll find a way to arrange it."

  Nell's camera must have caught the uncertainty on David Lammerman's face, because Nell saw it herself. He was staring intently at Camille Hamilton, waiting, questioning. Is it all right? At last she gave a little nod, and he turned to face Cyrus Mobarak.

  "I do think that Camille's discovery is enormously important," he said quietly. "She ought to be given access to DOS at once, with as much observing time as she needs. And I'd like to return to DOS, too, and work with her. But not at once. Right now, if you'll let me—" he looked Mobarak directly in the eyes "—I think it's time that I started to learn the family business."

  Nell's camera was still running. And finally she had her own experience of winners and losers. She was a first-time winner, because for the one and only time in her life, her camera was capturing the soul of Cyrus Mobarak.

  But she was a loser, too, and a lousy reporter; because she knew that she would never bring herself to use the shot.

  26

  End Game

  Home. At last.

  Bat opened the door and ambled the length of Bat Cave, picking up old, defanged weapons, opening the tiny—and empty—cases for multimegaton bombs, and shuffling files at the same time that he admired their studied disorder.

  The communications unit was spilling over with messages, buzzing and chirping at him as he progressed along the room. He padded across to it. Half a dozen problems and solutions from members of the Puzzle Network; four Call Me signals from Magrit Knudsen, one from Mord, electronically itching to know what had happened; and five No Reply Needed messages from the staff of the Passenger Transport Department.

  Bat frowned at the final arriving line, still visible on the screen—"You did it! Today Europa, tomorrow the stars!"—as he headed for the kitchen. He paused on the threshold. All the way from Europa to Ganymede he had been promising himself a five-cheese, five-liter fondue, made in his special cook pot. But in his absence, Bat Cave had been invaded. The main kitchen work surface was occupied by a long, decorated cake that read "Welcome Home, Bat" in red marzipan.

  He leaned over and sniffed. The aroma was pleasant, but not quite right. He cut a small piece, popped it into his mouth, and revised his opinion. It was ghastly: oily and heavy, and sickly sweet.

  Bat carried the cake over to the recycling unit. But even as he poised it on the edge of the chute, that great head-to-toe weariness swept through him again. After all the talk and all the stirring of emotion at Mount Ararat, he had not been able to sleep for one moment on the return trip. Now he didn't have the energy to read his messages, or to call Magrit Knudsen, or to chat with Mord. He didn't even have the energy to eat. Everything would have to wait until tomorrow.

  He headed for the great bed, yawning, stripping off his clothes as he went, rubbing and scratching his smooth black belly. The silky sheets were as soft and cool and thoroughly delightful as he remembered them. He turned back the top one, climbed in naked, and slid his feet down.

  About a meter in, they stuck and would go no farther. Someone had turned the sheets back halfway to make an apple-pie bed.

  Yarrow Gobel. Progressed to a twelve-year-old, with an adolescent boy's ideas of what was funny. Bat sighed, climbed out, and patiently remade his bed.

  He climbed back in and closed his eyes. He was exhausted. But now, unbelievably, when all of his worries were gone and he was snug in the depths of Bat Cave, sleep still would not come. He blinked his eyes open and stared at the grainy ceiling. What was the problem?

  Not the events in the mobile lab at Blowhole, even though he had suffered the ignominy of being wrong.

  Had it come after that, at Ararat Base? Bat had observed the duos and trios, forming before his astonished eyes and establishing themselves in real-time. Cyrus Mobarak and Tristan Morgan, feeling their way toward the use of a Moby in Project Starseed, with David Lammerman as the accepted intermediary. A David Lammerman who was also working out, with Camille's blessing and assistance, a new father-son relationship. And a Tristan Morgan who had half his mind on Wilsa Sheer—while she, Camille, and Jon Perry puzzled their way toward the structure of their own relationship. They might pursue their separate careers, but they would always share a unique heritage. Naturally they were fascinated by each other, and also by Hilda Brandt. They did not seem to resent what she had done. To children who had never known parents, perhaps she was the nearest thing to a mother that they would ever have.

  And then there was Brandt herself. She had not accepted that Europa might lose its restricted status, even when she thought that the life forms there were synthetic. She could protect it now, wit
h a far better chance of success than before.

  Except that Cyrus Mobarak, too, did not give up easily. There would be a gigantic battle over the Europan fusion project, fought at every public and private level of science, politics, and skullduggery. As to who might win, Mobarak or Brandt . . . that was a real problem, worthy of the top brains in the Puzzle Network.

  And yet none of that was Bat's concern. What afflicted him was a worry far more personal.

  He clambered wearily out of bed again and went to the message unit. He ignored the Puzzle Network entries, but he read all of the others. Not one of them had anything to do with work. They were inquiries about his journey to Europa, and announcements of forthcoming meetings—social, not professional. Two were simply invitations to dinner!

  Bat returned to bed. People were misinterpreting his trip to Europa. They seemed to think it signaled a complete change in his personality. He knew what they were after. They wanted a sign that read—in their own distorted terms—"Happy Ending."

  They were wrong, of course. Life was not a video show. And yet, maybe that was not the real message . . .

  Bat closed his eyes. But he could not close his ears and his mind. Around Bat Cave, in every direction, the interior of Ganymede pulsed with activity. Humans, as busy as termites, bored and built and ran and fetched and carried; thousand after thousand of them, eternally awake, endlessly bustling. He imagined that he could actually hear them.

  And it could only get worse. The population of Ganymede was increasing. The change was obvious in the transportation manifests, which showed more and more flights in and out every year, bigger and bigger ships carrying larger numbers of passengers and heavier cargoes. Where would it end? With Ganymede the natural nexus between the Inner and Outer Systems, how long would it be before it was groaning under the burden of too many people, like Earth before the Great War?

  Bat opened his eyes again. His trip away from the cave had allowed him to see the problem. Perhaps it had also provided a solution—the only solution that he could imagine, anywhere within the whole solar system.

  He climbed out of bed for one last time and returned to the message terminal.

  "Mord." Bat spoke to the skeptical face that appeared at last on the screen. He had made a decision. He was willing to put his money on Hilda Brandt. "What do you think of the idea of permanent relocation to Europa?"

  POSTLUDE

  A quarter of a century; a hundred major radiation storms and the random buffeting of solar winds; half a dozen passages through the jumble of the Asteroid Belt. The original orbits had been twisted and tugged and turned, until no trajectory analysis could ever track their chaos.

  First year: As the limits of conventional survival were reached and passed, second-stage techniques took over. Tissue resorption began. Arms and legs vanished; internal organs modified their functions. Hearts and livers and lungs atrophied, while each small body shrank and rounded to a smooth, featureless ovoid.

  Five years: The pod interiors hovered at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Within them, vital functions had long since slowed and stopped. Brains became fixed crystalline matrices, through whose frozen networks the minimal signals flickered like uneasy dreams.

  Decades: The end of the Great War was distant history, but the infants would not die. Time and survival had lost meaning. It was unimportant to say that discovery might come today, tomorrow, or in the far future.

  * * *

  At long last, the six pods had converged close to their original tight grouping, floating from alien skies once more into the busy routes of commerce. From its vantage point far above the ecliptic, a broad-beam survey unit bathed the potential menaces to shipping in a ghostly glimmer of pale violet. The beam moved away. Half a minute later it swung back for a puzzled second look.

  In their icy wombs the children waited. Time stretched on, toward the hour of second birth.

  THE END