Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  The room shifted unexpectedly as Meyer tried to stand, throwing him to the floor. “I don’t feel well.”

  “Welcome to living in the air. It’s usually pretty stable, but every four or five days, the traveling winds come around at the cloud layer and remind us we’re not on solid ground.” The medtech shrugged. “Then again, the ground’s no picnic, either. That’s why we’re floating up here. Feels like Earth, doesn’t it?”

  “Except for the swaying.”

  “That could be solved if we could grow Venusian bodies that don’t crush halfway to the surface — it’s 92 times Earth’s pressure. We can lick the temperature problem. It’s over 460 everywhere on the Venusian surface, like a planet-sized greenhouse, close enough to Mercury’s max, 420, to benefit from their high temp research. But we’re still struggling with the pressure.”

  Meyer sighed. “I suppose I’m to see Reege?”

  Meyer followed the medtech down a long hallway with several glass doors. Through one of them, green bodies hung lifeless. They resembled humans only in basic form; they looked more like foliage. “What are those?” Meyer asked, jabbing a finger at a door in passing.

  The medtech glanced back at Meyer, but didn’t slow down. “We call those the Martians. They’re experimental photosynthetic biobods, modeled after Earth plants, green from the chlorophyll, an attempt to grow a fully environment-adapted biobod, capable of breathing the Venusian atmo and withstanding the environment. The surface atmo is almost all carbon dioxide — add a little water, and you get photosynthesis. The problem is that there’s none on the surface, and it never rains.” She glanced back again and scowled. “They wouldn’t last very long down there without a healthy supply of water — if they could take the pressure, which they can’t.”

  Arriving at the end of the hallway, the medtech swung open a hand-carved wooden door — in stark contrast to the glass and steel everywhere else — and escorted Meyer inside. There at his desk, identical to the one on Mercury and Earth, sat a twin to Earth’s Reege.

  “Good to meet you, Meyer. Sit down, please. I have some questions for you.” Reege smiled pleasantly and indicated a chair opposite his desk.

  Meyer hesitated; he remained standing, ready to run if needed. “Before we get comfortable and someone jabs me in the neck with a hypo, let me ask you a question. Why am I here?”

  Venusian Reege’s smile faded. “An excellent question, Meyer. Why do you think you’re here?”

  Meyer relaxed and sat down. “First, I’m here to establish that you’re the real Benton Reege, using a simple question that you would answer in a specific way — which you’ve done. The rest I’m a little hazy on, now. When I left for Mercury — this morning, was it? — I thought there was an imposter Reege on one of the colonies, undermining the Reege empire from within, and I was supposed to find him. When I saw Reege on Mercury, I figured he was the imposter, and my job was done.”

  “But you’re no longer sure of this?” Reege steepled his fingers and looked gravely over them.

  Meyer hesitated and fiddled with a pen lying on the desk. “Mercurian Reege told me an interesting — and plausible — story about there already being bona fide Reeges on all of the colonies.”

  Fidgeting in his chair, Reege stared at his desk for a minute before looking up to answer. “That’s correct; there are ten of us.”

  Meyer cocked his head to one side. “Thus, my dilemma. If he’s not the imposter, why’d he drug me and send me here? If he is the imposter, why’d he send me here instead of just killing me or something?”

  “Let me be clear. That Reege should not have confided this information to you; but the fact that he did establishes his authenticity. The imposter would not have known this fact; the particular team involved in that one-time experiment are all fiercely loyal — and closely monitored.” Reege looked up and smiled, but he looked past Meyer. “Isn’t that right, Dolores?”

  Meyer realized too late that he hadn’t seen the redheaded medtech leave. Twisting violently, he tried to spin around and stand simultaneously, but she was quicker, and the hypo found its mark.

  “Fiercely loyal, Mr. Reege,” she said, smiling, as Meyer lost consciousness for the second time that day.

  * * *

  Squish.

  Meyer groggily opened his eyes after a few minutes. Even with the haze, he knew he was alone. Struggling to his feet, he lurched toward a door.

  A sumo wrestler biobod? Am I back on Mercury?

  The door swung open. A husky, dark-skinned man in a Reege lab coat paused in the doorway, frowning. “See what happens when you don’t wait long enough? Sit down.”

  Shaking his head, Meyer refused. “I’m okay now,” he wheezed. “Where am I?”

  The medtech pointed to the window. “Look.”

  Stumbling over, Meyer looked outside at the reddish-orange desert landscape. Mars, probably the Victoria Crater, judging by the view. Every schoolchild had memorized that crater, since it was near the site of Earth’s first off-world colony.

  That explained the plus-sized biobod. The Mars gravity and pressure were similar to Mercury’s, but without the temperature extremes — merely 140 below on the South Pole’s winter ice cap to a pleasant 20 above in summer up north. Because of the planet’s tilt and lopsided orbit, the seasons got milder the farther north you went. Near equatorial Victoria Crater was practically idyllic for Mars — bearable temperatures and interesting views.

  “Mr. Reege is waiting,” the medtech said drily, and led the way out the door and around the perimeter of a large round room where several other medtechs busied themselves. “It’s mostly carbon dioxide here, like Venus — didn’t you come from there just now? — but here we can get oxygen and small amounts of nitrogen from the atmo, too, so we can recycle our air.”

  “What? No green Martian bodies here?”

  The medtech’s face contorted, confused. “Why would there be — oh! You saw the Martians, didn’t you?”

  Meyer grinned.

  “Those are actually based on a working design we use here. Oh, don’t you raise an eyebrow at me! They’re up at the North Pole, where there’s plenty of ice we can melt.” The medtech headed down a hallway nearly opposite the squisher recovery room.

  “So, there really are little green men on Mars?”

  Laughing, the medtech corrected, “Big green men.” He turned a corner and knocked on a plain metal door, then opened it.

  Reege stood by a window. He turned as Meyer entered.

  Meyer sighed, and quizzed him as he had the other two. “If you’re going to stick me like the others, just do it now,” he said tiredly after a swallow of water the medtech had offered him before leaving. Meyer sat down.

  “No, we drug the water instead,” Reege said with a straight face, then chuckled. “Just kidding; it’s safe.” He turned his head and stared out the window.

  “Is there really an imposter, Mr. Reege?”

  Reege walked to the door. “No tricks, Meyer. Come with me.” He left abruptly.

  Meyer followed quickly, but struggled to catch up to Reege through frequent twists and turns down labyrinthine hallways. At last, Meyer found Reege waiting by an open door.

  “In here,” Reege said and slipped inside. “Close the door behind you. This is just between us.”

  Once closed in, Meyer eyed Reege suspiciously. “I don’t trust you.”

  “That’s okay; I trust you — that’s why you were hired for this task.” Reege sighed. “Could you take a seat over there, please? This … procedure will only take a moment.”

  Meyer hesitated.

  “I assure you, you’ll be out of here in no time at all. Put on that headset by the chair.”

  Still suspicious, Meyer settled into the seat and donned the headset.

  * * *

  Squish.

  Meyer fought the urge to escape this time; he waited for the inevitable arrival of a medtech to escort him to Reege.

  “Jupiter, I presume,” he croaked.


  “No,” giggled a statuesque blonde woman, looking straight off Malibu beach. “We can’t make biobods for the gas giants! You’re on one of a few dozen observation stations in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Reege squished in earlier to meet you.” She huffed and glanced at the door.

  Meyer stood. “Shall we go?”

  Navigating the curved hallways in the wagon-wheel space station to a transport tube that would take them across the spokes to the other side, Meyer chatted with the blonde medtech. Spinning at one-gee and atmoed with Earth air, his space station biobod was identical to his now-destroyed Earth body — except for the scar.

  “We do more than just monitoring out here, you know,” she said defensively when Meyer challenged the usefulness of observation stations. “We also have raw mineral mining operations all over these asteroids, especially the M-types — metallic, that is. Like Mars, these are working colonies here, not just research colonies. That’s how we’ve been able to multiply the number of observation stations out here so quickly, not to mention that the waveguides here established the original departure points for the outer system colonies. This station orbits our mining HQ on Ceres — also considered a dwarf planet for the last century, by the way; look out that window there — which has about a third of the total mass in the main belt, comprised of some two million asteroids. Of course, we’re tracking the other three main asteroids, Vesta — that’s the only one you can see with the naked eye from Earth — Pallas and Hygiea. Together, they make up another half the mass of Ceres.”

  “So, if those four are half the material out here, the other two million asteroids are pretty small?”

  “In comparison, yes. But the one that hit Earth 65 million years ago was still big enough to make the dinosaurs extinct!”

  Meyer laughed. “Point taken. By the way, with all those asteroids and comets out here, how do you keep from hitting them? This space station is huge!”

  The medtech grinned. “First off, comets are different; asteroids don’t have a coma, a fuzzy atmo formed from frozen gases released as a comet nears the Sun. The gases grab dust, which makes the comet’s tail. With the exception of a few main-belt comets orbiting here, most comets only come through the asteroid belt; even the short-period comets — recurring in less than 200 years — originate farther out. The closest is near Jupiter’s orbit; most travel well past the Kuiper belt, where Pluto orbits, some may even go to the edge of the Solar System. We still don’t know for sure, but we think the long-period comets come from the Oort cloud.”

  The medtech paused outside Reege’s office. “As for the asteroids in the main belt here, they look bunched together on star maps, but there’s an incredible amount of space for all of them, so don’t worry. You can go on in; maybe we’ll get to talk later.” The blonde smiled affectionately and retreated around the hallway.

  Unlikely, considering my previous receptions. Furious, Meyer twisted the doorknob and barged in unannounced. “Why am I here?” he asked without preamble. Once verified, before Reege could distract him Meyer blurted out angrily, “Why bother with the formalities, Reege? Why not just drug me and get on with it?”

  Reege shrugged. “Okay,” he said simply and went back to his work.

  Rustling behind Meyer was quickly followed by a sharp pain in his neck. Me and my big—

  * * *

  Squish.

  I’m getting tired of this routine.

  A few minutes later, Meyer followed a medtech to Reege’s office on the largest of Jupiter’s 63 named moons, Ganymede.

  “Believe it or not,” Reege said, staring out a window overlooking Jupiter, soon after the introductory formalities established him as the genuine Jovian Reege, “I don’t own the entire Solar System, as some maintain. I gave the colonies on Io, Europa and Callisto — the other Galilean moons — to friends years ago.” Chuckling, he turned to Meyer. “I kept Ganymede because it’s more interesting. Unlike the other satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede has its own magnetosphere, and it’s permanently embedded in Jupiter’s, which is 14 times larger than Earth’s — enough to protect all four Galilean moons from solar wind. There’s nothing else like it.”

  Meyer found his biobod agile and graceful, considering Ganymede’s one-sixth-gee made for a huge biobod, even by Mercurian standards. Joining Reege at the window, he said, casually, “Your medtech claimed your office always faces Jupiter?”

  Reege smiled and turned back to the window. “Ganymede is tidally locked, with this face always inward. You’re fortunate today to see the Great Red Spot — over there, just on the edge of the horizon. It fluctuates, sometimes disappears for a while, but it always comes back, spinning counter-clockwise, moving within an atmospheric band one way, while other bands around it move the other way. The time-lapse vids are spectacular.”

  “I saw one in the squisher recovery room,” Meyer said. “I found it unsettling.”

  “You probably get seasick on Earth, don’t you?” Reege headed for his desk without waiting for an answer. “That planet is fascinating, Meyer, worth every solcred it takes to study it. It has rings, you know, mostly dust and not even noticed until the late 20th century. It generates more heat than it gets from the Sun. It’s a giant gravity well, big enough to have helped shape the entire Solar System. Comets routinely collide with it, often enough that they used to call it the Solar System’s vacuum cleaner back in the 20th — they erroneously thought that passing cosmic bodies that weren’t pulled in were swept to the outer system and kept away from the inner system planets.”

  Meyer was skeptical. “I know Jupiter’s big, but surely it’s not that big!” He took a seat facing Reege’s desk.

  “It is, actually,” said Reege. “The gravitational field acts on a couple thousand asteroids, most of them as far away from here as Mars, some more like the distance to the Sun. They’re clustered in two so-called camps, the ‘Greeks’ leading Jupiter’s orbit and the ‘Trojans’ following it.”

  The medtech spouted a lot of information Meyer wasn’t interested in — like that Ganymede was between negative 120 and 200, with an oxygen-rich atmo — but there was one thing Meyer didn’t quite believe. “Is it true that Europa orbits exactly twice for every orbit of Ganymede? And Io orbits exactly four times? That seems awfully convenient to be a coincidence.”

  “It’s true; it’s called orbital resonance. And you’re stalling.”

  Smiling, Meyer said, “Can we dispense with drugging me this time? Just take me to your lab and I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Fair enough,” Reege said, standing. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Squish.

  Meyer started to remember. He talked to Jovian Reege, an unexpectedly civil conversation; he followed Reege to a lab, where he was asked to sit down; they talked some more, and then … he was squished to Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 60 known moons.

  With a one-seventh-gee biobod, Meyer thought at first that he was still on Ganymede and had just fallen asleep. The medtech in the squisher recovery room corrected him, and took him to Reege for their usual conversation.

  Like Jovian Reege, Saturnal Reege’s office took advantage of Titan’s tidally-locked orbit for a magnificent permanent vidview of Saturn, with its unique ice ring system. Unlike Ganymede, Titan’s opaque atmo prevented a direct view; the image came from an observer craft Reege had put in geosynchronous orbit.

  “It’s very similar to Jupiter in some respects,” Reege reflected, glancing toward the vidwindow from his desk. “It has atmospheric banding, although the winds are much faster, reaching 1800 clicks per hour. The most striking difference, of course, is from the planetary rings; they’re actually an uncountable number of individual particles, mostly ice, anywhere from dust to the size of a small ground transport vehicle. They even have their own atmo.”

  Meyer soon tired of Reege’s dissertation, finding him somewhat dry and far less congenial that Jovian Reege. “I thought there were several colonies on Titan? This facility seems sm
aller than the one on Ganymede.”

  “It is,” Reege said, with an annoyed twang. “There’s several dozen colonies, in fact. They’re very popular; once you clear the dense, nitrogen-rich atmo haze around a colony, you find that the ground features resemble Earth’s. But this particular colony is strictly research. We’re trying to replicate the kinds of conditions that spawned life on Earth.”

  Stunned, Meyer stared. “You’re trying to create life?”

  Reege offered a half-smile as an answer and rose. “I think you know the drill at this point. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Squish.

  Meyer sat up and swung his legs over the chair. They seemed very much like his Earth legs. Rubbing his temples, memories flooded his mind.

  He’d observed Uranus from Reege’s orbiter, noted its 27 moons named for characters from Shakespeare and Pope, and marveled at its 13 distinct ring systems — mostly ice, like Saturn’s, but up and down instead of across, due to Uranus’ odd axial tilt, almost perpendicular to its orbit. It made for some odd weather, which Reege was studying for some experiments in the asteroid belt. Reege was reluctant to give specific details, but Meyer got the impression he was attempting to terraform one of the oddly-spinning asteroids in the main belt.