by Ben Bova
With a slight shrug, the doctor replied, “Now we wait for the computer to analyze your scan and blood test. That might take a few hours. You are free to go.”
“Go? Go where?”
Dr. Pohan glanced at his wrist, then answered, “It’s almost the dinner hour. Go to the ship’s lounge. Meet your fellow Jupiter-bound passengers. Your luggage has been delivered to your stateroom, of course.”
Deirdre felt puzzled. “But I don’t know where the lounge is. I don’t even know where my stateroom is. I’ve just come aboard—”
“Of course,” said the doctor. “This is all new to you, isn’t it?”
With a preening brush of his curly mustache, the doctor rose from his desk and took Deirdre by the hand. She got to her feet, towering over the diminutive Asian, and let him lead her to the corridor door.
“That way,” said Dr. Pohan, pointing down the passageway to the right. With his other hand he fished a remote control box from his tunic pocket.
“Main lounge,” he said to the palm-sized remote.
A series of yellow arrows began flickering along the deck tiles.
“Follow the arrows,” Dr. Pohan said. “They will lead you to the lounge.”
“But my stateroom?” Deirdre asked.
“Oh, just ask any of the map displays in the passageways. They’ll show you. It’s simple.”
Deirdre nodded, but she felt more confused than reassured.
SHIP’S PASSAGEWAY
Feeling disconcertingly heavy, Deirdre followed the blinking arrows along the passageway, then turned down a shorter segment that ended at the double doors of an elevator. The doors slid open as she approached them. Without her saying a word or touching a button, the doors closed silently and Deirdre felt the elevator dropping. Before she could catch her breath the cab stopped so abruptly that her knees buckled slightly. The doors slid open again.
Another corridor, with more yellow arrows beckoning her onward. There were other colored arrows, too, she saw: red, blue, green. They must lead to other parts of the ship, she thought. Maybe one set of them will guide me to my quarters.
Like the passageway upstairs, this corridor curved noticeably. The corridors run along the outer perimeter of each level, Deirdre figured. The offices and other compartments are built around the core. Wishing she’d spent more time in the centrifuge back home, Deirdre plodded along the passageway.
She hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when she saw a tall, lanky fellow standing up ahead of her, all arms and legs, scratching his thick strawberry red thatch of hair and looking very puzzled.
He was peering at the various blinking arrows on the deck, Deirdre saw.
“Are you lost?” she asked.
He twitched with surprise. “Oh! Hi!” he said, in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.
“Are you lost?” Deirdre repeated.
With another scratch of his bushy red mop he said, “I’m trying to find the main lounge.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Deirdre. “Just follow the yellow arrows.”
“That’s just it,” said the lanky fellow. “Which ones are the yellows? I’m color blind.”
“Color blind?” Deirdre had never heard of such a thing.
“I can’t make out any colors at all,” said the young man. “The world’s all black and white to me. With a lot of gray.”
“That’s awful!”
“It’s genetic. I was born with it.”
“You mean you can’t see any colors at all?”
“Not a one. I can tell that your hair is darker than the skin of your face. And your clothes are sort of pale gray.”
Deirdre felt terribly sad for him.
“My name’s Andy Corvus,” he said, sticking out his right hand.
“Deirdre Ambrose,” she replied, taking his hand in hers.
Andy Corvus was a centimeter or so taller than she, which somehow pleased Deirdre: she was almost always the tallest one in any group. He was thin as a reed, though, lanky and loose-jointed. His unruly thatch of red hair reminded Deirdre of her father. He’s what Dad must have looked like when he was young. A lot skinnier, though. His eyes were pale blue and his face was kind of cute, she thought, with a little button of a nose and a sprinkling of tiny freckles across it. There was something a little odd about his face, she realized, something slightly out of kilter. The two sides didn’t exactly match up, as if they were separate pieces that were pasted together a little unevenly. Deirdre decided it made him look more interesting than he would have otherwise.
He was wearing a bright red short-sleeved shirt over garish orange slacks. Terribly mismatched, Deirdre thought. Then she remembered that colors meant nothing to him.
“Deirdre’s a beautiful name,” he said. “A poetic name.”
Smiling shyly as she disengaged her hand, Deirdre said, “My friends call me Dee.”
He broke into a wide, toothy grin. “I’d like to be your friend, Dee.”
“Good.” She slipped her arm into his. “Now let’s go find the main lounge.”
MAIN LOUNGE
The yellow arrows ended at the open double doors of the main lounge. With Andy Corvus beside her, Deirdre stood indecisively at the doorway.
The lounge was luxuriously decorated with colorful sweeping draperies along the bulkheads and wide flat screens that displayed scenes from space: the beautiful swirling clouds of Jupiter, Saturn with its gaudy rings, the stark grandeur of the battered, pockmarked Moon, even the breathtakingly deep blue ocean world of Earth, flecked with brilliant white cloud formations.
Every table was occupied, she saw. More than two dozen men and women sat in small clusters at the little round tables scattered across the lounge. Most of them seemed intent on private conversations, heads nodding, expressions serious. But there was one group of a half-dozen men off in a corner, talking animatedly and suddenly roaring with laughter.
“Somebody told a joke, I betcha,” said Andy, needlessly.
“I didn’t realize there were so many going to Jupiter,” Deirdre said. “I thought it was only four replacements for the scientific staff.”
Corvus nodded vigorously. “Well, there’s a whole crew of scoopship people. But just four of us scooters. Plus a couple of dozen bean counters and paper shufflers.”
“Scooters?” Deirdre felt puzzled. “Bean counters?”
With a slightly lopsided grin, Corvus explained, “Scooters is a name for scientists. Don’t ask me where it comes from; that’s just what they call scientists at the research station. Bean counters are accountants, the people who handle the budgets and try to keep the scooters from spending too much.”
“And paper stuffers?”
“Paper shufflers,” Corvus corrected. “Administrators. Department chiefs and such. Back a long time ago they actually kept records on paper, y’know.”
“I’ve heard,” said Deirdre.
“Well, let’s find a table. I’m hungry.”
“They all seem to be filled.”
Pointing, Corvus said, “There’s one over by the wall with only one guy sitting at it. Maybe he won’t mind some company.”
Deirdre followed Corvus as he threaded through the occupied tables toward the lone passenger sitting by the bulkhead, beneath the screen displaying the sad, cratered face of the Moon, half in harsh sunshine, half in cold shadow.
As the two of them made their way across the lounge, heads turned. Men and women alike stared openly at Deirdre. She was accustomed to being stared at and gave no sign of noticing their attention, keeping her face perfectly serious as she walked beside the gangling, grinning Corvus toward the table by the bulkhead.
As they approached, Deirdre saw why the man was sitting alone. Half of his head was metal. His left arm was a prosthetic; through the open collar of his short-sleeved shirt she could see that the left side of his chest was metal, as well.
A cyborg. She shuddered inwardly. How could anyone allow himself to have half his body turned into a machine? Then she remembered: The mercenary soldi
er who had destroyed the original Chrysalis habitat had turned himself into a cyborg. He had murdered more than a thousand rock rats, innocent men, women, and children. Her father had put the man on trial years later, once he’d been captured. Dad wanted to execute him, she knew. But the rock rats decided to exile him permanently, instead.
Could this be the same person? Deirdre wondered. It has to be, she told herself. A cyborg, half man, half machine. Even his face was half sculpted metal, etched with fine looping swirls, like those tattooed tribesmen from some primitive tropical island on Earth.
The cyborg noticed them approaching and got to his feet. Gracefully, Deirdre noticed. Not ponderous at all. Like an athlete or a dancer.
Andy didn’t seem bothered at all by the half-man’s appearance. “Okay if we sit here with you?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” the cyborg answered in a deep baritone voice. “I welcome your company.”
A simmering suspicion pulsing along her veins, Deirdre sat beside Corvus, facing the cyborg. He remained standing until she was seated, then resumed his chair.
Before any of them could say anything a squat little robot waiter trundled up to the table, its flat top glowing with the bar menu. Andy tapped the image of a beer, then selected the brand he wanted from the list that instantly appeared on the screen. Deirdre chose a glass of Earthside chardonnay: expensive, but she figured it would be the last of her luxuries for a long while.
The cyborg already had a tall glass of something dark in front of him. Machine oil? Deirdre wondered, realizing it was a nonsensical thought, a stupid bit of prejudice.
“My name is Dorn,” the cyborg said. His right eye was gray and somehow mournful-looking, Deirdre thought. His left was a red-glowing camera lens.
Dorn. That wasn’t the name of the man who’d destroyed the old Chrysalis, she knew. His name was … she rummaged in her memory. Dorik Harbin. That was it.
Corvus, meanwhile, had stuck his hand across the table. “Andy Corvus,” he said amiably. Dorn grasped the offered hand in his human one.
Then the cyborg looked at her. Trying not to stare at the prosthetic arm, Deirdre mumbled, “Deirdre. My friends call me Dee.”
“Dee,” repeated the cyborg, almost solemnly.
The robot rolled back to their table with drinks on its flat top. Andy picked up the stemmed wineglass and handed it to Deirdre, then took his own tall, tapered pilsner glass of beer.
“What should we drink to?” Deirdre asked.
Dorn immediately replied, “To a pleasant trip to Jupiter.”
“To the leviathans,” Andy said.
Both men turned toward Deirdre. She gave them a tentative smile, then suggested, “To understanding.”
“Yes,” said Dorn. “To understanding.”
They clinked glasses. Then Andy asked, “Understanding what?”
“Ourselves,” said Dorn, in his slow, heavy voice. “I believe it was Socrates who said, ‘Know thyself.’ ”
“And Goethe,” Deirdre countered, “who said, ‘Know myself? If I knew myself I’d run away!’ ”
Dorn made a sound that might have been a chuckle, deep down in his half-metal chest. Andy looked puzzled.
“What’re you?” Corvus asked her, “some kind of a philosopher?”
Deirdre lowered her eyes and replied, “No, not at all. I just have an eidetic memory.”
“A photographic memory? Wow!” Corvus was obviously impressed.
“What is your technical specialty?” Dorn asked.
“Actually,” she answered, “I’m a microbiologist.”
“Microbiologist?” The human half of Dorn’s face looked incredulous.
She made an almost apologetic smile. “I know. It sounds strange, a microbiologist living at the habitat orbiting Ceres. But our health and safety people are very concerned with biofilms and other microbial threats. Chrysalis II is a pretty small community, and we live in a completely sealed environment. We have to be very careful about the microbes we carry around with us.”
Deirdre thought that Dorn’s human eye flickered momentarily when she mentioned Chrysalis II, but it was so brief that she couldn’t be sure.
“Don’t you have disinfectants?” Corvus asked. “Ultraviolet bug killers?”
Dierdre’s smile turned almost condescending. “Andy, our bodies are habitats for whole ecologies of microbes. If you took an ultrascan of your body, and removed all your own cells from the image, you’d still see your body and all your organs outlined in microbes. They’re everywhere.”
Dorn said, “It’s not Chrysalis II that surprised me. I’m wondering why a microbiologist is needed at Gold.”
“Yeah,” Corvus said. “Those whales are big, not little.”
With a slight shake of her head, Deirdre replied, “All I know is that the request for a microbiologist came from Grant Archer himself, the head of the whole Jupiter team.”
“He specifically asked for a microbiologist?” Dorn sounded incredulous.
“I suppose they want me for the same kind of thing I do at Chrysalis II: health protection.”
“It still sounds strange,” Dorn insisted. “Gold must have its own medical staff.”
With a shrug, Deirdre said, “I suppose we’ll just have to wait until we arrive there to see why they asked for me.” Then she added, “But it doesn’t matter what they expect me to do there. They’ve promised me a scholarship to the Sorbonne. I’ll be going to Earth! I’ll be going to our home world.”
JUPITER ORBIT: RESEARCH STATION THOMAS GOLD
Grant Archer slid wearily into bed next to his wife. Marjorie smiled at him and murmured, “Two more weeks.”
Grant tried to smile back, but failed. All these years, he thought. All these years and it’s going to end in failure. Abject failure.
Grant Armstrong Archer III had originally come to research station Gold as a graduate student, doing his mandatory four years of public service. He had dreams of becoming an astrophysicist, of studying collapsed stars and black holes, of perhaps learning how to create space-time warps that could allow humans to span the mind-numbing distances between the stars. But once he saw the leviathans he forgot all that. He never left the Jupiter region again, brought his wife to the Thomas Gold station and had two children with her, eventually became director of the station.
He was a quiet type, his demeanor usually serious, his actions studied and methodical. No blazing genius, Grant Archer was a fine administrator, smart enough to allow the younger men and women who showed flashes of brilliance to do their work without being overly bothered by the bureaucracies that dogged every research program. He had kept his youthful slimness, thanks to a metabolism that seemed unable to produce fat. After a quarter century of marriage he was still the earnest, broad-shouldered, good-looking man that Marjorie had fallen in love with back in their college days on Earth.
His one obvious physical change over those years was that his sandy brown hair had turned silver. Grant kept it cropped militarily short, almost down to a skullcap. And once he had been named director of the station he had grown a trim little beard; it made him look more mature, he believed, more impressive. His wife thought it gave him an air of authority, but it evaporated whenever he smiled.
“Is she really coming out here?” Marjorie asked drowsily.
Staring up at the shadowed ceiling of their bedroom, Grant nodded. Then, realizing his wife couldn’t see him in the darkness, he said, “She’s on the passenger list. Her, and a half-dozen of her personal staff.”
“Don’t let it worry you,” Marjorie advised sleepily. “She’s probably coming out here to give you some kind of award. You deserve it.”
Grant knew better. Marjorie turned over and went to sleep, but Grant could not close his eyes. Katherine Westfall is coming here. Herself. With her hatchet men. That’s what they are, Grant knew. He’d looked them up in the nets. Since being named to the IAA’s governing council, Westfall and her flunkies had ruthlessly slashed the organization’s research bu
dget. The teams exploring Mars depended now entirely on private money; they were even allowing tourists to visit the Martian village that they had excavated. The work on Venus was down to almost nothing, as well.
And now she’s coming here.
Turning on his side, Grant told himself, They can’t close us down! They can’t! Those creatures are intelligent. I’m sure of it.
His mind kept returning to the mission, the journey into that immense alien sea. Twenty years ago, almost, yet he remembered every agonized moment of it. The surgical implants, the pain, the cold dread of being immersed in the high-pressure perfluorocarbon. Living in that slimy gunk, breathing it into his lungs instead of air.
The rapture of being linked to the submersible’s systems, feeling the power of the fusion drive as your own heartbeat, seeing through the dark forbidding sea with eyes that went far beyond puny human capability. What was it Lane had said about being linked? Better than sex. It was, in a way. Beyond human. Godlike.
It was dangerous, feeling all that power. The sin of pride. Hubris. They had nearly died in that deep, dark sea.
But meeting the leviathans had been worth all the pain, all the danger to body and soul. Seeing those incredible creatures, bigger than mountains, huge, immense, living deep in the Jovian ocean, lords of their world.
The mission had nearly killed them all. Lane O’Hara had been seriously hurt. Zeb Muzorewa, kind, thoughtful, gifted Zeb had almost died. Zeb had been Grant’s mentor, his guide. Grant had been lucky to survive the mission, lucky to return to the world of humans.
Not luck, he reminded himself. It wasn’t luck. That Jovian creature helped us. It saw we were sinking and it carried us on its back, like a dolphin carrying a drowning man, up to where we could get our propulsion systems working again and get out of the ocean, back into orbit and to the station.
They’re intelligent. Those immense creatures are intelligent. Grant believed it with all his soul. The Leviathans are intelligent. They have to be.
Grant glanced at his wife, lying beside him. For several moments he listened to her breathing: deep and regular. Sound asleep. I wish I could sleep, too.