by Ben Bova
Linda Vishnevskaya half turned in her chair and looked up at Archer. “That’s it,” she said. “They’re out of contact now. They’re into the sea.”
Archer nodded. “They’re on their own.”
Vishnevskaya got slowly, tiredly to her feet. Her tousled blond curls barely reached Archer’s shoulder. “On their own,” she murmured.
The other controllers were getting up from their consoles, stretching, working out the kinks in their bodies after sitting at their posts for so long. The whole mission control center seemed quiet, subdued, as if something had gone wrong.
“You’ll maintain a skeleton crew here, just in case?” Archer asked the chief controller.
She nodded. “One person. That’s enough to notify me and get everyone back here if something unexpected happens.”
“And if all goes as planned?” he prompted.
“Then we’ll hear from them in exactly one hundred and fourteen hours,” Vishnevskaya said, with a weary smile. “Of course, they will be sending up data capsules on schedule.”
“Good,” said Archer. He slowly climbed the stairs to the top level of the control center, where Katherine Westfall sat in one of the spectator’s seats, flanked on either side by a pair of blank-faced young men in dark tunics and slacks.
Trying to sound cheerful, Archer said to her, “They’re in the ocean, right on schedule. For the next five days they’ll be out of contact with us.”
Westfall stood up, and her two aides rose like automatons beside her. In her deceptively soft voice she said, “If something should happen while they’re in the ocean…” She left the rest unsaid.
Archer thought she looked almost … expectant. As if she wants something to go wrong. But he told himself he was being paranoid. Why would she want them to have trouble down there?
Linda Vishnevskaya left the control center reluctantly. She couldn’t overcome the feeling that nothing bad would happen to the mission as long as she stayed at her post. She knew it was stupid. Sheer emotion. Still she lingered, climbing the steps toward the exit as slowly as a child heading for a dentist’s chair.
Max, she thought. I know you have children my age and you don’t even know I exist except as a fellow technician. But I love you, Max. Come back to me. Don’t get yourself killed down there.
LEVIATHAN
The urge to dissociate was growing stronger. Leviathan swam upward toward the cooler waters above, hoping that the darters would be less likely to seek their prey there. Its sensor parts could not detect darters within their range of observation, but Leviathan knew how swiftly the predators could swarm in and overwhelm a lone member of the Kin, especially when it was in the process of dissociating.
Already some of the flagella members were shuddering with the desire to split away and begin budding.
Not yet, Leviathan insisted. Not yet. Be faithful. The time is coming but it’s not yet here.
Leviathan had purposely steered away from the current of downfalling food, reasoning that the darters would lurk near it in hopes of trapping a solitary member of the Kin. There is safety in doing the unexpected, Leviathan thought.
Hunger gnawed dully in Leviathan’s inner organ parts. Even the sensor parts and faithful dull-witted flagella began to send hunger signals to Leviathan’s central brain.
Wait, Leviathan told its members. Better to be hungry than to be eaten by darters.
The water was cooler at this level, which made the hunger pangs all the more insistent. No darters in range, the sensor parts reported. Leviathan could feel the trembling urge to dissociate growing stronger, stronger, rising toward an irresistible convulsion. In a few more moments the craving would be unstoppable and Leviathan would begin to disconnect into its separate components.
One of the flagella members detached from Leviathan’s body, shuddering uncontrollably as it drifted away. Still no darters within sight, the sensor parts reported.
But wait! Something was moving out in the cold darkness, coming closer. Leviathan desperately commanded its member parts to resist the craving to dissociate. Its brain studied the image the sensor parts were observing.
Not darters. Something strange. Almost as large as a full-grown darter, but misshapen, round, spherical, cold, and hard-shelled.
Something alien.
FARADAY
“Something’s out there,” Dorn muttered as he stared at the central display on his console.
Corvus floated to his side and peered at the screen. “I don’t see anything.”
Deirdre and Yeager came up, too, floating high enough in the perfluorocarbon liquid so they could look over the shoulders of the two men.
Dorn said, “Pressure sensors are showing that something is moving out there, sending an irregular pattern of waves through the ocean.”
“Fish?” Yeager suggested.
“Switching to active sonar,” said Dorn.
Faraday’s sonar system used sound waves at too low a register for human ears to detect. But almost immediately Deirdre saw a shape appear on Dorn’s central screen. Glancing at her own console, she saw the same image.
“Seventy-three kilometers away,” Dorn muttered.
Corvus nodded. “At that distance the thing must be at least ten klicks across.”
“We got one!” Yeager hooted.
A leviathan, Deirdre realized, peering more intently at the screen. The image was gray and grainy but she could make out the beast’s streamlined shape, studded with what looked to her like little pods. No, she remembered from her earlier briefings, those are fins, hundreds of fins that propel the animal through the water.
Yeager asked, “Any of those shark things around?”
“None in sight,” Dorn replied.
“So far, so good,” the engineer muttered.
“We’ve got to get closer,” Corvus said. “Closer.”
Without glancing away from the screens, Dorn said, “Slowly. We’ll approach slowly. We don’t want to alarm the creature.”
Alarm it? Deirdre asked silently. How could we frighten something that big? That powerful. We’re like a little child’s toy compared to it.
Then Corvus said, “Hey! It’s coming apart!”
* * *
Katherine Westfall stood alone in the observation deck staring out at the hard, unblinking myriads of stars blazing their light against the infinite blackness of the universe. Like people, she thought. We each shine with our own light, struggling against the darkness of inevitable death.
But is death truly inevitable? With rejuvenation therapies one can live for hundreds of years, she told herself. And in another century or two we’ll know even more and be able to extend our lifespans even further. Death needn’t be inevitable, not if you have access to the latest medical techniques.
And to have access to the latest medical techniques you need money, Westfall reminded herself. Money and power. She thought back to her childhood, when she had neither. To her mother drudging away in restaurant kitchens night after night, year after year, coming home exhausted, throwing herself on her bed only to get up again the next day and go back to work.
For what? For me, Mother always said. So that I could have a better life. Yes, I found a better life. I married it. I saw my chance and I took it. I’ll never be poor again, never be powerless, never have to worry that if I don’t please this one or that one I’ll be thrown out into the street.
She remembered her mother’s death, wretched and shriveled from the tumors that fed on her body. The best medical care in the world couldn’t save Mother. All they could do was to ease her pain at the end. And Elaine, the sister she never knew, the scientists couldn’t save her. They killed her, really. If it wasn’t for men like Grant Archer and that Muzorewa person, my sister would still be alive today.
The stars were slowly moving across the glassteel window of the observation deck. Westfall smiled inwardly as she imagined herself the center of the universe, with all the stars of heaven revolving around her. A pleasant thought, sh
e felt. That’s the kind of power that could keep you safe forever.
And then the stars began to dim as Jupiter’s mighty radiance flooded the observation deck. Even before the body of the massive planet swung into view, its powerful glow dimmed the stars themselves. Westfall felt the warmth of that glow touching her cheek, making her suddenly nervous, frightened.
Stand your ground, she told herself. Face your fears.
Jupiter rose from beneath her feet, a mammoth overwhelming presence, a true god, streaked with whirling, racing clouds, dotted with storms, powerful and all-engulfing.
Katherine felt the terror she’d known when strange men would come home with her mother, laughing powerful men who patted her on the head and shooed her off to her own corner of the room.
She hated those men. And she hated her mother for needing them. I don’t need anyone, she told herself. I destroy anyone who stands between me and safety. I’ll destroy Archer. He’ll never become chairman of the IAA. I will.
Face your fears, she said to herself as she squared her shoulders and stared into Jupiter’s swirling, seething clouds. You think you can conquer me? Giant planet, king of the gods, you’re nothing but a tool for me to use. I’m not frightened of you. I’m not. I’m not.
She laughed aloud at the sight of mighty Jupiter. Archer’s destruction will begin down there, Katherine Westfall told herself, with the destruction of that ship he sent into those clouds, with the death of the people he sent into that ocean.
DISSOCIATION
The ache in her midsection had grown into a knot that throbbed in her chest, but Deirdre tried to ignore it as she stood by her sensor console watching the leviathan. Andy swayed in the perfluorocarbon liquid beside her. Dorn was watching the sensor display on a screen of his control console, Yeager beside him, bending forward eagerly.
“It’s coming apart, all right!” Corvus said. “Look!” He was excited, but in the perfluorocarbon his voice still sounded deep, almost sonorous.
“We’ve caught it in the act of reproducing,” said Dorn.
“Jovian pornography,” Yeager cracked. Deirdre shook her head at him.
“Get closer,” Corvus urged.
“No,” Deirdre said, surprising herself. “Stay back.”
Dorn half turned, a questioning expression on the human side of his face.
“If it’s reproducing we should give it as much privacy as we can,” Deirdre said.
“It’s just an animal,” Yeager argued. “It doesn’t have any feelings of modesty.”
“How do you know?” Corvus asked.
“Animals have feelings,” said Deirdre. “They can get very annoyed when you bother them at the wrong time.”
“You wouldn’t want to annoy something that big,” Corvus added.
Dorn said, “I think discretion is the better part of valor in this case.”
Deirdre smiled to herself, thinking, Henry IV, Part I, act five, scene three.
She asked Dorn, “Can the spectrograph laser work at this range?”
“It should pick up something,” Dorn replied.
“Could you activate it for me, please?”
“On console two.”
Deirdre floated over to the console built into the compartment’s curved bulkhead and slipped into the foot loops there. On its screen she saw the spectrograph’s deep green laser beam lancing through the dark water. She touched the electronic keyboard and the visual display was immediately replaced by a string of alphanumerics. Plenty of chemical species in the water around the creature, Deirdre saw. The water’s saturated with the Jovian equivalent of pheromones and sex hormones.
She heard Yeager sneer, “Exoporn.” Max was still watching Dorn’s main screen and the leviathan shaking itself apart. “We could sell this footage to some of the freaks back Earthside.”
“Oh Max,” Deirdre chided.
Dorn said, “We can stay at this distance and observe without—” Suddenly he stiffened. “Sharks approaching.”
* * *
Leviathan saw the alien clearly, hovering in the distance. Stay together, it commanded its member parts. We can’t dissociate while a stranger is near.
But several of the mindless flagella had already broken free and were floating off. Leviathan tried to resist the mounting urge to dissociate. It would be too dangerous with the alien so close. We must stay together.
Sensor parts were drifting away. Deep within its armored hide, Leviathan’s vital organs were pulsing with the need to disassemble, to end their unity and begin the ancient passion of dissociation and recombination.
With stunning swiftness the need overpowered Leviathan. Everything else dwindled into nothingness. Nothing else mattered. The gigantic creature surrendered to the impulse, to the shuddering ecstasy of dissociating. The presence of the alien was overwhelmed in the driving compulsion to reproduce, the insistent orgasmic irresistible joy of release.
But as it at last surrendered to its primitive need, Leviathan’s brain registered a sudden terrified warning from the last of its functioning sensor parts. Darters!
That was the last thing Leviathan recognized. Its mind went blank. Its final thought was that death and rebirth are forever intertwined.
* * *
“Sharks?” Yeager barked. “Where?”
Dorn ran his fingers across the console’s electronic keyboard and the main display screen shifted to show a half-dozen sleek, dangerous shapes hurtling toward the cloud of pieces that had been a single leviathan only moments earlier.
“They’ll attack while the leviathan’s helpless,” Deirdre said.
“Predators,” Yeager muttered scornfully.
“We’ve got to do something to help!” said Corvus.
“Do what?” Yeager snapped.
“Drive them away,” said Deirdre.
Dorn shook his head solemnly. “Should we try to interfere in the natural processes of their world?”
Impatiently, Corvus insisted, “I came down here to try to make contact with the leviathans. I don’t want to stand here and watch it served up for lunch!”
“It’s helpless,” Deirdre said.
“It’ll be a massacre,” Corvus added.
Dorn looked up at Yeager. “Do you think we could discourage the sharks?”
Yeager made a sound that might have been a grunt. In the perfluorocarbon it sounded more like a moan.
“I attached a couple of electron guns to the outer hull. We could shock ’em if we can get close enough.”
“How close?” Dorn asked. But he was already activating the ship’s propulsion system, steering toward the approaching sharks.
“Fifty meters,” Yeager said, clearly unhappy. “Closer.”
Dorn nodded. Deirdre could hear the hissing rumble of the propulsion jets and felt the surge of acceleration. In the display screen the charging sharks’ images began to grow larger.
“The charge of the light brigade,” Yeager murmured.
Deirdre remembered a line from the poem: “All in the valley of death rode the six hundred.” Then she thought, We don’t have six hundred. There’s only the four of us.
* * *
“So how’s the sim?” Devlin asked.
Franklin Torre glanced over his shoulder before whispering, “Terrific. It’s like being with her.”
Devlin nodded. It had been simple enough to take a standard VR simulation and dub Deirdre Ambrose’s face in place of the porn star. It was a pretty ragged job of dubbing, but apparently Torre didn’t mind.
The two men were standing in a corner of the busy galley, slightly away from the lines of chattering people who were filling their dinner trays. Torre seemed to be worried that his sister would see him, Devlin thought.
“So you’re happy, then?” he asked, with his impish grin. “No complaints?”
“Uh … can you get one that’s a sort of Arabian Nights setting?” Torre asked, his cheeks reddening slightly.
“Harem scene? Sure. How many girls do you want?”
&
nbsp; His face flaming hotter, Torre said, “Doesn’t matter, as long as one of them’s Dee.”
“Can do, Frankie old chum. No problem.”
As Devlin began to move back toward the kitchen, Torre clutched at the sleeve of his stained chef’s jacket.
“Those nanos I gave you … what did you do with them?”
Putting on an innocent expression, Devlin said, “Oh, them? I took ’em myself.”
“Yourself?”
“Yeah. They’re harmless, aren’t they?”
“Well, not altogether…”
“You mean they’re not harmless?”
Torre whispered harshly, “I told you they can act on the gastric juices in the stomach.”
“Yeah, yeah, but it’d take them forty-eight hours to show any symptoms.”
“They’re not symptoms!” Torre snapped. “Not unless something goes wrong.”
Devlin patted him on the shoulder. “Now what could possibly go wrong, chum? Huh?”
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE
Deirdre watched, wide eyed, as the sharks seemed to leap closer in her console’s central screen. She tapped at the keypad symbols and slaved her sensor display to one of the screens on Dorn’s console so he could watch what she was viewing without turning to look at her console.
Andy was frozen in place behind Yeager, who was bending slightly forward, just to Dorn’s left.
“Hold on,” Dorn said calmly. “This might get violent.”
Deirdre wormed her bare feet more firmly into the deck loops and grasped the handgrips on her console.
Faraday was hurtling toward the band of sharks. Deirdre counted six of them on her console screen, bulleting single-mindedly toward the remnants of what had been a huge leviathan.
That’s their food, she thought. We’re trying to stop them from eating. We’re interfering in the natural order of this world. But then she looked again at Andy’s face, his soft blue eyes wide, his cute lopsided grin replaced by open-mouthed anxiety. Andy’s here to study the leviathans, Deirdre told herself. If we let the sharks eat this one we’ll have to go deeper and try to find another.