Seeing Stars

  Salvia was more than happy to hear the request. Without waiting to see if Rhus was following, she darted away from the station.

  At first, she had her stretch of beloved water to herself. Then, she felt the presence of someone skimming close to her. She flashed him a look then, annoyed, dived down, spiralling through the currents like a torpedo. To her chagrin, he followed. She levelled out at the Zaymen Ridge, the first and most explored of Europa’s underwater features, and slalomed between its stubby pillars, trying to outdistance him. It didn’t work. When she came to an exhilarated halt near the end of the ridge, he was there, only a couple of lengths behind her. She noted with satisfaction, however, that he appeared to be more out of breath than her.

  “What did you do that for?” he asked, in between gasps. He flexed his back rhythmically, urging more water into his lungs.

  “Dr. Faisbain told me to give you a ‘quick look around’,” she told him archly, “and that’s exactly what I did.”

  He snorted a chuckle and a small thread of bubbles rose to the surface.

  “It was very impressive,” he finally admitted.

  Salvia didn’t know if Rhus had made that up to make her feel better but it set a warm glow of pride in her belly. He was radiating blue and purple, which meant he wasn’t in an heightened emotional state. Maybe, she thought with a flick of her foot, he was telling the truth.

  “In fact,” he continued, “I didn’t think I could keep up.”

  It was Salvia’s turn to be impressed. Even as she was darting from one outcrop to another, she had kept an eye on him, gleaming brightly in the water behind her. Up till that minute, she thought she was the fastest swimmer in the ocean. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “On a ship. It’s called the Nemo and it came from Mars.”

  “And didn’t you have any place to exercise on this ship from Mars?”

  He laughed and the burst of bubbles from his mouth momentarily obscured his features. “Haven’t you ever been on a ship?”

  “Of course I have,” she answered, frowning deeply. “It’s just…I wasn’t awake at the time.”

  “You were asleep?” His voice was incredulous. “Did you come from Mars? If you did, you must have been asleep for the entire four months! Even the normals don’t sleep for that long.”

  Salvia flashed an embarrassed yellow again. “It wasn’t sleep, exactly. Dr Faisbain told me it was a state of suspended animation. That must be how you got here too.”

  He had probably picked up the name of the ship from one of the technicians, she thought, and was using it to try and impress her.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I was conscious almost the entire time.”

  “Conscious? Were you able to see anything?”

  As much as Salvia loved her watery home, the presence of the station was a constant reminder that there were other wonders beyond the ice crust. Other worlds. There were planets where the water had dried up, yet normals still managed to live there. There were other habitats under domes, protecting the inhabitants from hard vacuum or pollution. Some planets had rings around them, glittering garlands of ice and rock. Even Jupiter had thick colourful bands covering it. Had Rhus seen any of them?

  “The crew kept me in a transparent observation tank for the entire journey. It was almost as if I was living with them. The captain used to come to the observation tank all the time and talk to me.”

  There was a note of pride in his voice that Salvia envied.

  She had always known she was something apart from the rest of the station’s inhabitants. Dr Faisbain had been kind but firm on that point. Salvia was not a normal and shouldn’t think like a normal. Instead, she was told to open her mind to the wonders of Europa and take her cues from its marine landscape. Thinking like a normal, Faisbain told her, might only serve to narrow her perspective.

  Except…

  Normals were the only other sentient beings on Europa and being deliberately shut off from them was like being thrown out of a community for being too strange, too different. It was something that had obviously not happened to Rhus.

  Salvia would have to think about that. About why she was treated one way and Rhus another.

  “Come on,” she told him, not caring that her voice was a bit brusque. “I should get you back to the station before the normals start panicking.”

  “Then what happens?” he asked.

  She shrugged, at that moment not really caring what happened to him. “That’s up to them to decide.”

  She headed for the station at a more leisurely pace, a clearly puzzled Rhus lagging behind.

  Chapter Two

  Rhus wanted to power through the water. He wanted to skim the ice sheets at the moon’s surface while on his back, watching the small bubbles trapped beneath the frozen water wobble as he neared them. He wanted to dive to the depths and slalom the ridge again.

  He wanted to swim.

  He radiated a happy blue and purple as he followed Salvia back to the station, wondering if she understood how lucky she was. All this time, she was living in the most perfect environment imaginable while he was trawling the vacuum between planets. As much as the trip on the spaceship impressed and fascinated him, the feel of free-moving water against his skin told him he was finally home. He hoped nobody would try to take it away from him.

  The woman Salvia referred to as Dr Faisbain was waiting for them at Hatch Number Five. She looked older than a lot of the people who were in the spaceship with him, but she also looked kinder. Certainly, she was a lot more relaxed than the courteous yet stiff captain of the Nemo, Haber. The ship crew were often very serious and intense, even when supposedly relaxing, and they didn’t smile as often as Dr Faisbain. Rhus thought she must be a very important person to be given a position at the Europa station.

  “I brought him back in one piece,” Salvia was telling her.

  Salvia’s voice was higher than his. In the background, through the porthole’s window, he heard the faint vibration of her voice as it was piped into the launch bay, artificially deepened and processed somehow so normals could understand it.

  “That’s good,” Faisbain replied with a smile. “If you don’t mind, Salvia, we’d like to keep Rhus overnight at the lab for observation.”

  “Observation?” Salvia’s feet glowed red with dismay but Rhus noticed that she made sure to keep those extremities below the level of the porthole. He didn’t know how Salvia was able to keep her emotions so controlled like that. He couldn’t do it. He would have to ask her to teach him.

  “Now that he’s had some exercise on Europa and a chance to breathe in its water, we’ll need to do a full health check-up. He’s been in a very limited environment up till now and we want to make sure his body can cope with conditions on the moon.”

  “But didn’t you make him so he could cope?” Salvia asked.

  Rhus was surprised at her question. Only a little while ago, he was convinced she didn’t care if he stayed or left. Now, she appeared to be arguing on his behalf.

  “We did,” Faisbain conceded, “but sometimes things go wrong. Things we might not be aware of until we’ve done a full examination. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be fine. Once we’ve checked his health, we’ll insert the tracking beacon then we’ll release him to begin work tomorrow.”

  Salvia’s feet pulsed a quick flash of vivid scarlet—anger—before being cloaked in the simmering darker red again.

  “And you have some work for us?” she asked.

  “We kept our side of the bargain, remember?”

  What were they talking about? Rhus wanted to interrupt and ask but there was such an air of intensity between the two women that he didn’t dare. Besides, he was starting to feel very tired. Maybe a bit of a rest was exactly what he needed.

  It was Faisbain who broke the tension by moving away from the porthole and stretching her shoulders. Watching intently, Rhus repeated the action in the cool dark water.
<
br />   “Tomorrow, Salvia.” This time, the scientist’s voice brooked no objections.

  The metal hatch next to the porthole slid open. Rhus swam over to it and looked up into the tube of water.

  “We’ll complete our tests as quickly as possible.” Faisbain’s voice again. “I promise.”

  With a last look at Salvia, who gave him a reluctant nod, Rhus swam up into the tube and tried not to notice the lid screwing shut beneath his feet.

  There was a set of passages. The station’s staff knew about them because they were escape exits, to be used in the remote case that the major shaft leading up through the off-centre of the station somehow collapsed. They didn’t think Salvia knew about it because they thought she was stupid.

  Salvia, Salvia thought, is young, but far from stupid.

  After Rhus had entered the tube, Salvia told Dr Faisbain she would revisit the Zaymen Ridge. There was something interesting she had seen there, she said. She even swam halfway there, so the tracking sensors would note her route. Then she doubled back.

  Salvia was more than aware of the risk she was taking. There was nothing stopping a technician from glancing at a station screen and seeing her head back to the station, but she had done this several times before and hadn’t been caught on any of those occasions. She was betting that the novelty of Rhus would mean even less attention would be paid to her.

  Unlike the station’s main water shaft, the passage Salvia headed for was unlit. If she was a normal, she wouldn’t have even noticed the dark circle halfway up the vertical wall of the station, but the slow eddies that filtered through it called to the ocean creature in her, whispering of tubes full of water, rarely navigated.

  The pipe was covered by a thick, open-mesh lid. Salvia swam right up to the lid and stretched her arm between the ribbons of crisscrossing metal. Her fingers grazed a small manual release button on the inside of the tube. She pressed it and quickly withdrew her arm, letting the lid slide into a recess. Lowering herself, so her dorsal fin wouldn’t hit the metal, she quietly entered the pipe.

  From past visits, Salvia had roughly worked out where the major sections of the station were situated. She had, she’d been told, excellent spatial cognition. As if she didn’t know.

  She swam straight ahead, following the curve of the tube. At the first intersection, she took the downward pipe, then turned right. That would take her to the scientific observation section. Dr Faisbain’s territory. Salvia put a hand out and her webbed fingers touched the curved metal wall.

  “—finished?”

  That sounded like Dr Faisbain.

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Salvia didn’t recognise the second voice, but thought it must be one of the technicians.

  “And the beacon’s inserted?”

  “Yes, Doctor. And I’ve calibrated it so it’ll activate the upper arm sensory trigger on signal.”

  Absently, Salvia rubbed her arm. Every call from the station resulted in the stabbing pain in her upper arm. It was useful to know that disabling the beacon would also disable the pain. Or so she hoped.

  “Good. I’ll be at the meeting if you need me.”

  There were muffled sounds then a rhythmic pattern. Feet. Salvia kept her fingers on the wall while she paced along with the sound. The normals hadn’t realised how effectively vibrations travelled through metal and water. Living in air, they were used to the imperfect transmission of sound, not realising that Salvia could hear them often more clearly that they heard themselves.

  Dr Faisbain continued to walk. The only time Salvia met any confusion was if simultaneous conversations took place in rooms next to each other. And sound could get muffled if there was some kind of thick dampening material between the person and the floor. Luckily, there were small rugs only in a few areas, such as in the bedrooms and a couple of the small meeting rooms, and important meetings usually meant the involvement of most of the station’s staff. The rest of the company’s building, wedged between ice and liquid water, was sheeted in metal, which was easy to keep clean…and also very efficient at transmitting sound.

  Kicking her feet every now and then, Salvia kept up with Dr Faisbain’s tread. She was expecting the doctor to stop at one of her usual rooms but was surprised when the scientist kept walking all the way to the boardroom. Salvia frowned and pressed herself closer to the wall. The boardroom was only peopled during the monthly, station-wide briefing and information sessions and lay vacant in between times. Salvia cast her mind back and knew that the last monthly meeting had been last week. There shouldn’t be another gathering in the boardroom for another three weeks at least. Something very important must be going on.

  Even though she knew they couldn’t hear her, Salvia breathed shallowly and listened in, her cheek pushed up against the metal skin of the tube.

  “—glad you could make it, Dr Faisbain.”

  Salvia didn’t know who was speaking, but the tone of voice was familiar. It was courteous but masking condescension.

  “I came as quickly as I could, Captain Haber.”

  There was the scrape of a chair and a bit of murmuring as Faisbain sat down.

  Salvia didn’t know who this ‘Captain Haber’ was. She hadn’t heard the name before. Was he the captain of the ship that had brought Rhus?

  “And how is our newest denizen of Europa’s oceans?” That was Haber’s voice.

  “Rhus is doing better than expected,” Faisbain conceded. “Considering the accelerated medium in which he was developed, his skeletal and muscular structures are amazingly robust. He does seem to tire easily, however. Tests indicate a sub-standard level of oxygen absorption from the water, so it’s obvious that organ growth is lagging but I’m sure he’ll come up to speed quickly once he’s in his home environment.”

  “And Salvia?”

  “She’s fine.” Salvia knew the scientist well enough to detect the thread of stiffness in her tone. She wondered if anybody else heard it as well.

  “We’ve spent a lot of money on this venture already, Dr Faisbain. I’m expecting something more than ‘fine’, especially considering the rushed nature of the second creature’s development.”

  Creature? Were they referring to…Rhus? And her?

  “I’d like to remind you that Salvia and Rhus are both human, Captain.” The censure in her voice was obvious now, even through layers of steel. “They were grown from human stock and founded on human stock. With the exception of marine technology in their lungs, skin and eye structure, and some additional cetacean adaptations, they are fully human.”

  “No human has ever cost as much as much as one of your…patients, Dr Faisbain.”

  Haber’s voice was a bit muffled. Salvia imagined he would only sound like that if he was leaning forward and perhaps resting his hands on something that interfered with sound transmission. A table?

  “Costs that the company has recouped many times over.”

  Salvia knew there were others in the room. She could hear their shuffling interfering with her following the conversation, but it appeared the doctor and Haber were the only ones willing to talk. Salvia wondered why that was. Were hostility-laden arguments between normals some kind of spectator sport? Did someone keep score? Was that why others were in the room? None of the other monthly meetings had sounded anything like this.

  “The new compounds that are being synthesised to form lightweight, innovative building materials came from Europa,” Dr Faisbain said. “So did the material to create new bone growth matrices. The samples Salvia has brought back, from regions deeper and farther away than we dare explore, have led to innovations in fields as diverse as industrial compounds to micro-surgical techniques.”

  Salvia straightened her spine and smiled.

  Yes! You tell that superior-sounding arrogant man, Dr Faisbain.

  “And such discoveries have stopped for the past half a year, haven’t they, Dr Faisbain?”

  Salvia stilled.

  “Understandable, under the circumstances,” Faisbai
n said. Her voice was softer now and full of…uncertainty? Salvia frowned and continued to listen.

  “We created a modified human being,” she continued in a quieter voice, “sent her out into an ocean of darkness and expected only blind obedience? We don’t expect such behaviour from domesticated pets, much less another sentient being.”

  “She’s a tool of the company that employs us both.”

  “She’s a young woman, Captain Haber. An intelligent, sensitive and lonely young woman. The only thing that surprises me is how long she waited before staging her mutiny. I know you are on the company’s board, Captain Haber, and that you specifically requested the ship captaincy so you could relay the company’s…displeasure to me in person but, on your return, could you also tell the rest of the board that we’re dealing with an intelligent being here and not a circus animal?”

  There was a long silence and Salvia wondered whether the normals had used hand signals to indicate the meeting was at an end. She hadn’t heard any noises associated with people leaving. She tried to imagine what it might look like in the boardroom. Besides their voices, how did normals send emotional signals to one another? They didn’t have bioluminescent skin like she did, and their tones didn’t seem to vary much, staying in a lower range that she found signified secrets to be told, information that wasn’t to be shared. As far as she was concerned, normals were more about hiding things than revealing them.

  “When can we send the other one out?” Captain Haber finally asked.

  “Rhus”—there was a slight stress on his name—“will be ready to begin work tomorrow. We had a problem with the tracking device that was implanted on Mars and had to replace it. Other than that, he’s coping admirably.”

  “And the girl will start work again?”

  “Salvia is a reasonable young woman. She knows we made a deal. We stuck to our end. I’m sure she’ll stick to hers.”

  “We’re after results, Dr Faisbain. In the absence of new product launches, our share price has remained more or less static for more than half a year. Considering our investment here, the board considers this unacceptable. We’re depending on your hybrids to lift the bottom line.”