Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  Preetha writes back, Watching the journey from here. Will let you know when we lose them on instruments.

  There’s no other activity from Ground Control over the feeds. She’s there alone. She’s the night shift.

  When the message chime comes next, he starts, sits up. (He didn’t realize he’d been waiting for anything.)

  Lost it.

  Then, a separate line, as if, at the last second, she couldn’t help it.

  What does it look like from there?

  They’re nearly an hour apart. Whatever he’s looking at has already happened for her; whatever he tells her will arrive too late to be of any real use.

  Curiosity, then.

  He looks at the readout from the Evrard Telescope, which the first generation sent out far enough away that none of the minor moons can strike it—a clear, sharp eye on the system they’ve left behind.

  It’s beautiful; it’s always beautiful, from this far away.

  Like a splinter of mirror, he writes, swinging clear of the fire. But that was a while ago. By the time you get this, who knows.

  Jupiter spins so fast that not even its storms can keep up; the clouds beneath them are always shifting, so it feels like they’re dragging, like the planet that eats the horizon is uncoiling to devour them any moment.

  The shift would drive him crazy, probably, if the moon ever moved.

  (They’re locked—there’s no rotation, just the constant steady bask of light.)

  The windows on the station go darker when it’s supposed to be night, some vestige from home they don’t need any more. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Earth as more than a little blue marble you could see now and then, if you were with an off-base assignment out to the dark side where you could even see the sky.

  The planet eats it up, from where they are.

  They mark the days with calculations; you can’t do it from looking at the Red Storm.

  Still, it’s for the best. It helps you get used to living in the past. On the scale they’re working with, everything you look at is an imprint of something that’s moved on by now.

  What he doesn’t say: Earth could go up in smoke, and they wouldn’t know for an hour.

  You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.

  The bio team gets a report of more extinctions Earthside. It’s just paperwork; everyone knows they’re gone. They just have to wait out the standard time, to make it official.

  The WWF starts negotiations to send up a manned veterinary transport of deep-sea and Arctic specimens, who can be kept there until there’s enough greenhouse for them to breathe.

  The project’s code name is Ark.

  Henry thinks it’s maybe no wonder the names on Europa are patched together; eventually you run out of myths and have to start over.

  What’s your favorite animal? That you’ve seen, he adds, to make it fair.

  Birds, Preetha writes him. Or spiders. Anything that eats mosquitos. What’s yours? That you’ve seen.

  He writes, There’s a limpet species here the bio team is naming Methuselah. They’re still trying to date how long it’s been in stasis down there.

  Later, so late he can’t help himself, he writes, When I was eight, my parents took me to the zoo Earthside, so technically I remember elephants and penguins. But they took me because we were going to Europa, and this was our last chance to see them. I closed my eyes a lot, for revenge, I guess.

  A few days later, there’s a picture.

  The water has risen over the road—it must be a boat journey just to get to Ground Control, he can see the front edge at the bottom of the frame—and everything is so green his eyes hurt just to look at it, and for a second it’s hard to breathe.

  That’s not home, he says to himself. That’s the place you’re doing all this for. Home is where we go next.

  (It’s what the counselors tell you to say, when you feel a panic attack coming on.)

  It takes him a moment to register there’s a lake in the photo, and a bird perched in the foreground, brown with turquoise wings and a sturdy beak.

  Kingfisher.

  He wonders how far out of her way she went to get the shot. He wonders if she knows this is the first bird he’s seen in a long time.

  He goes out and takes a photo of the screen on the monitor they have over one of the open patches on the ice, where they can keep an eye on the limpets, clinging to rocks in water almost as sharp turquoise as the kingfisher, once the light gets in.

  He takes a photo of the bright yellow algae in the empty comm room.

  He sends them to her, titled A Trip to the Zoo.

  His parents hadn’t lived to see it, but Henry saw the launch of the first Praetoria, headed for Gliese 581.

  It was powerful and maneuverable, and he’d never shaken the feeling, all through the testing process that happened on the ice outside the comm center, that it looked like a mutant spider puppy in a robot suit.

  They’d launched it right through the cloud.

  It turned into a phoenix for a second in takeoff, punched a little bright spot against the gray, and vanished. The cloud slid closed behind it a moment later, smooth and opaque as a door.

  The Gliese team had data coming in all the time. Four people tracked it 24/7, parsing headings and fuel readings, initializing processes as the lag time got longer and longer; small things that hardly mattered, just things to tell it before it was too far away and there was nothing they could do.

  But they hadn’t seen Praetoria since the cloud swallowed it. The rest of their lives, they never would.

  (It was for the best that Henry was on a detail whose results were confirmed every time a transmitter started up again.)

  His supervisor, Wen, calls him up to make a trip in the crawler.

  (Moonside duty used to be split evenly, but now she has a kid; after you have a kid on Europa, your days taking risks are over.)

  “I think a board just fried,” she says. “Nothing critical. I’m impressed it took this long. We’re up to nearly a year before they start going.”

  (She’s fifth generation; her great-odd-grandparents had to hold handrails to keep from floating away, and never left base because the radiation shield wasn’t strong enough to cover more, and replace the transmitters every month or lose contact with Earth when the shear shorted everything out and left them in the dark until they were on the near side of Jupiter again.

  Earth is just a concept to Wen, like Gliese; she calls this home.)

  He heads north.

  It’s hard to take, suddenly—it’s worse, having looked at something as green as what Preetha sent, and looking now at an expanse of gray above him and below him, unbroken except for the red storms that loom over his shoulder, if he wanted to look.

  (It was dawn when Preetha took the picture; shadows were tucked under every leaf, and he’d looked at them and tried to remember what a real day looked like.)

  This isn’t home, he writes her. Gliese might be. We can scrape out a living here until we know. But this isn’t home, not really.

  She writes back, I hope you’re wrong.

  It’s struck him, before, that he’s wrong.

  It’s never struck him before that there’s hope.

  The facilities team spends more time on the twilight edge of the moon, south of the equator.

  They’re building a bigger civilian station for the passengers of the Manu, and all the passengers who are lined up to follow them. It’s huge; it’s something that can hold all the people who will need to rally here and go on, as soon as they hear back about Gliese.

  Nobody says anything—supplies arrive at intervals, two and a half years after someone on Earth sent them, and they use everything in cargo and everything they can salvage of the transports, and grumble about the extra strain on radiation shields and what must pass as food on Earth these days, if this is the best they can do.

  But with every work detail they send down the linae, and every inch of poly
mer caulk they seal into place, what they’re saying is, This has to be built, here, soon.

  Home won’t last.

  He makes a delivery of some of the ruined transmitter parts. The building team will break down a motherboard to the molecular level, and build whatever they can from the rest. He imagines fountains made entirely of transmitter parts that Jupiter burned out.

  Halfway back to the base, he turns, angles away from it all and out to the bare plains.

  (He’s been here long enough to read the ice, and his pace never falters. He can be alone in no time at all.)

  When he’s far enough from the base to breathe again, he parks the crawler and seals his suit and goes out onto the ice.

  He looks up at the flat gray disc that caps the sky.

  Electricity skitters across it, far up, where the radiation shields and the wind shear crack against the edges of this new, delicate thing that will make it safe to breathe, one day.

  (Once or twice, he’s caught Wen looking out the comm room at the cloud, tears in her eyes.

  It’s what her family came here to work on, back when they didn’t have the luxury of a civilian station team, or a Gliese probe. Her family came and worked on it when they were fighting for every breath.)

  It’s silent here; he notices the wind.

  Maybe it’s happened, he thinks. Maybe the numbers have quietly ticked over while he’s been gone, from that yellow dial at the airlocks over to green.

  Maybe he can take off his helmet, take a breath, live.

  The darkness presses against his chest.

  (He remembers watching the sky from Earth as a boy, five or six, thinking how big the moon was, how lonely and anxious it felt to look for it on cloudy nights when its light was swallowed up, when it vanished whole.

  His mother explained once that the light is always there, even if you can’t see it, but when you’re little, and your parents have told you that you’re leaving Earth, sometimes you don’t care much for physics.)

  In the distance there are pinpoints blinking in and out, signal lights from the base. They’re almost level with the horizon.

  If he drove another three minutes, he might not be able to see anything at all, except the cloud, and the shadow it casts across the ice.

  Though he’d lose his grip, maybe, if he did. The farther away you get from the base, the weaker the gravity field gets. At some point, it’s not safe.

  If you drove to the edge of the cloud, to see the sky whole, you’d begin to come apart.

  He looks up at the cloud, at the spot where he knows Ganymede is passing.

  Galileo saw this moment; he marked this position on his notes, a long time ago.

  The light’s still there; his mother taught him.

  (He wonders what would happen if he gathered all his strength and jumped.)

  It’s too late to make it back to base; he calls it in and stays the night in the bunk in the back curve of the crawler, hooks crimping the ice underneath him so he won’t roll away in his sleep.

  (Pods have bunks, with lightweight masks you strap on to recycle the air, so you can sleep without a helmet. There are comforts now, on Europa, to make you feel at home.)

  The sonar attachment bleats over and over, calling through the ice, looking for anything with a heartbeat.

  Do you have a favorite moon?

  Luna, she writes. Of yours, I like Sinope. It’s an imposter—the dust is red and everything else in the Pasiphae cluster is gray, but no one can prove why.

  He’s never thought of it that way, but he likes it.

  (Sinope was the Greek who outwitted Zeus by asking for a wedding wish, to stay a virgin. One name that’s suited, at last.)

  He writes, The transport will have to pass it, as they navigate the outer ring towards the center. Close enough to hit it, probably, knowing this navigation team.

  She doesn’t write back.

  He tries not to worry. Storms happen—more and more often now, from the reports. Sometimes the whole planet goes dark.

  (He knows that feeling. He lives under the cloud.)

  When she writes back, it’s short.

  Don’t tell me what they’ll see. It makes it harder.

  It feels like a stab between his shoulders, reading it.

  He’s forgotten that most people who do what he does do it because they long for the sky, and the moon, and a chance at the new worlds; that, for most of them, being alone is the side effect, not the object.

  It feels like something he should have known.

  He imagines her, suddenly, in the place he was when he first felt really alone—in the same little desk, looking at Galileo’s notes and holding his breath, trying to be quiet, feeling heavy all over and wondering if his heart would give out.

  The notes are taught in the Jupiter courses at the prep school for emigrants, in a single slide, to explain the discovery of the first four moons. Then it’s the images from Pioneer 10, and the video from Voyager (low-res and jumpy, solar system silent films), and then learning the song that names all sixty-six orbiting bodies, with clapping.

  (He was nine when they set out, so young that he’s forgotten in swaths what he might have known of home.

  He remembers the song, in patches that leave out Kallikore and Kore; he remembers seeing a meteor shower once, as his mother pointed at the sky and explained what was happening, and where they would be going soon; he remembers being betrayed by how much of the sky disappeared once they were moonside.)

  He doesn’t remember, now, how the moons were lined up when they approached Europa—if they were like the notes, or not.

  He barely remembers the moon that hung above Earth, the one you could see without ever meaning to.

  If he’d known, he’d have stood in the dark every night, counting craters and seas, storing up.

  On January 12, he writes her.

  What does it look like, from there?

  She writes, Like a bead of jasper, and four small stones.

  He’s looked at Galileo’s drawings, since, a thousand times, the careful circle and the five or six or eight-point stars in line.

  Sometimes there are only two or three stars, their different magnitudes noted. Sometimes one was noted as too bright, because one moon was in front of another, and he could only record what it looked like from that far away, with what little he had.

  On January 8, 1610, Galileo didn’t think to count Callisto, too far away for him to see. (He’d been armed with a telescope so weak it must have been hardly better than cupped hands.)

  He feels for Galileo, imagines the man sitting up and frowning at his notes, trying to decide how this could be, bodies moving in and out of sight.

  But on January 13, the circle is flanked by all four stars.

  This is the one they showed in school, captioned, “We have known about Europa ever since Galileo recorded it,” as if the first time he had pointed the scope at the sky, he’d counted the moons and moved on.

  (They never say what it must have been like to sit there for night after night and feel locked out of the truth. They never say that it took him a while to even be certain they were moons, not stars.)

  After that night, the scientists’ fever takes over, and Galileo sometimes takes several observations in a night, trying to pin down what the moons were, how fast they moved, what this rotation meant for the Earth he was standing on.

  But Henry doesn’t come back to those. He knows what it looks like when someone’s forming a hypothesis.

  He always looks at that first notation, January the thirteenth, all four moons drawn emphatically eight-pointed, the handwritten notes uneven, as if his hands were shaking, as if couldn’t help himself; for the first time, he had looked at something and really known.

  He sends the notes to her.

  She writes, I hope someone draws by hand for us, when they’re nearing Gliese, so the people who make it home will have something to remember it by.

  He writes, If it works, that would be wonderful. Not
sure how exploration works, these days. I had these—they didn’t make this home.

  But he doesn’t send it. Something stays his hand, every time; it sits and sits, and he doesn’t know why.

  The civilian dock is practically a city, sprawling and huge and too far from the base to be considered real, so the ISI representative moonside declares that the Manu will land in New Mumbai.

  Henry takes watch in the comm room, so Wen can join the contingent heading out to the naming ceremony in the audience hall there.

  (Fifth-generation status means you attend a lot of ceremonies.

  “Worth it?” he asked once.

  She said, “Depends. Is there food?”)

  He writes to Preetha, to tell her that Manu will be landing in a place named for home, a city long since swallowed by the tide.

  It’s fitting, he thinks, that there should be all the names possible, as if the moon’s gathering everything that had been left behind, back home.

  Europa had never escaped the little wars of nomenclature.

  Galileo had tried to name the first four moons in honor of the Medici brothers; they’d be standing on Francesco, maybe, if the term had stuck.

  Galileo had held steadfast to his right to name them. He’d fought against suggestions of using the names of Tuscan nobles (Victripharus), and leaving them nameless (as The Comets of Jupiter), and long after it had been named Europa by someone else’s measure, Galileo still called it Jupiter II, refusing to give in.

  It had been one name piled on top of another from the very first, long before anyone had ever set foot on it, long before they knew it was ice; before they knew anything about it except that it held steady, and so it was a moon, and not a star.

  The next message he gets from her comes over official channels, and by voice.

  “This is ISI Bangalore Ground Control. There’s been an H9N2 outbreak in the city. Hammond is infected. At the moment, everyone who was at Ground Control in the last forty-eight hours is under quarantine. There weren’t many of us, so the main team will hold steady elsewhere for now. We have supplies and medical staff standing by outside. Data collection and monitoring of ISI Manu will continue as scheduled. I’ll keep you apprised of developments. Kai Preetha, over and out.”