Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 112

by Neil Clarke

  The Abduction of Europa

  E. Catherine Tobler

  BOLAJI

  Everything blurs.

  This morning, I thought it was the condensation of my breath upon the helmet’s convex interior, but it’s something else. Deep space shapes our eyes in ways unknown. Under this pressure, Europa is hazy, distant water plumes fogging the horizon, but closer too, and I think there is an undiscovered crevasse. We should be more mindful, but we soldier on, single file, metal cleats biting into the thin ice that covers Europa’s salt ocean. Marius is already lost and though we walk toward Thrace Terminal, it has never seemed so distant. The second icecat seized up three days ago and no human has made this journey on foot.

  We should be perfectly fine—our suits were made for this world, heavy enough so that we will not struggle in the lesser gravity, thick enough to shield us from the radiation pouring from the sky. Beyond the haze, Jupiter churns in eternal storm. Before we left Thrace Terminal, we were mindful of the red spot, seeming to reemerge from having been swallowed—but I cannot see it now, Jupiter’s immensity hesitant to rise.

  It used to bother me, the idea that we would be dead in a day without all the shielding we live behind. That radiation would squash us like bugs, but you get used to it. Space is hostile, my father used to say, but so too the ocean. We were not built for these spaces, so must change ourselves to enter them. It has always been so; history tells us this.

  A low vibration churns in my gut as I stab my cleat into the ice and push myself through another step. Endless miles of ice, the naked sky above us. I peek at that sky and my knees jelly at the sight of Galileo Station coming into view, framed against the vast milk-in-coffee expanse of Jupiter. The station’s helium collection pods catch the distant sunlight and look like strands of spider web. They dance, but not in any wind. They plummet, into the clouds and gone, before returning with their precious cargo. The idea that the station is populated, that somehow people live within its walls, troubles my mind. Against the bulk of Jupiter, the station is no more than a pinprick, and if we living creatures fit within that pinprick—

  I am made to feel small. Nausea punches a clammy hand into my throat. I try to swallow it down, because vomiting in a containment suit is no one’s idea of a good time. The smell of my body is overwhelming, the silent admission that I escalated this endeavor, that Marius died, that they would send Kotto alone for us. Alone.

  It is the idea of paperwork that calms my mind; paper is a thing of the past, of course—it will be a series of cold keys and colder screens, making my fingertips chill with every swipe, but the idea of the work to come comforts, even if the idea of Kotto behind me does not. If you had to have anyone come after you, on a distant ice-clad moon where your partner had been—swallowed, my mind whispers.

  Tragically taken, I amend.

  Kotto would not be anyone’s first choice. Kotto knows walls and vehicles; she doesn’t know sky and ice. She doesn’t know the stories of these distant places the way I do.

  KOTTO

  They say that after a while, you don’t notice the cold.

  The station is cold and Europa, being four hundred and eighty-five million fucking miles from the sun, is naturally and one-hundred percent organically, cold. You think you won’t miss it—that far away, you’ll be locked up tight inside Thrace Terminal and too busy working. You’ll be diving into a goddamn alien ocean—what’s to miss? All that warmth is what.

  You don’t dream about sex—you dream about sunlight, about the way it looked falling through leaves, about the way it felt on your skin. They say you can’t remember—you were too young, born on Schiaparelli Station, shot toward Galileo as a teen, your family devoted to the deep; you’ve only ever seen holos of trees you foolish, foolish girl, but you remember what that light looked like. Like fucking heaven.

  I talk about light a lot in my mental assessments. I’m told that station-borns tend to have some trouble with natural light, or lack thereof. Something in our mind remembers it wasn’t supposed to be all darkness and cold; something inside still hungers for what we’ve never known. And Europa, despite being one of the brightest objects in the goddamn sky, isn’t ever quite bright enough from the surface.

  She’s all silver and ice—the Snow Queen, Marius called her—but you know that means she’s cold. Bolaji talks about the life that runs beneath her frozen surface, crackling in copper coils, and I thought at first he meant the ocean—but he means the lineae, which look like bloodied shadows to me.

  They meant to remove me from service once, given that my eyes cannot see the full color spectrum, but in the end decided that would be a waste, given my family’s devotion to the deeps. Once you’re out here, what else is there to do—it’s not like we’re building entertainment complexes or schools. We aren’t making cities—though aren’t we, every station is a city in miniature—and there aren’t exactly other jobs that need filling. This deep in, everyone’s a garbage collector, a plumber, a chef.

  I’d trained and advanced at the top of every class as if born to water, so it wasn’t like they could kick me without consequence. There are a good many of us, but still not enough. Deep space science remains a sparse thing. Most people stayed where they were born, in the warm, sunshiny splendor of Earth. Fucking Earth. It’s no more than a pinprick in the sky and I still crave it. Wonder what the oceans taste like. Wonder if I’ll ever get there.

  “Hold.”

  My voice crackles out of my suit and ahead of me, Bolaji pauses in our trek. I draw alongside him, watching the plumes of vapor that haze the sky. Somewhere else, our helmets might dot with moisture, but here, the plumes fall as snow and ice—it’s too damn cold on the surface to stay liquid for long. But Bolaji’s helmet is fogged and I lift a gloved hand, trying to wipe it away. It’s on the inside—he’s breathing too hard and I wonder if he’s got what Marius had, what we’re trying to deny he had. Shrieking about the lost station—he’d found it, he’d found it, but there was no lost station, we’d know. Wouldn’t we?

  People out there, it was said, they get sick and go mad because of the cold, because of the dark. You can’t tell a person’s gone mad, not until they melt down. But Bolaji’s eyes are steady on me.

  “Gotta get Marius out of your head,” I say. “What happened happened, Bolaji—you were good to go after him, but goddamn. Some people aren’t made for this kind of place, even if they were born out here.”

  But there’s something else in Bolaji’s eyes even as he nods at me and agrees. There’s something else and I don’t press. What did he see that I couldn’t see? There’s no because. I just don’t. I’m fucking tired and we’ll be sleeping another night on the ice and I’m tired. So tired of the cold they said I would stop noticing. They never said when—but they said I would.

  MARIUS

  On the edge of the salt ocean, a growing limb of night’s dark spreads and Marius can’t make sense of it quickly enough. The ocean has no edge, no shore because the ice cap covers Europa entire. In turn, the ocean covers every bit of rocky ground. But here, there is a shore, an outcropping where Marius stands barefoot. The limb of darkness spreads like water through sand toward him.

  “Bolaji, can you see this?”

  There is no reply.

  Marius kneels upon the shore where it feels like mica, thin and flaking. He dips his hands into the darkness and recoils at the sudden warmth. He has not known such a sensation outside being tangled with another body. (He thinks of William, pushes the memory away—that was another life, another planet.) The darkness creeps up his arms, to the elbow, to the shoulder. At that point, it feels as if a great maw has taken him in and the memory of cold is erased. This world was never cold, its ocean never solid.

  Marius watches the shore retreat at an alarming speed; the sparkling mica glints and is then gone as the salt ocean swells over his head. He thrashes, turning to look at what has a hold of him, but there is no face. Only clouded arms of ink, the limb of night having dissolved itself i
n the salt water.

  He learned to swim as a child on Schiaparelli Station and took top placements. It would be different in an ocean, they said; a calm and controlled pool was not an ocean where one would encounter tides, currents, undertow. Pools did not contain living creatures. Any creature on Europa, should its ocean prove salty, would be called a halophile—salt lover—but Marius always remembered “halo” for angels.

  The angel before Marius has a halo, and the deeper he is pulled, the more it glows in golden splendor. Oxygen deprivation can cause a mind to hallucinate, but Marius remains certain of what he sees before him. Certain, too, of the way his lungs have quieted, of the way he doesn’t feel cold, because every synapse is shutting down.

  BOLAJI

  When Zeus abducted Europa, he came to her in the form of a striking white bull and she, in praise of his beauty, draped him with hand-woven garlands of flowers. Endless scent and color streamed from his grand horns and he reveled in the feel of her upon his back.

  Europa, they would have you believe, so reveled in the feel of him beneath her, strong and sure and warmer than anything she had ever known, that she did not notice he was carrying her away from the shore, not until they were in the sea’s wet, not until he had pulled her under and changed into a man more beautiful than any before him—for of course, he was no man at all.

  They say Europa did not scream (Marius screamed—my people say a traveler to distant lands should make no enemies and this was not our intent—never our intent), but by then, she was under water. How could anyone have known? The foam that rushed to shore could have easily been from her thrashing in the water, trying to escape Zeus’s maniacal hold—but it was only the gentle swelling tide, they say, carrying flower petals to shore in the wake of a beautiful wedding.

  Europa’s tides are well-concealed beneath a cap of ice, plumes of water escaping when they can. But once free, they freeze and become part of the ice forevermore. Europa stretches infinite before us. Ahead, I can see the curved ridges we will likely take shelter in if we mean to rest and hydrate. The Delphi Flexus is not endless, but looks such from where we walk; we have to cross its boundary, and then the penitentes—the spikes of ice that prove this world is melting and refreezing in turn—before Thrace Terminal becomes a possibility.

  I am torn between which is a more severe loss: Marius or the two icecats. Kotto would say the icecats, given our present circumstances. I am worried I would agree.

  Within the flexus, we find a curve of ice in which to shelter. There will be no fire, but our suits are equipped with a series of chemical warming layers that should see us through. Likewise, there is a liquid feeding system, and though it is not my mother’s moin moin, it will do. My mother told me the death that kills a man begins as an appetite, and perhaps this is what she meant, so when Kotto bids me eat, I activate the suit’s feeding tube, tonguing once for water, twice for pureed food. There are two more meals to be had, which means at least two nights without. Possibly more. We will arrive at Thrace Terminal hungry.

  “Bolaji, what—”

  Kotto grabs my arm and extends it away from my body. The soft suit is the only thing that separates us from certain death via cold or radiation, and by the soft light radiating from her helmet, I can see what she sees. The sleeve of my suit has torn, from elbow to wrist, the fabric gaping open as if the sleeve has been unbuttoned. Every layer is ripped, ruined, and something pale rests within.

  It is so pale, I do not even recognize my own arm for my skin is not this color, but brown. I stare, for I have never seen such a thing—has it been burned by cold? If my suit has been compromised, why have I not perished?

  Kotto moves swiftly, cracking her case open to retrieve the emergency patch kit. I want to tell her to stop, but I sit silently, creamed spinach puree growing sour on my tongue. I should be dead. Why am I not dead? Kotto works fast—her hands are sure as she seals the entire length of the sleeve back together. In the cold, frost begins to crackle over the binding.

  “Kotto.”

  “Sssh.”

  She does not have to tell me twice.

  KOTTO

  They say that in deep space, the extraordinary will become ordinary and eventually you stop noticing it. When the extraordinary is one’s everyday job, it’s nothing to fuss over. We live in space, we are settling the entire system, these acts are no longer magic. These people—they need to stop talking, because they’re so fucking wrong.

  Bolaji’s arm should not be that color—it’s like ice, Europan ice. But it’s also not. If the lineae within Europa’s ice look like shadows to me, charcoal lines hastily sketched, this ice is different, for his veins make a lineae of their own, these deep blue. Or, what I presume to be blue. I should not be able to see this color—but here it is. I have never seen it, and yet I know it. An ancestral memory, my therapist would say. I want to ask Bolaji what color the lines are, but the suit needs to be sealed, and once it’s sealed we say nothing.

  “Kotto.”

  “Sssh.” I lift my hand, as if I could place it over his mouth to silence him. But he stays silent. Trembling. His eyes are wide and I tell myself they are not getting pale, they are as brown as they ever were, calling to mind the blackwood jungles my grandmother left me paintings of. So deep one could get lost, until the sunlight pierced the trunks and—oh Bolaji. What the hell? This was a simple rescue, nothing more.

  Beyond the goddamn color of his arm, Bolaji should be dead. I am certain this fact presses on him as much as on me. His suit was opened to space, to the Europan air which stands at nearly three hundred degrees below zero. Nothing can survive that. Not even the icecats proved able and they were built for it.

  Beneath my feet, the ice rumbles. Our training is so ingrained, I don’t even have to say “move!” before we’re in motion. We know.

  As stable as the surface should be, deep space remains largely unknown and hostile. Perhaps we were not meant to come this far—we are too fragile, too alive to know the depth of this cold. Europa is only doing what Europa does best. Under the strain of Jupiter above her, carting her deeper into the stars, she cracks and groans and spews water from her belly. Most of this water falls to coat the ground in fresh ice; some escapes into space.

  Bolaji and I climb up the flexus and slide down its backside, avoiding the spew of ice water. Despite the danger, I am grinning as we glide down the ice, over bumps and ridges as the crews on Mars often traverse the sand dunes. At the bottom of the ridge, our ice cleats stab us steady, though the ground rumbles still. High in the hazy sky, more water plumes.

  “Kotto—”

  “Bolaji, move,” I say, because I want some distance between us and that plume. If we’re resting at all (he should be dead, Bolaji should be dead), it’s not going to be on top of Europa’s vomiting mouth.

  MARIUS

  Others have been on Europa for eons, so long that when they try to convey it in numbers and words, Marius is overwhelmed. Others believe he has a mind for science, but Marius can’t digest what they transmit. Images flood his tear-blurred vision—another star system, far from where he now floats. An explosion, a nebula, debris hurtling through space. These simple things, Marius slowly understands.

  Marius cannot understand his own star system in its infancy, but when he realizes that nine worlds are spinning into creation around a violently bright sun (he still counts Pluto), he can taste tears on my lips. He views the planets as children, small but growing larger, hauling in rock and gas, coalescing atmospheres tolerable and toxic, flinging comets here and moons there. He watches young Mars flood and old Mars perish; Valles Marineris cracks wide and he fears the entire planet will split in two, but she holds, dusty and dead.

  No one has witnessed this, Marius thinks, though is quickly reminded by the strong body beneath his own that Others were here first. Others witnessed. This was theirs until slumber and gravity drew them into the depths where they slept, Marius and his kind cracked Europa’s ice like an egg, pierced her salty ocean, drill
ed into her rocky mantle. (Crude, but he thinks of William again—cracking, piercing, drilling.)

  Marius tries to speak, but is under water, and cannot understand how he is breathing, let alone how he might speak. He thinks he should not have left the station, but he had to, otherwise there would be no this. He was called to leave the station, knowing where to find them, knowing they had something to show him—the lost station, the end of all he had sought. Bolaji should never have followed—Marius is certain where the fault lies.

  He stretches into the cold dark and when he can no longer see any brightness above, loses his sense of direction. Everything is featureless black, as if nothing has ever been created. In this black, there has never been a sun, nor any speck of light, until something startling and green darts through the salted water. Glowing Others murmurate across his vision, one sliding through Marius’s palm small as a flower.

  The beings draw so near that they swarm around Marius, against his skin—skin, not suit, and he wonders when it was lost, and why he is not dead (is he dead?). When they swarm with more fury, his throat grows raw from screaming. He is not yet dead, he is not yet—

  BOLAJI

  Europa, once carried to Crete where she was to be queen, was welcomed by Asterion—he of the labyrinth, the creature that was half man, half monster. Did Asterion challenge Zeus for Europa’s fair hand? There are no such stories of what became of her there—but for the one that my mind creates: that Europa, enraged after being taken from her home and life, turned on them both; that Athena looked down in her wisdom and recognizing a warrior soul, transformed what remained of the garland of flowers into a sword. Europa killed Zeus and imprisoned Asterion within the labyrinth, before tracing the path of spilled flowers back home.

  I am certain this did not happen, but it seems so, as Kotto jostles me into consciousness once more. She stands as fiery, sword-brandishing Europa above me, intent on slaughtering whatever obstacle lands in our path. I have never seen Kotto as such before and it steals my breath. Kotto keeps always to herself, intent on her work, on finding the smallest organisms that call Europa’s oceans home. She cared nothing for humanity—only what life might exist elsewhere. When she found the first, this was the only time I heard her laugh; she said they were yellow-orange, but they glowed green for me.