‘Contact hasn’t been in any way considered,’ said Tatsuro. ‘It implicitly changes the basis on which we’re acting. It re-opens questions which were settled long ago.’
‘Circumstances have changed,’ I said. ‘I have little confidence in getting anywhere with the Jovians, but if it’s what Dr Malley here needs to convince him to share his work with us, I’m more than willing to try.’
Tatsuro shook his head. ‘It’s far too dangerous. We can’t afford to lose you, Ellen, and we can’t let some
negotiation
lose us time.’
‘We can continue preparations for the impact event,’ I said. ‘Contact, if it should happen, need not get in the way. If there are negotiations, I imagine they can be complete before the impact event, and in time to avert it if they’re successful. If there are post-human minds down there, one thing we know is they’d think fast. And as for the danger, well—is it any worse than making direct observations?’
‘If I may?’ Yeng said. Nods around the table. ‘It is worse, Ellen—with communication you necessarily open yourself more than with observation, and give more away. But I’ve strengthened the firewalls, and this—’ she waved at the back of the room ‘—has obviously been set up to filter incoming observations, and to isolate them.’
‘Correct,’ growled Tatsuro.
‘So between them,’ Yeng went on, ‘it should be more than enough. But I recommend a back-up, just in case.’
We argued for about an hour, but finally it was agreed. And once we’d come to agreement—a consensus, in fact; there wasn’t even the need for a vote—those of us directly involved went straight to work, while the meeting went on.
Yeng applied the back-up process—the equipment was to hand, because whoever had drawn the short straw, or volunteered, to handle the close-up observations would have needed one anyway. It took forty minutes, every second of which were, for me, deeply unpleasant: it starts with a tendril up a nostril, and ends with a painkiller for the worst headache you can imagine, a real migraine and
petit mal
combined, with thunder in your ears and a dirty yellow lightning in your eyes, as the pain flips over into synaesthesia.
And then it fades, to a dull relief. I stood looking at the cubic inch of smart-matter in my hand, within which my soul was stored, until the tiny block was absorbed seamlessly into the suit, vanishing like a cheap trick: nothing up my sleeve.
‘Takes it out of you,’ Yeng observed sympathetically; then we both saw the ambiguity, and laughed. I felt better, and stood up. The Command Committee had moved on to discussing the forthcoming visit from the Solar Council delegate. As usual in the Division, they were quite capable of focusing on one thing at a time, and leaving those who were implementing a previous decision to get on with it.
During my backing-up ordeal the television screen had been moved to one side, and Malley was using it to observe the Gate up close and in real-time. The Gate’s outline was clearer now than on the old recordings, because over several decades we’d cautiously attached an array of instruments and rockets around its circumference. The instruments we used for observation, the rockets to shift its location, gradually boosting it from low Jupiter orbit to its present position among the outer moons. The current image on the screen came from a fighter among the usual swarm that stood watch.
Where the television screen had been was now a smaller screen showing incoming Mission Control data about, rather than from, the shower of probes currently converging on the planet; and a control deck and wraparound helmet, for the privileged individual who was about to follow them down.
‘I’ve reprogrammed some of these remotely,’ said Yeng. ‘They’re standard gas-giant divers. There’s a prerecorded message—just a hailing and query—for you to fire off on the wavelengths the Jovians use for what we think are their communications, and an isolated core for any reply.’
‘How will I know which ones to fix on?’
‘They’re the only ones you’ll get through to. Don’t worry, they’re a big enough fraction of the total for you to have a good chance of getting close.’
‘OK,’ I said. I looked at the Mission Control display. ‘Five minutes to entry. Here goes nothing.’
Malley turned from his own screen and gave me a thumbs up as I sat down and put on the VR helmet.
Jupiter loomed, and in I fell.
It was the clarity of the light that struck me first. I knew intellectually what to expect, but I’d got used to seeing Jupiter from above, and from far away, as a roiling mass of clouds and upwellings. Close up, the scale of the spaces between those clouds was a visceral shock. There were chasms between the pillars of cloud in which Earth could fall in sunlight all the way to the metallic-hydrogen core.
The hundreds of probes, elaborate but expendable, stamped out like bottle-caps in the nanofactories, were passively aerodynamic: gliders with the shape and approximate size of stone arrowheads, their faceted surfaces glittering like chipped chert, their shafts the thin rods in which the drogues were stacked. The filaments of their aerials trailed behind them, parallel to the shafts. The probe heads had ailerons and rudders, so their flight could be controlled, but with a minimum two-way delay of twelve seconds such control could only be gross.
As they hit atmosphere at a hundred thousand miles per hour I was flicking from probe to probe, seeking out ones that seemed to be heading in interesting directions. The first one on which I settled was spiralling down in a clear updraft in which one of the bubble-clusters (I was not prepared, yet, to call them ‘cities’) was drifting upwards. I tagged another, which headed straight for one of the ‘walls’ of the convection cells, and stayed with the first as it descended. The pink and orange clouds streaked past.
Behind me—as I couldn’t help thinking—the drogues deployed one by one, and one by one were whipped away. By the time the last had gone, the probe had slowed to a mere fifty thousand miles per hour and was two hundred miles deep in the atmosphere, hurtling in a tightening circle down the well of clear hydrogen towards the bubble-cluster. I nudged the probe’s control surfaces and brought its descent almost to a halt, circling the cluster like a stacked airliner. The bubble-cluster was a thousand miles in diameter, made up of hundreds of translucent bubbles. This much our telescopes had already shown; and the hint of movement within.
Closer … now I could see the black threads, each at least a quarter of a mile wide, which radiated from the cluster and vanished into the cloud walls. That the threads connected with other such clusters seemed incredible, given the distances involved—but the only other explanation, that they were some
kind of intake and/or outlet pipes, was so far without evidence, tempting as the thought that they were mere sewers and ventilators might be.
Closer still … the apparent translucence of the bubbles sharpened to transparency: multiple hexagonal panes set in a lattice of sturdy-looking white struts. Behind them was movement, unmistakable, definite. I hit the ‘send’ key and swooped around again. On a reckless impulse I slewed the probe into a close pass across the top of the bubble-cluster. All I saw, of course, was a minute-long blur, followed by darkness as the probe plunged into the clouds.
I disconnected from the probe and flicked to the data, running the recording in slow motion, stepping it down and down until I seemed to be drifting along; increasing the magnification until each panel was as clear and close as a cockpit window.
And saw behind those windows—looking out, crowding, visibly following the tiny object’s flashing flight—deep violet eyes in gigantic faces, faces sweet and calm as those of any imagined angels. Their bodies too were like angels’: with long, trailing cascades of gold or silver or copper hair, and sweeping diaphanous robes of rainbow light, each breastplated with a sunburst of jewelled filigree. Their features weren’t sexless, or androgynous—they were differentiated into the variant ideals of masculine and feminine beauty. The interior of the bubble glowed and flickered with the radiance of their beating wings. Not like the wings of insects, or birds, or bats, but perfect parabolas, curved like magnetic fields, shimmering like polar lights; wings made from aurorae.
As I watched, they changed, flowing into the shapes of fantastic fish, of floating multicoloured scarves, of showers of flowers, of flaring fireworks. The vision ended as the probe passed beyond the cluster.
I replayed it, this time accompanying the images with the message I’d sent, and found that a response had been received. I hesitated, then went ahead and ran it through the firewall filters. What came out was not any kind of virus, but a quite straightforward message composed and sent repeatedly as a second-long sequence of English. The machines stretched out the burst, sampled it to a sound that sang in my ears, letters that shone before my eyes:
‘Responding to probe: we welcome your message. Standing by for further communication. Informally—hi guys and gals! It’s been a long time! Let’s talk! See you soon!’
The beauty of the Jovians, the warmth—and indeed the colloquial informality—of their message, should have been enough to melt all hostility, all suspicion. The gaiety of their display, the tones of welcome and love in their voice, made me yearn to see them and speak to them again. I ducked out of the VR helmet and put it down and looked up at Yeng. I could feel
my cheeks strained with smiles, damp with tears. Yeng smiled at me and glanced above my head. I swivelled the gimballed seat and found the rest of the crew and of the Command Committee crowded behind me.
‘Well?’ said Tatsuro. ‘You made contact?’
‘Yes,’ I said. My voice quivered.
‘No hacking? No viruses?’
Yeng shook her head. ‘It’s all clean,’ she said. ‘No viruses.’
‘None at all,’ I said. ‘See for yourselves. Look and tell me if those aren’t the most beautiful creatures you’ve ever seen. They’re … ravishing. Seductive. ’ I sighed, remembering. ‘And obviously capable of communicating with us. Whatever they’ve gone through, they’ve kept some continuity with humanity.’
The images I’d seen were replayed again, this time on the screen. Suze and Malley watched them, rapt. The crew and the Committee studied them more warily.
‘What do you think?’ asked Tatsuro. The others were, for a moment, too absorbed in what they’d seen to speak, so I got in first.
‘Why don’t we have a look at some of the other Jovians?’ I said. ‘The ones I
wasn’t
in contact with. Let’s see how typical this is, before jumping to conclusions.’
Reluctantly the others pulled themselves out of their contemplative admiration, and set to work. A few probes had passed as close, or closer, to other bubble-clusters as had the one I’d been tracking, and images of the clusters’ inhabitants could be extracted. Their appearances varied widely, and changed rapidly as we watched. The ‘angel’ form I’d first encountered was among them, but there were many others no less beautiful. The most common basic shape resembled a butterfly, with the parabolic, colourful wings, like those of the ‘angels’, extending from a central column or core. The sunburst shape, which on the ‘angels’ had appeared as a breastplate or pendant, was a feature of all the Jovian entities, though sometimes masked by their current form.
‘That jewelled object seems to be your basic Jovian,’ I said. ‘The CPU, perhaps? It sits in the glowing shape around it like a magnet in its fields—’
‘Which it may well be,’ said Yeng. ‘The wider form is like a controlled aurora, almost a television picture, which the Jovian can vary at will.’ She smiled. ‘They seem … playful, whimsical …’
‘Jovial!’ someone said.
‘It suggests,’ Tatsuro said seriously, ‘a degree of commonality with ourselves that the old Outwarder macros with their amoeboid shapes did not. Their reaction times show that they are still “fast folk” but their appearance is more … appealing, and they each seem to be distinct individuals. I have to say that one’s automatic reaction to these entities is quite the opposite of
the horror and hatred that the macros seem to incite.’ He waved a hand through some virtual display of his own, creating a sequential display of the beautiful, flickering images. ‘When people see them, I don’t think they’ll be as eager to destroy them as we are—or
were
.’
The members of the Command Committee were nodding gravely, stroking their bearded or beardless chins like peasant elders listening to an intellectual. I glared at them all, amazed that they could be so swayed.
‘Isn’t it obvious what’s going on here?’ I said. ‘
This
is the mind virus, the killer meme. The fast folk have simply adapted to an environment that contains humans with more power than they have—for now. Their beauty is a lure, precisely calculated to trigger our aesthetic reactions. That message, that display, was their first line of defence. We have to smash through it, or we’re doomed.’
That was the start of the argument. The other CC members knew as well as I did that life is a fight in which beauty is a weapon: an instrument of survival, like a baby’s cry or a child’s smile. They knew that the message I’d recorded—and any other communication—could be the output of a flatline. They knew … but why go on? They had the true knowledge.
So I still find it difficult to forgive, or indeed to understand, the next decisions of the Command Committee. Each decision went to a vote, and each vote was carried by twelve to two (me and Joe Lutterloh, our comms specialist). The committee decided: to release all the Jovian images and other probe data to the rest of the Division; to prepare for a direct contact, using a (heavily firewalled) radio link; and to cooperate fully with the Solar Council delegate, due to arrive in three days. There was still plenty of time to deflect the incoming train of Kuiper-Belt comets—all of them had guidance rockets attached, and right up to the last few minutes all it would take to divert them from the usual harmless slingshot swing around Jupiter would be a brief burn.
Tatsuro seemed to win over most of the committee with the argument that there was nothing to lose, and possibly a lot to gain, by doing things this way. The Division had originally intended to present the rest of the Union with a
fait accompli
, to give the Jovians no warning—but we’d known that there might be some problems later. This way, we’d pull the rest of the
Union into the decision. If coexistence with the Jovians turned out to be impossible—or was voted down—then the Jovians would still have no time to react if we went ahead with the bombardment. From the Jovians’ point of view, the incoming comets would appear no more threatening than our normal import traffic, until the final, fatal, fine adjustment to their course.
I thought, and argued, that this was assuming rather a lot about their capacities. Unfortunately, by opening the question of negotiation in order to get Malley to cooperate, I’d let the other committee members rediscover any doubts and hesitations they may have had—as well as exposing them to the insidious sight of just how attractive and appealing the Jovian entities could appear. I consoled myself with the thought that Malley’s co-operation was, in the long run, the most important thing from my point of view.
The Command Committee’s deliberations had been held
in camera
only because of the possible virus threat. With that apparently out of the way, the meeting was as open as all our meetings usually were, and all its decisions were open to appeal to the Division as a whole. The emergency meeting-room would be kept up, however, as an operations room to handle the direct communication. During that contact, it would again be isolated.
Malley, of course, was delighted at how the debate had turned out, and was eager to get on with his study of the wormhole. Suze too seemed pleased by it, and a little relieved when I showed no sign of hostility to her—or to anyone else who disagreed with me. I took my defeats in the votes with every sign of good grace. Inwardly I was seething, but it doesn’t take two hundred years to get a grip on that sort of thing. I’ve been good at it since my teens. (My
late
teens, admittedly.)
As are others. Tatsuro didn’t get to be the chairman for nothing. At the end of the meeting he said mildly:
‘Ellen, you are obviously not keen to participate in the negotiations, and you have little to contribute to the scientific analysis of the survey data. May I suggest that, until further notice, you continue to work with Doctor Malley, giving him all practical assistance on the wormhole navigation problem? ’
I agreed, of course, and the rest of the committee were more than happy to have me occupied in something I agreed with, rather than reluctantly participating in something I didn’t.
‘We have much to do,’ Tatsuro said. ‘But I suggest further that the crew of the
Terrible Beauty
take some time to get some sleep. You in particular, Ellen, must be quite exhausted. You can begin work with Doctor Malley in the morning.’
I smiled and nodded. As we rose to leave, Tatsuro turned so that his face was, for a moment, visible only to me. I saw his almost undetectable wink, and knew our concord held.
Suze stayed behind with Malley, who was given a work station at the far end of the room to continue with the wormhole observations. The rest of us headed for the suite which we shared as a crew, though several of us would undoubtedly be going elsewhere tonight. (Night and day in the Callisto caverns had nothing to do with that satellite’s inconvenient rotational period—they were arbitrarily based on GMT, like our ship time. For many they had little to do with their sleep patterns, either, which were often based on staggered shifts and distorted by anti-sleep drugs. The latter had a limited usefulness: the circadian rhythm was buried deeper in our cells than our genetic tinkering or pharmaceutical intervention could reach, and the brain’s requirement for regular sleep is—though more recent in evolutionary time—even less amendable.)
I stood aside to let the others in, then let the door click into place behind me and leaned back against it. The suite was as we’d left it when we’d been scrambled three weeks earlier. All the items of clothing or crockery left lying around had no doubt been patiently and mindlessly cleaned in our absence, which was just as well. The plants had been dusted and watered. The low ceiling glowed with its familiar dim evening light, the kitchen was humming quietly to itself, and the bedrooms off the lounge were sighing with invitation. The mailbox was politely silent; though probably bursting with messages from our colleagues and friends and forebears and offspring, it knew better than to remind us of this when we’d just come home. I looked around at Boris, Yeng, Tony, Andrea and Jaime.
‘I don’t know about you, comrades,’ I announced, ‘but I am not for any discussion. It’s been a long day, and a long trip, and we all need some R&R. I’m up for a high-alcohol drink, a low-gee Jacuzzi, and some low-gee sex. In any sequence, all at once, and more than once.’
‘“If”, “Else”, and “Repeat”,’ Yeng grinned. ‘Still the basic program logic.’ She caught Tony’s hand. ‘We’ll have a drink, but we’re going out.’
‘I guess that’s decided,’ said Tony. He squeezed Yeng’s hand, kissed the top of her head, let go her hand and bounded over to the drinks cabinet, where he started dialling up responses to shouted orders. Andrea and Jaime wanted to do their own thing too.
‘That leaves us,’ I said to Boris. ‘So, big gunner, you wanna make it with me, or just leave me with my suit’s imagination?’
He put his arm around my shoulders and boosted me towards a couch.
‘Ah, Ellen, of course I stay with you. All the girls in all the bars in Callisto …’ He paused, looking dreamy and regretful, until I gave him a friendly kick, ‘ … couldn’t drag me away from my good lady to whom I’m eternally grateful. ’
I first met Boris in 2110, on a military mission to the Sheenisov. We met on the frozen Lena outside Yatkutsk. He was a giant in furs, I a sexy spacewoman in my new smart-matter spacesuit, with its bubble helmet and black sheen. An angel more of death than of mercy, I was delivering home-brew kits for turning Siberian ore and Russian rust into shiny, perfectly machined small arms. His voice was like black molasses: American accent, deep, rich; it reminded me of Paul Robeson, and it still does. I could never forget it, or him.
Over the next nine decades I saw Boris, or he saw me, in many odd circumstances, but I could never stay, and he could never go. Eventually we found each other in the last battle, against the last believers, the last crazy altruists to risk their mortal bodies and potentially immortal minds for god or country or duty or other people’s property. I pulled him from a wrecked and burning tank in the suburbs of Lisbon, and took him with me to orbit and grew him all back, and I never let go of him again.
‘I don’t want your gratitude,’ I said, reaching up with one hand to grab a tall vodka-and-ice from Tony, and reaching down with the other. ‘That wasn’t why I pulled you out of the tank. It was pure selfish lust, comrade, and that’s what I want from you.’
And that was what I got. We did the If, we did the Else, we did the Repeat, we did the Do Until exhaustion. There are those who swear by free fall, but give me low-gee any day, or night. There’s more
purchase
. As for one-gee and above … it’s OK for a bit, but it does you in. How Earth ever got to its present population, I’ll never know. Cloning, possibly.
But eventually, we slept. I dreamt of angels, and sometimes woke with a start and with memories of other things, and clung to Boris until I rejoined him in sleep.
It’s 2089 and things are falling apart: as below, so above. Every day, every hour brings a new disaster to our screens, picked up from the dwindling number of functioning news services and the vastly larger, but also diminishing, numbers of communications amateurs and hackers and pirates. The net that brought the world together is dying in its arms. It’s been years since any rocket that didn’t carry a warhead has lifted from the surface. We’re on our own now: hundreds of thousands of people, millions of bugs and beasts, more millions of humans and other animals
in potentia
as frozen sperm and eggs,
in vitro
as cell samples and recorded brain-states; countless digital
ghosts; together they make up the space-based fraction of the biosphere. They add up to millions of eggs in hundreds of baskets; no longer, thankfully, in one. Spread out across near-Earth, Lagrange, Luna, Mars and the Belt, humanity and its animal allies are safe against anything short of a nearby supernova. The sky won’t fall, now; but Earth will.
The Green Death is in its early stages. Already, the biomedical laboratories where the only hope of a cure could be found are being put to the torch. The Greens are leading the mobs, happy to divert the unfounded suspicion from themselves. I, at this time, am absolutely convinced that the Greens have deliberately engineered the Death in a genocidal sacrifice to their evil goddess, Gaia.
So, with this awful warning of the consequences of the kind of thinking all of us have always opposed being shown in lurid and distressing detail before our very eyes, the two factions of the space movement, Earth-Tenders and Outwarders, unite in adversity to face the challenges of the future … No. We’re arguing over resources, we’re on the verge of
fighting
over resources—water, primarily. We’re bleeding all the solar power we can spare into the capacitors of high-energy lasers. We’re checking our nukes.
The Outwarders have—appropriately enough—long since moved out, or been pushed out, from the old near-Earth battlesat in which I still live. They’ve moved out to Lagrange 4—most of the traditional Space-Movement types, for reasons buried deep in Space-Movement tradition, settled at the other Lagrange point, L5—where they’re building the fleet for their Jovian expedition; and they’re mining the Moon.
That’s one source of conflict. They want Lunar polar water ice for their expedition. We want it for our survival—there’s ice out in the Belt, but its transfer-orbit delivery is a slow trickle. The allocation of rights to exploit particular patches of Lunar ice would have been tricky to work out, even with the best of intentions and a decent legal system in place. (Discovery? First use? Present possession? Does the first satellite identification count? The first landing? The first staking-out? The first successful mining-plant?) In these benighted days we’re all experts on libertarian property acquisition theory—trouble is, every claim has at least one respectable theory behind it, and a squad of underemployed legal experts in front of it, with guns.
I’m worried about the Lunar polar mines, because my parents—with whom I keep in touch, though we haven’t breathed the same air for decades—are managing one of them, on behalf of one of the old Space Movement’s front corporations.
Meanwhile, we—the Earth-Tenders—are using up resources in quixotic efforts like orbital medicine-drops (not as useless as it sounds, by the way—we drop medical
nanofactories
) and orbital zaps of whatever military force look like this week’s bad guys (big mistake) and servicing communications
satellites that would otherwise just
die
(good move, except that the military bad guys [q.v.] use them too). And the Outwarders claim, using whatever theory of property is to their immediate purpose, that at least some of the resources we’re allegedly wasting on aid for the stricken populations of Earth belong to
them
. For example, they helped to boost this station to its present orbit; we paid them, but they now claim rent for the
orbit
, backdated, with interest.
‘Fucking property rights,’ I say to Tony as I keep an eye on the deep-space radar. ‘It’s enough to make you turn communist.’
We’re seated criss-cross, each looking at a screen behind the other’s shoulder, in one of the station’s modules that barely has room for both of us, let alone for the tangle of cables and tubes and floating obsolescent equipment. Outside the open hatch of the module, other people are working, moving slowly in the sluggish stale air.
‘Hah!’ Tony doesn’t look away from the computer on which he’s collating loyalty checks on the station’s eight hundred and fifty-six personnel. ‘You’re a communist already, Ellen, you just don’t know it. When did you ever pay for your supplies, or get paid for your work?’