Manhattan in Reverse (8 page)

A flotilla of industrial and dormitory complexes drifted around Vespasian, each of them sprouting a dozen or more assembly platforms. Every family on Earth was busy constructing more micro-gravity industrial systems and long-range spacecraft. In addition to the twenty-seven moonbases, there were eight cities on Mars and five asteroid colonies; each venture bringing some unique benefit from the purely scientific to considerable financial and economic reward. Everyone was looking to expand their activities to some fresh part of the solar system, especially in the wake of the Caesar settlement claim.

Some of us, of course, were intent on going further still. I saw the clearest evidence of that as the
Kuranda
spiralled up away from Earth. We passed within eight thousand miles of what the planetbound are calling the Wanderers Cluster. Five asteroids in a fifty-thousand-mile orbit, slowly being hollowed out and fitted with habitation chambers. From Earth they appeared simply as bright stars performing a strange slow traverse of the sky. From the
Kuranda
(with the aid of an on-board video sensor) I could clearly see the huge construction zones on their surface where the fusion engines were being fabricated. If all went well, they would take two hundred years to reach Proxima Centari. Half a lifetime cooped up inside artificial caves, but millions of people had applied to venture with them. I remained undecided if that was a reflection of healthy human dynamism, or a more subtle comment on the state of our society. Progress, if measured by the yardstick of mechanisation, medicine, and electronics, seemed to be accelerating at a rate which even I found perturbing. Too many people were being made redundant as new innovations came along, or AIs supplanted them. In the past that never bothered us – after all who wants to spend four hundred years doing the same thing? But back then it was a slow transition, sliding from occupation to occupation as fancy took you. Now such migrations were becoming forced, and the timescale shorter. There were times I even wondered if my own job was becoming irrelevant.

The
Kuranda
took three months to get me to Jupiter, powered by low-temperature ion plasma engines, producing a small but steady thrust the whole way. It was one of the first of its class, a long-duration research and explorer ship designed to take our family scientists out as far as Neptune. Two hundred yards long, including the propellant tanks and fusion reactors.

We raced round Jupiter’s pale orange cloudscape, shedding delta-V as Captain Harrison Dominy Raleigh aligned us on a course for Ganymede. Eight hours later when we were coasting up away from the gas giant, I was asked up to the bridge. Up is a relative term on a spaceship which wasn’t accelerating, and the bridge is at the centre of the life-support section. There wasn’t a lot of instrumentation available to the three duty officers, just some fairly sophisticated consoles with holographic windows and an impressive array of switches. The AI actually ran
Kuranda
, while people simply monitored its performance and that of the primary systems.

Our captain, Harrison Dominy Raleigh, was floating in front of the main sensor console, his right foot velcroed to the decking.

‘Do we have a problem?’ I asked.

‘Not with the ship,’ he said. ‘This is strictly your area.’

‘Oh?’ I anchored myself next to him, trying to comprehend the display graphics. It wasn’t easy, but then I don’t function very well in low-gravity situations. Fluids of every kind migrate to my head, which in my case brings on the most awful headaches. My stomach is definitely not designed to digest floating globules of food. And you really would think that after seventy-five years of people travelling through space, someone would manage to design a decent freefall toilet. On the plus side, I’m not too nauseous during the aerial manoeuvres that replace locomotion, and I am receptive to the anti-wasting drugs developed to counter calcium loss in human bones. It’s a balance which I can readily accept as worthwhile in order to see Jupiter with my own eyes.

The captain pointed to a number of glowing purple spheres in the display, each one tagged by numerical icons. ‘The Caesars have orbited over twenty sensor satellites around Ganymede. They provide a full radar coverage out to eighty thousand miles. We’re also picking up similar emissions from the other major moons here. No doubt their passive scans extend a great deal further.’

‘I see. The relevance being?’

‘Nobody arrives at any of the moons they’ve claimed without them knowing about it. I’d say they’re being very serious about their settlement rights.’

‘We never made our voyage a secret. They have our arrival time down to the same decimal place as our own AI.’

‘Which means the next move is ours. We arrive at Ganymede injection in another twelve hours.’

I looked at those purple points again. We were the first non-Caesar spaceship to make the Jupiter trip. The Caesars sent a major mission of eight ships thirteen years ago; which the whole world watched with admiration right up until Commander Ricardo Savill Caesar set his foot on Ganymede and announced to his massive television audience that he was claiming not only Ganymede but Jupiter and all of its satellites for the Caesar family. It was extraordinary, not to say a complete violation of our entire world’s rationalist ethos. The legal manoeuvring had been going on ever since, as well as negotiations amongst the most senior level of family representatives in an attempt to get the Caesars to repudiate the claim. It was a standing joke for satirical show comedians, who got a laugh every time about excessive greed and routines about one person one moon. But in all that time, the Caesars had never moved from their position that Jupiter and its natural satellites now belonged to them. What they had never explained in those thirteen years is why they wanted it.

And now here we were. My brief wasn’t to challenge or antagonize them, but to establish some precedents. ‘I want you to open a communication link to their primary settlement,’ I told the captain. ‘Use standard orbital flight control protocols, and inform them of our intended injection point. Then ask them if there is any problem with that. Treat it as an absolutely normal everyday occurrence . . . we’re just one more spaceship arriving in orbit. If they ask what we’re doing here; we’re a scientific mission and I would like to discuss a schedule of geophysical investigations with their Mayor. In person.’

Harrison Dominy Raleigh gave me an uncomfortable grimace. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like to talk to them now?’

‘Definitely not. Achieving a successful Ganymede orbit is not something important enough to warrant attention from a family representative.’

‘Right then.’ He flipped his headset mike down, and instructed the AI on establishing a communication link.

It wasn’t difficult. The Caesars were obviously treading as carefully as we were. Once the
Kuranda
was in orbit, the captain requested spaceport clearance for our ground-to-orbit shuttle, which was granted without comment.

The ride down was an uneventful ninety minutes, if you were to discount the view from the small, heavily-shielded ports. Jupiter at a quarter crescent hung in the sky above Ganymede. We sank down to a surface of fawn-coloured ice pocked by white impact craters and great
sulci
, clusters of long grooves slicing through the grubby crust, creating broad river-like groupings of corrugations. For some reason I thought the landscape more quiet and dignified than that of Earth’s moon. I suppose the icescape’s palette of dim pastel colours helped create the impression, but there was definitely an ancient solemnity to this small world.

New Milan was a couple of degrees north of the equator, in an area of flat ice pitted with small newish craters. An undisciplined sprawl of emerald and white lights covering nearly five square miles. In thirteen years the Caesars had built themselves quite a substantial community here. All the buildings were freestanding igloos whose base and lower sections were constructed from some pale yellow silicate concrete, while the top third was a transparent dome. As the shuttle descended towards the landing field I began to realize why the lights I could see were predominately green. The smallest igloo was fifty yards in diameter, with the larger ones reaching over two hundred yards; they all had gardens at their centre illuminated by powerful lights underneath the glass.

After we landed, a bus drove me over to the administration centre in one of the large igloos. It was the Mayor, Ricardo Savill Caesar himself, who greeted me as I emerged from the airlock. He was a tall man, with the slightly flaccid flesh of all people who had been in a low-gravity environment for any length of time. He wore a simple grey and turquoise one-piece tunic with a mauve jacket, standard science mission staff uniform. But on him it had become a badge of office, bestowing that extra degree of authority. I could so easily imagine him as the direct descendant of some First Era Centurion commander.

‘Welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘And congratulations on your flight. From what we’ve heard, the
Kuranda
is an impressive ship.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d be happy to take you round her later.’

‘And I’ll enjoy accepting that invitation. But first it’s my turn. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve done here.’

Thus my tour began; I believe there was no part of that igloo into which I didn’t venture at some time during the next two hours. From the life-support machinery in the lower levels to precarious walkways strung along the carbon reinforcement strands of the transparent dome. I saw it all. Quite deliberately, of course. Ricardo Savill Caesar was proving that they had no secrets, no sinister apparatus under construction. The family had built themselves a self-sustaining colony, capable of expanding to meet their growing population. Nothing more. What I was never shown nor told, was the reason why.

After waiting as long as politeness required before claiming I had seen enough we wound up in Ricardo Savill Caesar’s office. It was on the upper storey of the habitation section, over forty feet above the central arboretum’s lawn, yet the tops of the trees were already level with his window. I could recognize several varieties of pine and willow, but the low gravity had distorted their runaway growth, giving them peculiar swollen trunks and fat leaves.

Once I was sitting comfortably on his couch he offered me some coffee from a delicate china pot.

‘I have the beans flown up and grind them myself,’ he said. ‘They’re from the family’s estates in the Caribbean. Protein synthesis might have solved our food-supply problems, but there are some textures and tastes which elude the formulators.’

I took a sip, and pursed my lips in appreciation. ‘That’s good. Very good.’

‘I’m glad. You’re someone I think I’d like to have on my side.’

‘Oh?’

He sat back and grinned at me. ‘The other families are unhappy to say the least about our settlement claim on this system. And you are the person they send to test the waters. That’s quite a responsibility for any representative. I would have loved to sit in on your briefing sessions and hear what was said about us terrible Caesars.’

‘Your head would start spinning after the first five hours,’ I told him, dryly. ‘Mine certainly did.’

‘So what is it you’d like your redoubtable ship and crew to do while they’re here?’

‘It is a genuine scientific mission,’ I told him. ‘We’d like to study the bacterial life you’ve located in the moons here. Politics of settlement aside, it is tremendously important, especially after Mars turned out to be so barren.’

‘I certainly have no objection to that. Are we going to be shown the data?’

‘Of course.’ I managed to sound suitably shocked. ‘Actually, I was going to propose several joint expeditions. We did bring three long-duration science station vehicles with us that can be deployed on any of the lunar surfaces.’

Ricardo Savill Caesar tented his forefingers, and rested his chin on the point. ‘What kind of duration do these vehicles have?’

‘A couple of weeks without resupply. Basically they’re just large caravans we link up to a tractor unit. They’re fully mobile.’

‘And you envisage dispatching a mission to each moon?’

‘Yes. We’re also going to drop a number of probes into Jupiter to investigate its structural composition.’

‘Interesting. How far down do you believe they can reach?’

‘We want to examine the supercritical fluid level, the surface of it at least.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I shall be most impressed if your probe design is good enough to reach that level. The furthest we’ve ever reached is seven hundred kilometres down.’

‘Our engineers seem quite confident it can be reached. The family has always given solid-state science a high priority.’

‘A kind of technological machismo.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, this is all very exciting. I’m very keen to offer you our fullest co-operation and assistance. My science team has been looking forward to your arrival for months. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. Fresh angles are always so rewarding, I find.’

I showed him a satisfied nod. This stalemate was the outcome with the highest probability according to our council strategists. We’d established that our family was free to roam where it chose on any of the moons, but not to stay. Which meant the most popular, if somewhat whimsical, theory was unlikely. Several senior family councils had advanced the notion that the Caesars had discovered high-order life out here, and wanted to keep it for themselves. After all, since they found bacteria in the undersurface seas of both Ganymede and Europa, then more complex life was an ultra-remote possibility. Personally, I had always considered that just too far-fetched. More curiously, Ricardo Savill Caesar hadn’t objected to us probing Jupiter itself. The second most likely theory was that they’d found something of extraordinary value in its atmosphere. Again unlikely. There had been dozens of robot probes sent here in the decades before their flight. Which put me far enough down the list to start considering alien spaceships and survivors of Atlantis. Not an enjoyable prospect for any rational man. But as Ricardo Savill Caesar wasn’t giving anything away, my options were reducing. It was an annoying challenge. He knew that I knew the reason for the settlement claim had to be staring right at me. I simply couldn’t see it.