“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was a lie,” he said vehemently. “The original Free Spirit heresy itself—poor people thumbing their noses at the church and getting crucified—but those were just the shock troops. Half the
prophetae
by night were cardinals and bishops by day.” He paused and saw her smiling at him. He laughed and shook his head. “Sorry. You’re supposed to be telling it.”
“You probably know more details than I do. It was al-chemy that intrigued me—all those undecipherable alchem-ical texts going all the way back to Roman times, senseless either as theory or as practice . . . But finally I realized it was as if they were refracting real traditions, horrible traditions, through a distorting lens.” She began to recite then, her voice taking on a raspy, menacing monotone:
“Hail beautiful lamp of heaven, shining light of the world. Here thou art united with the moon, here ariseth the bond of Mars, and the conjunction with Mercury. . . . When these three shall have dissolved not into rain water but into mercurial water, into this our blessed gum which dissolves of itself and is
named the Sperm of the Philosophers. Now he makes haste to bind and betroth himself to the virgin bride . . .
and so on.”
“The worst of it, anyway. The cult has been building temple planetariums since Neolithic times—in the alchemical writings the temples are disguised as the
alembic
, the sealed reaction vessel—and to dedicate the foundations, the adepts of the Knowledge would kill and eat a pair of male and female infants, fraternal twins . . . children of cult members, if they could get them. The twins were surrogates for the spiritual leader.”
“Or her,” Sparta replied. “In the end, there was supposed to be only one such person, who would unite in his or her body the male and female principles; it was the task of the highest circle to bring this sacred and magical creature into being. In every age the Free Spirit has tried, using the most advanced crafts of their own times, to create the perfect human being.”
“Yes, and you were the first to tell me about the Emperor of the Last Days—that when the Pancreator returned from the farthest reaches of heaven, from the home star in Crux, the Emperor was expected to sacrifice himself—or herself, if she was the Empress—for the sake of the
prophetae
.”
“They distorted what had once been a reassurance into something sinister. I think the practice of twin sacrifice didn’t stop until the 18th century—when modern science finally started to make an impression on the cult—and it is still echoed in the ritual meals of the knights and elders. The self-sacrifice of the Emperor or Empress, however, is not supposed to be symbolic. . . .”
“I have no intention of sacrificing myself. But Blake, to my own surprise—reviewing everything I’ve been taught and what I’ve learned since—I find that I’ve recovered my belief in the Pancreator. The Pancreator is real. And I think we will soon meet . . . her, or him, or it.”
The engineer’s face was as stern as a cop’s at an inquest. “Both the communication and ranging systems were delib-erately put out of commission. Someone with a good knowl-edge of celestial navigation reprogrammed the capsule’s guidance computer to depart from the planned trajectory during close approach to Io . . .”
“. . . specifically in order to rendezvous with Amalthea,” McNeil continued, acknowledging Hawkins’s interruption with a single slow shake of his head. “With the intention of making a
soft
landing. That part of the rewrite seems to have been a bit miscalculated. On the basis of Doppler input, the main engine did in fact retrofire—unfortunately, a few sec-onds late to do them any good. They’d already hit the ice.”
“No more interruptions,” Forster said sternly, fixing Hawkins with a hot and bristling stare. “Everyone will have a chance to speak. For my part, it’s my opinion that Tony’s initial analysis of the situation was accurate. Mays planned the thing carefully. And even without main-engine retrofire, he and his”— Forster’s glance flickered back to the distraught Hawkins—“no doubt innocent companion survived.”
“Sir.” Walsh was too cool to show surprise. Everything that had happened
was
recorded; Board of Space Control regulations required it, and the ship’s automated systems virtually prevented anyone from disobeying. Forster evi-dently expected sabotage.
“It’s my opinion that if Mays’s plan had succeeded, he would have reprogrammed his computer—or perhaps de-stroyed it, if necessary—and claimed that the crash had been caused by malfunction. He is here for one reason, and that is to spy upon us.” For a moment the professor withdrew into his own thoughts. Then he said, “All right. Let me have your comments.”
“They’re going to wake up within the hour, Professor,” said Groves. “They’ll be hungry and curious and eager to get rid of those tubes and wires and straps. How do you want us to handle the moment when it arrives?”
“We have an impossible job to do, and only a few days in which to do it,” Forster said. “I can think of no way that Sir Randolph Mays, once he is awake and mobile, can be prevented from learning what we learn, almost as fast as we learn it.”
“Out of the question. I want this clearly understood: no one among us is to behave other than according to the high-est dictates of ethics and space law.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll just have to find a way to keep him and his young friend busy.”
PART FOUR
The oceans of the little moon would have simply boiled away beneath the
Michael Ventris
if Forster had been will-ing to wait. But there were too many questions that could never be answered if that extraordinary biosphere were al-lowed to evaporate into space unobserved. Besides, the pro-fessor was an impatient man.
“I’m listening. I’m not a biologist. Could be any school of fish. . . .” Forster’s eager brows twitched. “A strong pattern, though, stronger than before. Not regular, actually, but with important elements repeated. A signal, you think?”
She said nothing, paying attention only to her driving. With powerful beats of its wings the Manta followed the glowing squadrons toward the bright heart of Amalthea. As before, the sub was forced to stop to adjust for depth, but because Amalthea was smaller now, the distance from the surface to the core was well within its absolute pressure limit.
The core was everywhere bright but not everywhere hot. As they swam closer they saw that the multiple streams of bubbles that radiated in every direction were being gener-ated by complex structures, glowing white towers a kilometer or more high, studding a perfectly mirrored ellipsoid. The light from the nearmolten towers—for even through dozens of kilometers of water they blazed brighter than the filaments of an incandescent bulb—was reflected in the curving mirror surface; it was these reflections, as well as their sources, that from a great distance had given the im-pression of a single glowing object.
“A spacecraft,” Forster said. “A billion-year-old space-craft. It brought Culture X from their star to ours. They parked it here, in the radiation belts of Jupiter, the most dangerous part of the solar system outside the envelope of the sun itself. And they encased it in a rind of ice thick enough to shield it for as long as it took. They seeded the clouds of Jupiter with life; generations upon generations kept passive watch, for
us
—never evolving, the cloud eco-system was too simple for that, but neither was it ever sub-ject to the catastrophic changes of a geologically active planet—until
Kon-Tiki
revealed that
we
had evolved ourselves, to a planet-faring species. That we had arrived.” He paused, and upon his young-old face there came an al-most mystic rapture. “And now the world-ship awakes, and sheds its icy shell.” Sparta, privately amused at his rhetoric but careful of his mood, said quietly, “What do you suppose will happen next?”
Forster gave her a bright shrewd eye. “There are many options, aren’t there? Perhaps
they
will come forth to greet us. Perhaps they will simply say good-bye, having done whatever they came to do. Perhaps they are all dead.”
They fell silent, as the searing core loomed beneath them, growing larger until it filled the field of view. Small by comparison to the bulk that had once surrounded it, the core of Amalthea was still enormous, bigger by far than most asteroids—three times as big as Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. Since their first soundings they had known they were not dealing with a natural object, but the sight of an artifact thirty kilometers in diameter was enough to make even Sparta, who was inured to wonders, grow contemplative.
With her infrared vision Sparta easily read the hot and cold convection currents that flowed over the shining ex-panse of the ellipsoid, a vista of strong currents and roiling turbulence. Heated to boiling, the columns of water that ascended from the glowing manifolds were marked by whole galaxies of microscopic bubbles, to her vision as bright as quasars. Colder, clearer water descended like pur-ple night around them, feeding the intakes at the bases of the towers.
She steered the Manta away from the heat, letting the relatively cooler water carry the sub downward. Even without her temperature-sensitive vision to guide her, she could have chosen the safe path merely by following the diving school of squid.