by Paul McAuley
She discovered a talent for killing. She got no pleasure from it, except to do it as cleanly and professionally as possible, and it did not diminish the guilt she felt because she had survived the Quiet War and her parents had not. Only time did that. But she was good at killing monsters. She cleaned out hundreds of urchin nests, destroyed infestations of fireworms which had wrapped themselves around electrical cables and caused crippling overvoltages, went up against and killed makos and mantas and spinners. But she had never before had to face a dragon, the smartest and most dangerous of all the monsters.
* * * * *
Indira took the railway west from Phoenix, along Phineus Linea to Cadmus. The scarp stood to the north, an endless fault wall half a kilometre high. It was one of the tallest features of Europa’s flat surface. Mottled terrain stretched away to the south, textured by small hills and cut by numerous dykes and fracture lines. Lobes of brown and grey ice flows were fretted by sublimation and lightly spattered with small craters. This was one of the oldest landscapes of Europa. The ice here was almost five kilometres thick.
It was early morning, four hours after sunrise. Europa’s day was exactly the length of its orbit around Jupiter, and so from any point on Europa’s subjovian hemisphere Jupiter hung in the same spot in the sky, waxing and waning through the eightyfive hour day. At present Jupiter was completely dark, a louring circular black hole in the sky nearly thirty times as big as Earth’s moon. Indira was in the train’s observation car, sipping iced peach tea and watching the beginning of the day’s eclipse. It would last three hours and was the nearest thing to true night on the subjovian hemisphere, for when the sun set Jupiter was full, and there was almost always one or more of the other three Galilean moons in the sky.
There was a sudden flash of light that briefly defined Jupiter’s lower edge as the diamond point of the sun disappeared behind it. Darkness swept across the ice plain; rigid patterns of stars suddenly bestrode the sky. As her eyes adapted, Indira could make out the flicker of a lightning storm near the upper edge of Jupiter’s black disc – a storm bigger than Europa.
Indira talked with Carr. She talked with Alice and told her what she could see, and tried to patch up the row they’d had.
‘Carr misses you already,’ Alice said. She was riding one of the slideways of the city’s commercial centre. ‘He says he’s going to change your room. It’s a surprise.’ She didn’t want to talk about her project. When Indira tried to press her about it, she said, ‘This is where I need to get off. I have to go.’
The train was full of miners. They were all flying on some drug or other; it was their last chance to get high before they returned to work. They were native Europans, originally from South Africa. They wore leather jackets and fancy hightopped boots over pressure suit liners. One of them played a slow blues on a steelbodied guitar; another, egged on by his comrades, tried to chat up Indira. He was a young man, tall and very handsome. He spent more time looking at his reflection in the diamond window of the observation car, ghosted over the speeding, starlit landscape, than he did looking at Indira. His name was Champion Khumalo. Indira thought that it was a nickname, but no, all his friends had names like that, or names out of the Bible. Trinity Adepoju. Gospel Motloheloa. Ruth and Isaac Mahlungu.
Once Champion gave up his halfhearted attempt to sweettalk Indira, they all became friends. Indira learnt that two of Champion’s brothers went to the same school as Alice. They passed around a bottle of pear brandy and snapsticks of something called haze. It smelt sharply of ketones and delivered an immediate floating feeling of bonhomie.
The miners were fascinated by her profession. ‘To clean all the ocean of monsters,’ Gospel Motloheloa, said, ‘is a noble calling.’
‘Well I don’t see why we need to go into the world below,’ Isaac Mahlungu said. ‘I have been a miner for thirty years and I have never needed to go there. This is our land, the surface, in the sun, under Jupiter.’
‘But the ocean is part of our world,’ Gospel said. She was the oldest of the miners. Her irongrey hair was done up in medusa ropes wound with plastic wire. There were keloid scars on her forehead: because they spent their working lives on the surface, most miners suffered from radiationinduced cancers. She said, ‘The ocean makes the land what it is, and so it is important to get rid of the monsters which infest it.’
‘The monsters are from Earth,’ Trinity Adepoju said. ‘That’s why we have to get rid of them.’ He was the guitar player, a tall man even for a Europan, with a ready smile and fingers so long they seemed to have several extra joints as he moved them idly up and down the neck of his guitar.
Indira remembered a conversation she had once had with Alice. She had been trying to explain to her daughter why Earth had won the Quiet War.
‘They have more wealth, more processing power, more people. They have used up their world and now they want to use up all the others.’
‘Then we’ll have to do things they can’t,’ Alice had said, so solemnly that Indira had laughed.
Champion said, ‘Even with the monsters gone we will still live on Earth’s sufferance.’
His friends nodded, and began to tell Indira their war stories. Many of the miners had been on Europa throughout the Quiet War. Although the population of the capital, then called Minos (the miners called it that still), had at last been evacuated to Ganymede, the miners had been left in their camps. Most had managed to synthesise enough oxygen from water ice, but there had not been enough food.
‘We were so hungry,’ Gospel told Indira, ‘that we were thinking of eating our boots at the end of it.’
Ruth Mahlungu said, ‘What are you talking about, woman! You are so vain that you would starve to death and be buried in your boots rather than eat them!’
The others laughed. It was true: Gospel’s boots were extraordinary, even for a miner: green suede decorated with intricate patterns made from little bits of mirror and red and gold thread.
There were stories of cannibalism. Several camps had been vaporised by the nuclear device which had broken through the crust to allow penetrators containing the biowar organisms to reach the ocean. This was at Tyre Macula, on Europa’s antijovian hemisphere. Although the area had been lightly populated, the blast had killed more than a hundred miners and had left a flat plain of radioactive ice and radial grooves hundreds of kilometres long: a bright sunburst scar on Europa’s mottled brown face.
Indira had heard all these stories before; it seemed that Europans would never tire of telling and retelling stories about the war. She had stories of her own, but they were all too sad to bear telling. The death of her family, the two years she had spent as an orphaned refugee on Ganymede. At last she managed to steer the conversation to the monastery.
Champion grinned. ‘You’re going there? That’s a good joke!’
The miners exchanged words in a language full of glottal clicks. They all laughed, but the young miner would not tell Indira what they found funny.
‘They’re very rich there, those people,’ Champion said. ‘They have a very big farm. They supply fixed carbon to half the mines.’
‘Their leader is a gene wizard,’ Gospel said.
Trinity said, ‘He calls himself Rothar. I don’t think it’s his real name. They say he ran from Earth because they caught him doing something illegal. He’s probably doing something illegal out there, too.’
‘Maybe making more monsters,’ Champion said. ‘Maybe he makes one monster too many, and wants you to kill it.’
‘They are strange people,’ Gospel said. ‘Not Christian at all, although they claim to be. They call themselves Adamists.’
This was more than Indira had managed to glean about the monastery from the commons. The miners didn’t know many hard facts, but they had plenty of gossip. Their talk grew lively and wild. Three hours after the beginning of the eclipse, the double star of Earth and Venus rose above Jupiter’s dark bulk, and then the Sun followed and flooded the ice plain with its light. Trinity took u
p his guitar again and had half the observation car singing along by the time the train reached Cadmus.
* * * * *
It was an industrial settlement, Cadmus: a cluster of stilt buildings, storage tanks, a spacefield that was little more than an ice field pitted with black exhaust blasts, the long track of a mass driver. Indira caught a few hours rest in a rented cubicle. Before she fell asleep she talked with Carr about the small change of his day. Alice was sleeping. She missed her mother, Carr said.
‘I miss her too.’
‘Be careful,’ Carr said.
Soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force were much in evidence. Two officers were talking loudly in the canteen where Indira ate breakfast, oblivious to the resentful stares of the miners around them, and she had to endure a fifteen minute interrogation before she could board the rolligon bus that would carry her to the monastery of Scyld Shield.
The journey took ten hours. As the bus travelled west, the diamond point of the Sun descended ahead of it, while Jupiter hung low in the east – Indira had travelled a long way, a quarter of the way around the icy little moon. Jupiter was almost full, banded vertically with the intricately ruffled yellow and whites of his perpetual storms. Io’s dirty yellow disc fell below the horizon and an hour later rose, renewed.
The road was a single track raised on an embankment above a wide plain of crustal plates. Some were more than ten kilometres across; most were much smaller.
Changes in currents in Europa’s ocean had broken the plates apart over and again, rafting them into new positions. It was like crossing the shaken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of simple Euclidean shapes. You could see here that the surface of Europa was a thin skin of ice over the ocean, as fragile as the craquelure on an ancient painting. Triplet ridge and groove features cut across the plates. They were caused by the upwelling of water through stress fractures. The ridges were breccia dykes, ice mixed with mineralized silicates, complexly faulted and folded; the grooves between them were almost pure waterice. They were like a vast freeway system halfbuilt and abruptly abandoned, cut across where the ice plates had fractured or had been buried by bluewhite icy flows which had spewed from newer fissures.
The road the bus was following crossed a groove so wide the ridge on one side disappeared over the horizon before the ridge on the far side appeared. Beyond it, geysers powered by convective upwellings had built clusters of low hills that shone amidst patches of darker material.
Like Io, Europa’s core was kept molten by heat generated by tidal distortions that pulled it this way and that as the moon orbited Jupiter. Heat leaking through underwater vents and volcanoes kept the ocean from freezing beneath its icy crust and drove big cellular currents from bottom to top. Cadmus was at the edge of the Nemo Chaos, where a huge upwelling current kept the ice crust less than a kilometre thick. The same upwelling currents which eroded and shaped the icy crust brought up minerals from the bottom of the ocean. It was why the miners were there. Indira saw a solitary cabin crawling away towards the horizon, its red beacon flashing. Every twenty or thirty kilometres the bus passed the drillhead of a mine, with one or two or three cabins raised high on stilts like so many copies of Baba Yaga’s hut. The mines pumped mineralrich water into huge settling basins. Vacuum organisms grew on the ice and extracted metals, and the miners harvested them.
Alice called Indira. She was enthusiastic about her project. Indira pretended to be enthusiastic, too, but she resolved that she would talk with Alice’s monitors when this was over. Her daughter’s education was taking a direction she did not like.
‘Spend some time with Carr,’ Indira told Alice. ‘Help him out.’
‘I don’t like the flowers. Some of them make me sneeze. And the light is too bright in the greenhouses.’
‘It helps them grow.’
‘The weeds don’t need light.’
‘That’s because they don’t photosynthesise.’
‘I know that. They’re —’ Alice scrunched up her face and said slowly and carefully— ‘chemolithotrophs. They absorb the chemicals in the water and make biomass which we eat.’
They talked about the metabolism of the weeds for a while. Alice promised that she would ask Carr about photosynthesis. She said that she was doing some gene splicing in the garden labs. Indira was encouraging. The more time Alice spent in the labs and the gardens, the less she spent skulking around the lower levels of the city.
The bus had low priority and had to keep pulling into refuge lanes to allow trucks pass. Indira was its only passenger; its first for several weeks. It seemed that very few people went to Scyld Shield. The bus grumbled that the monks weren’t friendly.
‘They tell me to be quiet, but it is a long drive out and I like to talk. It’s part of my personality design.’ The bus paused. It added, ‘I hope you don’t mind talking with me.’
‘What do you know about the monastery?’
‘It was a mine, before the war. The monks have built around the old shaft. But of course I have never been inside. They don’t have a garage. If I broke down someone would have to come all the way out from Cadmus. It’s irresponsible, but that’s the way things are these days in the freemarket economy. No one wants to pay for the upkeep of publicly owned infrastructure.’
Someone had probably dumped a bunch of antilibertarian propaganda in the bus’s memory. Indira was sympathetic, but hastily told it that she wasn’t interested in discussing politics. There was a silence. At last the bus said, ‘Many of the trucks come from the monastery. They supply huge amounts of cheap fixed carbon. Glycogens, proteins, cellulose, starches. They supply the bioreactors of most of the mines in this region.’
‘There must be a lot of monks.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ the bus said. ‘Only two of them regularly travel to and from Cadmus. The rest keep themselves to themselves.’
Which was what the dispatcher at the bus garage had told Indira. She could have called Vlad Simonov, of course, but she had her pride.
The sun set. Jupiter’s hard yellow light spread across the ice plains. Io had disappeared behind him; a few of the brightest stars had come out. Ahead, something briefly glittered on the horizon, vanishing before Indira could see what it was. The bus crawled on, and an hour later Indira saw the fugitive glitter again, much closer now. A plume of gas, shining in the sullen light of jupitershine.
‘There she blows,’ the bus said.
‘What is it?’
‘Scyld Shield’s methane vent,’ the bus said. ‘Most of the mines around here have them.’
Methane bubbled up from the hydrothermal vents and collected under the ice crust, occasionally breaking the rafts apart as it escaped through fault lines. Mines vented excess methane to keep themselves stabilised. The methane gas vanished into hard vacuum – at -150 degrees Celsius, Europa’s surface was slightly too warm for it to condense as snow – but the vent had deposited drifts of dirty white water ice across a huge polygonal plate. The monastery was on a ridge of brecciated ice beyond.
It was not as large as Indira expected, no more than a single silvered dome. The bus took a spur off the main road. It climbed a winding switchback up the face of the ridge and dived into a wide apron hacked out of an ice bench, where half a dozen tanker trucks were parked in front of a mass of insulated pipes, presumably taking on loads of raw biomass. The bus reversed onto an airlock coupling and said goodbye to Indira.
‘I’ll be back in three days,’ it said. ‘I come here every three days even when there isn’t anyone who wants to ride. That is, if I don’t break down. Perhaps you can tell me about the monastery when I take you back to Cadmus.’
The luggage pod followed Indira through the freezing cold flexible coupling into a big, echoing, brightly lit room. Two monks were waiting there. Both wore black robes and a kind of cowl around their heads, topped with square headdresses. Both had untrimmed patriarchal beards, with big pectoral crosses hung over them. The older monk was impassive, but the younger was the first person Indira
had ever seen do a doubletake in real life.
* * * * *
The two monks left Indira with her luggage pod in the middle of the big, empty space. Marks on the concrete floor suggested that it had once been partitioned into many small rooms. A gutted air compressor sat in one corner. She sat down on the pod and tried to call Carr, but her phone wasn’t getting any signal. It was so cold that the smoke of each breath crystallised into a floating frost with a tiny tinkling sound, too cold to sit still and wait.
She began to prowl around. The empty room took up half the dome; a corridor looped around the other half, with little rooms opening off on either side. None showed any sign of recent habitation. There were two service tunnels. One led downwards, curving out of sight; she had just opened the door of the other, its ribbed wall rimed with ice and stopped with a locked hatch, when the oldest of the two monks found her. It seemed that Brother Rothar, the abbot of the monastery, would talk with her.
The old monk’s name was Halga. Indira asked him about the other tunnel as they walked down, and he said that it led to the old mine structure, which had sunk into the ice after it had been abandoned during the war.
‘We cut a tunnel to it to see what we could salvage. Now we use it for storage.’
‘I didn’t mean to pry. I was just wondering where I should stow my gear.’
‘I think you should talk with Brother Rothar,’ the old monk said.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Brother Rothar will explain.’
The tunnel wound down a long way. Indira realised that the monastery was like a pin piercing the ice – a pin a kilometre long, with the dome at its head and a winding series of chambers and passages built around its shaft. Brother Halga explained that the whole structure had been synthesised from glass and silicates extracted from the brecciated ice, and bound together by diamond wire. Indira wondered how often they had to adjust the shaft because of stress in the icy crust; Brother Halga told her that the monastery was built on a breccia intrusion that went almost all the way down to the ocean.
