Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  Examples could be seen everywhere. The activity of the sun resulted from a never-ending internal battle of gravitation and radiation pressure. Every surface variation, from sunspots to gigantic solar flares, was the manifestation of some brief advantage of one of those forces, evidence that the balance had temporarily broken down. Galactic stability was no more than the delicate matching of rotational kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy, creating and maintaining spiral arms and central hubs and dark-matter halos.

  Life itself was not exempt from the principle. It had learned the lesson early. Successful species sat on the narrow line between exact replication, which permitted no adaptation to a changing environment, and too-imperfect replication, which resulted in large error rates and nonviable offspring. Sex was no more than an ingenious attempt to solve the problem, by permitting generational variability within the constraints of the exact duplication of genetic material. Within every cell of every organism the same struggle went on, a fine balance between uncontrolled combustion, which would kill, and the too-slow enzymatic release of energy, which in a competitive world was just as fatal.

  The Pareto principle had been in place for a long time. Its viewpoint was not something that twenty-first-century scientists thought about, because it had been built into them, by their teachers, by their reading, by their whole scientific environment. Science was balance. The principles of balance governed everything, from subnuclear processes to galactic evolution.

  * * *

  Camille Hamilton was a scientist. She had the mental equipment to be a scientist, and a first-rate one, in any era where society permitted it (a woman, and attractive: two strikes against her through most of history). But like all save a handful of the very greatest, Camille saw science through the philosophical eyes of her own times.

  The curious thing was that although Camille's childhood and adolescence on Mars had been one long struggle against poverty and neglect, she had never tried to view that experience in terms of general principles. Of course the ideas of struggle, balance, and delicate advantage had to apply to people. But it did not occur to Camille that there must be other unseen elementals within the solar system, men and women who fought each other to a standstill while they battled constantly for small advantage.

  And certainly it never occurred to her that in that war of titans, a slight misalignment or a minor imbalance could accidentally wipe out a being as insignificant as Camille Hamilton with a force as deadly and impersonal as the greatest solar flare.

  12

  The Word for World is Ocean

  Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer sat side by side, gazed down at the approaching surface, and saw two different worlds.

  . . . Europa is small, a minor planet with a diameter less than Earth's moon and a mass only two-thirds as great—

  —but Europa is vast, eighty times as massive as my homeworld, Ceres, and with fifteen times the surface area . . .

  . . . Europa's gravitational field is puny, small enough for easy ballistic launch, so small that the same vehicle can be used to travel to the moon and to land upon it—

  —but Europa reaches out and pulls a transit vehicle with a giant's hand, so forcefully that the rockets are already working when landfall is many minutes away. Escape velocity is whole kilometers per second . . .

  . . . Europa's surface offers nothing of value: no metals, no minerals, no fuels—

  —but Europa's surface is a treasure house of the most precious volatile of all: water . . .

  . . . Europa is a drab, lifeless ball, devoid of the breathing cover of atmosphere—frozen, sterile, and inhospitable—

  —No way. Europa is a womb, ready and waiting to welcome and nurture life, including millions, or billions, of humans . . .

  They stared at each other and recognized what should have been obvious in the first moment of their first meeting: They came from backgrounds so different that communication between them was almost a delusion. They were about the same age, and both were war orphans, but meeting as a Belter and an Earther they could find little else in common. It would take weeks, or months, of talk before they could understand each other's perspective.

  The odd thing to Jon was that they were certainly going to take those weeks or months.

  It worried him. He liked things to be logical—even emotional things. And nothing resembling logic applied to his reaction to Wilsa. When he first stood before her, face-to-face, he had experienced a sensation that was easy enough to describe: It was like the dreamy glaze of nitrogen narcosis, with all of that condition's odd certainty that the world was a safe and wonderful place. What was not easy—what he could not do at all—was to explain it.

  Was it some disguised form of sex, some aberration of hidden pheromones? He didn't think so. He might be an innocent in Nell Cotter's worldly eyes—she had as good as told him that—but he was far from virginal. He'd had partners enough. He and Shelley Solbourne had even enjoyed—most of the time—a two-month explosive affair, until their final argument. Anyway, the PacAnt floating bases, with their veiled threats of psychological treatment for anyone who declined to lead an active sex life, tended to force physical relationships upon even the naturally celibate.

  Which Jon certainly wasn't. He and Nell Cotter had been on the brink—almost-lovers, lovers in all but opportunity—when he met Wilsa. His desire for Nell was still there, as strong as ever. But suddenly, in an abrupt shift of viewpoint, it had seemed more important that he interact with Wilsa than to do anything else. He hardly remembered asking Hilda Brandt if Wilsa could travel to Europa with him.

  Had he done so? Or had the suggestion come from elsewhere? It didn't matter. The need to spend time with Wilsa, to understand her, to learn her, transcended details. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that this compulsion had no physical basis. He recognized that Wilsa was good-looking, sexy, and probably highly sensual with the right partner; but that partner was not himself. He felt no stir of sexual attraction to her, and the lack of feeling was obviously mutual.

  What the hell was going on?

  He stared down. The transit vehicle was following a direct-descent path, unconcerned with Earth obsessions of reentry trajectories and atmospheric braking. They were homing straight in on the Jovian antipodes of Europa. The sun behind them was at the zenith, turning the moon beneath to a glittering network of bright-colored ice plains separated by stellations of rough-edged cracks and nets of long, dark fissures. And such colors! Jon had expected muted tones, like those in the space images he had seen of Europa. The sparkling landscape below must be a short-lived anomaly, a combination of illumination and look angles. Trace elements, tiny refractive spicules of metal suspended within the top few millimeters of ice, were catching the sunlight at just the right inclination.

  Mount Ararat was visible directly below. Europa's only land surface consisted of four small connected peaks stretching in a knobby line over a dozen kilometers of surface. Even the highest hill was no more than a rounded nubble in an endless frozen plain. Encroaching ice nipped at the low points of the sawtooth ridge, almost dividing the knolls into separate islands of black rock.

  Igneous rocks, said a remote corner of Jon's mind. They must be. Or could nature find a role for sedimentary processes even on Europa, despite the absence of atmosphere, of rivers, of weathering, of life? Or was there life? That was the key question, the whole purpose of his trip. But somehow the frosty visage of the moon below spoke to him of a dead world.

  The descending vehicle had located its approach beacon and was following the signal. The sole Europan spaceport sat like a shallow circular cup near the peak of Mount Ararat's principal upthrust, in a crater formed at least in part by meteorite impact. Humans had merely improved on nature, smoothing the bottom to a perfect plane and adding gantries, antennas, hoists and slides. And, of course, the proton shields. Europa was subject to a particle flux even more intense than that at Ganymede.

  Jon gave the Europan spaceport its share of att
ention, but his main focus was still on the surrounding ice plains. He was seeking Blowhole, the access point to the Europan ocean. It should lie twenty kilometers off the rim of Mount Ararat. Blowhole was an artificially created and maintained vertical cylinder of open water through which the Spindrift would eventually descend—down, down, down, past a kilometer and a half of encircling ice and on into the Stygian unknown, for exploration of the fifty-kilometer-and-more Europan deeps.

  He could see no sign of Blowhole. It must be too small to be visible during a descent from space to Mount Ararat. He knew that Blowhole was maintained by a man-made thermal source at the lower ice-water interface, in combination with natural upward convection and the use of repeater pumps. With every upward meter, the warmed waters of Blowhole lost heat to the surrounding ice. The liquid column narrowed until at its top it was only twenty or thirty meters across, just wide enough to admit submersibles and service vehicles.

  "Look!" Wilsa's grip on his arm brought Jon out of his musings. A beam of the purest monochromatic blue had speared out from the center of the spaceport's smooth cup and caught them in its cone of light.

  "Final descent pattern," said Jon. Reluctantly he brought his mind away from Blowhole and the Europan interior. "Don't worry, we'll be all right. From this point, the ship will be controlled directly from Mount Ararat."

  That earned a flash of dark eyes. He realized belatedly that although space was new to him, Wilsa had probably made a thousand controlled descents.

  "I know that! I said to look, Jon. At the pattern. Can't you see it?"

  And he could, once it was pointed out to him. The sun was right overhead. The descending vehicle was arrowing toward a circular target, with the bright blue of Mount Ararat's upturned control laser as its bull's-eye. Beyond it glistened the refractive ice of Europa, a series of frost-touched rainbow rings. His mind's eye added another component: Farther yet, beyond Europa's horizon but full-lit by the sun, the cloudy globe of Jupiter would be glimmering in colors of ocher and umber and burnt sienna.

  That was what he saw and imagined. But Wilsa had an open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression on her face—almost a look of terror.

  What did she see? She had started humming to herself, almost too softly for him to hear.

  * * *

  Wilsa had caught sight of the rounded quadruple peaks of Mount Ararat at the same moment as Jon. She saw not igneous rocks, but the terrifying, upthrust fist of an imprisoned frost-giant, caught at the very instant when his four iron knuckles came smashing through the glassy shield of Niflheim's wall. The moment had frozen in time, but in another second he would escape, straddle the world beneath, steady himself, reach far up into space . . .

  The blow of the fist had shattered the world below into concentric circles. Chromatic rings spread across the planet. Those outgoing ripples of color in turn set up musical resonances. A melodic fragment expanded and took shape inside her. She began the conscious, near-sensual process of thematic development.

  That she and Jon held widely divergent views of the approaching world of Europa did not worry her, or even arouse much interest. Anyone with a talent for polyphony knew that two themes, totally different in style, mood, and content, could coexist in perfect harmony. She saw, as Jon probably did not, that both of them were right about Europa.

  Even the strange bond between the two of them, created at their first meeting, did not worry her. So much of her internal world would not yield to logical analysis. Take the themes that were drifting even now inside her head. They surely would not have appeared without the multihued panorama of Europa, Mount Ararat, and the bright shaft of the landing laser. But how could an impact on one sense stir the creative impulse in another? The synesthesia of inspiration: That was something she had never seen explained, scarcely heard discussed. And yet it happened, again and again. Visual inputs could transmute and then emerge from the crucible of the mind as golden music; architecture could give birth to great sonnets; music could inspire immortal words.

  Wilsa drifted on toward Europa, her soul singing. The final planet-fall at the Mount Ararat spaceport came as no more than an annoying interruption.

  * * *

  Jon had heard Hilda Brandt talk of an uncontaminated Europa and had wondered how she—or anyone—could hope to keep it that way.

  Now he knew. The only access to the untouched interior of the world was through Blowhole, with the surface elsewhere protected by an unbroken breastplate of ice. And to reach Blowhole, any living thing would have to do what he and Wilsa had just done: travel across twenty kilometers of open ice from Mount Ararat, in a temperature so cold that escaping air would freeze and drift down as tiny flakes of oxygen and nitrogen.

  But suppose that by some miracle of hardiness, a living organism were to escape the settlement on Mount Ararat, survive the cold, and drift out toward Blowhole? Then it would have to endure an even deadlier attack. The particle flux on Europa's surface was lethal to any unsuited creature. The outside of the suits that Jon and Wilsa were wearing needed no human-designed sterilization program. Nature had provided.

  With such safeguards, there was only one threat to the sanctity of Europa's interior ocean: the submersibles that might descend into it. And those were protected by a small but vigilant staff.

  In the first two minutes, Jon had recognized the female and two males assigned to receive them at Mount Ararat spaceport and accompany them across the ice to Blowhole. He had not recognized them individually, of course, but as a familiar type. They were matter-of-fact, knowledgeable, casual, and impersonal. They were Jon himself, transported across a billion kilometers of space.

  Or rather, they were Jon as he had been before his beloved hydrothermal-vent project had been axed. After that, he had been thrown away, first into the political mixer of Arenas, then out across the solar system with Nell Cotter. He was not sure how much of the old Jon still survived.

  The staff of Mount Ararat recognized Jon, too. He might be their savior, by confirming the existence of native Europan life forms and protecting the world from a development they did not want. But even if he could not do that, he was someone who shared their language of science and technology.

  They did not know at all, though, what to make of Wilsa. Famous she might be throughout the Belt, and now on Ganymede, but her reputation had not carried as far as the Europan scientific community. No one reacted to her name. They registered only her naive comments and questions. Jon was amused to note that after the first few minutes they addressed all their explanations of mechanisms and procedures to him.

  "When you're inside, you'll be hermetically sealed off from the exterior." One of the men, his muscles bulging beneath his tight suit in a way that made nonsense of the low-gravity environment, had opened the top of the submersible and was pointing within. "You'll have your own air and food, even your own water supply. It sounds silly, I know, with water all around you, but we don't want any danger of mixing and contamination. If water has a way to get in, pee might find a way out. Oh, and don't forget that the ship doesn't have a particle-flux shield. You mustn't take your suits off until you're at least a few meters under water. At that point, you'll be safe. All right, let's take a look at the controls."

  He climbed inside, gesturing to Jon and Wilsa to follow. Wilsa went first, up the three steps that led to the snug elliptical interior. Jon trailed behind to take a last look around. He had stood like this in central Antarctica, back on Earth, and had been overwhelmed by the thought that beneath his feet lay a mile and more of ice. If he walked for a hundred days in any direction, that would still be true. Here he had that same mile of ice beneath his feet—although below it lay not land, but more miles of water; and he could walk not for a hundred days, but forever. Except for the insignificant pimple of Mount Ararat, Europa's icy girdle was complete and unbroken.

  Jon looked up, searching for Jupiter. Then he realized that he would never see its looming presence here. The king of the Outer System remained forever on the far side of
Europa, holding the moon so that Mount Ararat faced always away from the great planet. But even after sunset, and without Jupiter's reflected sunlight, it was not dark. Ganymede and Callisto were visible in the sky to provide a sinister twilight. They showed the long, smoothed ramp leading from the submersible to Blowhole, to open water that sat like a black, staring-eye pupil a hundred meters away.

  Jon finally managed to make his legs work, and climbed the steps.

  "Of course, you're used to those terrific water submersibles you have back on Earth." The man had waited for Jon before he began his gruff explanation. "I doubt if you've ever seen anything as primitive as the Danae here. But everything works. The controls and dials will just be somewhat unfamiliar and take a little getting used to. Sit down, and I'll run you through checkout. We'll go really slow at first. Don't be afraid to tell me if you want anything repeated. Use "Sandstrom" as your info ID—that's me, I'm Buzz Sandstrom—to get you into the system."

  Jon nodded and began to move to the pilot's seat. Before he could get there, Wilsa pushed ahead of him and set her hands on the Danae's controls.

  "Level-One check," she said. And then her fingers were traveling across the console of keys and switches at a speed that even Jon—PacAnt's fastest, four years in a row—was not sure he could have beaten even on his own familiar equipment. Displays flickered and raced, audio beeped, tiny warning lights flashed on and off.

  "Clear on One," said Wilsa in a cheerful, witless voice. "Hold your hats. Beginning Level Two."