by Paul Preuss
She scrabbled in the tube and withdrew another white wafer. It melted with exquisite sweetness under her tongue…
She isn’t “Dilys.” She is Sparta again. Inside the black tightsuit she doesn’t feel the cold, except on her cheekbones and the tip of her nose. She is a shadow in the dawn woods, her short hair hidden under the suit’s hood, only her face exposed.
She waits in the woods for the low sun to rise, bringing the color of October to the dewy woods. The smell of rotting leaves reminds her of an autumn in New York. With Blake. When things started to split.
The smell of leaves… That was what Earth had that no other planet in the solar system had. Rot. Without rot, no life. Without life, no rot. Was it really Them who had made all this messy life, started it or at least coaxed it along on Venus and Mars and Earth? On Mars and Venus life had dried up, frozen or gotten pressure-cooked, washed away in the hot acid rain or blown away in the cold CO2 wind. Only on Earth had it taken hold in its own filth.
And now it was spreading fast, trying to keep one step ahead of itself. Rot spreading to the planets. Rot spreading to the stars.
All this nasty stew a gift of the Pancreator—the prophetae’s peculiar way of referring to Them. Those who were out there “waiting at the great world,” according to the Knowledge—she had remembered it all, now; it had all been encoded in Falcon’s programming—and the Knowledge said they were waiting among “the cloud-dwelling messengers” for “the reawakening”—of which the prophetae were the sign-bearers…
She had been chosen by them to carry the sign, made to carry it. She had been built to find the messengers in the clouds, to listen and speak with them—with the radio organs that had been ripped out of her on Mars—to speak in the language of the signs the prophetae had taught her and whose memory they had imperfectly erased when they had rejected her.
The sun rises. A shaft of orange light penetrates the dew-laden forest and finds Sparta’s pale eyes, striking fire.
She resists our authority
To resist us is to resist the Knowledge
But the Free Spirit were those who resisted, mocking their own name for themselves. These false prophetae were trapped in their ambition and blind to their own tradition. What they could not see was that she had indeed yielded to the Knowledge, and in her it had flowered. Flowered and ripened and eventually burst, like a fig hanging too long on the branch, splitting open to expose its purple flesh, heavy with seed. They were too stupid to see that they had wrought better than they knew, too stupid to see what she had become. For Sparta was the Knowledge Incarnate.
When she would not follow their false path, they had turned against her. They had tried to cut the Knowledge out of her head, burn it out, drain it out of her with her heart’s blood.
She had escaped them. For these years she had slowly been reassembling herself from the torn and scorched scraps of flesh they had left to her. She was harder now, colder now, and when she had succeeded in resurrecting herself, she would do what needed doing. What the Knowledge—which was Herself—demanded.
But first she would kill those who had tried to pervert her. Not out of animus. She felt nothing for them now, she was beyond rage. But things needed to be cleaner, simpler. It would simplify matters to eliminate those who had made her, starting with Lord Kingman and his houseful of guests.
Then she would have time to kill the usurper, the quasi-human creature they had intended to substitute for her. This Falcon. Before he could take the wrong message into the clouds.
From her vantage in the woods she sees a figure appear on Kingman’s terrace. The house is rimmed in light from the rising sun. Morning mist curls across the meadow grass and bracken, rendering the mansion as gauzy as a painting on a theater scrim.
She allows the image from her right eye to enlarge on the screen of her mind. It is incredibly crisp and undistorted, better than new—Striaphan has that effect on the brain.
The man on the terrace is the one named Bill, the one whose smell is such an odd layering of unfamiliar scents. He is staring right at her as if he knows she is here—which is impossible, unless he has telescopic vision to match hers.
Where he stands, he looks to be an easy target. Unfortunately the shot is impossible, even with her rifled target pistol. The bullet’s gyroscopic spin, processing as it resists gravity’s arc, will have pulled it into a wide spiral by the time it reaches the terrace. At this range not even the fastest computer in the world—the one in her brain—can predict where the bullet will strike, except to within a radius of half a meter.
On the other hand, with the bullets she is using, if she catches a piece of flesh, even half a meter is as good as dead.
But no, let Bill wait.
Now Kingman comes out of the tall doors, wearing his shooting jacket and carrying his gun. He recoils at the sight of Bill—but though he clearly wants to avoid him, it is too late. She listens…
“Rupert, I really didn’t intend to…”
“If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll have another go at that tree-rat. Maybe I’ll get him this time.”
Kingman’s voice is clipped, soft, he never looks the other man in the eye. The shotgun rests in the crook of his arm, rests there so casually it is obvious it must pain him not to raise the muzzle and blast this species of rat who stands right in front of him. But instead he turns and marches past, down the stairs to the wet lawn, and sets out across it—straight toward her.
No dogs with him. He must consider dogs a nuisance when it comes to potting tree-rats.
Kingman first. Let him come halfway. Then if this Bill creature is still exposed…
Still she listens, to the squish and slither of Kingman’s Wellingtons across the rank grass. The sun is full behind the leaves at the edge of the woods, turning them bright red and yellow, silhouetting the tracery of their veins.
Better to take him in the woods. Then go back toward the house, into it if necessary, taking the rest one by one. Quietly. Privately. Head shots are best.
Kingman is in the bracken now, the stiff wet fronds of the autumn-brown fern soaking his twill trousers to the knees. The near trunks come between her and him, although now and then she can glimpse him between them, moving through the mist.
She is still listening, tracking his progress through the bracken, on the verge of breaking her trance, stepping off to intercept him—
—when she hears the other.
Vibrations at the edge of her enhanced sensibility, way off to her right. Delicate footsteps in a slow, intricate rhythm, like the last drips of rain from the eaves, after the storm has passed.
A deer. Two of them, does probably, stepping slowly and lightly through the woods, searching the undergrowth for fodder.
But there is another step as well, slower yet, and heavier. Not an animal, but moving almost like one. Footsteps faint and oh-so-cautious. The moves of a professional stalker.
Kingman’s gamekeeper? No, as of half an hour ago, the old gaffer was sleeping off last night’s binge, in his room in the west wing.
This is a new player.
She gets a vector on the sound, then ceases listening and relaxes into movement. Though she can no longer hear as well, she can imagine the stranger’s stepwise moves.
Now comes Kingman on her left, pressing through the wet brush like an elephant, walking with the unthinking confidence born of a lifetime’s familiarity with these woods. She moves right, not wanting to cut off the unknown player but rather to come in behind, to have a look. She goes through the brightening forest with all the grace and alertness she can muster.
She catches herself—barely—just before she walks into him. Had she not had the advantage of knowing he was there… Well, he is very good. She trembles motionless against the rough bark of a bent old oak.
Then he moves, and she sees who he is. Curly red hair, camel’s hair coat, pigskin gloves—among the sunlit autumn leaves he is almost better camouflaged than she. His skill comes as no surprise to her.
>
The orange man. He’d almost killed her on Mars, and again on Phobos. She’d had a chance to kill him then, but out of some misguided impulse—of what, justice? Fair play?—she’d held back. Even though she knew he’d killed the doctor who had freed her from the sanatorium, even though somehow she knew even then—though she had not quite made the connection in memory—that he’d tried to kill her parents. Perhaps succeeded.
She rests her cheek against a cushion of emerald green moss on the tree trunk, holding her breath and waiting for him to go on past, down that narrow creek bed choked with fallen leaves. Whatever scruples she’d had are irrelevant now.
His footsteps stop.
She pushes her face cautiously forward, peering around the tree trunk. She can not see him. But Kingman’s footsteps keep coming through the woods.
The loud crack of the orange man’s pistol splits the morning calm. Even without the suppressor he normally uses, she knows the .38 by its sound—
—which startles the deer. They go bounding deeper into the preserve, crashing through the brush without pausing to look back, two living animals not making enough noise, however, to obliterate the heavy fall of Kingman’s dead body—straight over, he hits the forest floor like a felled tree. Head shot.
If she could see the orange man she would shoot him, but he is already moving away from her, screened by too many tree trunks, walking calmly in the direction of the house. She creeps after him, until her view of the meadow and the mansion is clear.
He’s out of the woods now, into the open, making no effort to hide himself. All of Kingman’s guests are gathered on the terrace, chatting calmly with each other as they watch the orange man’s progress. The one called Bill has turned away from the rail to the face the others. His stance is relaxed, arrogant.
For fifteen seconds she listens…
“So, Bill, on to Jupiter”—Holly Singh speaking, a smirk bending her red lips—“But how do we know Linda won’t be there ahead of us. As she was on Phobos?”
Bill takes his time answering. Then he says, “Actually, my dear, I’m depending on it.”
Her trance takes only an instant. She comes out of it with her mind made up. She aims and squeezes. The orange man’s head comes apart, more pink than orange.
To get off her other shots takes time, perhaps a third of a second each. The inherent uncertainty of the extreme range takes its toll. Only two of the first four rounds find targets.
The one aimed at Bill gets Jack Noble instead, in the midsection. The second shot is wasted against the wall of the house. The next one is aimed at Holly Singh, who is ducking. It finds her shoulder, taking the shoulder and half her neck. The fourth shot breaks an irregular block of stone from the balustrade—
—by which time the others are down, hiding behind it. A few seconds later they begin firing back from its cover.
She is already gone, running through the woods more lightly than the deer.
21
That first day, the Father of the Gods smiled upon Falcon. It was as calm and peaceful here on Jupiter as it had been, years ago, when he was drifting with Webster across the plains of northern India. Falcon had had time to master his new skills, until Kon-Tiki seemed an extension of his own body. Such luck was more than he had dared to hope for, and he began to wonder if he might have to pay a price for it.
He smiled inwardly. Even within the perfect man, shreds of superstition remain.
The five hours of daylight were almost over. The clouds below were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had not possessed when the sun was higher. Color was swiftly draining from the sky, except in the west itself, where a band of deepening purple lay along the horizon. Above this band was the thin crescent of a closer moon, pale and bleached against the utter blackness beyond.
With a speed perceptible to the eye, the sun went straight down over the edge of Jupiter almost 3,000 kilometers away. The stars came out in their legions—and there was the beautiful evening star, Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far he was from the place of his origin. It followed the sun down into the west. Humanity’s first night on Jupiter had begun.
With the onset of darkness, Kon-Tiki began to sink. The balloon was no longer heated by the feeble sunlight and was losing a small part of its buoyancy. Falcon did nothing to increase lift; he had expected this and was planning to descend.
The invisible cloud deck was still some fifty kilometers below, and he would reach it about midnight. It showed up clearly on the infrared radar, which also reported that it contained a vast array of complex carbon compounds as well as the usual hydrogen, helium, and ammonia. Falcon could see all this for himself, with perceptual abilities that were not general knowledge.
The chemists were dying for samples of that fluffy, pinkish stuff; though some of the previous atmospheric probes had gathered a total of a few grams, they had had to analyze the compounds on board, with automated instruments, in the brief time before they’d disappeared into the crushing depths. What the chemists had learned so far had only whetted their appetites. Half the basic molecules of life were here, floating high above the surface of Jupiter. Where there was “food,” could life be far away? That was the question that, after more than a hundred years, none of them had been able to answer.
The infrared was blocked by the clouds, but the micro-wave radar sliced right through and showed layer after layer, all the way down to the hidden “surface” 400 kilometers below. That was barred to him by tremendous pressures and temperatures; not even the robot probes had ever reached it intact. It lay in tantalizing inaccessibility at the bottom of the radar screen, slightly fuzzy, showing a curious granular structure that neither Falcon nor his radar screen could resolve.
An hour after sunset he dropped his first onboard probe. It fell swiftly for about a hundred kilometers, then began to float in the denser atmosphere, sending back torrents of radio signals, which he relayed to Mission Control. Then there was nothing else to do until sunrise, except keep an eye on the rate of descent and monitor the instruments.
While she was drifting in this steady current, Kon-Tiki could look after herself.
Flight Director Im announced the end of Day One. “Good morning, Howard. It’s one minute after midnight, and we’ve got green boards all around. Hope you’re enjoying yourself.”
Falcon’s reply came back, time-delayed and distorted by static: “Good morning, Flight. All the boards I’m looking at are green too. Looking forward to sunrise so I can see a little more out the windows.”
“Call us then. Meanwhile we won’t pester you.”
Im keyed the ship’s bridge.
“Mangkorn here, Flight.” The ship’s second mate, a Thai with ten years’ service among Jupiter’s moons, was the officer of the new day; Captain Chowdhury had gone to his cabin to catch some sleep.
“Good morning, Khun Mangkorn,” she said. “Can you give me an update on our VIPs?”
“The cutter is on a ballistic Hohmann from Ganymede. No change of ETA.”
“Thank you.”
Ten minutes passed without incident. Suddenly graph lines leaped on the screens. Im reached for the command channel. “Howard! Listen in on channel forty-six, high gain.”
There were so many telemetering circuits that she could have forgiven Falcon if he remembered only those few which were critical, but he didn’t hesitate. Through her commlink she heard the click of the switch on his panel.
He brought up the frequency on his inboard amplifier, which was linked through to the microphone on the probe that now floated 125 kilometers below Kon-Tiki in an atmosphere almost as dense as water.
“Put it up on the speakers,” Im said. The communications controller immediately switched the loudspeakers to the probe’s channel.
At first there was only a soft hiss of whatever strange winds stirred down in the darkness of that unimaginable world. And then, out of the background noise, there slowly emerged a booming vibration that grew loud
er and louder, like the beating of a gigantic drum. It was so low that it was felt as much as heard, and the beats steadily increased their tempo, though the pitch never changed. Now it was a swift, almost infrasonic throbbing.
Then, suddenly, in midvibration it stopped—so abruptly that the mind could not accept the silence: memory continued to manufacture a ghostly echo in the deepest caverns of the brain.
The controllers exchanged glances. It was the most extraordinary sound that any of them had ever heard, even among the multitudinous noises of Earth. None could think of a natural phenomenon that could have caused it. Nor was it like the cry of an animal, not even one of the great whales.
If Im had not been so engrossed, she might have noticed the barely constrained excitement on the faces of two of her controllers. But she was on the comm to the bridge. “Khun Mangkorn, would you send someone to wake up Dr. Brenner, please,” she said. “This could be what he’s been waiting for.”
The awesome sound came over the speakers again, following exactly the same pattern. Now they were prepared for it and could time the sequence; from the first faint throb to final crescendo, it lasted just over ten seconds.
But this time there was a real echo, not an artifact of memory—very faint and far away, it might have come from one of the many reflecting layers deeper in the stratified atmosphere.
Or perhaps it was from another, more distant source. They waited for a second echo, but none came.
“Howard, drop another probe, will you? With two mike pickups maybe we can triangulate the source.”
“Okay, Flight,” came the delayed reply, and over the speakers in Mission Control they heard the nearly simultaneous thump of the robot instrument probe separating from Kon-Tiki’s capsule. Oddly enough, none of Kon-Tiki’s own microphones was picking up anything except wind noise. The boomings, whatever they were, were trapped and channeled beneath an atmospheric reflecting layer far below.
