Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 84

by Greg Mellor

  Io. Jen was there in a NanCon soloship. Ras could visualize her, nude (as was her habit), her red hair pulled back, paintbrush in hand, working on her landscapes. Ras loved her boldness. Sometimes he feared it. Nothing fazed her.

  Hurry back, sweetheart. Ras pressed his palm to the window. Even after all the decades of their togetherhood, she still thrilled him. Her touch on his body; the smell of her skin; the taste of her mouth. The morning before they left for Callisto, Jen had stood before their window, naked and fragrant with the scent of their lovemaking.

  I need you.

  Ras turned around, then inhaled sharply.

  The aged man in the center of the room looked just as startled. “There you are,” he said, kneeling to set an armload of wood into the fireplace.

  What Ras noticed first wasn’t his clothing (a stained Tharsis Dust Devils sweatshirt, shorts fashioned from cut-off plaid trousers), but the flesh he was wearing.

  The jowly, hang-dog face with folds under the eyes that looked deep enough to hold water. Cottony white hair dabbed the back of his bald head, which reminded Ras of a chocolate egg. The topography of veins beneath the skin of his hands. Skinny brown legs that didn’t look strong enough to carry their owner.

  Anton Douglas was a forceful reminder of how people used to age: wrinkled skin hanging like taffy; the pains accompanying cellular breakdown and the failure of subcellular functions; genetically programmed senescence.

  That was before the biotech renaissance a century ago. Ras’s own legions of intercellular ribots kept his apparent age at thirty-five Earthyears, and had for four decades. Ras hadn’t seen anyone who looked old since he was a child.

  If Douglas were still on Earth, he’d be approaching his 132th birthday. The oldest person in human history. Why would he, of all people, let this happen to himself? What terrible sin needed such awful restitution? Ras glanced at the portrait, wondering what tales she could tell.

  The old man wiped his hands on his shorts. “Oak logs burn best, don’t you think? Burn longer.” He pulled a wooden match from a pocket and scraped it across the fireplace stonework. The stick flared and Ras caught an acrid whiff of burning powder.

  The man grinned at his expression. “When was the last time you smelled that, eh? Probably never, I’d say. Pity. ’Course, these aren’t from oak trees. Grew ’em in the fablabs upstairs. Can’t tell the difference, though. I can’t anyway, so I s’pose no one else can either.” He stood slowly, pushing himself up by pressing his hands on his knees.

  Ras realized he’d been holding his breath. He stepped toward the old man and offered his hand. “Dr. Douglas. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  Douglas shook Ras’s hand, but his grip carried no enthusiasm. He examined Ras as if he were a newly created life form. “So. Welcome. I hope my assistant didn’t annoy you. I took him on as a political favor,” he continued. “The boy’s as harmless as he is brainless. Take the ‘con’ out of ‘contemporary’ and what have you got?”

  “It was fine, Dr. Douglas. I’ve taught too many of his ilk to be bothered.”

  “Glad to hear it. Call me Anton.”

  Despite the invitation, Ras could never call this man by his first name. it would be like calling God ‘Jo,” if he believed in God.

  Douglas sat in the bentwood rocker next to the fireplace. With a simple gesture he commanded Ras to sit in the chair beside him. “I’ve been following your work, Dr. Bodogom. You were born in Aresopolis with a back yard view of Olympus Mons.”

  He paused, and Ras couldn’t tell if it had been a question or not. “That’s right,” he finally said.

  Douglas continued, his eyes unblinking. “You moved to Earth with a full scholarship to Harvard. Terminal degrees from Harvard and Copernicus U. You returned to teach at U. Mars with high commendations as well as a Nobel Prize for discoveries in Martian paleontology, specializing in the remains of water-dwelling forms from the Sigerson-Sachter deposits.”

  He looked at him the way Lars Sigerson had so long ago at the base camp near Lowell Ridge. Annoyed and a little disbelieving. “You shared another Nobel sixteen years later for research on molecular manufacturing applications.”

  So the Great One wasn’t infallible. “No,” Ras said. “For developments in neuronanology and their applications to cerebral interfaces, cognitive science, and neuronet augmentation. With Dr. Jen Kangeledes. Our cytext on neuronautics is still a primary source.”

  Douglas nodded. “You’re good,” he said.

  Of course I am, Ras thought, a little affronted. “Thank you. And my name’s Ras.”

  “I know. What’s on your mind, Ras?”

  He leaned toward Douglas. The man even smelled old. “Four months ago you hired us to head up your biotech team for a project we were forbidden to write about even in our personal files. To keep the creature alive at all costs—”

  “Not ‘creature,’ Ras, the native life form.”

  Ras talked over the interruption. “But this morning, I walk into my office to discover my task files are locked.” He fought to keep his voice even. “My lab door refused my ID. My PA was reassigned. What the hell is going on?”

  Douglas answered calmly. “Have you been dissatisfied here?”

  Ras blinked. He cursed himself for it. “No. It’s been the most rewarding work of my career. Our studies of the cre—, native life form’s genome verify its common Earth ancestry, and its genetic match with homo sapiens is purely astonishing. The implications for biology alone are enough to—”

  Douglas’s hand waved through the air as if swatting gnats. “Yes, yes. Yet another revolutionary breakthrough. Have you any idea how many of those I’ve seen?”

  Anton Douglas was a legend. He controlled NanCon when the corporation brushed aside government bureaucracy, corporate power-mongering, and scientific caution to pull the cork from the bottle of nanotech.

  Here was the man who had either liberated the human race, or enslaved it. He’d loosed wonders, and terrors that didn’t bear thinking about. Of course Ras didn’t know.

  Reflected firelight danced in Douglas’ dark eyes. “I thought not.”

  He reached toward the cherry wood table beside him and lifted the lid off a round glass plate. “Would you like a slice of lemon cake? I made it myself.”

  Ice crystals high in the cerulean sky paint a misty halo around the bright sun. With the short ten hour Jovian day-night cycle, local noon arrives quickly. In a few more hours, darkness will return to this side of Jupiter.

  At night, the spherical creatures glow against the shadowed cloudscape, like spirit lights spied in the Ozark darkness. She follows them.

  Jen is ten kilometers from the herd. Close enough to discern individual markings on the largest bodies. Each bulbous orb is a being at least two dozen meters across. Living hot air balloons with long threads fringing the bottom orifice. The filaments ripple in slow waves.

  These leviathan jellyfish float surrounded by other life forms. They drift on the wind or bob up and down on waves of undulating flanges. From the first computer-enhanced images provided by probes, the Jovias research teams dubbed them ballooners. The ballooners probably metabolize cellular life, retaining and heating stores of pure hydrogen while utilizing heavier gases and molecules for tissue generation. As Jen watches, their colors change to match the brownish-orange and beige patterns of the towering cloud structure. Protective camouflage, Jen guesses. An unspoken Yes bubbles up.

  The pressure of her companion’s damaged consciousness troubles her, but not enough to abort the mission. Its communications are simple, yet vibrant with meaning. They had miscalculated the effect of the brainstem remnant. She feels its thought, They’re like us, one flesh remembered.

  She records the thought to the crystal embedded within. The Jovians have mind. Intelligence. And they can communicate. Given what she knows about life in Jupiter’s troposphere, the confirmation comes with little surprise. Of course they’re like us. They are us. Closer than chimps for all their u
nearthly shapes.

  What do they think about? What does identity mean to them? Or death? Or love? The other doesn’t answer.

  Smaller balloon forms, variations that might be young or perhaps sub-species, huddle in packs. Colors and patterns flow over their skins like oil on water.

  There! Flitting among the colossal floaters. Manta ray-shaped flyers like herself. She watches them swoop and dive in random flight paths. No. Not random. They soar in an intricate dance that says—what? It’s a message that she can almost understand, like a word just out of reach.

  There is only one solution. Move closer.

  Then she realizes with a start her body is already taking her in, faster than she would like. Home. Remembering.

  “Follow me.”

  Douglas led Ras out of his suite and into an adjacent hallway.

  The passageway stopped at an opaque field door. Douglas took Ras’s hand and walked into the reflective surface. The door recognized Douglas and flowed around them. Ras felt the tingle of reduced stunners as he passed through. He recognized the octagonal compartment they entered. He had arrived in a similar one, though less sumptuously furnished. They were in a private car in the ground-to-orbit tower. He and Douglas sat on opposite ends of an overstuffed couch behind a long glass-topped table.

  “Top floor,” Douglas announced. He activated a display on the tabletop. “Goodness! It’s past lunch. Here’s the menu. We have time.”

  Ignoring his suggestion, Ras tuned in a Solweb news channel. He had just come down from the labs. Why go back up?

  Ras deliberately kept his eyes on the news while Douglas settled in with eggs and grits, watching him appraisingly. Weight slowly drained away from them as the car rose 4500 kilometers.

  The Callisto orbital was an all-purpose complex. Its primary body perched atop the elevator tower like a four-kilometer-wide sombrero spinning at .6 gee at its rim. Its axis hub nursed a brood of modules and fablabs.

  The car announced their arrival with a slight bump. Once the field doors shimmered, they drifted out. Douglas indicated they should access a flyway leading to the outer carousels. It was one of twenty radial connections between the station’s hub and the outer ring.

  Ras stayed close as they headed for Main Bio. Passersby—even members of Ras’s team—ignored him. Kamilla Juarez stepped out of Xenomorphology, attention locked on the datapad she carried. She smacked into Ras. At least that was typical. Kami never noticed where she was going.

  “Oh, sorry.” She laughed as always. A shadow crossed her broad, freckled face, “Everything’s ready, Doctor Douglas.” Kami then gave Ras a quick hug. “I heard you came through this morning. I’m so glad.” Douglas frowned and shook his head, and Kamilla actually blushed.

  Fear speared through Ras. “Kami, what’s going on?”

  She turned beet-red and walked, almost ran, down the sterile corridor. The old man took Ras’s arm and squeezed. “This way.”

  They proceeded to the main lab. The place had been tidied since last night. Ras was never this neat. Of the ten people milling about, people he worked with every day—joked with, ate lunch with—none acknowledged him.

  Ras checked the environment tank, then cried out. “What have you done?” he shouted. “Who killed it?”

  Everyone hushed. He ran to the console. His hand halted in midair as the time readout snared his attention. “What the hell?”

  According to the flashing date, last night’s research session—his most recent study of the now-gutted corpse splayed in the tank—occurred more than four weeks ago.

  Across hundreds of cubic acres of sky, ballooners slew among the mists. Their tendrils sway like kite tails. Colored patterns slide across their huge translucent bodies. Orange, tan, gold, pink, creamy white. Jen wonders if it’s language.

  Smaller floaters counter vagrant winds by belching from their underbellies. Flyers dart through the herd. The ballooners’ echolocation pulses rumble through her. It’s not unpleasant. Flyers chirp and whistle, reminding her of dolphins.

  Night slides over the cloudsea. Far to the south, ghost light ripples—an aurora larger than a planet. The air quivers with impending thunder. A whiff of carbon monoxide and phosphorous compounds—rust and violets.

  A change electrifies Jen; her skin shudders with pleasure as flyers gather near the huge ballooners. Their brilliantly colored wings almost touch the ballooners’ pictogram sides. Peristaltic waves ripple the ballooners’ bodies.

  From within, the other sings. Joy. Rebirth. Remembering. Emotions pour into her. Jen feels a little frightened by her companion’s enthusiasm. But this is his world. These are his people.

  As a scientist, she’s fascinated by the alien mind emerging from the Jovian’s cortex fiber linked to her brain. As an artist, she thrills to the spill of imagery. She’s already wondering how to paint this. As the girl who grew up in Arkansas, she’s terrified.

  Comfort comes in a memory of Ras’s scent. She suspects the other dredged it up to calm her. Longing sweeps through her. I wish you were here. The chip traps the emotion in the amber of precise neurographic matrixes. Ras. Don’t leave me.

  She releases control to the other.

  In its way, it’s grateful. Know and be Remembered. Before the end we will all remember.

  Her body inhales, and heats the air to maintain buoyancy. She’s carried toward a warmth of community. If she were on Earth, this would be a big ol’ picnic. As the world darkens, the floaters glow with a pale yellow light that shines through their flesh. For kilometers in all directions, hundreds of paper lanterns hang in the blue-black night.

  Then it begins.

  “Everyone leave,” Douglas said.

  Everyone did except Ras. “Where’s Jen?” he asked. “Dr. Kangeledes. My wife.”

  Douglas met his eyes. No emotion showed on his ancient face as he activated the console. “Four weeks ago there was an accident involving the native life form. You died. Here, let me show you.”

  They are welcomed by a congregation of flyers whose great wings glisten with reflected light from the floaters’ bioluminescence. The nearest ballooner, as big as a barn, ripples its tendrils. Pale orange fog drifts from its opening. All the ballooners are releasing mist into the air. New scents surround her. Wood smoke. Mushrooms. Jasmine. Musky aromas she can’t identify, but they speak to her companion, and so to her.

  The Remembering.

  Patterns play across the skin of the ballooners forming intricate pictures. Children are born. Hunters seek their prey, food-sharers raise new generations while flyers explore, always pushing further across the cloudsea. The ballooners keep memories, etched in light, preserved in flesh, enhanced with hormonal cues. It is as rich a history as any she knows from Earth.

  Anton Douglas keyed in a playback sequence and Ras watched himself die.

  The person working in the e-tank was definitely him. The figure, wearing a smartskin life suit and helmet, entered the tank where the creature lay suspended in a simulated Jovian troposphere. Its streamlined body was flattened dorsoventrally and almost four meters long. Each of its broad triangular wings could stretch to twelve meters. It hung with a Surrealist droop, resting on a cushion of utility fog. Alive, but not responsive.

  Ras watched himself study the screens monitoring the probes and neurolinks woven into the life form’s brain. A fleshy lip just behind the upper eye pairs covered a natural, though puzzling, vent into its braincase.

  Ras didn’t recall what he saw.

  The image froze as Douglas said, “This is your breakthrough.” He indicated the computer graphics the “other” Ras was studying. “I mean that sincerely. A method of directly interfacing with the native life form’s brain is a major advance.”

  Ras leaned in close to the screen. He shoved Douglas’ hands away to augment the image.

  “You succeeded,” Douglas said. “Your neural mapping identified enough analogs to human cerebral functions that it was possible to directly access memories stored in the Jovian’
s cortex.”

  Skeptical, Ras looked at Douglas.

  “You proved it,” Douglas said. “It is descended from Earth’s genomes. Human issue all the way down to the right-hand spiral of its DNA. The Jovian brain matches Homo Sapiens 98% and pocket change, even though analysis proves this species has existed here for fifty thousand years.

  “You called me in the middle of the night. I told you—ordered you—to wait for your full support team.”

  “Where’s Jen?”

  “On Io, around Jupiter’s far side. We tight beamed a message to her. By the time she arrived, it was too late.”

  “Where is she now? She should be here.”

  Douglas resumed playback. Ras closed his eyes against a sudden dizziness. He knew he would never do what happened next. He just wouldn’t. With the back of his hand, he wiped a sheen of sweat from his lip and forced himself to look.

  Ras watched himself load a new program into the peabrain fiber linked to the life form’s brain; instruct it to rearrange node clusters intertwined with the limbic area; interface his own cranial links to the new config; then engage the program. He watched as he removed his helmet, and inhaled the high-pressure, hydrogen-dominant air. His face changed from an expression of calm, to exhilaration, then horror. The person on screen folded to the floor, blood pooling over his bloated lips.

  He would never do this.

  “The alarm sounded,” Douglas said. “By the time we reached you, you’d been dead for six minutes. Apparently, you thought you should be breathing Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

  Ras hugged his body against a chill. He looked into Douglas’s eyes. “Where’s Jen?”

  Memory is shared through a psychotropic hormonal mist, enhanced by moving colors conjuring pictures on breathing flesh. The hormone-laden smoke calls up a global disaster. Streaks of fire explode in light and sound and heat. Millions die. Jen lives the Remembered horror.

  In a few hours, the species is condemned. The Wind Singers disappear—how they die is uncertain. The Hunters are killed. The food-sharers die protecting the young. Without the food-sharers, the children can’t survive. Mated adults try to feed their offspring, but that’s not the path evolution chose for them. Infant after infant starves. The loss is devastating. The adults stop breeding.