“But you must have learned. You didn’t go back to Earth.”
“There were other reasons for that. Just before I finished on Horus and found out whether I was in or out, news came back from Mercantor about the Guljee Expedition, with all the killings. The other Stellar Group members decided it was the final proof that humans were too bloody-minded to wander free around the stars. Right after that they put the quarantine in place. Chan Dalton had to disband the team. We all went our separate ways. He gave me my freedom, and enough money to start another life. I kept in touch with the other team members for a long time, but when the quarantine went on and on we drifted apart and lost contact. With the road to the stars closed, there was no point in thinking of ourselves as a team. It was a depressing period for everybody. But you’re too young to remember it.”
“No I’m not. One of my first memories was the big news that none of the Link access points were working.”
“Not quite that. We could go anywhere within the extended solar system. But nothing beyond a lightyear.”
“Surely the Geyser Swirl is more than that. We’re a lot more than a lightyear from the Sun.”
“More than a hundred lightyears. That’s one of the mysteries we came here to solve: Why is there a Link access point open to humans? Well, we’re here, and no closer to finding out.” Bony waved his arm around at their barren surroundings. They had been walking steadily as they talked, and had reached the top of a sharp-edged ridge. The black rock showed signs of weathering by wind and rain, but nowhere in all the expanse of hills and valleys ahead could the eye find any sign of a living thing. The sun was lower in the sky, and soon it would be time to turn back.
“In fact,” Bony went on, “we have other mysteries. How could we come through a Link and arrive in the middle of the sea? Our mass detector is supposed to inhibit a Link transit when there’s matter at the other end.”
He was talking too much, and more to himself than to Liddy. He was surprised to hear her say, “And now there’s one more mystery to explain.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you said there was no life on land, and I assume that included birds.” Liddy was pointing off to the left. “But isn’t that a bird?”
Bony followed her arm and at first could see nothing. Then he caught the dark moving point in the sky. A bird.
So there were birds, or at least some kind of flying animal. He had been wrong about that, and he must be just as wrong about life on land. Surely a flying form couldn’t evolve directly from a sea-creature without a land form in between.
The moving dot was larger, drifting across the sky on a slanting course that would cross their own path far ahead of them. Bony stared hard, trying to make out details of the flying shape.
“I see a tail behind the main lobes,” Liddy said. Her eyes must be sharper than his. “And a line of little dots on the side of the body. I think — yes, it’s turning. There are wings. But—”
Bony could see them, too. The moving shape was banking. As it did so, the profile as seen from below was revealed. It was the same triple-lobe winged form that had cast its shadow on Bony when he was on the seabed. And something else. The sun was at their back, and the sunlight catching the underside of the object turned it to a silvery gleam.
“That’s reflection from metal,” Liddy said excitedly. “It’s a ship!”
“It is. And it’s big . Those `little dots’ you see on the side are ports. But how can it fly, with a shape like that? It seems to just hang in the air.” Bony grabbed Liddy’s arm. “Come on. It will be getting dark in another hour or two and we don’t want to find ourselves wandering around the sea at night. We have to get back to the Mood Indigo and tell Friday what we’ve learned.”
Liddy gave him a questioning look, but she turned at once and allowed him to lead her back the way that they had come. She didn’t say anything, but Bony suspected that she knew the real reason he wanted to return to their ship. It had nothing to do with their responsibility to report everything they found to the official leader of the expedition, Friday Indigo. It was the fact that the outline of the ship they had just seen did not resemble any design in use by humans or other species of the Stellar Group. It was not the product of Tinkers, Pipe-Rillas, or Angels. The ship they had seen wasn’t just alien, it was alien alien.
Bony had a sudden suspicion that the land surface of Limbo might offer greater dangers than the depths of its oceans.
10: RECRUITING ON EUROPA
Chan Dalton, his arrival at Europa less than two hours ahead, was still trying to make up his mind.
It was the classic question; you had two tasks to perform and one promised to be much harder and more unpleasant than the other. Did you tackle the tough one first and get it out of the way? Or did you postpone, and hope that before you came to the hard part you might be struck by a meteorite, or that a solar flare would wipe out life in the solar system?
The angry weapons master first, or the cheerful dreamer? Deb Bisson, or Tully O’Toole?
Chan made up his mind — after a fashion. Whoever was closer to his arrival point, that’s the one he would call on first. And let’s hope that it was Tully the Rhymer, the disheveled dreamer.
The message unit was nagging for attention. Probably to give the ship its final docking instructions. Chan casually flipped the switch, then sat up straighter as the imaging region filled with a three-dimensional whirlpool of colors.
A shape gradually coalesced, a bulky green mass with waving upper fronds. A computer-generated voice said, “Chan Dalton?”
“You’re an Angel.”
“No. We are the Angel. The Angel who was with you on Travancore, the Angel with whom you once mind-pooled. Such pooling is now permanently forbidden, but are you that same Chan Dalton?”
“Of course I am. Can’t you tell?”
“All humans, unfortunately, look much the same to us. We can now proceed. We are linking in from the home-world of Sellora.”
“That’s impossible. This ship doesn’t have equipment for direct interstellar linkage.”
“Not impossible, merely improbable. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. We assure you, we are linking to your ship. Chan Dalton, we must talk. We have heard that you are in the process of assembling a team of humans; in fact, the same team of humans who many of your years ago submitted a plan for travel to unknown parts of the Perimeter.”
“That’s—” Chan had been about to say again that it was impossible for anyone except himself to know such a thing. He restrained himself. It would merely encourage the Angel to offer another human platitude or quotation. “How do you know what I’m doing?”
“An Angel has the potential to simulate the thought processes of any particular human, provided that there has been enough prior contact. You had a most intimate contact with us. We know how you think.”
“Then you’re ahead of me. I don’t know how I know what I’m thinking. I don’t know where I’m going when I land on Europa. I don’t know if I can put a team together. I’m not even sure I can find some of the members, let alone persuade them.”
“Let us assume that you achieve those goals. Then we wish to warn you. Without the tempering influence of Angels, Tinkers, and Pipe-Rillas, your team contains the seeds of instability and violence. Murder cannot be permitted. No matter what you find in the Geyser Swirl, no matter what violence you may encounter, you must not destroy intelligent beings to solve your problems.”
“You told me that already, in the Star Chamber meeting.”
“That was before we learned one other item of information. After the Star Chamber meeting, we employed a piece of equipment able to search for and locate any living Angel within large volumes of space at arbitrarily large distances. We applied that instrument to the Geyser Swirl. And we found — nothing.” The blue-green fronds waved in an agitated manner. “Nothing. The Angel who went to the Geyser Swirl is dead.”
“How could that happen?” Chan was genuinely amazed. The Angels offered a combination of guile, caution, and resilience that made them practically indestructible.
“We do not know. It is beyond our comprehension. There was no sign even of the Singer’s crystal, which withstands huge force and high temperatures. Therefore we know only this: something in the Geyser Swirl provides great danger and offers potential for violence.” The upper fronds were waving wildly. “We are unable to speak more. We wish only to warn you, and to say you must not seek to match violence with violence—” The fronds suddenly closed to cover the top of the bulbous upper part, and a chromatic flicker of colors moved across the image. The Link connection was beginning to break down. “Take care, take care,” said the fading computer voice. “Remember this: There are more things in the Geyser Swirl, Chan Dalton, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. ”
Thanks, Angel. That’s just the sort of encouragement I could have done without. Chan did not bother to speak the words. He was staring at an empty image area.
* * *
Europa is only a fourth the size of Terra, but its ice-covered ocean has an average depth of more than fifty kilometers. The volume of water contained there is as much as in all of Earth’s oceans. The world-spanning sea of Europa is deep and dark and the seabed beneath is a treasure trove of metals, delivered over billions of years by meteorite impact and melting slowly through and down. The waters themselves are clear and potable; they are also uncharted, and unpatroled. They form, not surprisingly, a haven for some of the system’s most desperate criminals.
Chan’s task, to find and recruit Tully O’Toole and Deb Bisson in a couple of days, should have been impossible. He had hope, for one reason only: since neither Tully nor Deb was in hiding, the chances were good that he would find them on Europa’s single land area. He had examined the image on the screen ahead during final approach, and felt encouraged. Mount Ararat was not much to look at. Europa’s single “continent” consisted of four connected peaks, stretching in a knobby line over a dozen kilometers of surface. Even the tallest hill was no more than a black pile of igneous rock in an endless frozen plain. The encroaching ice pinched low points of the sawtooth ridge, almost dividing the knolls into separate islands. The total land area was just a few square kilometers, and like all of Europa it was subjected to a continuous hail of protons, accelerated by Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field. No sane person would try to live there, and no one did. The population was beneath, in an interconnected labyrinth of chambers and corridors tunneled from the rock.
Chan studied the layout, and decided it should not be hard to find anyone on Mount Ararat who was not actively trying to hide. So now he had to answer the question that he had been avoiding: Who first?
As the transit vessel dropped in toward Mount Ararat’s primitive spaceport, he entered the two names and requested information on their last-known locations. Answers came back at once, pinpointed on a map of the underground city. One glance, and Chan cursed. He might have known it. Tully O’Toole was at the edge of Mount Ararat’s northern hill, as far from the port point as you could get. Deb Bisson was an easy five-minute underground walk from the ship’s landing point. The issue was settled.
What time of day was it here? As it landed, the ship’s display adjusted to local time. As Chan recalled it, Europa and the other Jovian moons used some crazy decimal system, dividing each day into ten hours of a hundred minutes. What did one-ninety correspond to? Late, well after midnight, but how late? He made up his mind. He was in a hurry. Night or day, he must go at once to Deb and talk to her.
Chan went through the landing procedures in a haze of anticipation, answering the machine’s questions impatiently and with half his brain. Expected duration of stay? One or two days, maximum. Import/export materials? None — unless you counted a couple of humans. Purpose of visit? Chan paused for a moment. Discussions? Let’s hope he was right about that.
And then he was inside, through the lock and hurrying along a wide poorly lit corridor designed more for automated vehicles than for people. His surroundings were as bare and forbidding as the naked rock through which the tunnel was carved. He could not imagine Deb living here. No prison on Earth was as bleak.
But then, beyond the first chamber and bulkhead, everything changed. Even Chan, hurried as he was, had to pause and look around him.
Anyone who believed that all residents of Europa lived simple, primitive lives should come here and take a look. The rough-cut walls of black rock had been transformed to smooth white surfaces, covered with murals depicting native Europan life-forms. The beauty of paintings showing the tube worms and crystalline arrays that flourished at the seabed vents was a matter of taste — Chan thought they were hideous — but they were original, expensive artwork. And there was no doubt about the cost of the deep, living rug across which he walked. The organisms of the carpet were tailor-made to thrive in Europa’s individual gravity and atmosphere. So, too, were those in the ceiling of the corridor. The soft, bioluminescent glow that they provided verified that locally it was late at night.
Chan trod softly, almost tiptoeing as he came to the next corridor of residential suites. He was in an area that would qualify as high-class dwelling space anywhere in the solar system. Deb, whatever she was doing, was not living in poverty.
He came to a wide, solid door. The small plate attached to it read D. Bisson in discreet cursive script. A communication grille sat in the wall at the left-hand side. Chan hesitated. The logical — and polite — thing to do was to signal, identify himself, and request permission to enter.
But suppose that she told him to go to hell, turned off the communicator, and would not let him in? He had come a long way to leave without an audience. And he had been the one, back on Mars, who told Danny Casement that team recruiting must be done face-to-face. It was more true for Deb Bisson than for anyone.
He gently tried the door. As expected, it was locked. But this was a normal domestic lock, not one of the infinitely variable smart ciphers. For a man who had spent the past two decades in Earth’s Gallimaufries, that was almost an invitation.
Chan had not seen a living soul since he landed on Europa, but he walked carefully up and down the corridor before returning to Deb Bisson’s door. Everything seemed peaceful. He bent down to study the lock.
It took longer than expected, but within five minutes he was delicately turning the final cylinder and easing the door open. The inside of the apartment was even darker than the corridor. He stood on the threshold for a few moments to study his surroundings. He was in a big rectangular room, at least ten meters long. Judging from the equipment, with its beams and pulleys and weights, this was some kind of exercise area. The surface gravity of Europa was even less than on the Moon, and if you stayed here for a long time it was essential to work out regularly. Otherwise you lost muscle tone and bone mass. The higher gravity worlds like Earth and Venus would close to you permanently.
The far end of the room held three doors. The left-most two were open, and by the faint light within them he could make out a hint of comfortable furniture in one and wall cabinets in the other. He guessed at living room and kitchen, or possibly living room and workroom. The third door was open just a crack. It was presumably the bedroom, and it was totally dark.
Chan tiptoed toward it. He didn’t want to wake Deb up suddenly. In the old days, even at the best of times, that guaranteed a bad mood. The best way would be to stand at her bedside and speak in a soft voice, so that she would wake slowly and naturally.
He pushed the door wide and stood staring into the room. He thought he could make out the shape of a big bed, with what might be a sleeping body lying toward the right side of it.
He took another step forward. As he did so he was grabbed from behind and flipped end over end. He was caught in midair and both arms were twisted behind his back. Something that felt like a band of steel whipped across his throat, choking him.
A voice hissed in his ear, “All r
ight, smart boy. Struggle and you’re dead.” The steel band tightened. “Don’t even try.”
It was an easy command to obey. It took Chan’s best efforts just to breathe. He felt himself being frisked for weapons and heard a grunt of surprise. Suddenly he was thrown across the room and landed on the bed. He hit on top of something that yelped, and as he rolled over and tried to sit up a light went on.
Chan saw everything in one quick flash. He had been thrown onto a bed covered with a mess of tangled sheets. Deb Bisson crouched about three meters away. She was naked, her body damp with sweat and her dark hair in a wild cloud about her intent face. Her white limbs were deceptively smooth and feminine. In one hand she held a steel chain, and the tendons in that forearm flexed and stood out like cables. Next to Chan was the man whom he had landed on. He was big, blond, muscle-bound, also nude, and his mouth gaped open.
Chan saw the expression on Deb’s face change from murderous intent to question to total shock.
“You!” she said. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing here — in my apartment — in my bedroom — in the middle of the night — when I was — you bastard, what the devil are you doing here at all ?”
“I need to talk to you.” Chan held his hands up in self-defense, because Deb’s face had darkened and she was raising the steel chain.
“I don’t need to talk to you. Ever.” The chain whipped from one hand to the other so fast that Chan heard it but didn’t see it. “You get out of here before I slash your guts out and stuff them down your lying throat.”
Chan had no doubt that she could do it, with her bare hands if she had to. He eased off the bed and stood up, very slowly and carefully. He knew better than to smile.
“Deb, I know you hate me. I understand why, and I can explain what happened.”
“I’m not interested in your explanations.”
“I know. And that’s not why I came here. For years, I haven’t called you or tried to contact you—”
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