The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “The name didn’t stick, obviously. The Galilean Moons got their current names from another astronomer, Simon Marius, who discovered them independently, around the same time Galileo did. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto – all named for the Roman god Jupiter’s lovers, a convention that continued for the other moons. It’s a good thing Jupiter was so promiscuous, because there are a lot of moons.”

  Elena nodded. “In the twenty-first century, when they sent a probe to explore Jupiter’s moons, they named it Juno – Jupiter’s wife, coming to check up on his lovers.”

  “Ha,” Callie said. “Cute.” It was sort of cute. Mostly it reminded her of Michael’s myriad infidelities. That association, at least, helped soothe her complex mixed feelings about seeing Michael again, tilting them away from heartbreak, and regret, and the smoldering remnants of love, and more firmly toward anger and self-righteousness. She was much more comfortable with the latter feelings.

  “Marius didn’t name the moons so elegantly at first,” Shall said. “First he just numbered them, and then tried to name them after his own patron, the Duke of Brandenburg, but no one else liked the idea.”

  “Good. That family got all those Bach concertos anyway,” Elena said. “No need to be greedy.”

  “Marius’s third idea was to name the four moons after other planets in the solar systems, since the moons orbited Jupiter as those planets orbited the sun.”

  Elena wrinkled her nose. “What, he wanted to name them Mercury, Venus, like that?”

  “Not quite. He proposed calling them the Venus of Jupiter, the Mercury of Jupiter, the Saturn of Jupiter – like that. Do you know what he called Ganymede?”

  “What?”

  “The Jupiter of Jupiter.”

  Elena burst out laughing. “The Jupiter of Jupiter! It’s elegant in its simplicity. I can’t imagine why that didn’t catch on.”

  “It’s a mystery. Then Marius hit upon the idea of extending the mythological naming structure for the planets to the moons, and here we are.”

  “If I’d discovered a bunch of brand new moons, I wouldn’t have named them after some patron, or any imaginary old gods, either,” Callie said. “I’d have named them after myself.”

  “The… Callielean moons?” Elena said. “I don’t know. Doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”

  “Kiss my ass,” Callie said. “Then kiss the ass of my ass.”

  The Bloedworst AKA the Golden Spider AKA the Inevitability of Death didn’t have a nice observation deck like the White Raven did, so Elena, Ibn, Robin, and Uzoma all crammed into the cockpit with Callie. She had the viewscreens on the walls set to simulate a window view of the satellite below them.

  Much of the surface of the Jupiter of Jupiter was smooth gray ice, mottled with darker areas that were predominantly rock; they looked almost like continents adrift in a sea of ice, which wasn’t all that far from the truth. Callie hit the zoom function and the view of the moon jumped closer to them, its pocked and striated surface filling the screen. She magnified again, and then again. “There. That’s Ilus, the best city on the best moon of the second-best planet in the system.”

  “It looks like… did you ever blow bubbles, as a child?” Robin said. “Sometimes you’d blow a lot of bubbles all at once, and they’d get caught on the ground or a leaf or whatever, and the bubbles would stick to each other, and you’d have these overlapping hemispheres…”

  Callie nodded. “That’s pretty much the aesthetic down there, yeah.” Ilus had an immense central dome, covering a huge green park and most of the grand public buildings, but that dome sprouted a cluster of three dozen more domes of varying sizes from all sides, and some of those domes had their own smaller domes lampreyed on as well. Most of the bubbles were transparent, revealing gleaming towers or factories or forests, but some domes were pale pink or green, and some were opaqued into blackness.

  “It’s like a single dome covered in parasitic growths,” Elena said. “Or, no… like a Portuguese man-o-war. A colony organism, made up of multiple independent creatures, conglomerated together.”

  Callie shuddered. She’d visited relatives in the Algarve back on Earth as a child, and one of their favorite reclaimed beaches been closed one summer due to an infestation of those stinging, tentacled terrors of the sea. The invading men-o-war had transformed a beautiful, familiar place into a dangerous and threatening one. She looked at the city below. Maybe the Portuguese man-o-war wasn’t such a bad metaphor for Ilus, after all. After what happened with Michael down there, she’d avoided returning to Ganymede, and indeed the whole Jovian Imperative, as much as she could, because everything she’d once found beautiful and comforting had turned poisonous instead.

  “Ilus is less toxic,” she said at last. “For the most part, anyway. Stay out of the blacked-out domes if you’re concerned about your safety. They’re mostly unregulated decriminalized areas, and you agree to a waiver as soon as you enter that acknowledges you’re no longer under the protection of local authorities: enter at your own risk. It’s where you go for strange drugs, stranger sex, unsanctioned medical procedures, and things like that.”

  “I thought you said Ilus was a nice city?” Ibn said.

  “Eh,” Callie said. “It’s a good city. The dangerous parts are clearly marked and set aside for people who want to explore them, and the rest of the city is pretty safe. It’s your own fault if you stray from the path. Callisto doesn’t have any black dome districts at all – the super-rich have their own personal drug dealers – and it’s a lot less vibrant and more boring because of that. Io is nothing but bad neighborhoods. I like a place that has some life and options but where you won’t get mugged every time you take a walk. Ilus is best for our purposes.” Stephen wouldn’t have been able to acquire his sacraments on Callisto, for one thing. The bespoke psychotropics favored by the Church of the Ecstatic Divine were generally frowned upon by the conservative oligarchs who ruled the Imperative, as was the church itself – the CoED wasn’t illegal, but they operated mostly in the shadows.

  “Callie,” Shall said. “I have an incoming splintercast from – well, another me, from Glauketas.”

  Chapter 7

  “Talking to yourself again?” Callie said. “I always heard that was a sign of a weak mind.”

  “On the contrary, it’s a privilege enjoyed by those of us with better mental architecture than you squishy types possess,” Shall said.

  “What’s a splintercast?” Robin asked.

  “Encrypted communication,” Callie said. “Military – or pirate – grade. It embeds a concealed signal in other comms traffic, like a splinter under the skin. You need a corresponding cryptographic key to extract the message – to pull out the splinter.”

  “Are the decryption codes called tweezers?” Elena couldn’t help herself.

  “Ugh. No. Please don’t make that joke in front of Ashok, or he’ll start calling them that and never stop. Is this a message for my eyes only, Shall, or can we share it with the rest of the class?” Unless the signal was marked private, Shall would have already digested the contents.

  “It’s for all of us in general, and I think it will make you happy.”

  “Good news? That’s unusual. Put it up on the screen, then.”

  Ashok’s face appeared onscreen, too close to the camera, and thus even more distorted than usual. He pulled back far enough to wave jauntily. “O captain my admiral! And anybody else still on board the Inevitability of Boredom. We have a visitor.” He stepped away, revealing his machine shop, and a squidlike Liar clambered up onto the worktable and undulated two of her seven pseudopods in greeting.

  “It’s Lantern!” Ashok said from offscreen.

  “I think they know that,” Lantern said, in the warm and familiar tones of her artificial voicebox. Elena was pleased to see Lantern’s face. Not that she had a face; she had seven eyes, arrayed around the domelike central bulge of her body, and “front” and “back” were all the same to her. Her pseudopods pulsed briefly with undulati
ng lines of dark purple and pale blue, which meant affectionate greetings, if Elena was reading the body language correctly. Liars communicated among themselves primarily non-verbally, with pheromones and chromatic shifts and movements, and even when talking to humans, those other channels kept working. Elena was doing her best to learn the language, a gesture that Lantern seemed to appreciate.

  Lantern said, “Callie, Elena, Stephen, and any other humans I do not know as well but nevertheless possess generally positive feelings toward – greetings. I have glad news. I have thoroughly studied the data banks on my station, and examined all the outgoing and incoming communications from the past several months, and made discreet inquiries where necessary… and I have determined that your identities are safe.”

  Callie leaned back in her chair, and Elena was pleased to see her visibly relax. Then she frowned. “I wish this was a real-time transmission. I know Lantern’s sect does a lot of in-person communication, to keep things compartmentalized and undetectable. What if she missed some hand-off of information, or–”

  “I’m certain of my findings,” Lantern went on. “It has taken me months to be comfortable announcing this conclusion, because the price of error is death. You must understand, my sect does not like to admit any difficulties to the central authority. No one wants a visit from our leaders, because their evaluations have a tendency to become purges. As a result, our reports… minimize problems. The elder of my cell only told our leaders that humans had discovered a piece of Axiom technology – they did not even say it was a wormhole generator – and that steps were being taken to recover and destroy the artifact and silence the humans. After you helped me take over the local cell of my sect, I personally sent a report confirming that the technology had been destroyed, and the humans eliminated. Your names, and the name of your ship, were never transmitted beyond the bounds of the cell, and those who did know your names here perished when we staged our takeover. None of the other truth-tellers know you are alive.” She paused. “I’m sorry you were not here to receive the news in person, but I hope to see you again soon.”

  Ashok stuck his face between Lantern and the camera, grinning. “We’re alive again! It’s Resurrection Day!”

  The screen blanked.

  Callie swiveled around in her chair and grinned at the others. “I am no longer one of the undead.” She exhaled heavily. “That is a nice feeling.”

  “It makes crashing your own funeral a little easier,” Shall said. “You won’t have to be as subtle.”

  “Subtle? I was looking forward to seeing Callie dress up like a ghost,” Elena said.

  “I was leaning more toward putting on my infiltration suit and sneaking into my ex-husband’s office and ambushing him after the memorial was over, but I can do a more direct approach now.” She paused. “If anyone asks, though, this ship is still the Bloedworst out of Europa. I’m allowed to be alive, but I probably shouldn’t be on a stolen pirate ship with a false transponder.” She shooed them. “Ibn, Robin, Uzoma, go strap in – we’re landing soon.”

  After they were gone, Elena took the co-pilot’s chair without asking and allowed it to enfold her. “What are you planning to do, now that it’s the first day of the rest of your old life?”

  “Get a job,” Callie said. “While Lantern is investigating possible galaxy-saving missions for us, we still have bills to pay. At least now we can access our own accounts, and buy stuff openly from public marketplaces instead of the dark parts of the Tangle – the mark-ups for privacy are brutal – but we still need to get income flowing.”

  “Also, you like working,” Elena said.

  “Also that.”

  “What kind of work will you look for?”

  She shrugged. “Transporting things, or people, or chasing things, or people, or making sure things, or people, don’t get blown up while someone else transports them or chases them. That’s basically my whole skillset.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Callie chuckled. “My whole skillset in terms of moneymaking skills, then.”

  “I don’t know about that, either,” Elena said.

  “Ha. Nothing against people who do that kind of work – it’s as good a way to earn a living as any, and better than many I could name – but I enjoy it more when the motivation is purely intrinsic. I’ve never been to bed with someone I didn’t have romantic feelings for.”

  “Really? No drunken tumbles just because you like the look of someone in a bar? Your will is like unto adamant.”

  Callie shrugged. “It’s not that. It’s not even a philosophical stance. I’ve just… I can admire how someone looks, sure, but I don’t want to sleep with them. If I start liking someone in a certain way, though, lust follows.”

  “That’s really sweet.” Elena gazed at the viewscreen. “In the interests of disclosure, I’ll admit I did a fair bit of sleeping around for sport when I was younger, and it was more enjoyable than not. What you and I have is different, though, and I like it, too. Better, even. And not just because we get to practice and refine our techniques.”

  “We haven’t talked about… us… too much,” Callie said. “Our configuration, or whatever. It hasn’t really been an issue, since you didn’t seem interested in anyone else on the station, except maybe Sebastien–”

  Elena shook her head. “That ship has sailed. And crashed into a star.”

  Callie snorted. “I can’t say I’m sorry to hear it. But if you ever want to, you know… discuss things, or whatever… we can do that. I don’t really know what, this, dating, relationships, whatever, was like in the time you came from, and this is important to me. I don’t want to mess this up because we didn’t talk about things, or because we made bad assumptions.”

  Elena reached out and put a hand on her arm. Callie was so absolutely confident in other areas, it was kind of sweet to see her trying to navigate matters of the heart. “I like being with you, Callie. I’m in love with you. I’m not interested in being with anyone else right now. If that changes, I’ll talk to you about it. And if you start liking someone else, in that way that turns to lust, you’ll tell me, too, OK?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Elena nodded. After the way Callie’s marriage had ended, dishonesty in that arena wasn’t something she was too worried about. “Good. I think that’s all I need for now. Labels don’t matter to me all that much. How about you?”

  “Me neither.” Callie paused. “But they can be useful. Like… how should I introduce you to Michael? What should I say we are to each other?”

  “I can’t wait to see how you handle that situation.” Elena grinned, and before Callie could do more than wrinkle her forehead and open her mouth to reply, Ilus ground control was giving them instructions about their landing site.

  Shall broke into Callie’s private comms after she strapped in for the landing. “There was an additional voice message from Lantern, for your ears only.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Lantern said, “Callie, I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to share this in front of the whole crew, or if you’d like to consider your options before telling them. The leaders of my sect are very concerned about the situation in the Taliesen system. They want to send a representative to the base there to investigate in person, and to check on the Axiom facility, and I believe I can secure that mission for myself without raising suspicions. I am a new elder, after all, and they will believe I am trying to prove myself and my value by volunteering. Let me know if you discover anything in your researches on Ganymede… and if you’d care to join me on the voyage. I’d be very happy to have you, but I know you may want time to adjust to getting your lives back. If this were a certainty, I would ask for your help more ardently, but the lack of communication may have nothing to do with the Axiom at all – it could just be an accident or a technological failure.”

  “Well?” Shall broke in when the transmission was over. “What did she say?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Callie said. “She might
have some unpaid interstellar work for us to do.”

  “Saving the galaxy isn’t very lucrative, is it?”

  “No, but at least it makes people try to kill us.”

  Callie, Stephen, Elena, Ibn, Robin, and Uzoma disembarked at the docking station, one of a network of small domes a bullet-tram ride away from the city proper. They had a brief wait on the platform before piling into an otherwise empty tram car, a gently lit lozenge that zipped along, humming through a subterranean tube.

  “Here we go.” Robin clung to a pole, eyes bright through the screen of her hanging hair. “Off to the next thing.” She bounced on the balls of her feet, and given the low gravity on Ganymede, it was a lot of bounce.

  Ibn nodded. “I am attempting to consider it an adventure.” He paused. “Unfortunately, I dislike adventures.”

  Uzoma nodded. “Agreed. I have had enough adventure. I look forward to the controlled conditions of a physics lab.”

  Elena sighed. “I’m going to miss you all so much.”

  “We’ll miss you too, but the pirate’s life isn’t for us,” Robin said. “Ibn and I were talking – the destination of our goldilocks ship, all those centuries ago? There’s actually a colony there now. The wormhole gate for that system is located about a month’s journey from the planets, so it’s not the most popular colony, and they’re actively looking for more immigrants. It’s called the Kur system now, and there are two habitable planets, Ki and Nammu. Ki is the colony candidate we were aiming for. We might have actually made a start there, if we’d arrived like we were supposed to, and other people hadn’t beat us to it.”

  “You want to go there?” Elena asked.

  Ibn nodded. “We’re interested to see how it all turned out… and to see what we can do to help.”

  “We’ve set you up with personal accounts, with a share of the take from Glauketas,” Callie said. “You aren’t set for life or anything, but it should be sufficient to pay your passage and get you established.”