Rick Cook: Unfinished Symphony

“It’s so hot,” Snow said.

The High Folk’s infrared detectors were not nearly as sophisticated as their natural sonar or their eyes, but it was obvious this thing was much hotter than the surrounding air. Even the living things of the cloud depths didn’t get this hot.

Ensign turned toward it. “Dead things fall, living things fly.” He eyed the mysterious object suspiciously, noting that the edges of the upper part fluttered in the breeze. “Keep your distance—it may be some kind of predator…”

Ensign climbed to gain a dominant position over whatever it was.

“Where does plankton like this grow?” Snow asked her more experienced pod mates.

Sky seed? It was a logical assumption. There were certain kinds of plankton that grew sails or drogues to better reap the rich energy harvest of the sunlight. But it didn’t feel right to Ensign. Plankton were tiny and soft. This thing was larger and its body appeared disturbingly hard.

Above the clouds there were only the High Folk, sharks and plankton of many different kinds. Most of Jupiter’s vast and complicated ecology was down in the cloud seas and known to the High Folk only as humans knew the depths of their own oceans. Sighting new kinds of life was rare for the High Folk, but it did happen.

“How do you know it grew?” Melody trilled. “This comes from the sky and who knows how things form there?”

“Keep away from it,” Ensign called again. But the fascination felt too much and all of them eased closer.

Snow slid out from under the thing and gained altitude, coming abreast of it. “Maybe somebody made it,” she offered.

The Geek snorted in derision, “You can make music and ideas—you can’t make things!” He glided closer.

“I told you to keep your distance.” Ensign called sharply. “Snow, you’re also too close.” He turned to pass over the ballooning canopy, examining its texture and colors with his lower eyes. Suddenly his tingle sense came alive. A massive lightning strike was building to the east.

“LIGHTNING—BREAK WEST!”

As one, the pod sheared away. The response was so instinctive it was several seconds before any of them realized there were no clouds to the east to generate lightning.

Ensign felt foolish for calling a false alarm. Then he realized that the tingling he’d felt wasn’t the usual hash of static but rather something alien, regular—like a song sung by lightning.

This was even stranger. The High Folk could stimulate each others’ tingle sense, but only at very close range. It was a calf’s trick to sneak up on an adult and fake a lightning warning to watch the adult break away. But that was a fluke ability, a nearly useless side effect of the sense that kept the High Folk from flying into areas of high electrical potential where their mere presence could trigger a shattering lightning bolt. Why could this thing invoke the tingle sense?

Snow’s inarticulate cry jerked him out of his reverie.

Snow was tangled in the Star Seed’s sinews, its sail billowed out over her wing and the hard object hung below it. When he’d ordered the pod to turn, he had inadvertently directed the newest member of the group directly into the strange object. Snow floated frozen, terror in her eyes. Ensign asked, “Snow, are you all right? Is it burning hot?”

Snow’s voices came ragged and panicky. “I—-feel—lightning—warnings—from—everywhere!”

Gary Rhine sipped his coffee and watched the traffic stream by the coffee shop. His turquoise-and-silver bolo tie and white short-sleeved shirt barely met the standards for office dress. His sport coat hung on a hook in his cubicle, still wrapped in plastic from the cleaners.

The late afternoon meeting was as unofficial as the setting. No one in the PR office would have dreamed of letting The Rhino near the press and Rhine held the media in general in contempt. But then Larry Collins had officially turned over coverage of planetary encounters to younger colleagues at the bureau after Voyager passed Neptune. Although he would file a color story for the wires, this was more a meeting of old friends.

“The probe’s radio antenna points upward and broadcasts a conical beam to Galileo overhead,” Rhine explained as he marked the napkin with bold scrawls of a felt-tipped pen. “We timed the probe’s entry so the spacecraft will be in the cone at the right time.” Another series of circles, slashes and heavy dotted lines bleeding black and fuzzy into the napkin. “The Earth is right at the edge of the beam and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array in Socorro, New Mexico, listened for the signals during the probe mission. They say they got the signal.”

He pulled the napkin back for some more scrawls. “Now our next job will be to see if we can pull a Doppler signal out of those data and determine the horizontal drift velocity of the probe, which will tell us something about Jupiter’s wind strength. If we’re lucky we may get a vertical velocity, too. That could be correlated with the altitude data that’s supposed to be transmitted from Galileo in a few days.” He paused. “If we re real lucky, we may even be able to decode the modulation and obtain raw probe data.”

“So the mission’s a success?” Collins asked as he studied Rhine’s handiwork.

Rhine shrugged. “So far. Or it was when I left. God knows how it’s managed to fuck up while we’ve been sitting here drinking coffee.”

Larry lifted his white eyebrows in mock surprise. “Cynical, ain’t we?”

“Let’s just say I’m a devout believer in Murphy’s law.” Another sip of coffee and then a broad grin. “Hell, I knew Colonel Murphy back at White Sands.”

“So you’ve told me. And as I recall you always thought he was an optimist.”

Gary chuckled. “Sonofabitch was.” Then he glanced at his watch. “Well, I gotta get back and massage some electrons.”

Larry picked up the check and stood up. “Yeah, I suppose I should go do something productive too. Like write something about this that maybe someone, somewhere will want to read. You got any hot surprises for me about the mission?”

The engineer grinned like a little boy. “Oh, lots of them. We just don’t know what they are yet.”

“So the only surprise would be no surprise, eh?”

“Larry,” Rhine said completely sincerely—and utterly incorrectly— “the only thing that could surprise me is if the probe mission went off perfectly.”

The Geek hovered over the Sky Seed, at once fascinated by its song and afraid of its signals as lightning warnings. Melody circled warily, her shadow falling on the tiny sphere at the bottom. Suddenly The Geek exclaimed, “The song changed—it definitely changed just for a moment there!” Melody circled back, eyeing the sphere closely.

When her shadow covered the Sky Seed again, The Geek sang out that the song had changed a second time. “It responds to you, Melody! It is alive!”

She shuddered slightly, moving away from the thing, but The Geek pressed even closer. Meanwhile Snow was slimmed to a fleeing shape and maintaining her altitude with jerky little motions of her wingtips.

Ensign lay off to her side and sent her a constant stream of reassurance. Her plunge away from the non-existent lighting had left several of the shroud lines tangled around her body and the canopy draped over a wing. She might be able to free herself by violent maneuvering, but Ensign was afraid that would cause the searing hot Sky Seed to touch her with disastrous consequences.

The Geek was still experimenting with casting shadows on the thing to hear its song change. Occasionally he tried to speak to it, but it would not respond on any frequency. Melody hovered off to the other side, trying to encourage Snow without getting too close to the thing.