Jeff Carlson: The Frozen Sky

Europa possessed every building block of life. There was water, heat, and organic material from comet and meteor strikes. They had long speculated that Europa’s great ocean was not wholly frozen. The icy crust went down an average of ten kilometers, reaching twenty km in places, but beneath it was slush and eventually liquid. In fact, some areas would be as hot as boiling where raw magma or gas pushed up from the moon’s rocky core.

Was there also life in the ocean? If yes, it must be limited to hardy bacteria like those found near ocean-floor volcanoes on Earth or in the corrosive toxins of mine tailing ponds. Europa’s surface was stained with sulfuric acid and salt. This was evidence of caustic pH levels in the ocean.

Lam’s school of thought predicted a world inside the ice, a small, unsteady, vertical world. A hundred man-made probes had found nothing for a hundred years, but Lam said that was to be expected. He drew his model in an area where a fin of subsurface mountains partly diverted the crushing, glacial tides. The safe zone was a mere fifteen cubic kilometers in volume — and even within its confines, the ice and rock were burned and torn.

Lam was among the first to understand the violence of this environment. It mesmerized him.

Here are the bugs in an open rift, he said. What are they doing? We don’t know. Mating? Migrating? Nearby there is a rumble, and a super-heated geyser floods the rift. It collapses, then gradually freezes with the bugs suspended inside. But there are more pocket ecologies stacked throughout the region, some with tenuous atmospheres of water vapor or volcanic gases such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide, poisonous hydrogen chloride, and explosive hydrogen sulfide.

The warm holes in the ice were mild compared to the acidic salt ocean. Eons ago, in some of these crannies, bacteria had grown and thrived. The same crude microorganisms had been the first lifeforms to inhabit Earth. They were called chemoautotrophs — self-nourishing chemical reactions that ate iron, sulfur, ammonia, or manganese.

The bacteria refused to die.

In time, isolated from the minerals and poisons that fed them, a few strains had adapted to split water molecules as a new energy source, eating hydrogen instead of iron or manganese. The byproduct was oxygen.

The new bacteria released oxygen gas into some of the pocket ecologies. Oxygen changed things forever. It allowed for larger, faster, more complex organisms. Life on Europa flourished because it had no other choice, evolving and spreading never more than a few steps ahead of constant upheaval.

Christmas Bauman was fifty-three and not so new to long-term commitments. That was partly why she won her slot as the expedition commander, as a balance to Lam and Vonderach. Vonnie liked her, too. Bauman pretended sarcasm with them, but it was a way of communicating her experience. Vonnie could measure Bauman’s amusement in each fraction of a centimeter that her brows lifted above her muddy green eyes.

She was heavier in the chest and hips than Vonnie and more willing to use her body despite her age, dominating conversations by wading into the middle of any group.

She had her own fascination. “What if—” she kept saying.

What if the bugs weren’t dead? They might be hibernating or otherwise biologically active. What if their chemistry wasn’t too strange to co-opt, and could be used in geriatrics or cryo surgery? Yes, they appeared to have been scalded in magma-heated water and then gradually mashed and distorted by the freezing process. The bugs appeared very dead indeed, but who could say what adaptations were normal on Europa? Maybe they’d evolved to spread in this manner, like spores, preserved for ages until the ice opened up again. No one could be certain until a gene smith examined the bugs, so Bauman committed to a year’s hardship on nothing more than spectral scans and what if .

They made a game of it inside the weightless cage of their ship, What if I trade you my dessert tonight for some of your computer time? and What if you turn off your friggin music?

The three of them spent eleven weeks in that box. There wouldn’t have been room for them to start bouncing off the walls, and Christmas Bauman stepped into her role very naturally as their leader — a little bit of a mom, a little bit of a flirt.

Bauman kept the pressure low with her jokes and also made sure they paid attention to each other, because the temptation was to look ahead. Lam constantly updated his sims as the mecha sent new data. Vonnie had responsibility for ships’ systems and maintenance. All three of them reviewed and participated in various consultations, boards, and debates.

Eleven weeks. It could have been long enough to learn to despise each other or even short enough to remain strangers until they arrived, but Bauman set aside much of her own work to invest in her colleagues instead.

They were eighteen days from Europa when the mecha found carvings in the ice.

This time it was a Chinese rover, running close to the ESA find. Its transmissions were encrypted and altercast, but the Europeans and the Brazilians each caught enough of the signal to have something to work with. In less than four hours, the naked code went systemwide.

Vonnie had learned politics at the University of Stuttgart, and, later, as an instructor at Arianespace. Information was power. There didn’t seem to be much sense in withholding the discovery. Too many eyes were watching. Most likely, the Chinese had protected their discovery out of habit and would have shared it within a day or two. Nonetheless, the mood on Earth took a hit. Vonnie and Bauman both received priority messages listing new contingencies and protocols.

The tension could have ruined them. They could have sunk their energy into the worst kind of distraction, yet Bauman saw them through.

“What if he is a dastardly chink spy?” she asked straight-faced.

Vonnie gaped at her, embarrassed by the slur.

Lam laughed out loud. “Yankee scum,” he said to Bauman, who added, “Hey, let’s not leave her out of this. What do you think, Von? I guess that makes you the Aryan superwoman.”

“Right.” Vonnie touched her blond hair, so much lighter than Lam’s jet black stubble or Bauman’s sand-colored mop. She didn’t like having their attention drawn to her best feature, which she’d cropped into a buzz cut to keep it out of her face in zero gee.

Aryan wasn’t the loaded word it had been for Vonnie’s great-great-great-grandparents, but with Germany leading the European Union again, their nation remained self-conscious about its sins in World War II. More recently, they’d seen two generations of conflict with immigrants drawn to Germany’s riches. Some political parties had walked a slippery line between racism and protecting their culture, drawing condemnation from people all over the globe. Vonnie certainly looked the part of Hitler’s master race, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, trim and fit. To her, that meant she’d had to work harder than most candidates to prove herself.

“We know we’re good people even if she’s gorgeous, you’re too smart, and I’m overbearing,” Bauman said.

Vonnie and Lam nodded. They were friends enough to realize they were on their own, no matter what played out back home. Inside the ship’s hab module, they gathered around a display to watch their datastreams.

The telemetry stolen from the Chinese rover was in radar and infrared. It showed the rover’s low-slung perspective trundling forward with gradients of temperature laid over white-and-green imagery. To its left, irregular lumps masked the horizon where warm gas oozed from several vents. The rover turned closer— And the perspective fell sideways.