Gregory Benford - Jupiter Project

That might be okay if you were already an adult. You had your own internal gyroscope then. You knew where you were headed. But to grow up you had to take risks. That was the key. You had to do what seemed right to you, not right to the majority.

To stop being a kid you had to have the right to be wrong. And that was what the Can couldn’t tolerate. So the quiet, steady pressure was on. Don’t step out of line. Don’t let yourself go. Don’t let passion or anger sweep you away.

Well, screw that. I thought back over the last month and I could see how I’d been acting. One minute I was the cooperative, likable Matt, and the next I was filled with doubts, worries. Typical adolescent stuff. But my dopey ride out to get that Faraday cup had changed something inside me now. I had risked something—my life—and those long dark hours arcing back to the Can had changed me. Right, it had been a stupid gamble. So what? The point was, I took it. I did something for me, not for the Jupiter Project. It wasn’t like the hike I look on Ganymede to get the air bottles. I did that because Yuri challenged me. Going for the Faraday cup was for me, not for the Can.

So I made a promise to myself. Growing up was painful, sure. But I was going to do it. I was going to make Matt Bohles the way he wanted to be. I was going to face risks—risks of all kinds. When the time came, I was going to change. If you want to grow, you have to gamble.

I slaved away for two more hours harvesting bean sprouts. It’s wet work. The vaporizers pump out clouds of big, wobbly bubbles that take forever to fall in the low G. They blow into the sprout paddies, cloudy with nutrients. You get soaked. You can inhale one through your nostrils if you don’t watch it.

I was loading bags of sprouts onto the conveyor when I noticed the guy who was delivering the recycled bags. It was Yuri.

He looked at me for a long moment. I knew I could turn away and wade back into the paddies. He wouldn’t follow me, particularly since he didn’t have hip boots on. But that wasn’t the right way to handle it.

I walked over to him. keeping my hands relaxed at my sides. “Sorry about that.” I said.

He grimaced. “I think you will soon be more than sorry.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.”

“Your luck will not carry you forever.”

“You have a point.” He started to turn away. “Look, Yuri, there’s something I want to ask you. Why have you been riding me?”

He halted. A puzzled look crossed his face. “I… I had to, Bohles. You were ahead of me.”

“So?”

“I…my talents are not the same as yours, but…the Laboratory rewards your…sort…more than mine.”

“So what? Who says you have to win on their terms?”

Yuri looked at me blankly. “We are…not alike. I have different…ideas about…”

“It’s your father, isn’t it? He’s been pushing you.”

“It must be obvious even to you that our families are different. My father has strong ideas…”

“Look, he made you dress up in that—”

Yuri scowled and I saw that I had gone too far. He didn’t want to remember that.

“Garbage, Bohles, garbage. If you can’t take the competition, get out.”

“That’s not what I meant. You and me could—”

“Don’t give me any goddam breaks, Bohles,” Yuri snapped, and marched away.

I shrugged. Some games you can’t win. Some gambles you lose.

I worked off my aggressions on the bean sprouts. That tired me out, but it didn’t stop me from thinking about J-11.

I went out for a drink that evening, with Jenny. We talked about the Jovian life-form, and the flood of questions that needed answering. The bio types were doing flip-flops, changing theories faster than they changed their underwear.

The saga of Rebecca and Isaac was by now common scuttlebutt, too, so I gave in to Jenny’s questions and told her about it. Now that I thought about the whole thing, it was more funny than embarrassing.

And through it all, I fell an odd hovering presence between Jenny and me. We edged toward the subject slowly, but each of us sensed that the other wanted to talk, talk the way we had before. I found myself agreeing with her. “I’ve felt it, too,” I said quietly. “They don’t want us to get emotionally involved, I guess. So, almost without thinking about it, they’ve set up the Can…”

Jenny finished it for me. “For their age group, not ours.”

“Yeah.”

“A programmed world.”

“And in a way, they’re right,” I said. “This is a damned dangerous place. Ishi…” My voice trailed off.

Jenny said, “When you add all that, on top of all the crap separating men and women already…”

“Yeah. The distrust. The anger.”

“And the just plain awkwardness. But we’ve got to overcome it.”

“How?”

“By being ourselves. ” Jenny said.

“It’s hard to be yourself when you’re in a fishbowl.”

“You mean when everybody’s watching.”

“Right.”

“You know…” She smiled a quiet, mischievous smile that I had seen a few times and liked a lot. “It is hard to get any privacy around here. But I know a place.”

“Where?”

“I do some of my chore time in the infirmary. There’s a reserve room, kept stocked with med stations and beds, in case of a major accident. Not many people even know it’s there, we use it so seldom.” She looked at me sideways and bit her lip. A hesitant turn crept into her smile.

“We might get caught.”

“I suppose so.”

I felt an odd electric tingling. A quickening, nervous energy.

To grow, gamble.

What can you say about it? That all the thousands of hours you spent trying to imagine it never prepared you for the real thing. That it really is different from anything else. And that yet in a way it’s like a lot of other things, physical and emotional, all merged and heightened and more intense. You’re clumsy, sure. But there’s something about it that takes you out of yourself and into some other place. And it takes you into the person you’re with.

There’s all that, sure. But mostly it’s a huge, gaudy kind of fun.

When Jenny and I left the infirmary I felt emotions that were new to me. Love, maybe: it’s hard to tell. I know the things you feel when you’re an adolescent are going to change with time, the way everybody and everything does—but still, the warm aura that surrounded us was real, not some kid’s delusion. I wasn’t just feeling the “release of tension” the manuals tell you about, it was more like Jenny and I had been to a place that you can’t get to without something very special happening. Exactly what all that meant, we’d find out in time. For now, it was enough to have been there.

As we ambled along the dimly lit nighttime corridors, I said, “Y’know, it’s funny, how some things are right in front of you and still you don’t see them.”

“Ummm. Such as?”

“I had to be jolted into paying attention. Into taking my nose off the grindstone.”

“Oh?” Jenny arched her eyebrows.

“That stunt of mine, flying out to Satellite Fourteen. The regular Matt Bohles wouldn’t have done that.”

“Probably not.”

“I guess all this—yeah, including my interest in you—started with Ishi.”

She looked at me. “How?”

“Well. I started thinking of these things, you know.”

“But not about me in particular?”

“Well, no, not at first.”

Jenny was looking at me in a funny way. “You mean, it was because Ishi died? Not because of something he said?”

“No, because he died. It… I don’t know, everything seemed different after that.”