Bud Sparhawk: Primrose and Thorn

“What a dump,” Louella complained loudly. She threw her bag against the bare metal deck and watched as it lazily bounced back into the air. “Not even a bar on the place! To make matters worse I have to share the damned cabin with you. I can’t even have some gods-be-damned decent privacy before the race!”

Pascal winced at the strident tone of her voice. He regretted accompanying her throughout the long voyage from Earth to the Jovian system. He should have come on another ship.

Louella’s growing catalog of complaints had increased throughout the long transit from Earth. Thankfully, there’d been enough distractions on the transport to silence her complaints, once in the while. The transport had a bar to keep her amused, and enough willing young crew members to keep her bemused. But those diversions were short-lived. Too soon she came back to the fact that she wasn’t racing, wasn’t in control, wasn’t at sea.

It made her bitchy.

“How the devil am I supposed to keep my sanity if they can’t even provide civilized, basic amenities?” Louella continued in a rasping voice that cut across his nerves like fingernails on slate.

“Bad enough that I have to miss three seasons of the circuit for this fool race! Bad enough that we have to stay in this stupid can until the others get here! But that doesn’t mean I have to live like some freaking Spartan in the meantime!”

She lifted the lid of the utilitarian toilet. “Jesus, we even have to share the damned can!”

“Perhaps you should complain to the hub master,” Pascal said quietly as he floated across the tiny cabin and anchored himself with one hand. “Maybe he can provide whatever it is that you need.”

Louella spun gracefully around on her hold and frowned at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Pascal winced again. What had he said now ? It didn’t matter; she’d be hell to live with if he just let it be. “Nothing,” he said. “I just thought that maybe the captain has resources we don’t know about. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

“Humph,” Louella huffed, as if unsure of the meaning of his answer. She kicked her floating bag into some netting to secure it. “You’ve got the bunk beside the door, asshole. And don’t get any ideas about us sleeping together.” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Pascal replied dryly and turned to fiddle with the controls on the wall. Under his breath he added, “Nightmares, perhaps, but not dreams.” He pressed the switch to open the viewport.

“What did you say?” Louella asked sharply. “Something I wasn’t supposed to—oh my god! Would you look at that!” Pascal didn’t answer, he was as awed by the sight as she.

Framed in the viewport was the entirety of Jupiter, half orange, rose, and umber, and half in darkness. The rim of the planet filled the ’port from top to bottom, leaving only a narrow circle of stars at the edges to show that anything else existed in the heavens.

The bright line of the elevator cable extended from somewhere beneath the window and ran straight toward the planet’s equator, far below, just as it extended thousands of kilometers out into space from this geosynchronous station. The cable’s silvery line narrowed as it diminished into perfect perspective toward the giant planet.

Jupiter’s great red spot wasn’t visible. Pascal assumed that it was either on the other side of the planet or somewhere within the semicircle of darkness that marked the night side of Jupiter. But there were enough other large features present to occupy the eye.

Wide bands of permanent lateral weather patterns ran across Jupiter’s face. Each showed feathery turbulence whorls at the edges as they dragged on the slower bands toward the equator or were accelerated by faster ones toward the poles. From here he could easily see the separations between them.

In the center of one of the higher latitude bands there was a dark smudge. Pascal thought it might be the persistent traces of the “string of pearls” comet, over a hundred years ago, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember if the marks would be on top or bottom from his viewpoint. He decided to ask the hub master about orientation.

“What a sight,” Louella whispered as she moved beside him. “Gorgeous, just gorgeous,” she said, with a touch of awe. “Where are the floating stations? Could we see them from here?” she asked quickly and pressed closer to the viewport.

Pascal dismissed her inquiry with a shrug. “The stations are too small to see from here. You’re still thinking in terms of Earth. We’re over six hundred times farther out than one of the orbiting stations would be at home. CS-6 would have to be the size of Australia for you to see it with your naked eye.

“You’ve got to remember that each one of those weather bands is several thousand miles across,” Pascal continued as he backed away from the view-port and the terrifying precipice it represented. “We could put the entire Pacific inside any one of them and still have plenty of room left over.”

Louella’s face took on a rapt expression as she absorbed the scale of what she was observing. “You could sail forever in those seas,” she breathed heavily. “Forever.”

Rams encountered his first problem when he was thirty hours under way. Primrose had been beating steadily to windward since he left CS-15. By his projections they should have been slightly north of the projected track of CS-42, the next station in line. This leg of his upwind trip would be two thousand kilometers long before he came about and headed south on the shorter lee leg. That was as far as he could travel and stay within the limits Weather had advised. He couldn’t go beyond the MM sub-band without risking excessive turbulence. No, he thought, it was better to keep to the smooth and dependable jets of air in the middle of the band.

It was no small effort to steer Primrose between the two stations. CS-15 had been moving westward at a steady twenty-six meters per second under the slower westward winds of the KK sub-band.

The two stations had been about eight thousand kilometers apart when he had departed. He had planned to tack about eight times across the face of the wind; four 2,000-kilometer legs to the north and four 3,000-kilometer legs to the south. The southern tacks would gain him the least progress but give him good position to intercept the station as it raced toward him.

It was a good sail plan. The only problem was that it wasn’t working out. The inertial guidance system indicated that, instead, he was steadily bearing west of his projected course. Rams checked the set of the sails and the pressure readings. Using these numbers, he calculated that Primrose was still bearing forty degrees to the wind, just as he had planned. What could be wrong? Was he was being blown off course by an unexpected head wind?

An hour later he understood the situation. Something was disturbing the “smooth laminar flow” predictions of Weather. He just encountered a more northerly wind than expected. He decided to adjust his tacking strategy to adapt to the shift. He’d have to take a longer line on the southern tack. But the slower passage would put him at risk from the storm, which could mean big trouble.

He plotted his course for the next ninety hours with great care.

As they sped down toward the seas of Jupiter, Pascal sat as far from the port of the tiny cab of the elevator as he could and tried to ignore the pit of blackness, a hole in the sky at the center of an enormous emptiness. The thought of all the distance they had to fall terrified him.

“I still don’t understand how you guys do it,” the pink-faced elevator pilot said from his perch at the bow. “I mean, I can see how a sailboat can go with the wind. The hot air balloons on Earth just go with the wind, right? Why wouldn’t they do the same here?”