Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“Then you’re ahead of me. I don’t know how I know what I’m thinking. I don’t know where I’m going when I land on Europa. I don’t know if I can put a team together. I’m not even sure I can find some of the members, let alone persuade them.”

“Let us assume that you achieve those goals. Then we wish to warn you. Without the tempering influence of Angels, Tinkers, and Pipe-Rillas, your team contains the seeds of instability and violence. Murder cannot be permitted. No matter what you find in the Geyser Swirl, no matter what violence you may encounter, you must not destroy intelligent beings to solve your problems.”

“You told me that already, in the Star Chamber meeting.”

“That was before we learned one other item of information. After the Star Chamber meeting, we employed a piece of equipment able to search for and locate any living Angel within large volumes of space at arbitrarily large distances. We applied that instrument to the Geyser Swirl. And we found — nothing.” The blue-green fronds waved in an agitated manner. “Nothing. The Angel who went to the Geyser Swirl is dead.”

“How could that happen?” Chan was genuinely amazed. The Angels offered a combination of guile, caution, and resilience that made them practically indestructible.

“We do not know. It is beyond our comprehension. There was no sign even of the Singer’s crystal, which withstands huge force and high temperatures. Therefore we know only this: something in the Geyser Swirl provides great danger and offers potential for violence.” The upper fronds were waving wildly. “We are unable to speak more. We wish only to warn you, and to say you must not seek to match violence with violence—” The fronds suddenly closed to cover the top of the bulbous upper part, and a chromatic flicker of colors moved across the image. The Link connection was beginning to break down. “Take care, take care,” said the fading computer voice. “Remember this: There are more things in the Geyser Swirl, Chan Dalton, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. ”

Thanks, Angel. That’s just the sort of encouragement I could have done without . Chan did not bother to speak the words. He was staring at an empty image area.

Europa is only a fourth the size of Terra, but its ice-covered ocean has an average depth of more than fifty kilometers. The volume of water contained there is as much as in all of Earth’s oceans. The world-spanning sea of Europa is deep and dark and the seabed beneath is a treasure trove of metals, delivered over billions of years by meteorite impact and melting slowly through and down. The waters themselves are clear and potable; they are also uncharted, and unpatroled. They form, not surprisingly, a haven for some of the system’s most desperate criminals.

Chan’s task, to find and recruit Tully O’Toole and Deb Bisson in a couple of days, should have been impossible. He had hope, for one reason only: since neither Tully nor Deb was in hiding, the chances were good that he would find them on Europa’s single land area. He had examined the image on the screen ahead during final approach, and felt encouraged. Mount Ararat was not much to look at. Europa’s single “continent” consisted of four connected peaks, stretching in a knobby line over a dozen kilometers of surface. Even the tallest hill was no more than a black pile of igneous rock in an endless frozen plain. The encroaching ice pinched low points of the sawtooth ridge, almost dividing the knolls into separate islands. The total land area was just a few square kilometers, and like all of Europa it was subjected to a continuous hail of protons, accelerated by Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field. No sane person would try to live there, and no one did. The population was beneath, in an interconnected labyrinth of chambers and corridors tunneled from the rock.

Chan studied the layout, and decided it should not be hard to find anyone on Mount Ararat who was not actively trying to hide. So now he had to answer the question that he had been avoiding: Who first?

As the transit vessel dropped in toward Mount Ararat’s primitive spaceport, he entered the two names and requested information on their last-known locations. Answers came back at once, pinpointed on a map of the underground city. One glance, and Chan cursed. He might have known it. Tully O’Toole was at the edge of Mount Ararat’s northern hill, as far from the port point as you could get. Deb Bisson was an easy five-minute underground walk from the ship’s landing point. The issue was settled.

What time of day was it here? As it landed, the ship’s display adjusted to local time. As Chan recalled it, Europa and the other Jovian moons used some crazy decimal system, dividing each day into ten hours of a hundred minutes. What did one-ninety correspond to? Late, well after midnight, but how late? He made up his mind. He was in a hurry. Night or day, he must go at once to Deb and talk to her.

Chan went through the landing procedures in a haze of anticipation, answering the machine’s questions impatiently and with half his brain. Expected duration of stay? One or two days, maximum. Import/export materials? None — unless you counted a couple of humans. Purpose of visit? Chan paused for a moment. Discussions? Let’s hope he was right about that.

And then he was inside, through the lock and hurrying along a wide poorly lit corridor designed more for automated vehicles than for people. His surroundings were as bare and forbidding as the naked rock through which the tunnel was carved. He could not imagine Deb living here. No prison on Earth was as bleak.

But then, beyond the first chamber and bulkhead, everything changed. Even Chan, hurried as he was, had to pause and look around him.

Anyone who believed that all residents of Europa lived simple, primitive lives should come here and take a look. The rough-cut walls of black rock had been transformed to smooth white surfaces, covered with murals depicting native Europan life-forms. The beauty of paintings showing the tube worms and crystalline arrays that flourished at the seabed vents was a matter of taste — Chan thought they were hideous — but they were original, expensive artwork. And there was no doubt about the cost of the deep, living rug across which he walked. The organisms of the carpet were tailor-made to thrive in Europa’s individual gravity and atmosphere. So, too, were those in the ceiling of the corridor. The soft, bioluminescent glow that they provided verified that locally it was late at night.

Chan trod softly, almost tiptoeing as he came to the next corridor of residential suites. He was in an area that would qualify as high-class dwelling space anywhere in the solar system. Deb, whatever she was doing, was not living in poverty.

He came to a wide, solid door. The small plate attached to it read D. Bisson in discreet cursive script. A communication grille sat in the wall at the left-hand side. Chan hesitated. The logical — and polite — thing to do was to signal, identify himself, and request permission to enter.

But suppose that she told him to go to hell, turned off the communicator, and would not let him in? He had come a long way to leave without an audience. And he had been the one, back on Mars, who told Danny Casement that team recruiting must be done face-to-face. It was more true for Deb Bisson than for anyone.

He gently tried the door. As expected, it was locked. But this was a normal domestic lock, not one of the infinitely variable smart ciphers. For a man who had spent the past two decades in Earth’s Gallimaufries, that was almost an invitation.

Chan had not seen a living soul since he landed on Europa, but he walked carefully up and down the corridor before returning to Deb Bisson’s door. Everything seemed peaceful. He bent down to study the lock.