Ben Bova: Leviathans of Jupiter

The computer-slowed imagery showed the leviathan rising. At least it seemed to be rising past the tiny shapes and dots sprinkled across the picture displayed on its flank.

“Those must be fish and other smaller creatures,” Deirdre said, pointing. “And that stream of dots, maybe that represents the organic particles flowing downward.”

“Maybe.” Corvus nodded uncertainly.

“And there’s the leviathan himself.” Deirdre pointed. “And us, alongside him.”

“Both rising.”

“Yes.”

Abruptly, the image of the leviathan began breaking apart. Deirdre and Corvus watched as the creature’s image disassembled into hundreds of separate pieces.

“It’s going to dissociate again?” she wondered.

Corvus shook his head. “It just did that a day and a half ago, when we first came down to this level.”

“That was deeper than we are now.”

“But now it’s saying that it’s going to break up again? Does that make sense?”

Deirdre thought she understood. “Maybe it’s saying that it can’t stay up at this level without breaking up! It’s telling us that it’s got to go back to its own level.”

“And we’ve got to go back to ours,” Yeager insisted.

Deirdre stared at the screen. The leviathan was still flashing the same imagery. It’s so huge! she thought. Like a mountain floating loose in the ocean. But it’s got to return to its own place. And Max is right, we’ve got to return to ours.

Reluctantly, she reached out to the touch screen and began drawing a farewell message.

Holding its members together with sheer willpower, Leviathan saw that the alien was signaling again.

It showed the image of Leviathan itself, diving downward until it disappeared past the lower edge of the image. And the alien, rising upward until it too disappeared from view.

The message was clear. The alien was leaving, returning to its own realm in the cold abyss above, leaving Leviathan to return to the Kin and the Symmetry.

But then the picture changed. It showed the alien returning, with more round little hard-shelled spheres just like itself, all of them swimming amid the Kin down where the Symmetry prevailed.

Leviathan understood the alien’s message. It must leave now, but it will return—with more of its kind.

Leviathan duplicated the alien’s message along its own flank, to show that it understood. You will return, Leviathan acknowledged. And we will be here waiting for you.

“It’s repeating our message,” Deirdre told the others. “It understands what we’re trying to say.”

“Maybe,” Yeager said. “Maybe it’s just mimicking what you drew.”

Deirdre shook her head. “I don’t think so, Max. It understands us.”

Dorn called out, “Increasing buoyancy. Heading for the surface.”

Corvus stood beside Deirdre and slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Heading for home,” he murmured.

Deirdre nodded, her eyes on the sensor screens watching the enormous leviathan swim in a brief circle, then bend its broad back and plunge downward, deep into the depths of the globe-girdling ocean, heading back to its own domain.

“Good-bye,” she whispered, surprised at how sad she was, how downcast she felt to be leaving the magnificent creature. “We’ll come back,” she said, knowing it was a promise she was making to herself as much as the leviathan. “We’ll come back.”

As Faraday rose smoothly through the ocean Deirdre felt the pain in her chest easing. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, she thought. But no, the medical readouts had shown her heart laboring, her lungs straining down at the depths where they had been.

“Broaching surface in thirty seconds,” Dorn announced.

The vessel jolted and shuddered as it bulled its way out of the ocean. Deirdre felt as if the sea was trying to keep them, hold them back, prevent them from getting away.

And then they were soaring through Jupiter’s wide, clear atmosphere, the curve of the planet’s vast bulk barely noticeable even when they were halfway to the clouds. Her eyes glued to the screens’ displays, Deirdre saw a clutch of Clarke’s Medusas drifting placidly off in the distance, colorful as old-fashioned hot-air balloons.

“Entering cloud deck,” said Dorn. The displays showed a dizzying swirl of colors and the vessel buffeted and jittered in the typhoon winds of Jupiter’s racing clouds. Andy gripped her tighter as Deirdre clung to him with one arm and reached for the console handgrips with the other. She saw that Max and Dorn were also grasping safety holds.

Suddenly the shaking and vibration stopped, as abruptly as a switch turning off, and the display screens showed the eternal black of space. Deirdre told the computer to increase its brightness gain and pinpoints of stars gleamed against the darkness.

“We’re in orbit,” Yeager said, his voice almost breathless with relief.

The curving bulk of Jupiter slid into view, huge, glowing with broad swaths of color. Just above its limb a single bright star glowed.

“That’s the station,” Andy said, relaxing his grip on her just a little. “We’re almost home.”

“But we’ll go back to them, won’t we?” said Deirdre, feeling as if she wanted to cry.

This is worse than being in the ocean, Deirdre thought. She lay in the narrow decompression capsule, unable to move. It was like being in a coffin, an elaborate high-tech sarcophagus, too tight to shift her arms from her sides, its ridged plastic lid too low for her to lift her head. Worse than the bunks in Faraday, she grumbled to herself.

“Stay still,” the technicians had told her. “It’s best if you just lay absolutely still while we bring the pressure down.”

I have to stay still, she thought. There’s no room to move in here. She was still breathing perfluorocarbon, still bathed in the cold, slimy liquid. Eight hours, the technicians had said. Eight hours minimum.

“You’ll sleep through most of it,” one of the technicians had said. “Just relax and sleep.”

Wonderful advice, Deirdre thought. Just relax and sleep. Might as well, there’s nothing else to do while I’m in here. Sleep. They’re injecting a sedative into the perfluorocarbon, she knew. I wonder how they can determine the proper dosage? What if it’s not enough? Or too much?

Her thoughts drifted to the leviathans. Those enormous animals. The one in particular that had tried to communicate with them. I wonder what he’s doing now? I wonder if he’s thinking about us.

Without consciously realizing it Deirdre slipped into sleep, dreaming of the leviathans, floating deep in the Jovian ocean and talking with the leviathan as normally and easily as she would speak to Andy or Max. The leviathan was telling her about himself, what it was like to live in that deep, dark sea, all the secrets of life in—

“Are you awake, Dee?”

Deirdre’s eyes popped open and she saw Andy, Max, and Dorn leaning over the edge of her decompression capsule, beaming down at her. The capsule’s top had been swung back. And she was breathing normal air!

“I was dreaming,” she said.

“How do you feel?” Corvus asked.

Blinking, she replied, “Okay … I think.”