Drake wondered if it was all his own wishful thinking: a human urge to turn back the clock to a happy time of simplicity and certitude. He stole a glance at Ana, who was looking out of the port and humming to herself in that beloved rich contralto. A surge of happiness engulfed him. Humans could change, the solar system could change, the universe itself could change. It did not matter, as long as Ana was with him.
After Uranus, the happenings about Saturn seemed minor. Its biggest moon, Titan, was being developed. It was not, however, being terraformed by machines or downloaded humans. Instead, bioengineered human forms were colonizing the unmodified moon.
“It’s another experiment, of course,” Ana said. “Just to see how far the human biological limits can be pushed. There’s no doubt that we could do here exactly what we’re doing on Neptune, but where’s the fun and challenge in that? As it is, what we have on Titan is quite an undertaking. It’s not the low temperature. That’s a hundred and eighty below water freezing point, but it can be handled easily — just a matter of insulation, when you get right down to it. The hard piece is the chemistry, ours and Titan’s. Nitrogen, methane, ethane, and organic smog: how would you like the problem of adapting a human to breathe and drink those? Do you want to take a closer look?” And, after one look at Drake’s
face, “Right, then, I guess that’s all for Titan and Saturn. Jupiter it is.”
The activities they had seen back on Uranus made more sense to Drake after they had left Saturn and its horde of moons, approached Jupiter, and descended at last for a feathery landing on one of the Jovian satellites.
He remembered Europa from Par Leon’s time as an ice world, the fifty-kilometer deeps of its continuous ocean plated over by a kilometer and more of icy plateaus and thick-ribbed pressure ridges. But it was that way no longer. Their little ship landed on a giant iceberg, floating in random currents along a broad river. With the sunlight striking in at a low angle, the long stretch of open water seemed mottled and tawny like the skin of a great snake. It wound its way to the horizon between palisades and battlements of blue crystal. As the berg carrying the ship moved sluggishly along, Drake saw open water leads running off in all directions. He shivered. He could imagine strange creatures, huge and misshapen, writhing along the icy horizon.
Europa in its tide-locked orbit turned steadily about Jupiter. The Sun slowly vanished from the black sky. The sounds of jostling floes became louder, carried to the ship through the water and ice of the dark surface. To Drake’s musician’s ear the bergs cried out to each other, sharp high-pitched whines and portamento moans in frightening counterpoint, against a background of deeper grumbles.
“This is why we need the Uranus fusion project,” Ana said cheerfully. “Europa is warmed at the moment by individual fusion plants within the deep ocean, and that leads to patchy melting. It will be a lot better here when Jupiter produces a decent amount of heat.”
“You mean you’ll do the same thing for Jupiter as you’re doing for Uranus?”
“Not the same. But similar. Uranus is really more like a test case.”
“But if you’re going to do it eventually, why wait?”
“Oh, the age-old problem. We still have—”
She said a word that Drake had never heard before. A soft voice from the ship’s communications system at once added, in English: “no exact equivalent; conservatives/Luddites is closest match.” It was the first time Drake had realized that the ship’s computer monitored every conversation, and had a program to provide near-equivalents for references it judged unfamiliar to Drake.
Ana didn’t seem to realize how incongruous it was, that a project to transform Uranus beyond recognition could be judged as the “conservative” and old-fashioned approach. She went on, “But the Jupiter transformation will be approved eventually. Give it a few thousand years, and it will all be finished and working. The ice will go. And we’ll have another whole world for development.”
She had been setting out a meal for the two of them, and she obviously did not share Drake’s increasing uneasiness. But she must have sensed it, because suddenly she stopped what she was doing and came across to his side.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.” It was preposterous to be anything other than fine. He was with Ana again, after an endless separation. But maybe it was because he was with her that he was allowed to admit to fears and doubts. In any case, try as he would he could not stop shivering.
“You don’t look good.” She placed her hand on his forehead. “And you don’t feel good. Damp and clammy. Let’s take a look at you.”
She walked over to the ship’s controls, touched a panel, and studied a display.
“Hmm. It’s nothing physical.”
“How can you tell?”
“I can’t. The ship can. It monitors the health of both of us continuously. It says you’re all right. But it only deals with physical problems. So the rest is up to us.”
Ana went across to the table where she had been working, returned to Drake’s side, and handed him a drink. “Here. This should help for starters. I told you there would be temporal shock, and I was right. It just took a while to show up. You sip on that, while I order something as close as this crazy chef can manage to the foods you were raised on. And for tonight, I think we’ll manage with a little less Europa. I’m going to dim the lights and close the ship screens. You can
sit there and imagine you’re safely back on good old Earth.”
She could not have known it, but long ago, back in the happy days that Drake had not even allowed himself to think about, Ana had done just the same thing when he was upset. She took over. She was strong when he was weak, obligingly weak when he felt strong.
Drake did just as he was told. They ate a full, leisurely meal, with Ana doing almost all the talking. The chef provided a reasonable shot at the foods and even the wines of Old Earth. Finally, Drake could begin to relax and probe the cause of his problem. It was not rational, but he realized that it was the sounds of Europa. He could not rid his mind of them. Others might hear nothing but moving ice floes on a changing moon. He heard tormented groans, and the agonized death cries of ice demons.
“You have too much imagination,” Ana said firmly, when he told her about it. “One day you will have your reward. All this will turn itself into music.” She switched off the lights, lay down next to him, and cradled his head against her breast. He hid himself away in the perfumed night of her long hair.
It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that they would become lovers that evening. Neither of them realized that Drake, deep inside, thought of it as “lovers again.”
Chapter 13
“And I was desolate and sick of an old passion.”
Physical euphoria carried everything before it, all the way into the inner solar system. Lovemaking, as always with Ana, provided an epiphany for Drake. As an antidote to temporal shock it could not have been better. Immersed in the familiar touch and smell and taste of her soft body, he would have seen Earth and Sun destroyed with equanimity.
It was not quite that bad, although four thousand years earlier the Earth had come close.
“A disaster?” Drake looked around at the place where the ship had landed. They were on the winter edge of a diminished Antarctic ice cap. In his time, nothing had grown on this rocky shore. The only animal life in June and July had been the emperor penguins, huddled over their eggs to protect them from the fifty-below-zero polar blizzard.
Now a gentle rain was falling, and the air was filled with calling seabirds, skuas and petrels and albatrosses and terns. Rank grass and flowering plants flourished along the salty margin of the beach. Plovers and curlews were nesting there in enormous numbers.