Cold as Ice (22 page)

Instead, she lolled back in her chair.
She had won.
Instantly, and against all her expectations.

Camille wanted to call David back and boast of her triumph, but she didn't have the gall to do that. She would call him back, certainly, for a mutual gloat. But she would tell him the truth: that she had talked with Hilda Brandt; that she was going to Europa; that she had, in fact, achieved just what she set out to do. But that she had absolutely no idea of
why
she had succeeded.

* * *

[left]
Paradigms for changing times.

New discoveries have always forced changes in perspective, slowly but irreversibly. To the eighteenth century, the System of the World laid down by Isaac Newton was, above all else,
calculable,
a great machine moving rationally through absolute space and time like an orrery of exquisite clockwork. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the leitmotiv for science had changed. It became the era of expanding worlds and shrinking humanity. Earth had been dethroned as the center of the universe, to become a tiny mote, one among multiple millions, on a stage that constantly expanded from planets to stars to galaxies. At the same time, mankind descended from a being in God's own image to an upstart animal, a bewildered player newly arrived on a scene where other actors had been in position for billions of years. The blow to the species' ego inflicted by evolutionary theory was immense.

The first quarter of the twentieth century learned to accept the diminished view of Earth and of humanity's role, but science soon found forced upon it a new paradigm: the disappearance of the absolute. In place of final knowledge came uncertainty, relativity, undecidability, incomputability.

After a traumatic seventy-five years, scientists at last came to terms with that vanishing concept of complete knowledge . . . and found themselves facing another drastic change in viewpoint. A seed planted before 1900 and dormant for a hundred years began to sprout. Soon after the beginning of the twenty-first century, a principle enunciated by an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, arose to provide the underlying scientific dogma of the new age: "Whenever a number of like items are grouped together, a small percent of them will account for almost all of the group's significance." Pareto's principle, reformulated and strengthened, explained that most of nature worked only to hold the status quo, to inhibit change.
Marginal
forces—small force differences—controlled the behavior of the universe.

To children of the late twenty-first century, the struggle to develop the mathematical tools appropriate to the new scientific world view was just history. The paradoxes of the calculus of small differences, with their tangled substrate of divergent series and asymptotic expansions, were no different to them than were earlier logical worries over differentials, limits, generalized functions, action at a distance, and renormalization. What remained were the polished tools and the main principle: The natural scientific underpinning of the world is balance. The universe exists only as a delicate matching of immense forces. Change, and life itself, are the result of minuscule imbalances.

Examples could be seen everywhere. The activity of the sun resulted from a never-ending internal battle of gravitation and radiation pressure. Every surface variation, from sunspots to gigantic solar flares, was the manifestation of some brief advantage of one of those forces, evidence that the balance had temporarily broken down. Galactic stability was no more than the delicate matching of rotational kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy, creating and maintaining spiral arms and central hubs and dark-matter halos.

Life itself was not exempt from the principle. It had learned the lesson early. Successful species sat on the narrow line between exact replication, which permitted no adaptation to a changing environment, and too-imperfect replication, which resulted in large error rates and nonviable offspring. Sex was no more than an ingenious attempt to solve the problem, by permitting generational variability within the constraints of the exact duplication of genetic material. Within every cell of every organism the same struggle went on, a fine balance between uncontrolled combustion, which would kill, and the too-slow enzymatic release of energy, which in a competitive world was just as fatal.

The Pareto principle had been in place for a long time. Its viewpoint was not something that twenty-first-century scientists
thought about,
because it had been built into them, by their teachers, by their reading, by their whole scientific environment. Science was balance. The principles of balance governed everything, from subnuclear processes to galactic evolution.

* * *

Camille Hamilton was a scientist. She had the mental equipment to be a scientist, and a first-rate one, in any era where society permitted it (a woman, and attractive: two strikes against her through most of history). But like all save a handful of the very greatest, Camille saw science through the philosophical eyes of her own times.

The curious thing was that although Camille's childhood and adolescence on Mars had been one long struggle against poverty and neglect, she had never tried to view that experience in terms of general principles. Of course the ideas of struggle, balance, and delicate advantage had to apply to
people.
But it did not occur to Camille that there must be other unseen elementals within the solar system, men and women who fought each other to a standstill while they battled constantly for small advantage.

And certainly it never occurred to her that in that war of titans, a slight misalignment or a minor imbalance could accidentally wipe out a being as insignificant as Camille Hamilton with a force as deadly and impersonal as the greatest solar flare.

12
The Word for World is Ocean

Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer sat side by side, gazed down at the approaching surface, and saw two different worlds.

. . . Europa is small, a minor planet with a diameter less than Earth's moon and a mass only two-thirds as great—

—but Europa is
vast,
eighty times as massive as my homeworld, Ceres, and with fifteen times the surface area . . .

. . . Europa's gravitational field is puny, small enough for easy ballistic launch, so small that the same vehicle can be used to travel to the moon and to land upon it—

—but Europa reaches out and pulls a transit vehicle with a giant's hand, so forcefully that the rockets are already working when landfall is many minutes away. Escape velocity is whole kilometers per second . . .

. . . Europa's surface offers nothing of value: no metals, no minerals, no fuels—

—but Europa's surface is a treasure house of the most precious volatile of all:
water . . .

. . . Europa is a drab, lifeless ball, devoid of the breathing cover of atmosphere—frozen, sterile, and inhospitable—

—No way.
Europa is a
womb,
ready and waiting to welcome and nurture life, including millions, or billions, of humans . . .

They stared at each other and recognized what should have been obvious in the first moment of their first meeting: They came from backgrounds so different that communication between them was almost a delusion. They were about the same age, and both were war orphans, but meeting as a Belter and an Earther they could find little else in common. It would take weeks, or months, of talk before they could understand each other's perspective.

The odd thing to Jon was that they were certainly going to take those weeks or months.

It worried him. He liked things to be logical—even
emotional
things. And nothing resembling logic applied to his reaction to Wilsa. When he first stood before her, face-to-face, he had experienced a sensation that was easy enough to describe: It was like the dreamy glaze of nitrogen narcosis, with all of that condition's odd certainty that the world was a safe and wonderful place. What was not easy—what he could not do at all—was to explain it.

Was it some disguised form of sex, some aberration of hidden pheromones? He didn't think so. He might be an innocent in Nell Cotter's worldly eyes—she had as good as told him that—but he was far from virginal. He'd had partners enough. He and Shelley Solbourne had even enjoyed—most of the time—a two-month explosive affair, until their final argument. Anyway, the PacAnt floating bases, with their veiled threats of psychological treatment for anyone who declined to lead an active sex life, tended to force physical relationships upon even the naturally celibate.

Which Jon certainly wasn't. He and Nell Cotter had been on the brink—almost-lovers, lovers in all but opportunity—when he met Wilsa. His desire for Nell was still there, as strong as ever. But suddenly, in an abrupt shift of viewpoint, it had seemed more important that he interact with
Wilsa
than to do anything else. He hardly remembered asking Hilda Brandt if Wilsa could travel to Europa with him.

Had he done so? Or had the suggestion come from elsewhere? It didn't matter. The need to spend time with Wilsa, to understand her, to
learn
her, transcended details. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that this compulsion had no physical basis. He recognized that Wilsa was good-looking, sexy, and probably highly sensual with the right partner; but that partner was not himself. He felt no stir of sexual attraction to her, and the lack of feeling was obviously mutual.

What the hell was going on?

He stared down. The transit vehicle was following a direct-descent path, unconcerned with Earth obsessions of reentry trajectories and atmospheric braking. They were homing straight in on the Jovian antipodes of Europa. The sun behind them was at the zenith, turning the moon beneath to a glittering network of bright-colored ice plains separated by stellations of rough-edged cracks and nets of long, dark fissures. And such colors! Jon had expected muted tones, like those in the space images he had seen of Europa. The sparkling landscape below must be a short-lived anomaly, a combination of illumination and look angles. Trace elements, tiny refractive spicules of metal suspended within the top few millimeters of ice, were catching the sunlight at just the right inclination.

Mount Ararat was visible directly below. Europa's only land surface consisted of four small connected peaks stretching in a knobby line over a dozen kilometers of surface. Even the highest hill was no more than a rounded nubble in an endless frozen plain. Encroaching ice nipped at the low points of the sawtooth ridge, almost dividing the knolls into separate islands of black rock.

Igneous rocks, said a remote corner of Jon's mind. They must be. Or could nature find a role for sedimentary processes even on Europa, despite the absence of atmosphere, of rivers, of weathering, of life? Or
was
there life? That was the key question, the whole purpose of his trip. But somehow the frosty visage of the moon below spoke to him of a dead world.

The descending vehicle had located its approach beacon and was following the signal. The sole Europan spaceport sat like a shallow circular cup near the peak of Mount Ararat's principal upthrust, in a crater formed at least in part by meteorite impact. Humans had merely improved on nature, smoothing the bottom to a perfect plane and adding gantries, antennas, hoists and slides. And, of course, the proton shields. Europa was subject to a particle flux even more intense than that at Ganymede.

Jon gave the Europan spaceport its share of attention, but his main focus was still on the surrounding ice plains. He was seeking Blowhole, the access point to the Europan ocean. It should lie twenty kilometers off the rim of Mount Ararat. Blowhole was an artificially created and maintained vertical cylinder of open water through which the
Spindrift
would eventually descend—down, down, down, past a kilometer and a half of encircling ice and on into the Stygian unknown, for exploration of the fifty-kilometer-and-more Europan deeps.

He could see no sign of Blowhole. It must be too small to be visible during a descent from space to Mount Ararat. He knew that Blowhole was maintained by a man-made thermal source at the lower ice-water interface, in combination with natural upward convection and the use of repeater pumps. With every upward meter, the warmed waters of Blowhole lost heat to the surrounding ice. The liquid column narrowed until at its top it was only twenty or thirty meters across, just wide enough to admit submersibles and service vehicles.

"Look!" Wilsa's grip on his arm brought Jon out of his musings. A beam of the purest monochromatic blue had speared out from the center of the spaceport's smooth cup and caught them in its cone of light.

"Final descent pattern," said Jon. Reluctantly he brought his mind away from Blowhole and the Europan interior. "Don't worry, we'll be all right. From this point, the ship will be controlled directly from Mount Ararat."

That earned a flash of dark eyes. He realized belatedly that although space was new to him, Wilsa had probably made a thousand controlled descents.

"I know that! I said to
look
, Jon. At the pattern. Can't you see it?"

And he could, once it was pointed out to him. The sun was right overhead. The descending vehicle was arrowing toward a circular target, with the bright blue of Mount Ararat's upturned control laser as its bull's-eye. Beyond it glistened the refractive ice of Europa, a series of frost-touched rainbow rings. His mind's eye added another component: Farther yet, beyond Europa's horizon but full-lit by the sun, the cloudy globe of Jupiter would be glimmering in colors of ocher and umber and burnt sienna.

That was what
he
saw and imagined. But Wilsa had an open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression on her face—almost a look of terror.

What did
she
see? She had started humming to herself, almost too softly for him to hear.

* * *

Wilsa had caught sight of the rounded quadruple peaks of Mount Ararat at the same moment as Jon. She saw not igneous rocks, but the terrifying, upthrust fist of an imprisoned frost-giant, caught at the very instant when his four iron knuckles came smashing through the glassy shield of Niflheim's wall. The moment had frozen in time, but in another second he would escape, straddle the world beneath, steady himself, reach far up into space . . .