Jupiter (26 page)

All five of the controllers watched
Zheng He
disappear into the clouds of Jupiter. For several minutes Grant simply stared at the wallscreen showing the planet's colorful cloud deck. The ship had gone. It was as if it had never existed.

But my friends are in that submersible, Grant said to himself. They're going down through those clouds right now, while I sit here with nothing to do but watch over this dumb console. If anything happens to them, I'll be powerless to help them.

'Status reports,' Dr Wo called out, his rasping voice sharper than usual. 'Life support?'

'Functioning within nominal limits,' replied Frankovich.

'Structural integrity?'

Nacho Quintero answered, 'No problems.'

The medical monitors and sensor systems were all showing completely normal performance. Even the troublesome infrared telescope's coolant level was back to normal. When Wo asked for the power systems, Grant swiftly scanned his monitor.

'Power all green,' he reported.

Wo swivelled his gaze across the cramped, stuffy compartment, from one controller to another, and then looked up at the wallscreen. It still showed nothing but Jupiter's endless clouds.

'Should we call them?' Patti Buono wondered aloud. 'Make voice contact?'

'They are due to report in three minutes,' Wo pointed out, gesturing to the mission schedule timeline displayed on his main console screen.

The time ticked by so slowly that Grant thought his console clock might have stopped. Not a word was spoken in the control center. No sound at all except the electrical hum of the monitors and the distant whisper of the air circulation fans. Wo seemed to turn into a block of wood, a statue, unmoving, unblinking. Grant wondered if the man was even breathing. Sweat beaded his own upper lip and brow; he felt it trickling along his ribs.

'Control, this is
Zheng He
.' Krebs' voice shattered the silence.

'I hear you,' Wo said, as calmly as if she were sitting next to him.

'All systems functioning normally. No problems.'

'Good,' said Wo, with a satisfied nod of his head.

'We are preparing for the descent. Communications blackout will prevent further…' she seemed to search for a word, '… further communications.'

'I understand,' Wo replied. 'We will track your beacon as long as possible.'

The sub actually carried two beacons, Grant knew: a longwave radio transmitter and an infrared communications laser. Both would be absorbed by Jupiter's deep, turbulent atmosphere, swallowed up in the raging storms and lightning strokes that awaited
Zheng He's
crew. By plotting the signal strength and dispersion of the beacons, though, Grant and the other scooters aboard the station could learn more about the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere.

Even if it kills the crew, Grant heard a sardonic voice in his head whisper.

The submersible also carried half a dozen 'torpedoes': small self-propelled automated capsules that could be fired from the sub to pop up to the top of the cloud deck and broadcast a pre-recorded message.

None of the controllers left their consoles as long as the submersible maintained communications contact. But after six more hours, even the radio beacon was drowned out by the constant flicker of Jovian lightning. They would hear nothing more from
Zheng He
unless and until the crew popped a message-bearing capsule.

Wo pushed his wheelchair back from his console. 'There is nothing more to do here,' he said, sounding tired, weak. 'They are on their own now.'

He wheeled himself out of the control center. The plan was to have one person at the central console — Wo's usual post - throughout the mission. Quintero had drawn the first four-hour shift; Grant was last.

'Let me make a quick run to the toilet,' Quintero said, squeezing his bulk past Grant's console.

'I'll sit in until you get back,' Grant said to Nacho's rapidly disappearing back.

'Even Macho Nacho has to pee sometime,' Patti Buono said, trying to lighten the tension that had smothered them all.

'Don't you?' asked Ukara, heading for the corridor right behind Quintero.

'Now that you mention it…' Buono got up and followed her.

Grant didn't bother bringing a chair to the central console, he simply stood in front of its darkened lights and stared up at the wallscreen. Might as well turn it off, he told himself. The radio speaker built into Wo's console hissed static that crackled every few seconds from a lightning bolt.

Quintero came back and hauled his own chair over to the central console. 'Thanks, amigo. I'm okay now.'

'Good,' said Grant, suddenly realizing that his own bladder needed relief.

The nearest restroom was a dozen meters down the corridor. Grant headed for it, but saw that Dr Wo was sitting in his powerchair near its door.

'Uh… do you need help, sir?' Grant asked. Wo looked up at him disdainfully. 'What I need—' he began in a snarl, then stopped himself. For a moment Grant didn't know what to expect. Then, much more softly, Wo said, 'Come with me, Mr Archer.'

He followed Dr Wo to the director's office. As always it was overheated, uncomfortably warm. But Grant saw that the vase atop Wo's desk was empty.

Wheeling himself behind the desk, Wo gestured Grant to sit, then said, 'I understand you have run into a setback with the gorilla.'

Nodding, Grant admitted, 'I'm afraid I've thrown away several weeks' work.'

'Patience, Mr Archer. Patience.'

'Checking the neural net before I put it on her would have saved me this setback,' Grant muttered. ,

Wo nodded. 'So you must start over.'

'I suppose so.'

'Just as the crew is doing in the
Zheng He
. We failed in our first attempt to explore the ocean, and now they are trying again.'

'Before the IAA inspectors can stop them,' Grant said.

Wo let out a sigh and nodded once.

'May I ask a question, sir?'

'You may ask,' said Wo.

'What does
Zheng He
mean? Is it the name of a person, or what?'

The director actually smiled. 'A good question. An excellent question!'

Grant waited for more.

'Zheng He was a great explorer. Commander of the Ming Emperor's navy in the fifteenth century. Fifty years before Columbus and his pitiful little boats crossed the Atlantic, Zheng He's treasure fleets sailed all across the Indian Ocean, to Africa, Arabia, the islands of the East Indies, even to Australia.'

'I never heard about that,' Grant said.

'Great ships, ten times bigger than the Spanish caravels,' Wo continued. 'Hundreds of ships! Thousands of sailors! Half the world was in China's sway while the Europeans still believed the world was flat!'

'Then why—'

'But the Emperor Zhu Di died, and his successor had the great ships burned. They destroyed the fleet! They forbade exploration and commerce! China turned inward and decayed.

By the time the Europeans reached China's shores, the Empire of Heaven was weak, poor, divided, easily conquered.'

He fell silent. Grant thought over what Wo had just told him, then said, 'It could have been the other way around, then, couldn't it? If they had allowed Zheng He to continue, China could have conquered Europe.'

'Easily.'

'Why did they stop?'

Wo took a deep breath and ran a weary hand over his eyes. 'Zheng He was a eunuch.'

Grant felt shocked. 'You mean he'd been castrated?'

'Many were, in those days. In Europe, also. Boys with sweet singing voices were castrated well into the nineteenth century, I believe.'

'Zheng He was a eunuch,' Grant repeated in a whisper.

'Most of the palace officials who promoted his fleet were eunuchs. The Confucian bureaucrats who ran the rest of the government opposed the eunuchs' positions of power with the emperor.'

'Palace politics.'

'Yes,' said Wo. 'Palace politics. And the losers were often executed.'

'The Confucians won?'

'Eventually. When the Emperor Zhu Di died, the Confucians tightened their grip on his successor. The great treasure fleet of Zheng He was destroyed.'

'And China crumbled.'

'It took China more than five hundred years to recover. Even today China is not as rich or powerful as it could have been.'

'It was lucky for the Europeans, then.'

'Yes, very fortunate for them,' Wo grumbled.

Grant tried to lighten the mood. 'But today we're beyond all that. Asians and Europeans and Africans - we're all working together.'

'Are we?'

'Aren't we?'

'If your Zealots had their way this station would be closed … destroyed just the way Zheng He's fleet was destroyed.'

'They're not
my
Zealots,' Grant retorted, as firmly as he could manage.

'I feel very close to the spirit of Zheng He,' Wo said, closing his eyes. 'His spirit touches my own.'

Grant said nothing.

'In a way, I am also a eunuch. My manhood was destroyed in the accident.'

'I didn't know,' Grant blurted.

'So I sit here, weak and helpless, while others sail into the unknown sea.'

'You're not helpless.'

'They blame Krebs for the accident. It was really my fault. I panicked.'

'I never heard that,' said Grant.

'Krebs is too loyal to reveal it. She has taken the blame so that I could remain as director.'

'What happened?'

Wo waved a hand. 'What does it matter? Now I sit here and wait for word from them.'

'They should be in the ocean by now,' Grant mused.

'Yes. And while we struggle to explore, the Confucians, the bureaucrats who have the positions of power back on Earth, are on their way here to destroy us. They fear what we are doing here. They despise us.'

'They can't stop us. We're doing what we came here to do.'

'I should be down there with them.'

Grant looked at the older man's tired, dejected face. Lines of fatigue and worry and self-doubt were etched into his flesh.

'If it weren't for you, sir,' he said,'they wouldn't be out there exploring the ocean at all. None of us would be here.'

And he realized as he said it that he himself would probably be back on Earth, or at Farside, if it weren't for Wo's monomaniacal determination to find intelligent life in Jupiter's vast ocean.

Yet, for the first time, Grant felt that he'd rather be here - even as a lowly grad student - than anywhere else. Wo's passion has infected me, he realized.

Weakened by its battle against the darters, slowly starving in this barren region of the sea, Leviathan allowed the powerful currents surging out of the eternal storm to drive it farther from the towering, roaring wall of seething water and its menacing bolts of lightning.

Its wounded members flared with pain signals. Leviathan needed food, and plenty of it, to heal the flesh torn and shredded by the darters' teeth. Yet there was no food to be found.

At least there were no darters in this empty part of the ocean. Leviathan doubted its members would have the strength to fight them.

Food. Leviathan had to find food. Which meant it had to circle the immense storm, return to the side where the currents flowed into it and the food streamed thickly.

Riding the circling currents, drifting rather than propelling itself through the ocean, Leviathan wondered if there might be some food — any food — up higher. It was dangerous to rise too high into the cold abyss above, but Leviathan knew it would be death to remain at this depth, where no food at all was available.

Slowly, cautiously, Leviathan made its flotation members expand. The immense creature drifted higher, nearing exhaustion, nearing the moment when its members would instinctively disintegrate and begin their individual buddings, in the last desperate hope of survival by spawning offspring.

The old instincts would be of no avail now, Leviathan knew. The members could separate and reproduce themselves in the hope of uniting into renewed assemblies, but what good would that do where there was not enough food even for one? Even if a few individual members survived temporarily, how could they live without the unity of all the others? Apart they were helpless. What could flagella members do without a brain to guide them? How could a brain member exist without sensor members and digestive members and—

Leviathan halted its pointless musing. There
was
food drifting in the currents above. The sensor members felt its faint echo vibrating through the water. The storm's merciless flow swept the particles into its own mindless vortex before they could sift down to the comfortable level where Leviathan swam.

It would be cold up there, numbingly cold. Leviathan's kind traced tales of foolish youngsters who rose too high in their haughty search to outdo their elders and never returned, disintegrated by the cold and their members devoured by darters or the eerie creatures that haunted the abyss above.

Upward Leviathan rose, straining against the growing cold, heading toward the meager trickle of food that its sensor members had detected.

It was not food, Leviathan realized. Despite the numbing cold and the continuing pain signals from its wounded members, Leviathan's eye parts showed that the echoes the sensors detected came not from a thin stream of food particles but from one single particle, much larger than any food Leviathan had ever known, yet puny compared to Leviathan or even to the darters.

It was that alien thing that had been seen before. Far, far off in the distance, up so high that Leviathan dared not even try to approach it, a strange circular object was struggling through the abyss above, sending out eerie signals that made no sense whatsoever.

Is this real? Leviathan wondered. Or are we so close to disintegration that our brain is beginning to fail?

The alien continued to flash signals mindlessly into the empty ocean, totally oblivious to Leviathan drifting in the cold empty sea, far out of range of its sensing systems.

Grant left Dr Wo's office feeling strangely upset, conflicted, wondering where his true loyalties lay, what he was truly loyal to.