Leviathans of Jupiter (10 page)

But who's going to believe it, without solid evidence to back up her word? I'd be laughed out of the business—or worse, accused of fraud.

Got to make Deirdre's sensory impressions visible, recordable. Got to get her brain wave patterns into some form of reproducible data retrieval program.

But how?

INFIRMARY

Dorn took one step into Dr. Pohan's compact little office, saw Deirdre sitting before the doctor's desk, and froze into immobility.

“Come in, come in,” Dr. Pohan urged him, gesturing to the only other chair in the room, beside Deirdre's.

He settled slowly, almost suspiciously, into the chair. It creaked beneath his weight.

Dorn said, “Your message said you required a blood sample from me.”

“Require is too strong a word,” said the doctor amiably, unconsciously brushing his curling mustache with one finger. “We request a blood sample. Request.”

“We?”

“Ms. Ambrose has a medical condition that can be alleviated with a donation of your blood, sir.”

Dorn turned his head toward Deirdre. “I'll give you as much blood as you need, of course.”

“Why, thank you,” she said.

“A few cubic centimeters should do nicely,” said the doctor. “A few cc's will be more than enough, I'm sure.”

Dorn nodded. Deirdre felt enormously grateful.

*   *   *

Katherine Westfall was on
Australia
's bridge when her wristphone pinged. She glanced at its miniature screen briefly, saw that the message was from Dr. Pohan, and ignored it. The phone would automatically record his message for her to retrieve later.

Captain Guerra had invited her to the bridge and was showing it off to her with the glowing enthusiasm of a proud father.

She thought the bridge seemed surprisingly small, considering the size of the ship. The place seemed to vibrate subtly with the background thrum of electrical power. And it felt too warm, as if overly crowded. Yet only four officers were on duty, in addition to the captain. A cluster of display screens showed various sections of the ship's interior; she could see passengers walking along passageways, crew personnel working at machinery she could not fathom. The multiple views reminded Katherine of the segmented eye of an insect. There was even a view of the empty beds of the infirmary, and Dr. Pohan's office, with the wrinkled little leprechaun sitting at his desk.

On the opposite bulkhead a single broad screen showed a telescopic view of Jupiter's slightly flattened disk.

“We're getting closer every hour,” the captain said grandly. “You can see the planet's oblateness clearly.”

“It looks much paler than I had expected,” Katherine said, remembering the pictures she had seen of vibrant bands of deeply colored clouds, swirls and eddies of storm systems the size of Earth and bigger.

The captain muttered something about false-color imagery.

The bridge had only half a dozen crew stations arranged in a shallow semicircle around the captain's command chair, and two of the curved, instrument-studded stations were unoccupied, at that. Standing beside Westfall, Guerra pointed out consoles for navigation, propulsion, life support, and communications. Uniformed officers, two of them women, sat at each console.

“And these other two?” she asked, pointing to the empty consoles.

“Backup stations,” said Captain Guerra. “We don't need to man them unless there's some sort of emergency.”

“Indeed?”

“As a matter of fact,” the captain said, patting one hand on the arm of his command chair, “I could run the ship from my chair here, all by myself alone. The systems are so highly automated that I could do away with the crew altogether and she would still run perfectly well.”

Westfall made herself appear impressed. But she couldn't resist asking, “Then why do you carry the crew along with you, Captain?”

Guerra's bearded face looked surprised at her question, then nettled. But almost instantly he broke into an accommodating grin. “You're joking, of course.”

“Perhaps,” Westfall said, permitting herself a slight smile. “But if I were heading the corporation that owns this vessel I'd want to know why I had to pay for crew members who aren't needed.”

Obviously struggling to maintain his pleasant expression, the captain replied, “They are
needed
”—he emphasized the word—“for two reasons. One, in case the automated systems fail or conditions exceed their programming limits.”

Westfall nodded.

“And two—well, frankly, it's for the passengers. Our psychology consultants tell us that the passengers would be afraid to travel on a completely automated ship.”

“I see. It's public relations, then.”

Guerra's genuine smile returned. “Exactly! Public relations.” He paused, then added, “Besides, some of the passengers enjoy having dinner with a good-looking young ship's officer. Eh?”

With a knowing arch of her brow, Westfall said, “I prefer older men, myself. Men of experience.”

The captain absolutely glowed. For a moment Katherine thought he was going to wink at her.

Instead, he asked, “In that case, would you join me for dinner this evening in my quarters?”

“Why not?” Westfall replied, thinking how predictable the captain was, how easy it was to get this man to do her bidding.

Once back in her own suite she immediately went to the desk in her sitting room and played Dr. Pohan's message. The gnomish little doctor's image looked very serious, almost grave, on the desktop screen.

“I met with Ms. Ambrose and the cyborg this morning. He has agreed to donate blood. He didn't even ask what the reason was. All I had to do was tell him that Ms. Ambrose had a medical problem and he agreed without hesitation.”

Good, thought Westfall.

The doctor continued, “I should be able to synthesize enough immunoglobulin to sustain Ms. Ambrose until we reach the Jupiter station. She will still be carrying the rabies virus in her blood system, of course, but she will exhibit no symptoms.”

Perfect, Westfall said to herself. Once we're at station
Gold
she'll have to depend on me to get enough of the serum to keep her alive. I'll have her under my control.

LEVIATHAN

The Kin searched for a down-welling current that would carry food particles to them. The Elders directed the Kin toward a new storm that recently had arisen, reasoning that its power would draw food down from the cold abyss above. Leviathan and the rest of the Kin could sense the storm's turbulence growing even though it was still too far away to see directly. But there was no infall of food to be found at this distance from the storm. The Kin pushed on, directed by the wisdom of the Elders.

Storms were dangerous, but the Elders decided that the Kin had no choice but to seek new currents of down-drifting food particles even if they had to go dangerously near the storm's turbulent power. Without the food, members of the Kin would starve. As death approached they would dissociate into their separate member parts, never to bud again and generate new members of the Kin.

And there were darters out there, as well, their voracious hunger never satisfied. They would never dare to attack the Kin in all its unity, but when an individual swam off to dissociate, the darters pounced. A lone member of the Kin, dissociating into its separate components, was prey to the darters. Before the components could bud and then coalesce to form a new leviathan, the predators would attack.

It was an ancient dilemma. Without dissociating and budding, new members of the Kin could not be generated. But by going off alone to dissociate, a lone leviathan was prey to the ever-lurking darters.

Leviathan remembered its own buddings, and the narrow escapes it had won from the slashing, insatiable darters. Its battles were painful memories, and the time for a new dissociation was approaching, Leviathan knew.

Time and again Leviathan had pictured the same question to the Elders: Why must a member go off alone to dissociate and bud? Why cannot some members of the Kin escort the individual through its dissociation and budding?

The Elders' response was always the same horrified revulsion. Dissociating in view of others! Disgusting! The images they flashed said that the Symmetry could only be maintained by continuing the ancient ways, the rituals that the Kin had observed from time immemorial. The darters are part of the Symmetry, they pictured. Accept them as you accept the food that drifts down from the cold abyss above.

Their answer did not satisfy Leviathan, but there was nothing to be done about it. The Kin would go about their lives, feeding, dissociating, budding, and coalescing to create new Kin members just as they always had. And the darters would feast on their weakest.

Unless the flow of food was permanently ended, the Symmetry completely broken. Then the Kin and the darters alike would starve.

The storm was growing stronger. Leviathan's eye parts could see the faint flicker of lightning far off. Faintly, faintly Leviathan's sensor parts reported that there were indeed currents of food swirling toward the storm's churning vortex.

Stationed out on the perimeter of the Kin, Leviathan kept its sensory parts keenly on guard against approaching darters. But it saw nothing. The sea was empty of their threat. Still, Leviathan felt uneasy. They were out there, it knew. Out beyond the range of our sensors, Leviathan reasoned, the darters are waiting for one of us to break away and begin dissociating. Alone.

How close to the storm will we go? Leviathan drew the image of that question on its flank, its luminescent members lighting up in response to the directions from its central brain. The image flickered from leviathan to leviathan, inward toward the core of their flotilla, where the Elders made their stately way.

As it waited for an answer, Leviathan thought again that the Kin who were about to dissociate should be at the Kin's center, protected from the darters. Yet the Elders regarded his suggestion with abhorrence. Do not attempt to change what has always been, they pictured in harsh blue images. Accept what must always be.

Accept. Leviathan had no choice but to accept the will of the Elders. But it thought that when the time came, many, many buddings from now, when Leviathan itself became an Elder, it would change these ancient ways. It would protect the members who now had to face the darters alone. It would make the Kin safer and better.

For now, though, Leviathan had to accept the Elders' decision. For now—

Leviathan's sensor members flashed a shrill warning. Darters! A huge pack of them out there, just on the edge of detection. Moving in the same direction as the Kin, but angling so that they were cutting across the feeble flow of food that was being sucked toward the growing storm.

The darters were placing themselves between the Kin and the needed current of food. This was something new. Leviathan had never seen such a maneuver in all the images the Elders had shown.

The darters were waiting to ambush the Kin. Not satisfied with attacking lone members, they were maneuvering to cut off the Kin from their food.

This was something new. And dangerous.

OBSERVATION BLISTER

As they left Dr. Pohan's office, Deirdre looked up at the cyborg and said, “Thank you so much, Dorn.”

“De nada,”
he said, then translated: “It's nothing.”

“It means a lot to me.”

He said nothing.

She felt almost uncomfortable walking beside him along the passageway. She was not accustomed to having to look up at people, and he was almost ten centimeters taller than she, his shoulders broad, his torso like the thick body of a miner's digging torch. He's half metal, she kept thinking to herself. Half of his body is a machine.

At last she said, “You didn't ask what my medical problem is.”

“Does it matter?” he asked. “You need my help. It's simple enough for me to give it.”

They passed a pair of crewmen in gray fatigues coming down the passageway from the other direction. Both men smiled at Deirdre and glanced furtively at Dorn as they squeezed past the cyborg.

Deirdre wondered, “What happened to you when you tried to make contact with the dolphins?”

For several paces Dorn said nothing.

“I'm sorry,” Deirdre said. “I shouldn't pry.”

“I saw my own past,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

“Your past? That made you go berserk like that?”

His voice heavy with misery, Dorn replied, “It was like all my nightmares at once.”

Deirdre didn't know how to respond to that.

They walked on for a few more moments, then Dorn asked her, “Did you look up Dorik Harbin's dossier last night?”

Nodding, Deirdre replied, “Yes, I did.”

“So you know who I was.”

She thought about that for a moment, then said, “But who are you now?”

He looked down at her as they paced along the passageway.

“I mean,” Deirdre explained, “the dossier stopped with the verdict at your trial. Dr. Yeager says you're some kind of priest. And when did you…” She couldn't finish the sentence.

“When did I disfigure myself? When did I become a cyborg?”

Deirdre nodded again. Another group of people were coming down the corridor toward them, five passengers, from the way they were dressed.

Dorn waited for them to pass, then suggested, “We need some privacy to discuss this without being interrupted.”

Or overheard, Deirdre added silently.

She followed him as he headed for the elevator. He expects me to go to his quarters? she wondered.

But once they got into the elevator Dorn called out, “Observation blister.” Turning to Deirdre, he said, “We should be able to speak freely there.”

Australia
's observation blister was a glassteel ring that ran around the circumference of the ship's outer hull. It was an adornment for passengers, where they could look out on the universe from the safety of the ship. To the surprise of the shipping company's management, hardly any passengers took advantage of the facility during midtransit. Despite highly advertised lectures and even cocktail parties hosted by the captain, most passengers had little interest in observing the all-engulfing black emptiness of the universe. It made them uneasy, even frightened. Only when the ship was approaching planetfall did passengers come to gape at the world they were approaching.