Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (14 page)

They were about to enter the Climber, JoveCo’s pipeline maintenance vessel that had nearly killed Mike. Nina’s pulse raced. She pulled the clear hood over her face, and took a deep breath as soon as stale-smelling air pressurized it into a sphere. She held her breath for a moment, and slowly exhaled as her head thudded in syncopation with her chest.

“I’ve already programmed Climber to run your test,” Williams said. “It’ll report once it gets back within comms range.”

That got her moving. She was sick of waiting. She shook her head and floated into the airlock.

Williams sealed the stationside door, then released one on the other side, and another just beyond, which opened into the Climber. He pulled himself inside, where he clung to a handhold and faced her.

“We’ve placed two full-medical suits in here,” he said.

“In case the AI craps out when we reach the stormclouds,” Nina said. “Too bad Mike didn’t have one.”

Nina made a conscious effort to release her grip on a handle. Before her last mote of courage fled, she launched feetfirst past him and came to a stop on a deeply padded seat. Williams sealed the doors behind them. The innermost shut with an echoing
clang
. She removed the suffocating helmet and tried to calm her breathing.

Jupitershine from an array of portholes lit a gray-carbon and scuffed-aluminum interior the size of a small garage. Walls curved off in both directions around a hub slightly wider than the Beanstalk. The donut-shaped, lifting-body vessel rode the pipeline like a bead strung on a wire between Jupiter’s atmosphere and the station tethered in stationary orbit above, propelled like a railgun along a magnetic field. Designed to seat twelve passengers back to back or facing each other across a large porthole on the other, it also offered panoramic views beneath and overhead. She’d seen the company promo materials: “Window seats for everyone!”

Nina drifted over to one of the meter-diameter portholes on the floor and gripped the handholds beside it. She marveled at the luxury represented by so much ultraglas, where displays would have served better. Far below, Jupiter looked hundreds of times as large as the full Moon in Earth’s sky. She had to turn her head to take it all in.

“Watch your feet,” Williams said. He flipped out a tablet and began tapping the air. “Climber, prep for descent.”

“Acknowledged,” said a silky-smooth AI voice via the vessel’s speakers.

The seats slid sideways along a set of rails set into the curved hull until they stopped, upside-down. Williams spun himself around and buckled into one of them, as if hanging from the ceiling.

He smiled at her expression. “We won’t feel acceleration for long,” he said, “but being butt-down on the ‘heavy’ side is safer. Orient with Jupiter ‘up.’”

Nina did so, buckling into a seat a couple of rows away.

“Climber,” Williams said, “take us down.”

The vessel jerked free and accelerated with a force comparable to what she had felt aboard the fusion-torch, three days of steadily shoving away from Earth at one-third
g
. The hull began to hum. Through the porthole near her feet, Nina watched JoveCo Way Station shrink to a gray pinwheel dancing around the Beanstalk, then to little more than a bright moon against the Milky Way’s starry profusion.

Minutes later, the Climber’s AI announced, “Ceasing acceleration.”

Williams smiled from the seat facing her. “We’re now sailing toward Jupiter at three thousand kilometers per hour. We’ll pick up more speed falling into its gravity well, but Climber adjusts magnetic resistance to keep us below rated max.”

Nina felt her weight gradually lift. She looked up. Her heart stumbled. Even moving this fast, Jupiter was so large and far away that it looked motionless. The pipeline plunged into Jupiter’s skies like a syringe, drawing hydrogen from virtually limitless veins to fuel the ambitions of people like Williams.

And the dreams of people like Mike.

Attached deep beneath those cloud tops, Mike’s beacon kept the Beanstalk clear and the Jovians safe.

“Let’s put Jupiter beneath us,” the man said. He tapped a couple of icons floating before him, and the seats slid back to their original position.

Below her grippy slippers, the planet raged with silent beauty. Nina shivered. This was the place that had nearly killed the only man she could put up with enough to share a life.

She closed her eyes, painfully aware of the thousand quick deaths that lay just beyond the walls of this little ship.

She tried not to dream.

Eight hours later, the climber’s AI startled Nina awake.

“Contact,” said the speakers.

The flip-out carbon tabletop between them was littered with interface devices and display frames Velcroed to its surface. Williams gave her a short nod as his eyes and fingers flickered across colorful 3-D user interfaces projected above the frames. His lips moved in silent communion in a way that reminded Nina of Mike working with his beloved adaptive intelligences. Both had cybernetic enhancements, like most who worked with AI.

Williams looked up from his virtual wrangling. “Climber transmitted your test broadcast. We’re also within range to pick up Jovian signals.”

“Any word on Mike?” Nina asked.

“We’re out of comms range, but an hour ago Else reported his repairs are progressing as expected.”

Nina looked through the window at her feet. They had fallen so close to Jupiter that vast, stepped cloudbanks rose up toward the craft, half-lit ephemeral valleys thousands of kilometers long and hundreds tall. Lightning flickered within the stacked layers, and pale storms swirled far below. Some of those cyclones could swallow other planets whole. It was as if vast celestial potters fashioned the clouds into roaring towers on a scale designed to provoke existential horror. The Sun had settled near the horizon, setting the higher wisps afire in yellows and golds. She felt the same kind of awe as locking eyes with a tiger.

“Do we need to be so close?” she asked.

“Farther away, Jupiter’s electromagnetic activity overwhelms low-power transmissions,” he said. “It’s why we shield the station. And this Climber.”

Nina powered on her tablet. Orange columns and green rows poured out of the 3-D display as the AI interface flickered to life. She studied the signal. Exactly the same as the recorded message Mike had tight-beamed via laser to the torch ship. Right before his accident.

“Getting a signal clean enough to work with?” Williams asked.

She nodded. Her AI easily scrubbed the background static. Her new decryption algorithm pecked away.

“Climber,” Williams said, “decelerate and hold position.”

The hull began to hum even louder than when they left the station. Nina gained much of her weight back. Their devices shook on the table. After a few minutes, she grew nearly weightless. Her display popped up a new stream of data.

Nina studied the results. She’d transmitted a hybrid of the two basic Jovian phrases, hoping to spur a dialog. She’d be happy if they merely asked,
Huh?
No response. At least, nothing different.

“I’m not even sure it’s communication,” she said. “What’s the point of such heavy encryption? How do they expect us to understand?”

“Perhaps it keeps outsiders from eavesdropping.”

“The message hasn’t changed in all its repetitions,” she said. “A discrete, uncrackable, 12-gig packet. It’s more lecture than conversation.”

Nina gave an exasperated sigh and rapped the power icon on her tablet, dispersing a hopeless confusion of data, then tossed it to the tabletop. The device rebounded, but Williams caught it and fastened it down.

“What do you need?” he asked.

Nina unfastened her seatbelt, grabbed a handhold beside the central porthole, and stretched across, feet floating up behind.

From this angle, she could see all the way to the edge of the planet. One of Jupiter’s moons gleamed dull silver in the black sky, perhaps the one that fed them. Night fast approached, a black shadow devouring the planet. Lightning seared the darkness, some bolts longer than the Grand Canyon. To either side of the Equatorial Zone—where the Beanstalk pierced—two cloud belts raced in opposite directions with winds powerful enough to shear the skin from the Climber. Cyclones boiled to life where belts and zones touched. The atmosphere swarmed with thousands of spiraling storms each powerful enough to desolate the Earth. Deep beneath blazed the heart of a failed star. People could only survive this close to such an utterly indifferent god by relying on miraculous technologies. Which sometimes failed. Nina tore her eyes from the view and looked at Williams.

“No offense to your babies, Don, but AIs are less creative than freshman-calc students.”

“I have faith in you,” Williams said.

“How about letting me send this to some post-docs I’ve worked with,” she said. Her voice echoed against the ultraglas.

“We need to understand what we’re dealing with before opening this up to others,” Williams said.

“Typical.” She glared at him. “You’ve made
first contact with aliens
a trade secret. Amazing. They don’t belong to you.”

“We face both promise and risk. It’s best to—”

“To keep the Jovians for yourself?” Nina made a frustrated sound. “When did you become a robber baron?”

Williams crossed his arms. “I’m as big a fan of exploration as Mike. Here, I’ve ushered the human race to the doorstep of the stars. I intend to take us the rest of the way.”

“Lovely,” Nina said, “but you’re infected by a meme. Ever since the first Australopithecus started demanding tribute for access to
his
river or
his
fruit trees, capitalism has perpetuated and spread. It’s a brain disease. Whenever a market bubble or banking scheme based on untenable math collapses, civilization falls closer to ruin. All because the most-infected people can’t stop gathering fortunes. The more you collect for yourself, the worse it gets for everyone else.”

“Without funding from wealthy donors,” Williams said, “your university wouldn’t have survived the Crash. There wouldn’t be grants for research. Grad students wouldn’t have fellowships for tuition. We wouldn’t have AIs to analyze algorithms or crunch numbers, or the interfaces to direct them—”

“So you’re the patron saint of a big charity.”

“It costs a fortune to exploit these kinds of resources,” Williams said, gesturing toward the side porthole. “It takes visionaries to do something meaningful with it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Nina said.

Williams nodded. “You’re talking redistribution. When have people ever chosen less? Spread humankind’s resources equally among everyone, and there’d be nothing left for projects like this. We’d lose our capability to realize great dreams and visions.”

“You’re not listening—” Nina began.

“I am,” Williams said. “We’re close to achieving
your
vision, Nina, but to get there we need to use the system to our advantage. Capitalism won’t vanish overnight. If we dive headfirst into utopianism without filling the reservoir of wealth, we’ll break our necks when we hit dry lakebed.”

Nina looked away, out at Jupiter, a waning crescent. “It’s just a failure of imagination.” Sunset moved fast across its cloud tops, setting her skin ablaze with Jupitershine.

“I agree,” Williams said. “Do you know why Mike signed on to work here?”

“He wanted to explore Jupiter,” Nina said, her voice flat.

“Sure, but also because I agreed to base JoveCo on a transformative socioeconomic framework.
You
got him thinking about such things. He’s pretty convincing.”

Nina arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re calling JoveCo a utopia?”

“Hardly, but it’s a fairer system than most. Only partners can hold JoveCo stock, and everybody here’s an equal partner.”

“Even you?” Nina said.

He shrugged. “I invested more, so I hold more stock. But my salary’s the same. We all share equally in the bounty we produce, with opportunity for bonuses based on three-sixty performance reviews.”

Nina sighed. “I didn’t mean to pick a fight,” she said.

“It’s my fault,” Williams said. “I’ve worked with programmers for 30 years. I should know better than to get defensive.”

“And after working with
academics
for two decades,” Nina said, “
I
should know better, too. I’m just disheartened. Mike’s accident really threw me. Frontiers are dangerous, but it’s
Mike
.”

“Fate and the cold equations of space conspire to yank the controls out of even the boldest hands,” Williams said. “We need a break. In more ways than one.”

“This is the first encryption I’ve been unable to crack,” Nina said, “ever.”

Williams reached into the knapsack belted to the seat beside him and withdrew the wine. He slipped a straw through the cork’s membrane and passed it to Nina.

“To better luck,” he said.

Nina saluted him and took a long pull. It was the most delightful wine she’d ever tasted. She sighed, then handed it back. “Wine through a straw. I feel like a student again.”

Williams chuckled and took a sip. “Let’s listen to the locals,” he said. In a firmer voice, he said, “Climber, tune comms to the Jovian broadcast and put it on speaker.”

The climber suddenly got noisy, speakers hissing and then crackling loudly whenever lightning seamed the sky below. Williams did something with his interface to clean up the signal until they spoke a steady rhythm—
Go away!
—accompanied by a background sizzle that reset every 42 seconds.

Same as ever. Nina gave a strangled groan.

“Can I help?” Williams asked.

“Ozymandias,” Nina said, “your power is meaningless here.” She stared down at Jupiter. Winds raged and an entire species sang a background chorus to ignorant ears.

Williams handed the wine to her again. Nina took a long drag before tossing it back to him. It left an aftertaste of flowers and dappled sunlight on her tongue. She closed her eyes and thought of her last dinner with Mike, before he came here, so long ago. She couldn’t remember what they ate, only the outdoor table overlooking Puget Sound—boats and floatplanes humming nearby.