2312

Swan and a cat

Swan got off the Wegener feeling embarrassed and depressed by the horrid ideas of her youth, in this case the savanna-pampas Ascension—not to mention her own poaching in same, caught red-handed indeed, the smart-ass. But then it got even worse when their taxi unloaded them into a terrarium headed Jupiterward, and it turned out to be the Pleistocene, another of her youthful indiscretions, an ice age north with any number of spavined megafauna resurrected and clomping around in pathetic mutant versions of themselves. Giant short-faced bears, looking around in openmouthed confusion—also dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, American cheetahs, mastodons, and woolly mammoths, most of them only semi-genuine revivals from ancient DNA, really synthetics, birthed from elephants or lions or Kodiak bears, and thus uneducated in the ways of their kind. It was sad. Swan cursed herself and went feral to get through the remaining week to Jupiter, and almost paid for it with her life; for one thing, it was painfully cold, and then one morning she woke up in a stupidly uncomfortable perch in a tree to find it shaking under the weight of a cat climbing it, a big cat, a who-knew-what—possibly just a mountain lion, maybe a snow leopard, it had such long fur—intent to get to her, and as it was no heavier than she was, it seemed like it could climb the tree high enough to make it happen. Maybe twelve meters to the ground, terrarium spinning at one g—for a second she cursed the long-ago shift away from Martian g in terraria, which at first had been the norm—then fear drove all thought from her head. Get out of the nest. Get higher than a cat your own weight can get: obviously a problem. She pulled herself up onto the branch over her, which pronged up much more vertically than her sleeping branch. The cat eyed her calmly, not moving yet. Topaz eyes in brindled long white fur; upper lip drawn back, teeth white and hungry. No malice in it. Up the vertical branch, feet deep in forks, painful twists to free herself, up and up. Swaying now in the canopy, all the branches around her equally thin and flexible. Some kind of oak. If she kicked it on the snout when it attacked, possibly it would miss and fall. Foreclaws would latch on to her; her kick would have to twist away—maybe up. She tried to get higher, couldn’t.

She was on the Pleistocene. She carried a stun gun.

But she had left it in the nest. “Shit.”

The cat began to shift onto Swan’s branch. Quite a weight to sway it that much.

“Pauline, any suggestions here?”

“Scare it,” Pauline said. “Adrenalate fully, then do something bizarre.”

Swan twisted and let go, fell feetfirst into the face of the cat, screaming as loud as she could. When her feet hit something else, she clasped branches to her and felt something smash into her ribs. Air knocked out of her, no more scream. She scrabbled with her feet for some purchase, found none, looked down. The cat was on the ground, looking up at her. Swan screamed again, felt the stab of a cracked rib. She changed to a raging shout, cursing the cat foully. Kill it like Archilochus. Grating, painful snarl of a voice, bitter shrieking that hurt her throat and screeched unbearably in her own ears, the sound making her aware she had lost it. The cat heaved a heavy sigh and padded away.

She climbed back to her nest and retrieved the stun gun. Getting down out of the tree hurt like hell.

She avoided Wahram completely after that, and by the time they were dropped off on Callisto, she had become a little fond of that stab in her side. It made her feel better; it was an expression of her grief, her anger. The moment of dread involved was not forgotten, but digested into something else, some kind of triumph. She had almost been eaten for breakfast! She had been a fool and survived yet again—how often it had happened. Surely it was a fate. Surely it would keep on happening.

“This is the most basic of false syllogisms,” Pauline assured her when she spoke the thoughts aloud.

The Jovian moons were huge, with Jupiter itself a gargantuan oil painting of overelaborate genius, viscous blobs swirling around from one gorgeous paisley orangerie to the next; every border between the bands was a fantasia beyond compare. Swan loved the sight of it, and the city from which she viewed it wasn’t bad either: the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, built on the eponymous rim of the great multi-ringed crater. Valhalla had six rings, splashed into the side of Callisto like concentric waves on a pond after a rock is thrown in. The city was located on the top of the fourth ring, extending all the way around; now cities were beginning on the tops of the third and fifth rings as well. It was said that they would eventually tent the entirety of Valhalla and, after that, maybe all the rest of Callisto; and it was a big world. There were even those arguing it could be properly terraformed, despite the lack of a starter atmosphere.

It was one big world of four, in fact, because all the Galilean moons were gigantic. But there was some kind of a curse on them, it seemed to Swan; one of them was almost useless, another contested. Io orbited so far within Jupiter’s ferocious radiation belts that it was never going to be occupied at all except by a few small hardened scientific stations. Europa, a big beautiful ice moon, had a great depth of ice for people to delve into to escape the Jovian radiation, strong even there: wondrous ice palaces, with giant Jupiter always gnarling overhead—or everyone had thought at first. But it hadn’t happened, because there had proved to be aliens living in the ocean below, a complete ecology of algae, chemotrophs, lithotrophs, methanogens, scrapers, suckers, fans, scavengers, and detrivores, all swimming or crawling or holding on or burrowing in; and they created a problem. Some thought they had already contaminated this ocean by their exploratory intrusion into it, because examining it with a drill had been the Lake Vostok problem writ large. But they had done their best to sterilize the probes, and then, having discovered and sampled the full ecology, they had sealed off the hole, and now sat on the surface in scientific stations, culturing and studying their sample populations and pondering whether they should stay or go, and if they stayed, what kind of presence they should have. Possibly the proposed ice palaces would be perfectly fine, with the life below completely sequestered by the ten kilometers of glaciosphere that lay between the moon’s surface and its ocean. On the other hand, life being life, spermatozoically wriggling into every place it could reach, contamination might almost certainly be assumed to follow any occupation of the moon. And yet, given that these creatures appeared to be cousins of theirs anyway, long separated by meteor voyage—and now already recontaminated by a visit—would living above them and continuing to be a minor contaminant clearly be such a bad thing? When there were already people out there swallowing the alien microscopic life, and shooting it into their veins? And when life had been bouncing around the solar system and interacting with its cousins all along? These were open questions, interesting and vivid to the Europans and the other Jovians, less so to the rest of the system. Swan remained somewhat interested from her design days, and she approved their recent decision to go ahead and settle Europa, only perching unobtrusively on top of the internal indigenous aquaria.

Now she spent her time walking the High Road that ran all the way round the Fourth Circle of Valhalla, waiting for their flight to Io. She was still avoiding Wahram, who watched her these days with a look of alarmed concern that she could not stand. Jupiter overhead was its usual lurid magnificence. Possibly the Jovians were right to be so self-absorbed; they had a whole little solar system here, full of different things. Between the rings of the crater, the surface of Callisto was a vast knobbly white plain, and Jupiter and the three other moons were up there performing their dance. It was a gorgeous space.

But they were here to see Wang, so soon she grew impatient for the Io shuttle, and tired of the view overhead. Jove squiggling its buffooneries over and over—it was not art but chemistry, mere fractal repetition. The saving grace was that they had recently lit great gas lamps in the upper Jovian atmosphere, to better illuminate the towns located on the Galileans’ Jovian sides. One could see how these painfully brilliant diamond points were distorting Jupiter’s cloud tops, adding new swirls and eddies; that made it art, the whole thing a kind of mad goldsworthy.

Finally the time came for the shuttle to Io.

Swan said, “Pauline, are you going to be all right down there?”

“I will be if you are. You definitely need to stay inside the Faraday cage there to stay safe. The Jovians will no doubt tell you that.”

And during the trip they did, at great length. In a box inside a box, like Russian dolls: they were so proud. Down then to Io, shedding a furious aurora behind their spacecraft, a blaze of transparent blue and green electric banners and flares arcing away as they flew.