Dark as Day

3 EARTH, YEAR 2097, SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

Seine-Day would be huge in the Jovian system, perhaps bigger yet at the L-4 and L-5 Trojan locations, and most important of all as a unifying influence on the expanding Outer System.

On Earth, however, huddled in close to the Sun and with old war wounds still unhealed even after thirty years, Seine-Day could not compete with other worries.

Worries such as the application. The written part had been submitted three weeks earlier. The oral examination would be held one hour from now, by an interviewer who had ridden a high-gee vessel all the way from Ganymede. Janeed Jannex stared east toward the rising sun and wondered if it would be worth showing up to meet the man. There must be tens or hundreds of thousands of applicants. Less than one thousand would pass the test and be allowed to head away from Earth for training in the Outer System. And most of those would be youngsters, early twenties or less, whereas Janeed and Sebastian were already well over thirty.

She was sitting at the extreme eastern edge of the GM platform, as far down its side as she could get without falling in. Her feet dangled in the cold salt water of the eastern Malvinas’ shelf. Behind her she could hear the gentle thrum-thrum-thrum of the great extractor. Its upper portion curved away to become a one-meter pipeline that headed arrow-straight south and west, past the Falkland Islands, across the full width of the Malvinas’ shelf, all the way to landfall at Punta Arenas.

The spine of the extractor plunged down through the middle of the Global Minerals’ platform and continued all the way to the seabed. Janeed and Sebastian were, according to their job description, “in charge” of the extractor operation during the remaining hour of the dawn shift. What that meant in practice was that any change in extractor performance, gas leak, or reduction in methane flow through the pipeline would be signaled by a klaxon loud enough to wake the dead. At that point the problem rose by definition above Jan and Sebastian’s authority and responsibility level. They would run at once to alert a more senior member of the GMS operations’ staff, assuming that by some miracle that person had slept through the din and was not already on deck.

The sun was well above the horizon, but here, in July at fifty degrees south, the wind off the winter ocean of the South Atlantic would remain brisk all day. Jan lifted her bare feet from the icy water, examined her long, near-prehensile toes that had chilled to a bluish-red, and dried them on the lower edge of her sweater. She had been sitting far too long, introspective and brooding in the glimmer of pre-dawn. She was supposed to be the optimist, the initiator, the “can-do” queen. But it was hard to be all those things when you felt sure that the next few hours would bring only disappointment. And if she reacted like this, how must Sebastian be feeling?

She put on her shoes, stood up stiffly, and climbed the ten-meter ladder to the main surface of the platform. Finding him should be no problem. He lacked her taste for minor masochism, and would be tucked in the warmest and most protected spot of the deck that still offered a broad-angled upward view.

This morning she found him on the western side of the extractor, well shielded from the breeze. He had spread an air mattress there — no hardships for Sebastian — and lay on his back, staring upward.

Janeed said, “Well?”

Without looking at her, or seeming in any way to acknowledge her presence, he said softly, “Formation to the northeast. Triple layer, alto-cumulus over strato-cumulus over cumulo-nimbus, all moving in different directions. Wind vectors different at each height. We’ll see rain within the hour, I’ll make bet.”

Jan didn’t want to bet, or look north-east or in any other direction. Clouds were clouds, and that was all. She moved to lean over him. “Not the weather, Sebastian. The interview.”

“What about the interview?”

“It’s less than an hour away. I’m nervous.”

He sat up, slowly. Sebastian did everything slowly, so slowly that Janeed often felt ready to scream at him. Sometimes she did. It made no difference.

“Jan, you’re nervous because you care.” His round moon face was smiling. “If we fail, we still have jobs.”

Jobs that could be done as well or better by machinery. Jobs that needed so little of your skills and energy that someone like Sebastian could spend all his days happily dreaming and staring at the ever-changing cloud formations of the South Atlantic, without any question from their superiors. Dead-end jobs for all of them, while the Outer System was desperately short of people, even if beyond the Belt they were so picky in their choosing from Earth that an applicant who lived here felt like a resident of an old leper colony applying for a position as a masseuse.

Jan didn’t say any of that. In fairness, she couldn’t. She had been the one who insisted, who did all the pushing and coaxing and persuading until Sebastian agreed that they would apply as a team. They were the same age, but ever since their rescue in the ruined northern hemisphere and transfer to a displaced persons’ camp, she had felt like his mother. Her chances would be better if she had applied alone, but she couldn’t do it. Who would look after Sebastian then? He was not stupid, no matter what others said, but he was undeniably strange. He had been rescued as a young child, and even at thirty-five he remained in many ways childlike.

She said carefully, “They’ll interview us together, as a team. Promise me one thing.”

“I promise.”

“You don’t know what it is yet. Promise me that you’ll talk. When we applied for these jobs you just sat there like a big dead fish.”

“But we got jobs.” He was smiling again, serene and gentle. “I’ll talk. Or try to.”

“Come on, then. Let’s at least try to make ourselves look presentable.” Janeed smiled back and reached out a hand to help him to his feet. She loved Sebastian, and she always would. Not in any sexual way, of course — she recoiled at the thought — but as the closest thing to family that she had ever known. Her parents, like Sebastian’s, were faceless and nameless, among the seventy percent of Earth’s eleven billion people who had died in the first few minutes of the Great War. Janeed should have been old enough to remember what her mother and father looked like, but her first memory was of a terrifying airplane ride followed by a hot meal at a displaced persons’ camp in Arenas. Before that: nothing.

The interviewer was a woman, not a man. She was a bone-thin redhead, with thin, tight lips. She wore the dark-green uniform of Outer System civilian government, and she appeared as confused by them as Janeed was nervous of her.

“Janeed Jannex and Sebastian Birch,” the interviewer said. “Miners.” She gave the word great emphasis. She frowned at the screen of her personal, and then peered around her at the hundred-meter floating platform of Global Minerals and the endless water beyond. She had chosen to sit out on deck for the interview, although the sky was growing darker and Sebastian’s prophecy of rain appeared more and more plausible. “You described your jobs as miners?”

“That’s right.” Janeed glared at Sebastian. Beyond a muttered greeting he had so far said not a word.

The woman, who had introduced herself as Dr. Valnia Bloom — Dr. Director Valnia Bloom, head of the Department of Scientific Research on Ganymede — said, “Would you care to explain that?”

“Certainly.” Jan looked at Sebastian, waiting. He said not a word, and finally she went on, “This will take a few minutes.”

Sebastian said, “It will rain hard in a few minutes.”

Valnia Bloom seemed skeptical, and looked up at the cloud-barred sky. Janeed wondered, had the woman ever seen rain? It certainly didn’t rain water on Ganymede, or anywhere else in the Outer System. On Venus it rained sulfuric acid, and on Titan it rained droplets of hydrocarbons. On Triton, Janeed had read, there were geysers of liquid nitrogen, but they hardly counted as rain. Sebastian was staring vacantly at Valnia Bloom, who finally said, “We’ll see about the rain. Go ahead. Keep it short.”

Jan stated daggers at Sebastian. Her look said, Talk! After a long silence, she felt that she had to go on. “Well, most of the onshore fossil fuels of Earth were always in the northern hemisphere, which is still uninhabitable. The coal under the Antarctic ice-cap is inaccessible, too. But the southern hemisphere is booming, and there’s a big need for energy and plastics, and no way to satisfy it.”

“I thought that Cyrus Mobarak had solved your energy problem, with the Moby Midget fusion reactors.”

“He did, for anything that can handle eight megawatts and up. But there’s a need all over the developing southern regions for small, portable units that generate only a few kilowatts. That’s what that provides.”

Jan gestured to the extractor, sticking up from the middle of the GM platform, and the pipeline running away to the southwest. Dr. Bloom stared at it uncomprehendingly.

“Methane,” Sebastian said, a split-second before Janeed felt she would be obliged to jump in again. Thank God, a word at last! But apparently that one word was all they would get. Jan finally added, “Methane down on the seabed. Trillions and trillions of tons of it.”

“But methane is lighter than water. In fact” — Valnia Bloom was frowning, in the effort of recollection — “the atmosphere of Earth is mainly oxygen and nitrogen. Methane is a lighter gas than either one of those. It can’t possibly be found down on your ocean floor.”

“Oh, it’s not. I mean, it is, but it’s not stored in gaseous form. It’s stored as methane clathrates — a structure that has four molecules of methane locked into a stable form with twenty-three molecules of water. At the temperatures of the deep ocean, around four Celsius, methane clathrates are solids. And they’re denser than water, so if they form on the ocean bed they won’t float up to the surface. And everything that sinks down from the surface of the sea decays and rots, and produces methane.”

Dr. Bloom looked less than thrilled by that vision of universal rot and corruption, a phenomenon unique to Earth, Other worlds, her expression suggested, kept their decay and recycling well away from civilized life; but she nodded and Jan went on, “So with all that methane from decomposition, plus naturally upwelling primordial methane, the seabed contains enormous amounts of it. And of course there’s loads of water. So we have these enormous clathrate beds, hundreds of kilometers across and tens of meters deep. All we do — all that does” — she pointed to the extractor — “is run the spine down to the clathrate beds and warm them up a bit. The methane is released in the higher temperatures, and rises to the surface, and flows away through the pipeline.”

Their interviewer was pleased. For the first time she was smiling. Dr. Bloom said, “So you’re miners. Yes, I guess that you are.”

“And you know,” Jan went on, “now that I think of it, I bet the same method would work for the Europan ocean. There’s life, there’s decomposition, there’s plenty of water.”

That was less of a success. The smile became a fixed and very starchy frown. “I thought that it was well-known, even in the Inner System” — her tone implied, the primitive Inner System — “that Europa is off-limits. Native life was discovered there five years ago. We do not care to have the only other known life form in the Universe contaminated for minor industrial gain.”

Sebastian opened his mouth. He was going to choose this worst moment to argue with the interviewer, Janeed felt sure of it. That would cancel out any good impression they had made. She could think of no way to cut him off, until like a gift from Heaven she felt two heavy raindrops strike her on the left cheek and square on the nose.

“Here it comes,” she said, “just the way Sebastian said it would. Let’s get below, before we’re all soaked.”

And maybe on the way I’ll have a chance to get you to one side, you moon-faced lump, and say that talking about the wrong things is worse than not talking at all.

The best-laid plans…

Dr. Valnia Bloom stuck to Sebastian, tight as a vacuum seal, all the way below until the three of them were packed into the tiny room that served as the junior crew hideaway.

Apparently the interviewer had reached a new point on her agenda, because she listened in silence to an internal prompt, opened a file, and pushed it forward.

“These yours?”

“Yes.” Janeed recognized her own test answers, to both the standardized question set and the free-form invitation to pick a subject and work it through. She had taken a chance, reviewing the growth of the economy of the Jovian moons since first colonization, then using that to make projections on Saturn and Uranus system development.

She expected at least a comment, but Dr. Bloom merely grunted, picked up a second file, and laid it in front of Sebastian.

“And this is yours?”

He peered, as though he had never seen the file in his life, then nodded. “Yep. That’s mine.”

Sebastian nodded. Janeed winced, she hoped invisibly. It was the standard question set, and a quick glance was enough to show that at least half had been left blank.

“How about these?”

This time it was half a dozen sheets. They showed not writing or numbers but drawings, black-and-white sketches with the unfinished look of something done at high speed. They were — Janeed ought to have guessed it — cloud formations, whorls and bars and herringbone patterns, mixed together with no apparent logic.

Sebastian took his time, stared, and at last said, “Yep. Didn’t have time to finish this one.” He pointed at a swirl like the image of a moving hurricane, spinning off smaller whorls from its trailing edge.

“They resemble storms on the face of the planet Saturn. Did you base what you drew on something you had seen?”

“Yep. There’s a regular vid feed, images from Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. I watch them. Uranus, too, though there’s nothing to see there.”

“You mean no cloud patterns.”

“Smooth as a billiard ball.”

“But you didn’t just copy these from the latest video feed.”

Sebastian frowned. “No. Didn’t copy them.”

“So where did you get them? I assume that you took the tests under controlled conditions.”

“We did.” Jan was not being spoken to, but she couldn’t keep quiet. “No one could come or go, no one could look at what anybody else was doing.”

Valnia Bloom ignored her. “Where did you get these drawings, Mr. Birch?”

Sebastian cleared his throat. “Well, I seen Saturn pictures on the vid feed. And these ones, I like dreamed, the way you do when drawing goes good.”

If Janeed’s wince had been invisible before, she was sure it wasn’t now. Fortunately, Dr. Valnia Bloom seemed to be taking no interest at all in what Janeed did — until she raised her head and speared both Sebastian and Janeed with a single glance.

“Your application was a rather unusual one. You are both over thirty, much older than our norm. Also, you asked to be considered as a team, but not singly.”

Jan nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And that is still your position?”

Jan nodded again and glared at Sebastian, who said, “Yep.”

“Very well. So be it.” Dr. Bloom collected the files and stood up. “That will be all.”

“Thank you.” The words stuck in Janeed’s throat, and she had to swallow and start over. “Thank you for letting us try. Will we be allowed to try again?”

“I think not.” Maybe Dr. Valnia Bloom was a sadist, or maybe she had been trained not to show feelings, because she had an odd little smile on her face. “There will be no second try.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“However, as I understand it, you are both required to give two weeks notice for service with General Minerals. I suggest that you do so immediately. Two and a half weeks from now there will be places reserved for you on a passenger shuttle. Once in a micro-gravity environment you will undergo complete physical examinations, after which a high-acceleration transit vessel will take you to Ganymede. Formal indoctrination will begin there.”

She was heading up the steep ladder that led back to the main platform. Halfway up, she ducked her head and turned to where Janeed and Sebastian sat stunned at the little table.

“I should mention one other thing of interest. You took the test three weeks ago. Correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Those sketches that Sebastian made at that time. They closely resemble actual storms on Saturn. But you did not copy them.”

“No, sir.” Sebastian spoke firmly for the first time. “I mean, no, ma’am. I said already, I didn’t copy them.”

“My last remark was not a question but a statement. I know that you did not copy images forwarded to Earth, for the best of all possible reasons.” Valnia Bloom was at the top of the stairs when she added, “You could not have. The storm system that you drew did not appear on the face of Saturn until ten days ago.”