Ilium

4 Near Conamara Chaos

Mahnmut the Europan moravec’s submersible was three kilometers ahead of the kraken and gaining, which should have created some sense of confidence in the diminutive robotic-organic construct, but since kraken often had tentacles five kilometers long, it didn’t.

It was an aggravation. Worse than that, it was a distraction. Mahnmut had almost finished with his new analysis of Sonnet 116, was eager to e-mail it to Orphu on Io, and the last thing he needed now was to have his submersible swallowed. He pinged the kraken, verified that the huge, hungry, jellied mass was still in flagellant pursuit, and interfaced with the reactor long enough to add another three knots to his ship’s speed.

The kraken, which was literally out of its depth here so close to the Conamara Chaos region and its open leads, flailed to keep up. Mahnmut knew that as long as they were both traveling at this speed, the kraken would be unable to extend its tentacles to full reach to engulf the submersible, but if his little sub were to encounter something—say a big wad of flashlight kelp—and he had to slow, or worse yet got fouled in the glowing strands of goo, then the kraken would be on him like a . . .

“Oh, well, damn,” said Mahnmut, abandoning any attempt at simile and speaking aloud to the humming silence of the submersible’s cramped environmental cavity. His sensors were plugged into the ship’s systems and virtual vision showed him huge clumps of flashlight kelp dead ahead. The glowing colonies were floating along the isothermal currents here, feeding on the reddish veins of magnesium sulfate that rose to the ice shelf above like so many bloody taproots.

Mahnmut thought dive and the submersible dived twenty klicks deeper, clearing the lower colonies of kelp by only a few dozen meters. The kraken dived behind him. If a kraken could grin, it would be grinning now—this was its killing depth.

Mahnmut reluctantly cleared Sonnet 116 from his visual field and considered his options. Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing. It was these damn bureaucrats’ fault—they needed to cull their local subseas of monsters before they ordered one of their moravec explorers back to a meeting.

He could kill the kraken. But with no harvester submersible within a thousand klicks, the beautiful beastie would be torn to shreds and devoured by the parasites in the flashlight kelp colonies, by salt sharks, by free-floating tube worms, and by other kraken long before a company harvester could get near it. It would be a terrible waste.

Mahnmut pulled his vision out of virtual long enough to look around his enviro-niche, as if a glimpse of his cluttered reality could give him an idea. It did.

On his console desk, along with the leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and the Vendler printout, was his lava lamp—a little joke from his old moravec partner Urtzweil almost twenty J-years ago.

Mahnmut smiled and re-engaged virtual along all bandwidths. This close to Chaos Central there would have to be diapirs, and kraken hated diapirs . . .

Yes. Fifteen klicks south by southeast, an entire belchfield of them, rising slowly toward the cap ice just as languidly as the wax blobs did in his lava lamp. Mahnmut set his course to the nearest diapir rising to a lead and added five more knots just to be safe, if there was such a thing as safety within tentacle range of a mature kraken.

A diapir was nothing more than a blob of warm ice, heated by the vents and gravitational hot zones far below, rising through the Epsom-salt sea toward the ice cap that had once covered 100 percent of Europa and which now, two thousand e-years after the cryobot arbeiter company arrived, still covered more than 98 percent of the moon. This diapir was about fifteen klicks across and rising rapidly as it approached the surface cap.

Kraken did not like the electrolytic properties of diapirs. They refused to foul even their probe tentacles with the stuff, much less their killing arms and maws.

Mahnmut’s sub reached the rising blob a good ten kilometers ahead of the pursuing kraken, slowed, morphed its outer hull to impact strength, pulled in sensors and probes, and bored into the glob of slush. Mahnmut used sonar and EPS to check the lenticulae and navigation leads still some eight thousand meters above him. In a few minutes the diapir itself would mush into the thick cap ice, flow upward through fissures, lenticulae and leads, and bubble slush ice in a fountain a hundred meters high. For a short time, this part of Conamara Chaos would look like Lost-Age America’s Yellowstone Park, with red-sulfur geysers geysing and hot springs boiling. Then the spray trail would disperse in Europa’s one-seventh Earth gravity, fall like a slow-motion slushstorm for kilometers on either side of each surface lenticula, and then freeze in Europa’s thin, artificial atmosphere—all 100 millibars of it—adding more abstract sculptural forms to the already tortured icefields.

Mahnmut couldn’t be killed in literal terms—although part organic, he “existed” rather than “lived,” and he was designed tough—but he definitely did not want to become part of a fountain or a frozen chunk of an abstract sculpture for the next thousand e-years. For a minute he forgot both the kraken and Sonnet 116 as he worked the numbers—the diapir’s ascent rate, his submersible’s forward progress through the slush, the fast-approaching cap ice—and then he downloaded his thoughts to the engine room and ballast tanks. If it worked right, he would exit the south side of the diapir half a klick before glob impact with the ice and accelerate straight ahead, doing an emergency surface blow just as the tidal wave from the diapir fountain was forced down the lead. He would then use that 100-klick-per-hour acceleration to keep him ahead of the fountain effect—essentially using his submersible like a surfboard for half the distance to Conamara Chaos Central. He’d have to make the final twenty klicks or so to the base on the surface after the tidal wave dissipated, but he had no choice. It should be one hell of an entrance.

Unless something had blocked the lead ahead. Or unless another submersible was coming out-lead from Central. That would be embarrassing for the few seconds before Mahnmut and The Dark Lady were destroyed.

At least the kraken would no longer be a factor. The critters refused to rise closer than five klicks to the surface cap.

Having entered all the commands and knowing that he’d done everything he could think of to survive and arrive at the base on time, Mahnmut went back to his sonnet analysis.

Mahnmut’s submersible—which he had long ago named The Dark Lady—cruised the last twenty kilometers to Conamara Chaos Central down a kilometer-wide lead, riding on the surface of the black sea beneath a black sky. A three-quarters Jupiter was rising, clouds bright and cloud bands roiling with muted colors, while a tiny Io skittered across the rising giant’s face not far above the icy horizon. On either side of the lead, striated ice cliffs rose several hundred meters, their sheer faces dull gray and blunted red against the black sky.

Mahnmut was excited as he brought Shakespeare’s sonnet up.

Over the decades he had come to hate this sonnet. It was the kind of things humans had recited at their weddings way back in the Lost Age. It was smarmy. It was schlocky. It wasn’t good Shakespeare.

But finding microrecords of critical writings by a woman named Helen Vendler—a critic who had lived and written in one of those centuries, the Nineteenth or Twentieth or Twenty-first (the record time-stamps were vague)—had given Mahnmut a key to translating this sonnet. What if Sonnet 116 was not, as it had been portrayed for so many centuries, a sticky affirmation, but a violent refutation?

Mahnmut went back through his notated “key words” for support. There they were from each line—“not, not, no, never, not, not, not” and then in line fourteen—“never, nor,” and “no”—echoing King Lear’s nihilistic “never, never, never, never, never.”

It was definitely a poem of refutation. But refutation of what?

Mahnmut knew that Sonnet 116 was part of “the Young Man” cycle, but he also knew that the phrase “the Young Man” was little more than a fig leaf added in later, more prudish years. The love poems were not sent to a man, but to “the youth”—certainly a boy, probably no older than thirteen. Mahnmut had read the criticism from the second half of the Twentieth Century and knew these “scholars” thought the sonnets to be literal—that is, real homosexual letters from the playwright Shakespeare—but Mahnmut also knew, from more scholarly work in previous eras and in the later part of the Lost Age, that such politically motivated literal thinking was childish.

Shakespeare had structured a drama in his sonnets, Mahnmut was certain of that. “The youth” and the later “Dark Lady” were characters in that drama. The sonnets had taken years to write and had not been produced in the heat of passion, but in the maturity of Shakespeare’s full powers. And what was he exploring in these sonnets? Love. And what were Shakespeare’s “real opinions” about love?

No one would ever know—Mahnmut was sure the Bard was too clever, too cynical, too stealthy ever to show his true feelings. But in play after play, Shakespeare had shown how strong feelings—including love—turned people into fools. Shakespeare, like Lear, loved his Fools. Romeo had been Fortune’s Fool, Hamlet Fate’s Fool, MacBeth Ambition’s Fool, Falstaff . . .well, Falstaff was no one’s Fool . . . but he became a fool for the love of Prince Hal and died of a broken heart when the young prince abandoned him.

Mahnmut knew that the “poet” in the sonnet cycles, sometimes referred to as “Will,” was not—despite the insistence of so many of the shallow scholars of the Twentieth Century—the historical Will Shakespeare, but was, rather, another dramatic construct created by the playwright/poet to explore all the facets of love. What if this “poet” was, like Shakespeare’s hapless Count Orsino, Love’s Fool? A man in love with love?

Mahnmut liked this approach. He knew that Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds” between the older poet and the youth was not a homosexual liaison, but a true sacrament of sensibilities, a facet of love honored in days long preceding Shakespeare’s. On the surface, Sonnet 116 seemed to be a trite declaration of that love and its permanency, but if it truly was a refutation . . .

Mahnmut suddenly saw where it fit. Like so many great poets, Shakespeare began his poems before or after they began. But if this was a poem of refutation, what was it refuting? What had the youth said to the older, love-besotted poet that needed such vehement refutation?

Mahnmut extended fingers from his primary manipulator, took up his stylus, and scribbled on his t-slate—

Yours most sincerely,

The Youth

Mahnmut looked at his letter and laughed, but the laughter died as he realized how this changed all of Sonnet 116. Now, instead of a treacly affirmation of unchanging love, the sonnet became a violent refutation of the youth’s jilting, an argument against such self-serving abandonment. Now the sonnet would read—

Mahnmut could hardly contain his excitement. Everything in the sonnet and in the entire sonnet cycle now clicked into place. Little was left of this “marriage of true minds” type of love—little except anger, accusations, incriminations, lying, and further infidelity—all of which would be played out by Sonnet 126, by which time “the Young Man” and ideal love itself would be abandoned for the slutty pleasures of “the Dark Lady.” Mahnmut shifted consciousness to the virtual and began encoding an e-note squirt to his faithful interlocutor of the last dozen e-years, Orphu of Io.

Klaxons sounded. Lights blinked in Mahnmut’s virtual vision. For a second he thought—the kraken!—but the kraken would never come to the surface or enter an open lead.

Mahnmut stored the sonnet and his notes, wiped the e-note from his squirt queue, and opened external sensors.

The Dark Lady was five klicks away from Chaos Central and in the remote control region of the submarine pens. Mahnmut turned the ship over to Central and studied the ice cliffs ahead of him.

From the outside, Conamara Chaos Central looked like most of the rest of the surface of Europa—a jumble of pressure ridges thrusting ice cliffs up two or three hundred meters, the mass of ice blocking the maze of open leads and black lenticulae—but then the signs of habitation became visible: the black maw of the sub pens opening, the elevators on the cliff face moving, more windows visible on the face of the ice, navigation lights pulsing and blinking atop surface modules and habitation nodes and antennae, and—far above where the cliff ended against black sky—several interlunar shuttles storm-lashed to the landing pad there.

Spacecraft here at Chaos Central . Very unusual. Even as Mahnmut finished the docking, set his ship’s functions on standby, and began separating himself from the submersible’s systems, he was thinking—What the hell have they called me here for?

Docking completed, Mahnmut went through the trauma of limiting his senses and control to the awkward confines of his more or less humanoid body and left the ship, walking into blue-lighted ice and taking the high-speed elevator up to the habitation nodes so far above.