Leviathans of Jupiter

CERES ORBIT: CHRYSALIS II HABITAT

Big George Ambrose was far from happy.

“I still don’t see why they need a fookin’ microbiologist,” he grumbled. “Bloody beasts on Jupiter are big as mountains, aren’t they?”

His daughter Deirdre nodded in agreement. The two of them were waiting in Chrysalis II’s departure lounge for the torch ship from the Earth/Moon system to dock at the habitat. No one else was in the departure lounge; no one else from the habitat was heading for Jupiter.

They did not look much like father and daughter. George was a huge bushy mountain of a man, with a tangled mop of brick red hair and a thick unruly beard to match, both bearing the first telltale streaks of silver. Deirdre was almost as tall as he, but seemed dwarfed next to him. She was strikingly beautiful, though, with wide innocent almond eyes that had a slight oriental cast to them and high cheekbones, thanks to her mother. She had her father’s strong jaw and auburn hair that glowed like molten copper as it streamed down past her shoulders. She was wearing a simple pullover blouse and comfortable slacks, but they couldn’t hide the supple curves of her ample figure.

“You’ll miss my retirement party,” George growled.

“I’m sorry about that,” Deirdre said. “But they promised me a full scholarship to the Sorbonne if I’d put in a year at the research station in Jupiter orbit. A full scholarship, Daddy!”

“On Earth.”

“Yes! On Earth!”

George shook his shaggy head. “Earth’s a dangerous place. Too many people. All sorts of diseases and maniacs runnin’ around.”

“Daddy, it’s Earth!” Deirdre exclaimed. “It’s civilization. It’s culture. I don’t want to spend my whole life cooped up in this habitat. I know you love it, but I want to see the real world!”

George muttered something too low for his daughter to catch.

George Ambrose had been director of the rock rats’ habitat orbiting the asteroid Ceres for the past quarter century. He had helped build the original Chrysalis for the miners and prospectors who combed the Asteroid Belt in search of the metals and minerals that fed the human race’s expansion through the solar system. He had directed the building of Chrysalis II when the rock rats’ first habitat had been destroyed in the Asteroid Wars.

And he had presided over the trial of the mercenary killer who had wiped out the original habitat.

Now he stood with his only daughter scowling at the display screen that spread across one entire bulkhead of the departure lounge. It showed the long, sleek torch ship from Earth making the final delicate maneuvers of its rendezvous with the slowly revolving wheel of the habitat. George saw tiny puffs of cold gas squirting from the ship’s maneuvering rockets: thruster farts, he said to himself.

Like most of the habitat, the departure lounge was strictly utilitarian: a row of hard benches ran along its facing gray bulkheads, the scuffed, dull heavy steel hatch of the airlock between them. No windows; the only outside view was from the wide display screen that stretched above one of the benches.

Across from the wall screen, though, was a mural that Deirdre had painted as a teenager, a seascape she had copied from memory after studying a docudrama about Earth’s oceans. Deirdre’s murals decorated many of the otherwise drab sections of the habitat: Even the crude, gaudy daubings she had done as a child still remained on the otherwise colorless bulkheads of Chrysalis II. They were little better than graffiti, but her father would not permit anyone to remove them. He was proud of his daughter’s artistry, which had grown deeper and richer as she herself blossomed into adulthood.

But George was not admiring his daughter’s artwork now. Still staring at the display screen, he impatiently called out, “Screen, show Ceres.”

The display obediently shifted from the approaching torch ship to show the cratered, dusty rock of the asteroid around which the habitat orbited. Largest of the ’roids in the Belt, Ceres was barely a thousand kilometers across, an oversized boulder, dusty, pitted, dead. Beyond its curving limb there was nothing but the dark emptiness of infinity, laced with hard pinpoints of stars bright enough to shine through the camera’s protective filters.

Big George clasped his hands behind his back as he stared at the unblinking stars.

“I only came out here to get rich quick and then go back to Earth,” he muttered. “Never thought I’d spend the rest of my fookin’ life in the Belt.”

Deirdre gave her father a sympathetic smile. “You can go back Earthside any time you want to.”

He shook his shaggy head. “Nah. Been away too long. I’d be a stranger there. Leastways, I got some friends here.…”

“Tons of friends,” Deirdre said.

“And your mother’s ashes.”

Deirdre nodded. Mom’s been dead for nearly five years, she thought, but he still mourns her.

“You can visit me on Earth,” she said brightly. “You won’t be a total stranger.”

“Yeah,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Maybe.”

“I really have to go on this ship, Daddy. I’ve got to get to Jupiter; otherwise I won’t get the scholarship.”

“I could send you to school on Earth, if that’s what you want. I can afford it.”

“That’s what I want,” she said gently. “And now I can get it without putting the burden on you.”

“That ship’ll be burning out to Jupiter at one full g, y’know,” George said. “Six times heavier than here.”

“I’ve put in tons of hours in the centrifuge, Daddy. I can handle it. The station orbiting Jupiter is one-sixth gravity, just like here.”

George nodded absently. Deirdre thought he had run out of objections.

They felt the slightest of tremors and the speaker built into the overhead announced, “DOCKING COMPLETED.”

George looked almost startled. “I guess I never thought about you leavin’.”

“I’d have to go, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, I know, but…”

“If you don’t want me to go…”

“Nah.” He shook his head fiercely. “You don’t want to get stuck here the rest o’ your life, like me.”

“I’ll come back, Dad.”

George shrugged. “It’s a big world out there. Lots of things to see and do. Lots of places for a bright young woman to make a life for herself.”

Deirdre didn’t know what to say.

His scowl returning, George said, “Just don’t let any of those sweet-talkin’ blokes take advantage of you. Hear?”

She broke into a giggle. “Oh, Daddy, I know how to take care of myself.”

“Yeah. Maybe. But I won’t be there to protect you, y’know.”

Deirdre grabbed him by his unkempt beard with both hands, the way she had since she’d been a baby, and pecked at his cheek.

“I love you, Daddy.”

George blushed. But he clasped his daughter by both shoulders and kissed her solidly on the forehead. “I love you, Dee Dee.”

The airlock hatch swung open with a sighing puff of overly warm air. A short, sour-faced Asian man in a deep blue uniform trimmed with an officer’s gold braid stepped through and snapped, “Deirdre Ambrose?”

“That’s me.”

“This way,” the Asian said, gesturing curtly toward the passageway beyond the airlock hatch.

George Ambrose watched his only child disappear into the passageway, the first step on her journey to Jupiter. And then to Earth. I’ll never see her again, he thought. Never.

Then he muttered, “I still don’t see why they need a fookin’ microbiologist.”

FUSION TORCH SHIP AUSTRALIA

Suppressing an impulse to look back over her shoulder for one last glimpse of her father, Deirdre stepped carefully along the curving tube that connected the Chrysalis II habitat to the fusion ship. She could feel her pulse thumping along her veins. Chrysalis II was all the home she had ever known. She was heading into the new, the unknown. It was exciting—and a little scary.

The tube felt warmer than she was accustomed to. Its walls glowed softly white, as if fluorescent, with a spiral motif threading along its length. The flooring felt slightly spongy to her tread, not hard and solid like the decks of the habitat. She knew it was her imagination, but somehow she felt slightly heavier, as if the docked torch ship had a stronger gravity field than the habitat she was leaving.

She heard the airlock hatch clang shut behind her and a moment later the crabby-looking little ship’s officer scurried past her without speaking a word and disappeared around the curve of the tube. He’s not very friendly, Deirdre thought.

When she got to the end of the tube he was standing there, by the ship’s gleaming metal airlock, glaring at her with obvious impatience.

“Embarkation desk,” he said, jabbing a thumb past the hatch.

Deirdre stepped through the open hatch into a compartment of bare metal bulkheads, not much bigger than a closet. There were three ordinary-looking doors set into the bulkhead opposite her. She hesitated, not sure of which door she was meant to take.

“Right-hand side,” the officer snapped from the other side of the hatch, pointing again.

Deirdre opened the door and immediately saw that the torch ship’s interior was colorfully decorated. The compartment’s walls were covered with brightly patterned fabric. The overhead glowed with glareless lighting. The deck was thickly carpeted in rich earth tones of green and brown. Carpets! she thought. Incredible luxury, compared to Chrysalis II’s utilitarian décor. And this is just an anteroom, she realized.

In front of her there was another door, marked EMBARKATION RECEPTION. Deirdre tapped on it, and when no one answered, she cautiously slid it open.

A man in a white uniform was sitting behind a metal desk in the middle of the compartment. The bulkheads on both sides glowed pearl gray: smart screens, Deirdre recognized. Behind the seated officer another wall screen displayed a scene of golden-leafed trees, a forest of Earth, heartbreakingly beautiful.

The man got slowly to his feet. He, too, was Asian, and no taller than Deirdre’s chin. He smiled and made a courtly little bow, fists clenched at his sides.

“Welcome to Australia,” he said. Gesturing to the gracefully curved chair of leather and chrome in front of the desk, he invited, “Please, Ms. Ambrose, be seated and allow me to introduce myself: I am Dr. Lin Pohan, ship’s medical officer.”

Dr. Pohan was as small as the surly officer who had ushered Deirdre aboard the Australia. He was almost totally bald, except for a fringe of dull gray hair, but a luxuriant mustache of silver gray curled across his face. His skin was spiderwebbed with creases, and as he smiled at Deirdre his eyes crinkled with good humor. He looked like a wrinkled old gnome to Deirdre. She realized this man had never taken rejuvenation treatments. She had learned in her history classes that some people on Earth shunned rejuv on religious grounds. Could he be one of them?

“I’m pleased to meet you,” she said, a little hesitantly.

Dr. Pohan bobbed his head up and down, then replied, “We must go through the formalities of checking your boarding file and medical record.”

“That should all be in your computer,” Deirdre said.

“Yes, of course. But then I’m afraid I must subject you to a complete physical examination.”

“But my medical records—”

“Not good enough,” said Dr. Pohan, almost jovially. “You see, we have had a death aboard ship on our way out here from Earth. It is my duty to make certain we don’t have any others.”

“A death? Someone died?”

“One of the passengers. Most unusual. And most puzzling. If I can’t track down the reason for it, we will not be allowed to disembark our passengers. We will have made the long voyage to Jupiter for nothing.”

CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

Australia was a passenger vessel, designed to carry paying customers swiftly from the Earth/Moon system out to the rock rats’ habitat in orbit around the asteroid Ceres. It was built like a slim tower, with a dozen decks between the bridge in the ship’s nose and the fusion propulsion plant at its tail. Unlike the cumbersome ore ships that plodded across the inner solar system, Australia drove through space under constant acceleration, usually at one Earth-normal gravity or close to it, accelerating half the distance, then flipping over and decelerating the rest of the way. Except for the brief periods of docking or turn-around, the passengers would feel a comfortable one g environment for the entire voyage. Comfortable, that is, for those who were accustomed to Earth-normal gravity.

This trip was special, though. Instead of terminating at Ceres and then heading back Earthward, Australia was going on to the research station in orbit around the giant planet Jupiter, a journey that would take an additional two weeks from Ceres.

Captain Tomas Guerra’s quarters were up at the top of the stack, within a few steps of the bridge. The rooms were comfortable without being overly sumptuous. Guerra did not believe in showy displays of privilege: He kept the décor of his quarters quite simple, almost minimalist. Bulkheads covered in brushed aluminum. A few silk screen paintings of misty mountains and terraced rice paddies on the display screens. Spare, graceful Scandinavian furniture. His one obvious display of luxury was his set of solid gold cups in which he served sherry to special guests.

Katherine Westfall was indeed a very special guest. Reputedly the wealthiest woman in the solar system, she was a member of the powerful governing council of the International Astronautical Authority, the agency that controlled all spaceflight and much of the scientific research done off-Earth. Rumor had it that she was being considered for the chairmanship of the council.

“It’s very good of you to invite me to dinner,” said Katherine Westfall, in a hushed, little-girl voice.

Captain Guerra dipped his gray-bearded chin once. “It is very good of you to take the time to join me.”

Katherine Westfall was as slender and petite as a ballerina, and like a dancer she calculated virtually every move she made far in advance—as well as every word she spoke. She should have been at ease in the comfortably upholstered recliner in the captain’s sitting room, but as she smiled demurely at the man he got the impression from her steel gray eyes that she was wary, on guard.

“I hope you weren’t inconvenienced by the lower gravity while we were docked with Chrysalis,” the captain said politely. “The rock rats keep their habitat at lunar g.”

Katherine Westfall thought a moment, then replied, “It was rather exhilarating, actually.”

“Low g can be stimulating, can’t it?” the captain said. “But we make better time under a full gravity. Once I had to make an emergency high-thrust run to the research station in Venus orbit: two g.” He shook his head. “Not comfortable at all. Good thing it was only for a few days.”

Captain Guerra had lived on his ship since receiving his commission from the IAA many years earlier. The ship was home, his life, his reason for existence. Rarely did he go down dirtside at the Moon or Earth. He had never deigned to set foot on the Chrysalis II habitat orbiting Ceres in the Asteroid Belt or the Thomas Gold research station at Jupiter. Nor the scientific bases on Mars, or orbiting Venus. To say nothing of the massive habitat in orbit around Saturn, which he regarded as little more than a penal colony. Mercury he had visited once, briefly, because he had to oversee the unloading of a cargo of construction materials there. But most of his time he spent aboard his ship, his mistress, the love of his life.

Of course, he did not lead a completely celibate life. Sometimes very attractive women booked passage on Australia, and rank has its privileges. He wondered if Katherine Westfall would succumb to the romance of interplanetary flight. She hadn’t given a hint of such interest over the weeks since they’d left the Earth/Moon system, but still it was a pleasant possibility.

He had once been lean and sinewy, but the years of easy living as he ran Australia across the solar system had plumped his wiry frame. Now, as he sat facing the IAA councilwoman, he looked as well padded as the seat he reclined in.

Guerra poured two heavy gold cups of sherry, handed one to Mrs. Westfall, then touched the rim of his cup to hers.

“To a pleasant journey,” he said.

“It’s been quite pleasant so far,” Katherine Westfall said, with a smile. She sipped delicately.

“I am curious,” said the captain, “as to the reason for your traveling all the way out to Jupiter.”

For a moment she did not reply, simply gazed at the captain with her gray eyes half closed, obviously thinking about what her answer should be. Her face was long and narrow, with a pointed chin and nose so perfect it could only be the product of cosmetic surgery. Her hair was the color of golden brown honey, stylishly cut to frame her face like a tawny helmet. She wore a pale blue business suit, simple and unadorned, except for an egg-sized sapphire brooch on its lapel.

“As a member of the International Astronautical Authority governing council,” she said at last, so softly that the captain had to lean toward her to hear her words, “I feel it’s my duty to personally review each major research facility the IAA is supporting throughout the solar system.”

Captain Guerra nodded. “Starting with Jupiter?”

“Starting with the Gold station,” Katherine Westfall concurred. Then a slightly impish smile curved her lips. “I feel one should always go for the gold.”

She had been born Kate Solo, named thus by the mother who’d been abandoned by the man she had thought loved her. Growing up in the underground warrens of Coober Pedy, in the heart of Australia’s forbidding outback, little Kate swiftly learned that determination and courage could make up for lack of money and social position. While her mother slaved away in restaurant kitchens, Kate strove to be the best student in the region’s far-flung electronic school system, consistently at the head of her digital classes, even if she had to cheat a bit now and then. She won a university scholarship by the time she was fifteen and moved to Sydney. With her mother.

It was at a party on campus that she met Farrell Westfall, twenty-seven years her senior, quite wealthy from old family money. He was a university regent, she an economics major in her second year of study. “Go for the gold,” her mother advised her.

Kate married Westfall before she graduated, and lived in a fine house hanging over the rocks on a rugged beach north of Sydney. With her mother.

Kate Solo became Mrs. Katherine Westfall. He was more interested in polo than the business world; she was determined to make certain that the family fortune she had married into was not dissipated in the ups and downs of the global economy—or by the importunings of her husband’s lazy and whining relatives. She guided her feckless husband through the booms and busts of the next quarter century, and by the time he died of an unexpected massive coronary she was one of the wealthiest women in Australia. By the time her mother died, a decade later, Katherine Westfall was one of the wealthiest women on Earth.

She shared her wealth ostentatiously and was ultimately rewarded with a membership on the International Astronautical Authority’s governing council. The directors of the IAA expected their new member to be flattered and malleable. They planned to use her as a public relations figurehead: a handsome, philanthropic woman who could speak the usual platitudes about the importance of scientific research before government councils and influential donors.

They did not realize that Katherine Westfall had her own agenda in mind. “Get to the top,” her mother had often told her. “Whatever you do, get to the top. You’re not safe until you’re on top.”

So Katherine Westfall initiated a subtle yet relentless campaign to be elected chairman of the IAA’s governing council. From that position no one could challenge her, she would never have to worry about falling back into obscurity.

There were others who coveted the chairmanship, of course, but Katherine realized that her most dangerous rival was a man who claimed he had no interest in the position whatsoever: Grant Archer, director of the research station out at Jupiter. Archer was a danger to her, Katherine knew, despite his protestations of modest disinterest. He had to be stopped.

Halfway through dinner in the captain’s quarters, Guerra asked her, “But why Jupiter, if I may ask? Why don’t you start with the research bases on Mars? After all, that’s where the most interesting work—”

She didn’t wait for him to finish. “The leviathans,” she said, her voice still muted but quite firm. “The leviathans are on Jupiter. Nothing else in the entire solar system is so interesting, so … challenging.”

Captain Guerra’s shaggy brows knit. “Those big whales? What makes them so interesting to you?”

Katherine Westfall smiled sweetly, thinking that if Archer could prove that those Jovian creatures were intelligent, the IAA would offer him their chairmanship on a silver platter.

To Guerra, however, she said merely, “The scientists want an enormous increase in their budget so they can study those creatures. I’ve got to pay them the courtesy of visiting their facility in person to see what they’re doing.”

To herself she added, I’ve got to stop them. Cut them off. Bring Archer down. Otherwise I won’t be safe.

LEVIATHAN

Leviathan glided among the Kin along the warm upwelling current that carried them almost effortlessly through the endless sea. But the food that had always sifted down from the cold abyss above was nowhere in sight. All through Leviathan’s existence, the food had been present in abundance. But now it was gone. The Elders flashed fears that the Symmetry had been disrupted.

At least there was no sign of darters, Leviathan’s sensor parts reported. They watched faithfully for the predators. As a younger member of the Kin, Leviathan was placed on the outer perimeter of the vast school of the creatures, constantly alert for the faintest trace of the dangerous killers.

Even so, a deeper part of its brain puzzled over the strangeness. Could the Symmetry truly be broken?

More than that, something new and different was imposing on the Kin. Something alien. Strange, cold, insensitive creatures had appeared in the world. Tiny and solitary, they came from the cold abyss above, cruised off at a distance from the Kin, then disappeared up into the cold again. Uncommunicative creatures, smaller than one of Leviathan’s flagella members. When Leviathan and others of the Kin had flashed a welcome to them, the aliens blinked in gibberish and then fled.

Troubling. It disturbed the Symmetry, even though the Elders maintained that such pitifully small creatures could pose no danger to the Kin. They do not eat of our food, the Elders pictured, and they do not attack us. They can be safely ignored.

But then the flow of food from the cold abyss above had faltered and finally stopped. Leviathan wondered. Could the aliens be the cause of the break in the Symmetry?

Leviathan remembered back to the time when one of those aliens had seemingly helped Leviathan itself when it had wandered far from the Kin and was attacked by a pack of darters. The predators were tearing at Leviathan when this tiny, dark, hard-shelled alien had come to its aid. By the time the Kin reached Leviathan and drove off the darters, the alien was dying, sinking toward the hot abyss below.

Leviathan had tried to communicate with the alien, to thank it, but all the pictures Leviathan displayed on its flank went unanswered. Fearing that the alien would dissociate itself as it sank into the hot depths, Leviathan nosed beneath the pathetically tiny creature and lifted it on its back toward the cold abyss from which it had come.

Leviathan’s reward for this kindness was a spray of painful heat as the alien apparently gathered its last strength and flew upward, never to be seen again.

That was more than two buddings ago, Leviathan remembered. In that time, other aliens had invaded the Symmetry. Invaded. That was how Leviathan thought of them. Strange, cold, hard-shelled creatures that flashed colored images that made no sense at all. They came down from the cold abyss, loitered near the Kin for brief periods, then returned whence they came.

Aliens, Leviathan thought. Not darters or the filmy tentacled creatures that dwelled on the edges of the cold abyss. Creatures the like of which none of the Kin had ever seen before. Not even the hoariest of the Elders had any idea of what they might be.

Aliens. The thought troubled Leviathan. Perhaps the Elders were correct and these aliens could be safely ignored. But why were they here, disrupting the Symmetry? What did they want of Leviathan and its Kin?

Were they responsible for the interruption of the food flow, for the disruption to the Symmetry?

INFIRMARY

As Deirdre slowly undressed in the tiny privacy cubicle of the ship’s infirmary she heard her father’s warning in her mind. The gnomish little ship’s doctor certainly didn’t look like a smooth-talking bloke, but Deirdre wondered if this medical examination was nothing more than an excuse to see her naked. Peering at the cubicle’s overhead panel of lights, she could not see any obvious signs of a camera. But still …

She piled her clothes and underwear neatly on the little stool beside her and slipped into the shapeless green medical gown that was hanging from a peg on the bulkhead. It barely reached down to her thighs. Then she hesitated. If he’s watching me, she thought, he’ll know that I’m finished undressing.

Nothing. Not a sound from beyond the flimsy partition. Deirdre stood there for as long as she could stand it, then cautiously slid the partition aside and stepped back into Dr. Pohan’s office.

He wasn’t even there. Surprised, she didn’t know what to do. She felt slightly ridiculous in the flimsy medical gown. It was a dull olive green, not good for her complexion, she thought.

“DEPARTURE IN FIVE MINUTES,” announced the speaker set into the overhead.

The corridor door slid back and Dr. Pohan came in again, his wrinkled bald face quite serious.“The scanner was off-line,” he said, apologetically. “I had to get a technician to reboot it.”

Deirdre nodded and unconsciously tugged at the hem of her absurdly short garment.

The doctor led her down the corridor past three closed and unmarked doors, then pulled open a fourth. It was another small compartment with a glass booth standing in its middle. White medical cabinets lined the walls.

Dr. Pohan gestured to the booth. “Kindly step inside. This will only take a moment.”

Wordlessly, Deirdre entered the booth. The doctor shut its transparent door, then went to one of the cabinets. When he opened it, Deirdre saw that a control panel was inside, rows of switches and dials surmounted by a circular display screen.

“Please stand still and hold your breath,” the doctor called, his back to Deirdre.

She heard a faint buzzing, then a single pinging note.

“Very good,” said Dr. Pohan, turning back to her. “You can come out now.”

“That’s it?” she asked as she stepped out of the booth. “That’s the test?”

“Complete three-dimensional body scan,” the doctor said, bobbing his head. “Now all we need is a blood sample.”

He went to another cabinet, rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a medical syringe. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he said.

Deirdre thought otherwise, but she held out her bare arm for him to puncture.

“DEPARTURE IN SIXTY SECONDS,” said the overhead speaker.

“MAIN DRIVE IGNITION.”

Australia’s departure from Ceres was barely noticeable. Fully dressed once again, Deirdre felt a slight jar, nothing more. But then she realized that she was beginning to feel heavy, almost sluggish. The ship’s building up to one g, she told herself as she followed Dr. Pohan back to his office. It’s going to be like this all the way out to Jupiter.

Deirdre sank gratefully into the chair in front of the doctor’s desk. Dr. Pohan was smiling pleasantly at her as he tilted slightly back in his chair. The tips of his curling mustache almost reached the crinkled corners of his eyes, she saw.

“You have been a good patient, Ms. Ambrose.”

“What happens now?” she asked.

With a slight shrug, the doctor replied, “Now we wait for the computer to analyze your scan and blood test. That might take a few hours. You are free to go.”

“Go? Go where?”

Dr. Pohan glanced at his wrist, then answered, “It’s almost the dinner hour. Go to the ship’s lounge. Meet your fellow Jupiter-bound passengers. Your luggage has been delivered to your stateroom, of course.”

Deirdre felt puzzled. “But I don’t know where the lounge is. I don’t even know where my stateroom is. I’ve just come aboard—”

“Of course,” said the doctor. “This is all new to you, isn’t it?”

With a preening brush of his curly mustache, the doctor rose from his desk and took Deirdre by the hand. She got to her feet, towering over the diminutive Asian, and let him lead her to the corridor door.

“That way,” said Dr. Pohan, pointing down the passageway to the right. With his other hand he fished a remote control box from his tunic pocket.

“Main lounge,” he said to the palm-sized remote.

A series of yellow arrows began flickering along the deck tiles.

“Follow the arrows,” Dr. Pohan said. “They will lead you to the lounge.”

“But my stateroom?” Deirdre asked.

“Oh, just ask any of the map displays in the passageways. They’ll show you. It’s simple.”

Deirdre nodded, but she felt more confused than reassured.

SHIP’S PASSAGEWAY

Feeling disconcertingly heavy, Deirdre followed the blinking arrows along the passageway, then turned down a shorter segment that ended at the double doors of an elevator. The doors slid open as she approached them. Without her saying a word or touching a button, the doors closed silently and Deirdre felt the elevator dropping. Before she could catch her breath the cab stopped so abruptly that her knees buckled slightly. The doors slid open again.

Another corridor, with more yellow arrows beckoning her onward. There were other colored arrows, too, she saw: red, blue, green. They must lead to other parts of the ship, she thought. Maybe one set of them will guide me to my quarters.

Like the passageway upstairs, this corridor curved noticeably. The corridors run along the outer perimeter of each level, Deirdre figured. The offices and other compartments are built around the core. Wishing she’d spent more time in the centrifuge back home, Deirdre plodded along the passageway.

She hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when she saw a tall, lanky fellow standing up ahead of her, all arms and legs, scratching his thick strawberry red thatch of hair and looking very puzzled.

He was peering at the various blinking arrows on the deck, Deirdre saw.

“Are you lost?” she asked.

He twitched with surprise. “Oh! Hi!” he said, in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.

“Are you lost?” Deirdre repeated.

With another scratch of his bushy red mop he said, “I’m trying to find the main lounge.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Deirdre. “Just follow the yellow arrows.”

“That’s just it,” said the lanky fellow. “Which ones are the yellows? I’m color blind.”

“Color blind?” Deirdre had never heard of such a thing.

“I can’t make out any colors at all,” said the young man. “The world’s all black and white to me. With a lot of gray.”

“That’s awful!”

“It’s genetic. I was born with it.”

“You mean you can’t see any colors at all?”

“Not a one. I can tell that your hair is darker than the skin of your face. And your clothes are sort of pale gray.”

Deirdre felt terribly sad for him.

“My name’s Andy Corvus,” he said, sticking out his right hand.

“Deirdre Ambrose,” she replied, taking his hand in hers.

Andy Corvus was a centimeter or so taller than she, which somehow pleased Deirdre: she was almost always the tallest one in any group. He was thin as a reed, though, lanky and loose-jointed. His unruly thatch of red hair reminded Deirdre of her father. He’s what Dad must have looked like when he was young. A lot skinnier, though. His eyes were pale blue and his face was kind of cute, she thought, with a little button of a nose and a sprinkling of tiny freckles across it. There was something a little odd about his face, she realized, something slightly out of kilter. The two sides didn’t exactly match up, as if they were separate pieces that were pasted together a little unevenly. Deirdre decided it made him look more interesting than he would have otherwise.

He was wearing a bright red short-sleeved shirt over garish orange slacks. Terribly mismatched, Deirdre thought. Then she remembered that colors meant nothing to him.

“Deirdre’s a beautiful name,” he said. “A poetic name.”

Smiling shyly as she disengaged her hand, Deirdre said, “My friends call me Dee.”

He broke into a wide, toothy grin. “I’d like to be your friend, Dee.”

“Good.” She slipped her arm into his. “Now let’s go find the main lounge.”

MAIN LOUNGE

The yellow arrows ended at the open double doors of the main lounge. With Andy Corvus beside her, Deirdre stood indecisively at the doorway.

The lounge was luxuriously decorated with colorful sweeping draperies along the bulkheads and wide flat screens that displayed scenes from space: the beautiful swirling clouds of Jupiter, Saturn with its gaudy rings, the stark grandeur of the battered, pockmarked Moon, even the breathtakingly deep blue ocean world of Earth, flecked with brilliant white cloud formations.

Every table was occupied, she saw. More than two dozen men and women sat in small clusters at the little round tables scattered across the lounge. Most of them seemed intent on private conversations, heads nodding, expressions serious. But there was one group of a half-dozen men off in a corner, talking animatedly and suddenly roaring with laughter.

“Somebody told a joke, I betcha,” said Andy, needlessly.

“I didn’t realize there were so many going to Jupiter,” Deirdre said. “I thought it was only four replacements for the scientific staff.”

Corvus nodded vigorously. “Well, there’s a whole crew of scoopship people. But just four of us scooters. Plus a couple of dozen bean counters and paper shufflers.”

“Scooters?” Deirdre felt puzzled. “Bean counters?”

With a slightly lopsided grin, Corvus explained, “Scooters is a name for scientists. Don’t ask me where it comes from; that’s just what they call scientists at the research station. Bean counters are accountants, the people who handle the budgets and try to keep the scooters from spending too much.”

“And paper stuffers?”

“Paper shufflers,” Corvus corrected. “Administrators. Department chiefs and such. Back a long time ago they actually kept records on paper, y’know.”

“I’ve heard,” said Deirdre.

“Well, let’s find a table. I’m hungry.”

“They all seem to be filled.”

Pointing, Corvus said, “There’s one over by the wall with only one guy sitting at it. Maybe he won’t mind some company.”

Deirdre followed Corvus as he threaded through the occupied tables toward the lone passenger sitting by the bulkhead, beneath the screen displaying the sad, cratered face of the Moon, half in harsh sunshine, half in cold shadow.

As the two of them made their way across the lounge, heads turned. Men and women alike stared openly at Deirdre. She was accustomed to being stared at and gave no sign of noticing their attention, keeping her face perfectly serious as she walked beside the gangling, grinning Corvus toward the table by the bulkhead.

As they approached, Deirdre saw why the man was sitting alone. Half of his head was metal. His left arm was a prosthetic; through the open collar of his short-sleeved shirt she could see that the left side of his chest was metal, as well.

A cyborg. She shuddered inwardly. How could anyone allow himself to have half his body turned into a machine? Then she remembered: The mercenary soldier who had destroyed the original Chrysalis habitat had turned himself into a cyborg. He had murdered more than a thousand rock rats, innocent men, women, and children. Her father had put the man on trial years later, once he’d been captured. Dad wanted to execute him, she knew. But the rock rats decided to exile him permanently, instead.

Could this be the same person? Deirdre wondered. It has to be, she told herself. A cyborg, half man, half machine. Even his face was half sculpted metal, etched with fine looping swirls, like those tattooed tribesmen from some primitive tropical island on Earth.

The cyborg noticed them approaching and got to his feet. Gracefully, Deirdre noticed. Not ponderous at all. Like an athlete or a dancer.

Andy didn’t seem bothered at all by the half-man’s appearance. “Okay if we sit here with you?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” the cyborg answered in a deep baritone voice. “I welcome your company.”

A simmering suspicion pulsing along her veins, Deirdre sat beside Corvus, facing the cyborg. He remained standing until she was seated, then resumed his chair.

Before any of them could say anything a squat little robot waiter trundled up to the table, its flat top glowing with the bar menu. Andy tapped the image of a beer, then selected the brand he wanted from the list that instantly appeared on the screen. Deirdre chose a glass of Earthside chardonnay: expensive, but she figured it would be the last of her luxuries for a long while.

The cyborg already had a tall glass of something dark in front of him. Machine oil? Deirdre wondered, realizing it was a nonsensical thought, a stupid bit of prejudice.

“My name is Dorn,” the cyborg said. His right eye was gray and somehow mournful-looking, Deirdre thought. His left was a red-glowing camera lens.

Dorn. That wasn’t the name of the man who’d destroyed the old Chrysalis, she knew. His name was … she rummaged in her memory. Dorik Harbin. That was it.

Corvus, meanwhile, had stuck his hand across the table. “Andy Corvus,” he said amiably. Dorn grasped the offered hand in his human one.

Then the cyborg looked at her. Trying not to stare at the prosthetic arm, Deirdre mumbled, “Deirdre. My friends call me Dee.”

“Dee,” repeated the cyborg, almost solemnly.

The robot rolled back to their table with drinks on its flat top. Andy picked up the stemmed wineglass and handed it to Deirdre, then took his own tall, tapered pilsner glass of beer.

“What should we drink to?” Deirdre asked.

Dorn immediately replied, “To a pleasant trip to Jupiter.”

“To the leviathans,” Andy said.

Both men turned toward Deirdre. She gave them a tentative smile, then suggested, “To understanding.”

“Yes,” said Dorn. “To understanding.”

They clinked glasses. Then Andy asked, “Understanding what?”

“Ourselves,” said Dorn, in his slow, heavy voice. “I believe it was Socrates who said, ‘Know thyself.’ ”

“And Goethe,” Deirdre countered, “who said, ‘Know myself? If I knew myself I’d run away!’ ”

Dorn made a sound that might have been a chuckle, deep down in his half-metal chest. Andy looked puzzled.

“What’re you?” Corvus asked her, “some kind of a philosopher?”

Deirdre lowered her eyes and replied, “No, not at all. I just have an eidetic memory.”

“A photographic memory? Wow!” Corvus was obviously impressed.

“What is your technical specialty?” Dorn asked.

“Actually,” she answered, “I’m a microbiologist.”

“Microbiologist?” The human half of Dorn’s face looked incredulous.

She made an almost apologetic smile. “I know. It sounds strange, a microbiologist living at the habitat orbiting Ceres. But our health and safety people are very concerned with biofilms and other microbial threats. Chrysalis II is a pretty small community, and we live in a completely sealed environment. We have to be very careful about the microbes we carry around with us.”

Deirdre thought that Dorn’s human eye flickered momentarily when she mentioned Chrysalis II, but it was so brief that she couldn’t be sure.

“Don’t you have disinfectants?” Corvus asked. “Ultraviolet bug killers?”

Dierdre’s smile turned almost condescending. “Andy, our bodies are habitats for whole ecologies of microbes. If you took an ultrascan of your body, and removed all your own cells from the image, you’d still see your body and all your organs outlined in microbes. They’re everywhere.”

Dorn said, “It’s not Chrysalis II that surprised me. I’m wondering why a microbiologist is needed at Gold.”

“Yeah,” Corvus said. “Those whales are big, not little.”

With a slight shake of her head, Deirdre replied, “All I know is that the request for a microbiologist came from Grant Archer himself, the head of the whole Jupiter team.”

“He specifically asked for a microbiologist?” Dorn sounded incredulous.

“I suppose they want me for the same kind of thing I do at Chrysalis II: health protection.”

“It still sounds strange,” Dorn insisted. “Gold must have its own medical staff.”

With a shrug, Deirdre said, “I suppose we’ll just have to wait until we arrive there to see why they asked for me.” Then she added, “But it doesn’t matter what they expect me to do there. They’ve promised me a scholarship to the Sorbonne. I’ll be going to Earth! I’ll be going to our home world.”

JUPITER ORBIT: RESEARCH STATION THOMAS GOLD

Grant Archer slid wearily into bed next to his wife. Marjorie smiled at him and murmured, “Two more weeks.”

Grant tried to smile back, but failed. All these years, he thought. All these years and it’s going to end in failure. Abject failure.

Grant Armstrong Archer III had originally come to research station Gold as a graduate student, doing his mandatory four years of public service. He had dreams of becoming an astrophysicist, of studying collapsed stars and black holes, of perhaps learning how to create space-time warps that could allow humans to span the mind-numbing distances between the stars. But once he saw the leviathans he forgot all that. He never left the Jupiter region again, brought his wife to the Thomas Gold station and had two children with her, eventually became director of the station.

He was a quiet type, his demeanor usually serious, his actions studied and methodical. No blazing genius, Grant Archer was a fine administrator, smart enough to allow the younger men and women who showed flashes of brilliance to do their work without being overly bothered by the bureaucracies that dogged every research program. He had kept his youthful slimness, thanks to a metabolism that seemed unable to produce fat. After a quarter century of marriage he was still the earnest, broad-shouldered, good-looking man that Marjorie had fallen in love with back in their college days on Earth.

His one obvious physical change over those years was that his sandy brown hair had turned silver. Grant kept it cropped militarily short, almost down to a skullcap. And once he had been named director of the station he had grown a trim little beard; it made him look more mature, he believed, more impressive. His wife thought it gave him an air of authority, but it evaporated whenever he smiled.

“Is she really coming out here?” Marjorie asked drowsily.

Staring up at the shadowed ceiling of their bedroom, Grant nodded. Then, realizing his wife couldn’t see him in the darkness, he said, “She’s on the passenger list. Her, and a half-dozen of her personal staff.”

“Don’t let it worry you,” Marjorie advised sleepily. “She’s probably coming out here to give you some kind of award. You deserve it.”

Grant knew better. Marjorie turned over and went to sleep, but Grant could not close his eyes. Katherine Westfall is coming here. Herself. With her hatchet men. That’s what they are, Grant knew. He’d looked them up in the nets. Since being named to the IAA’s governing council, Westfall and her flunkies had ruthlessly slashed the organization’s research budget. The teams exploring Mars depended now entirely on private money; they were even allowing tourists to visit the Martian village that they had excavated. The work on Venus was down to almost nothing, as well.

And now she’s coming here.

Turning on his side, Grant told himself, They can’t close us down! They can’t! Those creatures are intelligent. I’m sure of it.

His mind kept returning to the mission, the journey into that immense alien sea. Twenty years ago, almost, yet he remembered every agonized moment of it. The surgical implants, the pain, the cold dread of being immersed in the high-pressure perfluorocarbon. Living in that slimy gunk, breathing it into his lungs instead of air.

The rapture of being linked to the submersible’s systems, feeling the power of the fusion drive as your own heartbeat, seeing through the dark forbidding sea with eyes that went far beyond puny human capability. What was it Lane had said about being linked? Better than sex. It was, in a way. Beyond human. Godlike.

It was dangerous, feeling all that power. The sin of pride. Hubris. They had nearly died in that deep, dark sea.

But meeting the leviathans had been worth all the pain, all the danger to body and soul. Seeing those incredible creatures, bigger than mountains, huge, immense, living deep in the Jovian ocean, lords of their world.

The mission had nearly killed them all. Lane O’Hara had been seriously hurt. Zeb Muzorewa, kind, thoughtful, gifted Zeb had almost died. Zeb had been Grant’s mentor, his guide. Grant had been lucky to survive the mission, lucky to return to the world of humans.

Not luck, he reminded himself. It wasn’t luck. That Jovian creature helped us. It saw we were sinking and it carried us on its back, like a dolphin carrying a drowning man, up to where we could get our propulsion systems working again and get out of the ocean, back into orbit and to the station.

They’re intelligent. Those immense creatures are intelligent. Grant believed it with all his soul. The Leviathans are intelligent. They have to be.

Grant glanced at his wife, lying beside him. For several moments he listened to her breathing: deep and regular. Sound asleep. I wish I could sleep, too.

The memory of that mission haunted him. No humans had tried to penetrate Jupiter’s ocean since then. The cost in human lives was too high. People had been killed, people had been permanently disabled. Grant himself still limped from the electronic implants that had been dug into his legs. Stem cell treatments, years of physical therapy and psychological counseling, yet still he limped. Psychosomatic, the medics told him. Yes, of course. But his legs still ached.

Lane O’Hara had returned to Earth for recuperation. She never came back to Jupiter. Muzorewa spent months in recovery and once he’d returned to Gold he was named director of the research station. He immediately started planning a new mission into the ocean of Jupiter, but this time it would be robotic. Zeb would not send fragile humans into that alien environment. Not willingly.

When Zeb retired and Grant succeeded him as station head, he continued that policy. Uncrewed vessels of increasing sophistication went into the Jovian ocean. To study the Leviathans they had to go so deep that communication with the orbiting station was cut off. The scientists had to wait impatiently until the probes returned to find out what they had learned. Many probes never returned, and the scientists never learned why.

Grant knew that there was only one way to save the work he directed, one way to continue studying the leviathans. He had to prove beyond a doubt that the Jovian creatures were intelligent. And to do that, he had to send a human crew back into that cold, deep, alien sea. For years he had quietly, secretly, diverted funding from the research station’s normal programs into a furtive effort to build a new submersible capable of carrying a human crew down to the depths where the leviathans dwelled.

Now Katherine Westfall was on her way to Jupiter to slash the funding jugular of the research station. Once she found out about the new submersible she would have Grant’s head on a platter. Maybe she already knows, he thought, and she’s coming out here to preside at my execution personally.

He lay on his back and stared sleeplessly into the shadows of his bedroom. I can’t send people back down there, Grant told himself. It’s too dangerous; I can’t send people to risk their lives like that. How can I ask them to go where I can’t go myself?

But there’s no other option. We’ve learned as much as we can from the automated probes. We’ve got to get a team of scientists down into that ocean, with equipment that will allow us to make meaningful contact with the leviathans. Or forget about them altogether. Give up trying to make contact with an intelligent alien race.

He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer for guidance. No answer came to him, but Grant accepted God’s seeming silence. He hears, Grant told himself. He’ll send the answer. One way or another.

FUSION TORCH SHIP AUSTRALIA

“What’s so great about Earth?” Corvus asked, looking puzzled. “I’ve lived there most of my life. It’s no big thrill.”

Before Deirdre could think of a reply, Dorn said gravely, “I can see where Dee would be excited about it. If you’ve never been there before, well … it is big, and lots of it is still quite beautiful. The tropical rain forests—”

“What’s left of them,” Corvus grumbled.

“The open plains, the mountains, the oceans. They truly are beautiful, more beautiful than any space habitat, certainly.”

Corvus shrugged impatiently. “And the cities, with the crowds and crooks, the noise, the dirt, the diseases.”

“Don’t you like Earth, Andy?” Deirdre asked.

His expression softened. “Oh, I guess so. But it’s not paradise, believe me.”

“I still want to see it, experience it,” she said.

“It’s worth seeing,” said Dorn, almost wistfully.

“Why are you going to Jupiter, Andy?” Deirdre asked.

Corvus made a half-embarrassed grin, glanced at the cyborg, then looked back at her. “I’m going to make contact with those big critters in the ocean there.”

“Make contact with the leviathans?” Dorn said.

Bobbing his head up and down, Corvus said, “Yep. The leviathans.”

“Make contact?” Deirdre prodded. “What do you mean?”

Both hands fidgeting with his tall beer glass, Corvus replied, “You know what DBS is?”

“It’s a sort of brain probe, isn’t it?” she said.

“Sort of. But it’s more than that. A lot more. Deep brain stimulation. It’s a whole new field.”

“Didn’t they try treating cases of depression that way?” Deirdre asked.

Corvus waved a hand in the air. “It didn’t really treat depression. It just tranquilized the patient so he didn’t show any symptoms anymore.”

“The zombie machine,” Dorn muttered.

“That’s what some people call it,” Corvus said, looking slightly nettled. “They used it on convicts in jail. Kept them pacified, cut down on prison violence. A lot.”

“But the suicide rate tripled.”

Deirdre said, “You seem to know a lot about it, Dorn.”

The human half of his face twitched into what might have been a grimace. “I’ve received an accelerated education on the subject.”

“How come?” Corvus asked.

Flexing his prosthetic hand, Dorn replied, “I have been hired by the scientific directors of station Gold as a sort of experimental animal. They want to see how my body might be advantageous when it comes to probing Jupiter’s ocean. For the past year I’ve been a prime research specimen at Selene University, on the Moon.”

“Ooh.” Corvus’s face lit up with understanding. “Being half mechanical, you might be able to take the pressures of a deep dive better, is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“Humans haven’t gone down into the Jovian ocean in twenty years,” Deirdre said. “They tried two crewed dives and both were disasters.”

“Still,” said Dorn, “the scientists would like to go deep enough into the ocean to observe the leviathans.”

“They send automated probes down deep,” Corvus said.

Dorn nodded. “Now they want to send people.”

“But why?” asked Deirdre. “It’s so dangerous! And the robot probes can do anything people can do, can’t they?”

Corvus shook his head. “They can do everything except react to the unexpected, Dee. The robots can only answer the questions that we knew how to ask before they go into the water. You can’t program a computer to handle unexpected situations.”

“You can link human controllers,” she pointed out. “Have them in charge in real time so that—”

Dorn interrupted her. “As I understand it, the probes must go so deep into the ocean that they can’t maintain contact with the orbiting station. Electronic signals can’t penetrate the depth of water. Not even laser beams can get through.”

“Couldn’t they put relay stations into the ocean?” Deirdre asked. “They could pass the signals—”

“It’s too deep,” Corvus interrupted. “And the relays would have to stay more or less fixed in position.”

“Impossible in the currents of that ocean,” added Dorn.

Deirdre said, “Oh. So that’s why they want to send humans again.”

Both men nodded.

“But it’s so dangerous!” Deirdre exclaimed again. “Who would want to go down there?”

“I would,” Corvus answered, without a microsecond’s hesitation.

Deirdre looked aghast at the idea. “Why would you—”

“To make contact with the leviathans,” Corvus said before she could finish her question.

“Using DBS?” Dorn asked.

Bobbing his head again, Corvus said, “It’s a variation of the deep brain stimulation concept. You can link your brain to the brain of another person. It was originally developed for the intelligence services, and police. You know, you can probe a person’s brain, pull out everything he knows, whether he likes it or not.”

“Is that legal?” Deirdre wondered.

Ignoring her question, Corvus went on, fairly trembling with growing enthusiasm, “Well, back at the University of Rome, our professor got the idea of linking with nonhuman animals. Great for biological studies. Ecological, too. You can experience what an antelope or a lion experiences, see the world the way they see it. We started out with elephants, then chimpanzees. The anthropologists went crazy over it!”

“I can imagine,” Dorn muttered.

“No, seriously,” Corvus said eagerly. “I was one of Professor Carbo’s best students. I could link more easily than any of the others. I was an elephant out in the Serengeti for a solid week!”

Deirdre giggled. “I hope it wasn’t mating season.”

Looking almost hurt, Corvus said, “This is the only way we’re going to make any meaningful contact with the leviathans. Using neuro-optronic probes to link our brains with theirs.”

“Assuming the leviathans have brains,” Dorn said.

“They’ve got to! Critters that big? They’ve got to have a central nervous system with a brain to direct those enormous bodies.”

Dorn shook his head slightly. “You’re assuming that Jovian biology works on the same principles as our own. We have no way of knowing that’s true.”

“Wrong!” Corvus snapped. “We’ve studied those living balloons that float through the Jovian atmosphere, and some of the other airborne creatures. They all have brains.”

“Do you intend to try to link with them before you try to reach the leviathans?”

“I sure do.”

Deirdre put a hand on Corvus’s arm. “Andy, does that mean you’ll have the linking equipment implanted in your own brain?”

“Doesn’t have to be implanted,” Corvus said. Tapping his temple, he explained, “You just fit the sensors on your head, like a crown.”

“But how will you fit the sensors on the leviathans?” she asked.

Corvus’s enthusiasm wavered the slightest bit. “Well, we’ll have to get close enough to one of ’em so we can attach a sensor rig to its hide.”

“Like harpooning a whale?”

“Sort of.”

“Shades of Moby Dick,” Dorn muttered.

“And you intend to go down into the ocean and do this yourself?” Deirdre asked.

Corvus nodded. “Yep. Sure do.”

The three of them looked at each other, none of them knowing what to say next.

“DINNER IS SERVED IN THE MAIN DINING ROOM,” announced the ship’s intercom through the speakers set into the lounge’s overhead.

MAIN LOUNGE

“Dinner!” Corvus fairly leaped to his feet. “Let’s go. I’m starving.”

Deirdre felt relieved as she pushed her chair away from the cocktail table. She felt uncomfortable about Andy’s blithe willingness to immerse himself in the dark depths of the Jovian ocean and connect his brain to an optronic stimulator system. And my other companion is a cyborg, she said to herself. I sure can pick ’em.

Dorn got to his feet too and the three of them joined the others heading for the dining room.

Before they went a dozen steps, though, a burly, shaggy man in a tan one-piece coverall strode up to them and took Deirdre’s wrist in his thick-fingered hand.

“You’ve got to be the most beautiful woman aboard this ship,” he said, staring at her with unabashed admiration. “No, I take it back. You’re the most beautiful woman this side of Earth.”

“Thank you,” Deirdre said, deftly removing his hand from her wrist.

“I’m G. Maxwell Yeager. Don’t ask what the G stands for. I’m your dinner partner.”

G. Maxwell Yeager was almost as tall as the lanky Corvus and almost as wide across the shoulders as the cyborg Dorn. His face was stubbled with the beginnings of a dirty-brown beard and his hair, also sandy-colored, was a smoothly brushed mane that fell past his shoulders. He wore a rumpled khaki jumpsuit and an incongruous pair of shiny black cowboy boots, into which he had stuffed the legs of his coveralls.

He appraised Deirdre with a look that was halfway between sheer admiration and a blatant leer.

Reaching for her wrist again, he said, “Come on, let’s go to dinner.”

Deirdre backed away a step and Dorn moved between them, grasping Yeager’s extended arm with his prosthetic hand. “The lady is with us,” he said.

Yeager stared at the cyborg for a moment, then shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Okay, okay. In that case, I’ll join you.”

With Dorn on one side of her and Andy Corvus on the other, Deirdre left the lounge and entered the adjacent dining room. Shaggy-haired Yeager kept in step with them, on Dorn’s other side.

“Hey, Max,” a younger coverall-clad man called to him. “I thought you were gonna eat with us.”

Yeager waved at him dismissively. “I found somebody better-looking than you ugly mugs.”

Deirdre saw that the younger man was part of the raucous group that had been sitting together in the lounge.

“Scoopship team,” Yeager explained to her. “Engineers. You know what they say about engineers: so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

Andy giggled. Dorn remained impassive. Deirdre wondered why Yeager made fun of engineers.

“I’ve heard about you,” Yeager said to the cyborg. “You’re a priest or something, aren’t you?”

“Or something,” Dorn muttered.

Deirdre felt Dorn’s reticence like a palpable force. She said to Yeager, “And what’s your reason for going to Jupiter, Mr. Yeager?”

“It’s Doctor Yeager,” he replied, drawing himself up haughtily. “Doctor of engineering physics, University of Arizona.” Then he grinned at her. “But you can call me Max.”

“Hi, Max,” Corvus said good-naturedly from Deirdre’s other side. “I’m Andy.”

Yeager hadn’t taken his eyes off Deirdre. “And pray tell, fair one, what might your name be?”

With some reluctance, she told him, “Deirdre. Deirdre Ambrose.”

“Deirdre,” Yeager echoed. “That’s an Irish name. It means ‘passionate,’ doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Deirdre lied.

The dining room was just as sumptuously decorated as the lounge, and it was filling up rapidly. Yeager spotted a table for six halfway across the big chamber and led the others to it. He moved around the table to sit beside Deirdre, then tipped the chair on his other side to lean against the table.

“Put up the chair beside you, Andy,” he said to Corvus as they all sat down.

Blinking in puzzlement, Corvus asked, “Why?”

“They’ll think we’re saving the seats for another couple of people,” Yeager explained. “That way we can just be the four of us without any strangers butting in.”

“But we’re all strangers,” Corvus blurted. “I mean, we just met a few minutes ago.”

Yeager waved him down. “Nah, we’re old buddies. Shipmates.”

He dominated their conversation all through dinner, talking almost exclusively about himself.

“So I tackled the challenge. Me and my grad students. That’s three of them over at the table across the room, with the scoopship team. We designed a submersible vehicle that can carry a maximum of six human crew a thousand kilometers deep into the Jovian ocean and allow them to cruise down there for at least five days.”

“A considerable engineering challenge,” Dorn admitted, as he carefully brought a forkful of hydroponic greens to the human side of his mouth.

Yeager agreed cheerfully. “There’ve been two human missions into that ocean and both ended in disaster. Casualties. People got killed.”

“The pressure down that deep must be incredible,” Corvus mused.

“It is, and then some,” Yeager said. “Some of the uncrewed probes have been crushed. I mean, it’s tough down there.”

Deirdre listened with half an ear as Yeager nattered on. She wondered about Dorn. He was a priest? That was weird. He wasn’t wearing anything that looked clerical: just plain gray coveralls. The left side of his face was etched metal, as was the top of his head. His left arm was prosthetic. A priest? she wondered. He said the scientists wanted to see if he could handle the pressures of a deep dive better than a normal human. That means they’re planning a crewed mission into the ocean. After nearly twenty years. After killing people both times they tried it before.

“So I completed the design and my people have built the dingus out at Jupiter orbit,” Yeager was saying. “Now I’m heading out to the Gold station to supervise the final checkout before we start testing the beast.”

Andy Corvus looked impressed. “A submersible that can carry humans safely deep down into that ocean.”

Yeager mopped up the sauce on his plate with a crust of soybread. “It was a tough design challenge, let me tell you.”

No one responded to that, so he went on, holding the dripping crust in two fingers, “The secret is, you’ve got to make the beast big. I mean big. Big as the research station, almost. The problem with those earlier birds is they made ’em too small.”

“As big as Gold itself?” Dorn asked, intrigued despite himself.

Yeager nodded as he popped the bread in his mouth and chewed vigorously.

“That big, just to hold six people?” Corvus asked.

Gulping down the crust, Yeager said, “You need the size to handle the pressures. Compression. The vehicle’s built like a series of nested shells, one within the other. Like those Russian dolls, you know.”

“Babushka dolls,” Corvus said.

“Matryoshka,” Deirdre corrected.

Yeager grinned at her. “You know, for an incredibly beautiful woman, you’re pretty smart.”

Dorn bristled visibly, but Deirdre simply gave the engineer an icy glare.

Yeager took it all without malice. “Freedom of speech,” he said, almost wistfully. “It can get you into a lot of trouble. Ah well. What’s for dessert?”

“Tell us more about this ship you’ve designed,” Corvus said. “I’m going to be one of your passengers.”

“You?” Yeager looked surprised.

“Me,” Andy said. For once, he looked totally serious.

PASSENGER QUARTERS

Dorn accompanied Deirdre to her stateroom once dinner was finished. As Dr. Pohan had told her, the map screens placed strategically along the passageway bulkheads showed where her quarters were and how to get there. All she had to do was ask.

Despite her assurances to her father, the higher g force of the ship’s acceleration was making Deirdre feel weary, slow.

“Thank you,” she said as they walked slowly along the passageway. “I appreciate your protecting me from Dr. Yeager.”

“I learned courtesy from a very noble woman,” Dorn said, his voice low, heavy.

With a tired smile, Deirdre added, “I’ve fended off showoffs like Yeager most of my life, but I’m glad I didn’t have to do it alone, tonight.”

“De nada,” he said.

“You speak Spanish?”

“She did.”

“You must have loved her very much.”

Dorn shook his head slowly. “It’s not that simple.”

“Oh.”

Following the maps displayed upon the wall screens, they at last found Deirdre’s stateroom. Its door was like all the others that lined the passageway except that the oblong electronic screen on it bore her name. Another couple came up the passageway from the other side, deep in whispered conversation. They stared at Dorn as they squeezed by.

“I should be jealous of you,” Deirdre said, once they had passed.

“Jealous?”

“Usually I’m the one people stare at.”

Dorn said nothing.

“Since I was twelve,” she went on.

It was impossible to read the expression on the human side of his face. For long moments they simply stood there in the passageway, silent. For the first time in many years, Deirdre wasn’t sure what she should say, how she should handle this … cyborg.

“Thank you,” Dorn said at last.

She blinked at him. “For what?”

“For not asking about my past. For not probing into my life story.”

“It’s painful to you.”

“Painful. Yes.”

Very softly, she said, “Everybody has pain in their lives, Dorn.”

“I suppose that’s true,” he said, without much conviction.

Even more unsure of herself, Deirdre said, “Well, if you ever want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

This was the moment when guys made their move, Deirdre knew, but the cyborg merely bowed stiffly a few centimeters, then turned and started walking up the passageway.

But after a few steps he stopped and said over his shoulder, “My dossier is on file at Ceres. Look under the name ‘Dorik Harbin.’ ”

Then he proceeded up the passageway, the overhead lights glinting off the etched metal of his skullcap. Deirdre watched him for several moments, then touched the fingerprint-coded lock that opened her door.

Dorik Harbin, she thought. He is the man who wiped out the original Chrysalis, slaughtered all those people! He’s the man Dad wanted to execute. Yet he doesn’t seem like a murderer now. He’s … She searched for a word, decided at last to give it up. Then she remembered that Yeager said Dorn was a priest of some sort.

A priest?

It’s been a strange first night, Deirdre thought as she stepped into her stateroom. And we have two more weeks to go.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She felt that it would be good to get into bed and stop fighting this heavy gravity that was pulling on her.

Then she looked around the spacious compartment for the first time. Deirdre’s stateroom was considerably more splendid than the quarters she was accustomed to at home. All this space for one person! she marveled. Of course, she realized, it’s designed for a couple. Eying the wide, low bed, she giggled at the thought that it was big enough for a team of acrobats.

Her one travel bag was sitting on a luggage rack at the foot of the bed. She unpacked, then undressed, did her ablutions in the handsomely appointed lavatory, and avoided the temptation to try out the deep tub of the spa. Pulling on a shapeless old pullover shirt that reached to her hips, Deirdre sat on the bed and tried not to look at the blank wall screen.

Go to sleep, she told herself. Don’t pry into the man’s past.

Yet it was Dorn himself who told her that the rock rats’ settlement at Ceres held a dossier on him, under the name Dorik Harbin. She wondered why he no longer called himself that.

Yeager seemed to know something about him, Deirdre thought. All through dinner the engineer behaved as if he knew all about Dorn’s past. But then Yeager acted as if he knew everything about everything, she told herself.

Forget about it, she told herself. Let sleeping cyborgs lie. She stretched out on the bed and pulled the thin sheet up to her chin. But in her mind’s eye she kept seeing Dorn, half human, half machine. Why? How?

She remembered a line she’d read at school about a famous financier who had faced an ethical problem of some importance. “Bernard Baruch sat on his favorite park bench, struggling with his conscience,” the author had written. Then he added, “He won.”

Smiling to herself, Deirdre decided that she would override her conscience, too.

She sat up and called, “Computer, what’s the time lag between here and Ceres?”

The wall screen glowed softly and the computer’s synthesized voice answered, “Four seconds, one way.”

I can get the information in less than eight seconds, Deirdre realized.

“Computer, query the Chrysalis II habitat for the personnel dossier of Dorik Harbin.”

“Acknowledged.”

Deirdre lay back on the bed again and commanded the lights to switch off. I’ll read his file in the morning, she said to herself. After a good night’s sleep.

But she found that she could not sleep. Tired from the heavy gravity though she was, she was too curious to fall asleep. She got up and went to the tiny swivel chair at the compartment’s built-in desk and switched on the computer again.

And there it was: Dossier, Dorik Harbin. Born in Montenegro, Earth. Parents, two sisters killed in ethnic cleansing. Joined local militia at age twelve. Recruited by International Peacekeeping Force. Quit IPF to join Humphries Space Systems as mercenary soldier. Convicted of destroying original Chrysalis habitat, killing one thousand seventeen men, women, and children. Sentenced to permanent exile from Chrysalis II and all other Asteroid Belt communities.

Deirdre stared at the words on the wall screen. Her blood ran cold. He’s been involved in death and murder since he was a child!

She watched the video of Dorik Harbin’s trial. He offered no defense. He seemed to expect to be executed, seemed to want to be killed. But then an elderly woman in a powerchair rolled herself up to the cyborg and pled for mercy, saying that he had completely changed his personality, begging the inhabitants of Chrysalis II to exile Dorik Harbin, not kill him.

The dossier stopped with the rock rats’ decision to exile Dorik Harbin. They had no further interest in Dorik Harbin. But Deirdre did. She was riding out to Jupiter with a mass murderer. He may say he’s a priest now but he has blood on his hands. She wanted to know a lot more about this Dorik Harbin, or Dorn, as he now called himself. A lot more.

KATHERINE WESTFALL’S SUITE

Katherine Westfall’s three-room suite was up near the top of Australia’s long, slim body, one level down from the captain’s quarters. The staff people she had brought with her were ensconced two levels lower, separated from Mrs. Westfall by “officer’s territory,” the compartments where the ship’s officers were quartered. Still, even her staff’s accommodations were much more spacious and sumptuously decorated than the compartments for ordinary passengers and the ship’s crew.

Katherine was reclining against a mound of pillows on her bed, gazing out through the glassteel port set into the bulkhead of her bedroom. Countless stars hung out there, brilliant jewels against the eternal darkness, steady and unblinking. Earth and its bleak, sad-faced Moon were far behind the ship as it hurtled through space toward distant Jupiter.

Her personal communicator lay on the bed beside her, its palm-sized screen displaying a star chart. Katherine was teaching herself astronomy, or trying to. The chart didn’t seem to match what she was seeing outside, though.

Her slim brows knitting in frustration, she thought she understood where the problem was. The stupid tutorial on the screen was displaying how the stars would look from the surface of Earth. The ship was in space, and many, many more stars were visible. Thousands of stars too dim to be seen through Earth’s thick atmosphere now glowed at Katherine, blanketing the outlines of the constellations that she should be finding.

Her frustration gave way to understanding. Too many stars, she told herself. God’s overwhelming me with more information than I need. It was a trick she had used herself, from time to time. Drown an investigator in data. Give them what they want, but bury it in so much information that they’ll never be able to find the pattern they’re looking for.

Katherine Westfall smiled at the stars. And she thought that an astronomy display that showed all the myriad of stars one sees in space, but highlights the stars that one would see from Earth, might make a decent profit for an entrepreneur who knew how to bring a new product to market. She filed the idea away in her mind, alongside other ideas that she had stored there. It’s never too late to make a profit, she reminded herself. I may be retired from the corporate world, but that doesn’t mean I have to stick entirely to philanthropy.

Philanthropy. The word jogged her back to reality. You’re not here to study astronomy, she told herself. You’re spending six precious weeks heading for Jupiter to do what’s needed out there. It’s time to cut them off. No excuses. No mercy. Take a good look around their research station and then send them all packing back to Earth. Take Archer down before he can make his move against you.

Grant Archer was a threat. The head of the scientific team at Jupiter was on the short list to be appointed the next director of the IAA, the position Katherine wanted for herself. Not merely a council member; she had to be the director. Had to be. She heard her mother’s voice in her mind: “Get to the top, Katie. Whatever you do, get to the top. You’re not safe until you’re on top.”

She knew that Archer and his staff of scientists were feverishly trying to complete a new submersible craft and send a crew of volunteers down into that murderous ocean. To study the leviathans. It was supposed to be a secret, but the scientists could keep no secrets from her. She had her sources of information in place aboard the research station.

He thinks that a successful mission to study those creatures will guarantee his appointment to the IAA directorship. He thinks he’ll be able to jump ahead of me.

Unconsciously, Katherine shook her head. Archer and his scientists may say they want to study those Jovian beasts, but what they’re really going to do is kill more people. Like they killed Elaine.

It had been a shock to Katherine Westfall when she discovered that she had a sister. Her mother had never told her of it. Not in all the years they had lived together had her mother once mentioned that she’d had another daughter, years before Katherine: Elaine.

Katherine discovered her sister’s existence the day after her mother’s funeral, as she went through the pitiful remnants that her mother had left behind. A scattering of photos, most of them obviously taken many years earlier, when her mother had been young and pretty, long before the years of toil had ground her down to a hard, suspicious shell of a gray-haired woman.

Two images in the computer file showed her mother with a baby. Only two images out of hundreds that had accumulated over the years. But those two images sparked Katherine’s lively interest because both dated from before her own birth. Who was this baby? Why was her mother cradling the infant so tenderly in her arms?

The advantages of wealth include the ability to buy information. Katherine used her corporate security office to hire private investigators and track down this mystery child.

She learned at last that her mother had borne a daughter to one of her earliest lovers, nearly ten years before Katherine had been born. The man was wealthy, powerful. He refused to marry her mother, but took the baby from her to raise as his own. Mother never saw her again, Katherine realized. That’s what made her so bitter. That’s why she was so wary when Katherine met Farrell Westfall. “Get him to marry you,” Mother had insisted. “Marriage or nothing.”

So she had married. And her mother had died wealthy and comfortable. And Katherine learned she had a sister.

Her sister was a scientist who had been at research station Thomas Gold, orbiting Jupiter. But now, Katherine had found, she was back on Earth. In a convalescent hospital in Ireland.

She had traveled halfway across the world to meet her sister and arrived exactly two hours too late. Elaine O’Hara had died at almost the moment Katherine had left Sydney. She had been in poor health physically and emotionally since she’d taken part in the ill-fated mission into Jupiter’s deep, seething ocean.

Jupiter had killed Katherine’s only sister.

No, she told herself as she lay on the bed in her luxurious stateroom aboard Australia. It wasn’t Jupiter that had killed her; it was the single-minded, blindly arrogant scientists who had sent her to her death.

She smiled to herself, coldly. The sister she had never known would become the excuse she needed to kill the scientists’ investigation of Jupiter. One way or another, she was going to send them all packing back to Earth. And if anyone questioned her motives, she could always tell them about her dear, martyred sister and point the finger of accusation at Archer and all the other heartless scientists who willingly sent innocents to their deaths.

ELECTRONICS WORKSHOP

Andy Corvus was not smiling as he bent over the electronics components scattered across the worktable.

“Murphy’s Law,” he muttered to himself. “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

“What seems to be the problem?” Dorn asked.

The cyborg was sitting easily on a swivel-topped stool a meter or so from Corvus, who was on his feet, staring unhappily at the hardware strewn along the table. The electronics workshop was small, hardly big enough for the two men. Its one workbench was fully equipped, though, with tools and diagnostic instruments. Corvus wondered how Australia’s maintenance crew kept the ship going with such a minuscule workshop, but then he guessed that the ship’s systems got inspected and overhauled regularly in port, after a trip was finished.

Corvus looked up at Dorn and his face went from a frustrated scowl to a sheepish expression. “I’ve been working on this rig since we left Selene and it’s still not right.” Pointing at a gray titanium cylinder resting on the workbench, no bigger than his fist, he said, “I’ve got to get all these components to fit into that container. Six kilos of goods in a five-kilo bag.”

Dorn waved his human hand. “Get a bigger container.”

“It’s not that easy,” Corvus said, looking chagrined. “The size of the container is dictated by the volume available in the dolphin’s skull.”

“Dolphin?”

Grinning crookedly, Andy said, “Sure. Didn’t you know we’re carrying dolphins aboard the ship? Taking them out to the Gold station.”

“Dolphins.” Dorn seemed incredulous.

“It’s part of my work,” Corvus explained. “I’m brain-linking with the dolphins as a sort of preliminary test, to see if I can make contact with the leviathans.”

“And we’re carrying dolphins on this ship all the way out to Jupiter?”

Corvus nodded enthusiastically. “We sure are. Four whole decks have been converted into an aquarium for them.”

Dorn shook his head in disbelief.

“I was going to try to make contact with them later today, but if I can’t get my transceiver into the volume they’ve allowed for their skulls…”

“You’ll have to make smaller components,” Dorn said, quite matter-of-factly. Then he added, “Or make more room in the dolphins’ skulls.”

Deidre had slept poorly, her dreams filled with scenes of war and bloodshed. Dorn—Dorik Harbin—didn’t appear in those dreams; at least she didn’t remember his presence. But the dreams were horrifying, people being slaughtered, villages burned to the ground. And the old Chrysalis habitat methodically destroyed, slashing laser beams ripping its components apart, people blasted into the vacuum of space, not even able to scream as their lifeblood spewed out of them.

She was glad that Dorn wasn’t in the dining room when she came down for breakfast. But as she slid her tray along the dispenser tables she saw Max Yeager sitting off in a corner by himself, as if he’d been waiting for her.

As soon as he saw Deirdre the burly engineer got up from his solitary table and buzzed over to her.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling widely. “I hope you slept well.”

“Not very,” Deirdre replied.

She filled her tray with a plate of eggs, a mug of fruit juice, and a dish of melon balls, Yeager beside her every step of the way. She found an empty table and Yeager immediately pulled out a chair in his meaty hands and held it for her.

“I didn’t sleep all that well, either,” he said as he sat across the table from her. “Strange surroundings, eh? Have you done much traveling?”

With a shake of her head, Deirdre admitted, “This is my first trip away from home.”

“I’ve traveled a lot,” Yeager said. “Been to Mercury twice, helping Yamagata Corporation design those big solar energy satellites they’re putting up out there. Rumor is, they want to use some of ’em to power lasers that’ll propel lightsail ships out to Alpha Centauri.”

“Alpha Centauri?” she marveled.

Before Yeager could respond, Deirdre’s pocketphone buzzed. She fished it from the pocket of her slacks and saw the text message on its minuscule screen: “DEIRDRE AMBROSE, PLEASE REPORT TO DR. POHAN IN THE INFIRMARY. AT ONCE.”

Staring at her, Yeager wondered aloud, “What’s that all about?”

Deirdre pushed her chair away from the table and got to her feet. “I have to go,” she said.

“You haven’t had any breakfast!”

“I’m not that hungry, really.” And she hurried out of the dining room, glad to leave Yeager standing there alone.

Wrinkled, bald, mustachioed Dr. Pohan smiled at her as Deirdre stepped into his office, but somehow his smile seemed tense to her, forced. The wall screens showed images of medical scans, slices through her body, circles of intestines, interiors of lungs like budding, branching flowers, pulsing, beating organs.

That’s what I look like inside, Deirdre said to herself as she sat, staring fascinatedly, in front of the doctor’s desk.

Without preamble, Dr. Pohan said, “We have a puzzlement on our hands, young lady.”

“A puzzlement?”

“You have rabies.”

Shocked, Deirdre gasped, “Rabies? That’s impossible!”

Gesturing to the wall screens, “Impossible or not, your scans show the rabies virus lurking in your bloodstream. It can infect your brain, you know.”

“I can’t have rabies,” Deirdre insisted. “You get rabies from an animal bite, don’t you? I haven’t been bitten by any animal. We don’t allow pets on Chrysalis II; not animal pets, anyway.”

His strained smile still in place, Dr. Pohan said gently, “How you acquired the virus is puzzling, very puzzling. But the important thing at the moment is to neutralize the virus before it reaches your brain and you begin to show symptoms.”

“Neutralize it? You mean kill it?”

“If possible,” said the doctor. “There are injections that can eliminate the virus, but unfortunately we don’t carry such medications aboard ship. Who would expect cases of rabies to show up on an interplanetary liner?”

Deirdre caught the plural. “You said cases?”

“Yes. The woman you are replacing, she died of rabies on the trip out from Earth.”

INFIRMARY

“I could die?” Deirdre cried.

“If untreated,” said Dr. Pohan.

“But you said you don’t have the vaccine.…”

“The treatment requires human rabies immunoglobulin. We were able to fabricate a small amount of same in the ship’s pharmacy but it wasn’t enough to save my patient. The virus had spread through her nervous system and into her brain.”

Deirdre fought down an urge to scream. Forcing her voice to stay calm, steady, she asked, “Could you produce enough of it to treat me?”

For a century-long moment Dr. Pohan did not reply. At last he steepled his fingers and said softly, “We can try, Ms. Ambrose. It’s a rather difficult synthesis, but we can try.”

“And if you can’t…?”

The doctor shrugged. “The alternative is to freeze you until we arrive at Jupiter. I’ve already contacted the medical officer at station Gold and he has instructed his staff to produce the medication. It will be ready for you when you arrive there.”

“Rabies,” Deirdre repeated, her voice trembling just a bit.

“It is very strange,” said Dr. Pohan. “Neither you nor the unfortunate woman who died was bitten or scratched by a rabid animal. She was from Selene, a well-respected biologist. Of course, she frequently visited Earth. She could have contracted the disease there.”

“And she died.”

“Apparently she had been infected some time before boarding this ship. The preboarding medical examination missed her condition entirely. The automated scans were not programmed to check for rabies, unfortunately. By the time she began to exhibit symptoms, it was too late to save her.”

“And she died,” Deirdre repeated, in a whisper.

Dr. Pohan put on his professional smile once again. “Please do not worry unduly. We have caught your case early. You will not die from it, I am almost certain.”

That word almost blared in Deirdre’s mind.

Deirdre walked like an automaton from the infirmary to the elevators and went blindly, unthinkingly, back to the dining room. It was closed: too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. It didn’t matter; she had no appetite.

How could I get rabies? she asked herself a few thousand times as she headed back to her stateroom. By the time she got there, the room had already been cleaned, the bed made neatly, the lavatory sparkling.

Deirdre plunked herself down on the spongy little chair in front of the compartment’s computer. Rabies, she repeated silently. She told the computer to look it up.

She heard a thump on her door. With a sigh, she got up and slid it open.

Dorn was standing there, his broad body filling the door frame. Behind him Deirdre saw Andy Corvus, grinning shyly at her, and Yeager, his smile almost a leer. Corvus was clutching a large aluminum box, gripping the handles on its sides in both his hands.

“We’re going down to the dolphin tank,” Andy said enthusiastically before any of the others could speak. “Wanna come with us?”

Deirdre blinked at him. “The dolphin tank?”

Yeager piped up. “The ship’s carrying six dolphins out to Jupiter. Andy wants to talk to ’em.”

“Come on,” Andy coaxed. “I’ll connect you to the dolphins if you like.”

The box he was holding was obviously heavy; she could see the tension in his arms. Why doesn’t he ask Dorn to hold it for him? Deirdre wondered. Or at least to help him carry it?

Dorn spoke up. “If we’re imposing on your privacy…”

“No,” Deirdre decided, “it’s perfectly all right. I could use a little diversion this morning.”

The four of them started down the passageway toward the elevators, Corvus lugging the big case all by himself.

Katherine Westfall was deep in discussion with Grant Archer, at the research station orbiting Jupiter.

The discussion, though, was not a conversation. Australia was still so far from Jupiter that it took electronic communications, traveling at the speed of light, slightly more than twenty-one minutes to span the distance between the ship and the Thomas Gold station. So their discussion consisted of alternating monologues. One would talk and then, some forty-two minutes later, the other could respond.

Archer’s serious, steady-eyed face filled the wall screen in Mrs. Westfall’s sitting room. As she reclined in a softly yielding chaise longue, she studied the scientist’s intense, oh-so-earnest expression. He’s rather good-looking, she thought. Boyish, almost, except for that gray little beard. Married. Happily, from what his dossier says. At least, he’s been married to the same woman for more than twenty years.

“… and although we’re considerably over budget in several areas,” Archer was saying, as if reading from a text, “I feel certain that once you’re here and have the chance to see what we’re trying to accomplish, you’ll agree that our work is too close to success to be inhibited by budget cuts.”

She smiled at him. Naïve fool, she thought. Scientists are all alike. What I’m doing is so important that it mustn’t be stopped or even cut back. Money is no object. Of course it isn’t. It’s not their money that they’re spending.

Archer had stopped talking. His image stood frozen on her display screen. That meant that he was finished for the time being and was waiting for her reply to reach him.

Westfall did not need a prepared script. Keeping her smile in place, she said, “I’m sure that the work you’re doing is very important, Dr. Archer, but the economic facts of life must be taken into account, whether we like it or not.”

Sitting up a little straighter, she went on, “Your research work is funded out of the profits made by the scoopship operations, as you know. The market for scooping fusion fuels out of Jupiter’s atmosphere has leveled off. We are no longer expanding our construction of new fusion powerplants on Earth, and even the market for fusion torch ships has gone rather flat.

“That means that the profits have leveled off, and you can’t expect increases in your funding. I’m afraid there’s nothing that I, or you, or anyone can do about that. You must cut back on your budget, just like the rest of us.”

She hesitated, wondering inwardly, Should I let him know that I’m aware of this giant submersible he’s building? No, she decided. I want to see the shock on his face in person, up close.

She spoke a few more meaningless words of farewell, ending the discussion. The screen went blank gray.

Katherine Westfall leaned back in the couch as if exhausted by the morning’s exertion. But she was thinking, I know what he’ll do now. He’ll rush to get that submersible finished and send a crew back into the ocean before I can cut off his funding altogether.

He’ll push his people to their utmost. He’ll be in a sweat to go back into the ocean and kill more of his underlings. Just like his predecessor killed my sister.

Good, she thought. All to the good.

DOLPHIN TANK

It was like being underwater. The dolphin tank took up four entire decks of the torch ship: four levels had been ripped out and filled with salt water, their outer bulkheads reinforced to withstand the pressure. The central core, where the elevator and ship’s plumbing and electrical conduits ran, passed through the giant glassteel-walled tank.

Deirdre gasped in awe as she and her companions stepped out of the elevator cab. They were standing on a narrow circular platform, surrounded by the aquarium and its gliding, sinuous, colorful fish. She shivered slightly; the place felt chilly, and it smelled of a salty tang—clean, she decided. The air was cool and fresh, not like the other decks where the human crew and passengers lived.

“It’s like being inside the ocean!” she exclaimed.

Corvus nodded happily. “That’s right. It’s as self-contained an ocean environment as the best ecologists on Earth could produce in this limited volume.” He put the square aluminum case he’d been carrying down on the bare metal deck and rubbed his arms. “That bugger is heavy!”

A pair of dolphins slid past, sleek, gray, squeaking and clicking, their mouths turned up in a perpetual silly grin. They reminded Deirdre of Andy.

“Well,” Corvus said, “to work.” And he began to tug off his coveralls.

“You’re not going into the water with them?” Yeager asked, looking a trifle apprehensive.

“Just long enough to insert the transceiver into that youngster there.” He pointed at one of the smaller dolphins. It seemed to be eying Corvus as it swam past.

Once he’d peeled down to black skintight trunks, Corvus opened the big aluminum case and began pulling out a pair of swim fins, a breathing mask, and a cylinder of compressed air. Dorn stepped over and helped him strap the air tank onto his back.

“How do you get into the water?” Deirdre asked.

Pointing behind her, Andy explained, “Easy. Up the ladder to the top of the tank, over the edge up there, then kerplop! into the water.”

“You’ve done this before?” Yeager asked.

“Every day since we left lunar orbit, just to get acquainted with the dolphins.”

Deirdre was impressed with Andy’s agility as he scrambled up the metal ladder carrying his fins in one hand. He’d hung the palm-sized metal cylinder of his transceiver around his neck on a metal link chain.

“The water must be cold,” she said to Dorn, standing beside her. Yeager had moved slightly away; he was staring into the tank, watching the fish swimming tirelessly past.

Corvus pulled on his breathing mask and slipped into the water with barely a ripple. One of the dolphins swam up toward him with a barrage of clicks and whistles. Andy jackknifed and dived down toward the smallest of the dolphins. It circled him twice, chattering madly, then dashed away. Two of the bigger dolphins glided alongside Andy, one on either side. The little dolphin obviously wanted to play, but after several minutes of gyrations, the dolphin finally eased into a steady glide and allowed Corvus to slide one arm along its back.

They swam together for several minutes. Deirdre saw that, baby or not, the little dolphin was slightly longer than Andy’s lanky form, swim fins and all. The adults dwarfed him.

At last he was able to insert his transceiver into a slot that had been surgically implanted in the young dolphin’s skull. The two larger dolphins hovered around the youngster, chattering off a rapid-fire clatter of clicks. That’s their language, Deirdre said to herself.

After a few more minutes, Andy kicked up to the surface and climbed out of the tank. Dripping wet, he came down the ladder to join them on the deck.

Dorn pulled a big white terry cloth towel out of the capacious aluminum case and draped it over Andy’s shoulders as soon as he slipped his air tank off. Deirdre couldn’t help wondering if the puddles Andy was dripping onto the deck might be slippery.

Yeager, looking even more ill at ease, had the same thought. “These puddles could be dangerous,” he half growled.

“There’s a mini vac in here someplace,” Corvus said, ducking his head into the case. He pulled the vacuum out and offered it to Yeager. “Here.”

Yeager looked astonished, then almost angry. But he took the tool and sucked up the puddles without complaint. Deirdre was surprised at how loud the machine was; its buzzing noise seemed to echo off the walls of the tank.

Corvus didn’t notice the noise at all. He was busy pulling a gray electronics box out of his carrying case. To Deirdre it looked almost like an old-fashioned notebook computer, perhaps slightly bigger. Sitting it on the lid of the big aluminum case, Corvus opened up the device, turned it on, nodded when its screen brightened.

Then he pulled out a slim metallic circular band that glittered with optronic chips, lifted it in both hands like a royal crown, and settled it onto his matted, still-wet hair.

“Okay,” he said, looking up at Deirdre and the others. “Now we see if it works.”

Corvus seemed to go into a trance. His eyes half closed, his slightly uneven face relaxed into a sleeplike softness as he crouched on his knees by the electronics box. Like a sleepwalker he turned to the curving wall of the aquarium, then pressed his fingertips against the glassteel.

Dorn was watching him intently. Yeager looked edgy. Deirdre stood over Corvus, not knowing what to do, or if she should even try to do anything. Unbidden, the memory of her visit to Dr. Pohan came back into the forefront of her mind. Rabies, she thought. If he can’t synthesize the antidote I could die.

The baby dolphin glided up to Corvus, squeaking and chattering, its two parents hovering not far off. Corvus turned sluggishly and rested his back against the curving glassteel wall of the tank. His chin drooped to his chest, his eyes closed completely. But his fingers twitched slightly.

“Is he all right?” Deirdre wondered.

“He seems to be breathing normally,” said Dorn.

For several nerve-stretching minutes they watched Corvus. Nothing happened. The baby dolphin hovered near Andy, but silently now. The two adults swam smoothly, their powerful tails rhythmically surging up and down. The fish scurried around and around the circular tank endlessly. The adult dolphins had gone quiet, too, Deirdre noticed.

She looked from Corvus’s semicomatose figure up to the circling fish and the silent dolphins, then back to Andy again. “Should we do something?”

“Do what?” Dorn asked.

Yeager gave a disgusted snort. “This is like watching paint dry.” He turned and punched the elevator button.

“You’re leaving?” Deirdre asked.

“I’ve got better things to do with my time than watch him—”

Corvus stirred. His entire body seemed to spasm once, then his eyes opened and he smiled lazily. “Made it,” he said. “How long was I out?”

Reaching down to help Corvus to his feet, Dorn replied, “We didn’t time you.”

“That’s okay,” Corvus said easily as he lifted the circlet off his head. “It’s all in the computer log.”

“You were in contact with the dolphins?” Deirdre asked.

“Sort of,” he said. “It wasn’t really all that good. I couldn’t get much out of her.”

“The little one?”

“Yeah. Baby.” He pointed as the trio of dolphins glided past them, chattering again. “She’s got the transceiver in her skull.” Brightening, he said, “Well, it wasn’t bad for a first try.”

The elevator doors slid open and Yeager stepped into the cab.

“Hey Max!” Corvus called. “Don’t you want to try it?”

“Hell no!” Yeager snapped as the doors slid shut.

“He’s scared,” Corvus said, as if it surprised him.

Dorn shook his head. “Merely cautious. He’s an engineer, after all. He doesn’t plunge into a new experience without checking all the possibilities first.”

Corvus nodded, but he still looked disappointed.

“How about you, then?” he asked Dorn.

METAMORPHOSIS

“Me?” Dorn seemed shaken by Andy’s question.

Corvus nodded hard enough to make a lock of his wetly matted strawberry hair flop over his forehead. “See if you can make contact with them,” he said.

Dorn looked up at the dolphins swimming past, then back at Corvus again. “I don’t know…”

Corvus stepped toward him, holding the optronic circlet in his extended hand. The slim metal band, studded with many-hued ovals, gleamed like a jeweled tiara. “It ought to work fine: I mean, the metal of your head will make a terrific contact.”

Dorn looked anything but willing, Deirdre thought. He accepted the ring with his human hand and slowly fitted it over the metal cap of his head. On him it looks like a crown of thorns, Deirdre thought.

Smiling with satisfaction, Corvus pecked at the computer’s miniature keyboard.

“Okay,” he said to Dorn. “Just relax. I’ll set up the connection for you.”

Dorn stood as rigid as a tightly pulled bowstring while Corvus tapped away on the laptop’s keyboard.

“Might help if you close your eyes,” Andy suggested.

Deirdre saw the cyborg’s human eye close. The prosthetic eye seemed to go dim.

For several heartbeats nothing happened. The dolphins were chattering again, back and forth. Deirdre wished she could understand what they were saying to each other.

“Not everybody can make contact,” Andy whispered to her, as if afraid he might break Dorn’s concentration. “It’s a sort of—”

“NO!” Dorn roared. He spasmed, his back arching, his arms flailing wildly, hands clenched into fists. His human eye snapped open, the prosthetic one glowered hot red.

“No!” he bellowed again. Corvus tried to duck beneath his wildly swinging arms and went sprawling onto the deck. Dorn spun around and took a tottering step toward Deirdre, his half-human face a mask of rage. She backed away, terrified.

Scrambling to his hands and knees, Andy banged a fist on the keyboard of the computer.

Dorn stopped in mid-frenzy. For a long moment he stood frozen, the human side of his face twisted in what might have been blazing anger, or agony. His chest heaved. Sweat rolled down his cheek.

Deirdre’s back was pressed against the elevator doors. She, too, was panting, frightened. He could smash the wall of the aquarium with that metal arm of his, she thought; glassteel or not, he could crack the tank’s wall and drown us all.

But Dorn seemed to regain control of himself. Slowly. He stood there unmoving while Andy clambered awkwardly to his feet and Deirdre stared fearfully at the cyborg. Slowly Dorn’s arms slumped down to his sides. Slowly the terrible rictus that had twisted his face so horribly relaxed.

At last he said, almost sheepishly, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it.”

“Are you all right?” Deirdre asked, breathless.

Dorn nodded once, somberly. “I am now.” He lifted the optronic band off his head and handed it to Corvus.

“What happened?” Andy asked, taking the rig from the cyborg’s prosthetic hand.

“I failed to make contact with the dolphin,” Dorn replied flatly.

“Yeah, but you … you sort of went berserk for a minute there.”

“I apologize.”

“What did you see?” Corvus persisted. “What did you feel?”

Dorn hesitated a fraction of a moment, then replied, “Nothing.”

“Nothing? But what—”

“Nothing,” the cyborg repeated. Then he added, “I’m afraid I’m not a good subject for your attempt to make contact with the dolphins.”

With that he pivoted like a machine and took a step toward Deirdre. She slipped aside and Dorn leaned a finger of his prosthetic hand against the elevator button.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said as he stood facing the elevator doors.

“Are you all right?” Deirdre asked again.

“Yes. As all right as I can be.”

The elevator doors slid open and Dorn stepped inside the cab. He touched the control pad and the doors shut. Deirdre heard the faint hum of the electric motors that lifted the elevator upward.

“Wow,” said Andy. “That was weird.”

“It was scary,” Deirdre agreed. “He’s a very powerful man.”

Shrugging as if to put the whole episode behind him, Corvus held the optronic circlet out toward Deirdre.

“Would you like to try it?”

Deirdre could feel her eyes go wide. “Me?” she squeaked.

“What happened to Dorn isn’t normal, Dee,” Andy said, his voice faltering, uncertain. “I’ve never seen the linkage affect anybody like that.”

“Maybe it has something to do with his being a cyborg,” Deirdre suggested.

Corvus shrugged. “Maybe.” He offered the circlet to her again. “Do you want to try it?” he repeated. “Please?”

Deirdre decidedly did not. But as she looked at her friend’s soft blue eyes and heard the pleading in his voice she heard herself say, “Sure, I’ll try it … I suppose.”

CONTACT

With considerable misgivings Deirdre settled the slim optronics band onto her auburn hair. Andy nodded, satisfied, and made a few adjustments on the little computer.

“Now just relax,” he coached her. “Close your eyes and relax. Like you’re going to sleep.”

Easier said than done, Deirdre thought. In her mind’s eye she saw Dorn raging and flailing like a madman. That won’t happen to me, she told herself. It won’t. It can’t.

“Maybe you ought to sit down,” Corvus said. Opening her eyes, Deirdre saw him gesturing to the big aluminum case. “Here,” he suggested. “You can sit here.”

Deirdre sat tensely on the case. It felt cold, even through the fabric of her slacks. She closed her eyes again and rested her chin in her hands. Cold and hard. Not like the water. The water’s warm and soft, it covers you all over, smooth and warm and soft.

Small. Mother says this water is small. She remembers when she was young and the water stretched forever. You could swim for days and never see the same bottom. And out farther the bottom was so far away you couldn’t see it at all.

Effortlessly, she glided to the surface for a gulp of air. Mother and Father swam behind her, and they breathed, too. Through the hard wall that was the end of the world she saw a strange creature, neither dolphin nor fish. Land creature, Mother told her. But it was swimming with us a few breaths ago, she said to Mother. It played with me.

Land creature, Mother repeated. Not one of us.

She saw another land creature resting on a square rock. That’s me! she realized. But I’m here, safe with Mother and Father. It was confusing. How can that be me, outside the world, when I’m here where I’ve always been?

She decided to ignore the strange land creatures. They didn’t really matter. The world was good. Filled with fish. No dangers. Mother had told her more than once about the dangers in the big water, fish with sharp teeth who liked to eat baby dolphins. None of them here in this water. This is good water. Small, but good.

She emptied her lungs, popping a trail of bubbles from her blowhole, and rose swiftly to the surface. Bursting through, she jumped exuberantly into the not-water and splashed down again, nose first.

Mother chattered unhappily. Father, too. Don’t go off on your own, they warned.

But there’s nothing to be afraid of, she replied. This little water has no dangers in it. You told me so yourselves.

Still, be careful. Someday we might reach the big water, and there will be dangers there. Learn to be careful.

She thought Mother and Father were being foolish. They remember the old fears, she told herself. But then she thought how exciting it would be to swim in the big water, to travel on and on, never seeing the same bottom twice, racing through the big water. Father told her that his family chased fast-swimming fish that were so numerous their schools were wider across than all the dolphins of the family put together. The family hunted those fish.

Not like here, where the water was so little that the fish were few, hardly enough to keep the hunger away. So few that they had no place to run to, no place to hide. Even when they formed a school it was small and easy to slice through.

She glided unhappily through the stupid fish. This water may be safe, she thought, but it’s not much fun.

Maybe I can get Father to jump with me! She swam close to his sleek, powerful body and asked him. Mother immediately said no, but Father—

“That’s enough,” said Corvus.

Deirdre blinked and looked up at Andy. He was lifting the optronic circlet off her head, the expression on his face quite serious, almost grim.

“What…?” Deirdre felt confused. This isn’t Father, a voice in her mind said.

“You were under for five full minutes,” Andy said somberly. He looked worried, almost.

Deirdre sat up straighter and took a deep breath. I’m sitting on Andy’s case. I’m aboard the torch ship. We’re heading for Jupiter.

“Are you okay?” Andy asked.

“I think so,” said Deirdre. Then she smiled, remembering. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“You made contact.” It wasn’t a question.

“I was the dolphin!” Deirdre said, suddenly aware of what had happened. “It was … I … it was like I was the dolphin, swimming in the tank!”

“Great!” he said. Pointing to the laptop, open on the floor beside the case she was sitting on, Andy said, “I was monitoring your vital signs on the screen. You made the transition without a hitch.”

“It was strange,” she said. “It was like … I wasn’t me anymore. I was the dolphin. The little one.”

“Baby.”

Nodding, Deirdre said, “It’s a shame to keep them in that little tank, Andy.”

“Little? It’s the biggest we could build for them.”

“But it’s little for them. They’re used to swimming in the ocean, not a tank.”

“They’ve never been in the ocean, Dee. These dolphins were raised in cetacean laboratories on Earth. Baby was born in La Jolla, California. Her mother was taken from the Pacific when she was younger than Baby is now. They were transferred here to this ship a week before we left Earth orbit.”

“But Baby remembers the ocean,” Deirdre insisted. “The adults have told her about being in water where they could go day after day and never see the same bottom twice.”

Corvus ran a hand through his thick mop of hair. “Really? Baby remembers things she’s never experienced for herself?”

“Yes, she does.”

For a moment Corvus was silent. Then he said softly, “Dee, if Baby can remember things that she’s never seen, that means that she was told those things by the older dolphins. Like stories we pass down from one generation to the next.”

Deirdre said, “I suppose it does.”

Corvus licked his lips. “That means they’re intelligent, Dee! The ability to pass information from one generation to another is one of the key indicators of intelligence!”

MAIN LOUNGE

They had missed lunch. By the time Deirdre and Andy got to the main lounge, the doors to the dining area were closed, not to be opened again until the cocktail hour.

“I’m starving,” Deirdre complained. “I haven’t even had breakfast.”

Pointing to the row of automated dispensers off to one side of the lounge’s empty bar, Corvus suggested, “We can get a sandwich or something, I guess.”

The dispensers’ offerings were limited, but Deirdre was so hungry that she took a salad, a sandwich, and a square dark object that was purported to be a fudge brownie. Plus a large cola. Corvus settled for a salad and a cup of lukewarm tea.

“I’m a vegetarian,” he explained when Deirdre looked questioningly at his meager tray.

The lounge was almost empty at this hour of the mid-afternoon. They found a table by the bulkhead, beneath a wide screen displaying a view of Saturn, with its gleaming broad rings.

As soon as they put their trays on the table and sat down, Corvus said urgently, “You’ve got to help me with this.”

“With what?” Deirdre asked.

“The dolphins!” he fairly yelped. “You made contact with Baby so easily. You’re a natural. You got more out of her in five minutes than I’ve gotten in two days. A lot more.”

“Beginner’s luck,” Deirdre murmured.

“No, you’re a natural. Wow! If we can show evidence that they’re intelligent … wow! What a breakthrough that’ll be!”

“I suppose it would be significant.”

“Significant! It’s monumental. Here we’ve been searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life for the past hundred and fifty years and there’s an intelligent species right on Earth with us!” His grin was ear-to-ear.

“Is what we’ve done today enough to prove it?” she asked.

Wagging his head, Andy replied, “Nope. Not by itself. All we’ve got is your unsupported word about what Baby was thinking. That’s not enough.”

“Why not?”

He smiled gently at her. “I think it was Carl Sagan who said, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ ”

“Not just my word?”

“Nobody’s accusing you of lying, Dee. But the scientific community will need more solid evidence than your unsupported word.”

“So what—”

Her phone buzzed. Deirdre’s first instinct was to turn it off, but then she realized that the most likely person to be calling her was Dr. Pohan.

“Excuse me, Andy,” she muttered as she pulled out the phone and flipped it open.

It was indeed Dr. Pohan. And he was smiling broadly beneath his florid mustache. Without preamble he said, “I have good news, Ms. Ambrose. Please come to my office in the infirmary as quickly as you can.”

Dierdre clicked the phone shut and got to her feet. Half her salad and all of her sandwich and dessert still remained on the table.

“I have to go, Andy.”

“Who was that?” he asked, looking up at her.

“I’ll tell you later,” Deirdre said as she picked up her tray and headed for the disposal chute. She managed to gulp down two bites of the limp sandwich before she dumped what was left and hurried toward the infirmary.

Dr. Pohan was still smiling benignly when she sat down in front of his little desk.

“Good news, you said?” Deirdre asked.

“Indeed! Indeed.” Dr. Pohan’s head bobbed up and down.

“You can synthesize the vaccine?”

“It appears so,” the doctor said cheerily. “We need a donation of blood of a type that is compatible with yours. I have scanned the records of everyone aboard ship and come up with a potential donor.”

“A potential donor?” Deirdre asked. “Only one?”

“One should be sufficient, if he is willing to give us some of his blood. From a comparatively small amount we can synthesize the immunoglobulin you require.”

Her pulse speeding, Deirdre asked, “And is he willing?”

“We will find out shortly. I have asked him to join us here.”

At that, Deirdre heard a single sharp rap on the door behind her.

“Enter,” cried Dr. Pohan.

She turned in her chair as the door slid open.

Dorn.

Back in the main lounge, Andy Corvus chewed thoughtfully on his salad.

She made contact with Baby, he was saying to himself, I’m sure of it. She couldn’t just make up the impressions she told me about. The dolphins have language! They can actually communicate abstract ideas to one another!

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.

Dorn ushered Deirdre through one of the hatches that lined the circular passageway between the elevators and the blister. She stepped through and gasped.

As Dorn closed the hatch, Deirdre suddenly felt as if she were standing in space. The lights went out automatically when the hatch shut and there was nothing between her and the infinite universe but the transparent curving bubble of glassteel. Her knees went weak.

So many stars! The universe was filled with hard unblinking points of light: red, blue, yellow, it was overwhelming. Clouds of stars, swirls of stars, endless boundless teeming stars that sprinkled the blackness of space with color and beauty. Back at Chrysalis II they had observation ports, but nothing like this. This is like being outside!

Dorn heard her gasping breath. “Are you all right?”

“I…” Deirdre had to consciously remind herself that she was perfectly safe, standing on a glassteel deck, warm and protected from the vacuum out there that stretched to infinity. “I think so,” she half whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Dorn said softly. “I forgot how overwhelming it can be the first time. I’ve spent much of my life in spacecraft. This dark forever is like home to me.”

She turned toward him, saw the starlight glinting off the etched metal side of his face.

“The Sun is behind us,” Dorn began to explain, “on the other side of the ship. We’re in shadow here. That’s why you can see so much without the Sun’s glare cutting down visibility.”

“It’s … it’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.”

“The universe,” Dorn said, as solemnly as if praying. “Infinity.”

For several minutes Dorn pointed out the brighter stars for her, identified blue-hot Rigel and the sullen red of Betelgeuse.

At last she interrupted him. “You said we could talk in private here.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding gravely. “The blister goes all the way around the ship, but it’s divided into compartments that are soundproof.” He hesitated. “I believe the ship’s management thought couples might enjoy romantic liaisons here.”

Making it under the stars, Deirdre thought. Not a bad idea, once you got accustomed to having all those unblinking eyes watching you.

“You asked me when I became a cyborg,” Dorn said.

“I don’t want to pry,” said Deirdre. “If it’s painful for you—”

“Pain is part of life. If we’re going to work together at the Jupiter station, you deserve to know about me.”

So he told her. Told her of his life as a mercenary soldier during the Asteroid Wars. How the corporation he worked for supplied their mercenaries with performance-enhancing drugs. How he had murdered a woman who loved him in a blaze of narcotic-driven jealous fury. How he destroyed the old Chrysalis habitat under the battle frenzy that the drugs induced. How he had held a minigrenade to his chest once his mind cleared and he realized what he had done.

“You tried to commit suicide?” Deirdre asked.

In the starlit shadows Dorn replied evenly, “I wasn’t permitted to die. The corporations had invested too much in me. And besides, their medical technicians saw me as an interesting problem. So I was saved. I was rebuilt.”

“That’s how you became a cyborg.”

“Yes. Not every scientist works for the benefit of humankind. Some of them—many of them, I think—work to solve problems that intrigue them. Work to achieve things no one else has achieved before them.”

Deirdre remembered a quotation from her history classes. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer had said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

DORN’S TRANSFORMATION

“You became a priest?” Deirdre asked.

For a heartbeat Dorn remained silent. Then, “I had a life-altering experience. I encountered … an artifact. A work of an alien intelligence.”

“In the Belt?” Deirdre jumped at his revelation. “The rumors are true? About an alien artifact in one of the asteroids?”

“True,” said Dorn. “There is an alien artifact buried inside a small, stony asteroid. The rock is the property of Humphries Space Systems, Incorporated. I was still an employee of HSS when it was discovered. I was assigned to guard the asteroid and make certain that no one saw the alien artifact.

“But I saw it. Every day, for weeks. It changed me.”

“It’s really true?” Deirdre marveled.

“Really true. However, Martin Humphries guards the asteroid jealously. At first he wanted to keep it for himself alone. When he flew out to see it, though, the artifact drove him insane. He collapsed, jibbering, helpless.”

Dorn stopped, as if the memories he was recalling were too painful to continue. But before Deirdre could think of anything to say, he resumed.

“Humphries recovered, eventually. But he would allow no one to see the artifact. And he wanted to eliminate those who saw his collapse, who heard his weeping, inconsolable pleadings.”

“He wanted to kill you?”

“He tried. But I, too, had seen the artifact. Experiencing it changed my life. I stopped being Dorik Harbin, mercenary warrior. I became Dorn. A priest. I began to try to atone for my former life.”

“Atone? How?”

“By finding the bodies of the mercenaries killed in the Asteroid Wars. Finding them and giving them proper death rites.”

“You did this?”

“For years. Wandering through the Belt, finding the dead who had been left to drift alone endlessly in space. This I did, together with the woman you saw at my trial.”

“My father exiled you.”

Almost smiling in the dim starlight, Dorn said, “He wanted to execute me. He wanted to kill me with his own hands. He settled for exile. I was recruited by the scientists of the Jupiter station. They’ve been testing me at Selene University for the past two years, to see if I can help them make deep dives into the Jovian ocean.”

“And here we are,” Deirdre said, trying to make it sound light, “on our way to Jupiter.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve lived quite a life,” she said. It sounded pathetically inane, she knew.

With a slight shake of his head, Dorn confessed, “But now I have no purpose for living. I’ve found all the dead from the Wars that I could. That doesn’t atone for all those I killed.”

“You’re working for the scientists now.”

“Yes, for the scientists. But serving their purposes doesn’t give me any purpose to my life. I’m an empty shell, Deirdre. I have nothing to live for.”

She reached out and touched the human side of his face. “You’ve gone through so much. You’ll find some reason for living. Maybe at Station Gold. Maybe you’ll find your true purpose there.”

“Maybe,” he echoed. It sounded hollow to Deirdre.

“Well,” she said, “thanks for telling me about yourself. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

She started for the hatch, but Dorn put up his metallic hand, stopping her.

“This conversation began,” he said, “with you saying that I didn’t ask what your medical problem is. May I ask you now?”

She bit her lip, hesitating. He has a right to know, Deirdre told herself. He’s willing to give you his blood to help you. He has a right to know the truth.

“I have rabies,” she said, so softly she could barely hear her own words.

“Rabies.” Dorn appeared unshaken by the news. Then he asked, “I didn’t realize that animals are kept in Chrysalis II.”

“They’re not,” said Deirdre. “No pets. No meat animals. We get protein from soy substitutes and aquaculture.”

“Then how did you contract rabies? It comes from being bitten or scratched by a rabid animal, doesn’t it?”

Nodding, she answered, “That’s what makes it so peculiar. Dr. Pohan hasn’t been able to figure it out.”

“Is the doctor certain that it’s rabies? It seems totally unlikely.”

She shrugged. “He’s certain. The virus showed up in the blood sample he took.”

Dorn looked out at the endless stars for several silent moments. At last he said to Deirdre, “He took a sample of your blood.”

“Yes. He did it for all the passengers. Didn’t he take a sample of your blood?”

“Weeks ago, just after I boarded at Selene.”

“He must have taken samples from everybody.”

“He extracted your blood with a hypodermic syringe?” Dorn asked.

“How else?”

“And you haven’t been bitten or scratched by an animal before you boarded this ship?”

A little impatiently, she replied, “I told you, Dorn, there aren’t any animals in Chrysalis II to bite or scratch me!”

“Then the only time your skin has been punctured is when the ship’s doctor took your blood.”

“Yes…” She finally saw where he was heading. Her eyes widening, Deirdre asked, “An infected needle?”

“How would it get infected with rabies here aboard the ship?”

“Dr. Pohan said there was a rabies case on the way out from the Earth/Moon system. A fatality.”

Dorn shook his head slowly. “I’ve been aboard this ship since it left lunar orbit. As far as I know, none of the passengers who came aboard from Earth or Selene have died.”

Deirdre felt confused. “He lied to me?”

“He not only lied to you,” said Dorn. “He infected you with rabies.”

ANDY CORVUS’S STATEROOM

Max Yeager looked around the compartment with narrowed eyes as Corvus ushered him into his quarters.

“Cripes, this place looks like the back room of an electronics lab. Where the hell do you sleep?”

Corvus waved toward the bed, which was covered with several laptops, a scattering of headsets, thumb-sized hard drives, diagnostic tools, and other gadgets. Two more laptops sat open on the compartment’s tiny desk, their screens glowing, and a half-dozen more rollup screens were pasted to the bulkheads. The compartment’s built-in wall screen showed a garishly colored image of what looked to Yeager like a canary yellow head of cauliflower. Or maybe a human brain. Tiny numbers pulsed on the imagery.

“What’re you doing in here?” Yeager demanded. Inwardly he felt almost insulted at the cluttered, chaotic state of Corvus’s room. You can’t get any work done in such a turmoil, he thought. I’ll bet he can’t even find the toilet in this mess.

Scratching at his thick thatch of red hair, Corvus said good-naturedly, “I’m trying to figure out a way to reproduce the visual imagery that Dee saw when she was in contact with Baby.”

“Aha,” said Yeager.

“Aha what?” Andy asked. “Aha, like you know how to do it, or aha, you think it’s impossible.”

Frowning slightly, Yeager said, “Aha, like now I understand what all these screens are showing.” He jabbed a finger at the rollups on the bulkheads. “Brain scans.”

“Right. The one on the wall screen is Baby’s brain.”

“And what are all these numbers blinking on top of the imagery?”

“Color identifiers,” said Corvus. “I’m color blind, so I use the numbers to tell me what the colors are.”

“Uh-huh.” Yeager swung his gaze back and forth among the screens. “So this one is the dolphin’s brain…”

“And all these,” Corvus waved a hand, “are Dee’s—Deirdre’s brain.” He stepped to the desk and sat on its springy little chair.

Yeager noticed that his feet were bare. He probably can’t find his shoes, the engineer thought.

Pointing to the two adjacent laptops, Corvus explained, “And these two show Dee’s brain activity in real time when she was connected with Baby.”

Yeager bent over Andy’s shoulder and peered at the two screens. He couldn’t help worrying that the pair of laptops were too big for the compartment’s desk. If he’s not careful he’s going to wind up with one of them on the floor, the engineer thought. Maybe both of them.

“See?” Corvus was saying. “When an area in one of their brains lights up, the other brain lights up, too.”

“Not the same area,” Yeager muttered.

“Well, they’re not the same brains. Not the same species. One’s a dolphin and the other’s a human being.”

“So how do you know they’re connected?”

“They light up at the same time. And even though the regions of the brain showing activity aren’t exactly the same, they’re pretty darned close. I mean, we’ve made functional maps of human and dolphin brains for years. They’re both lighting up in the same functional area.”

Yeager grunted, “Huh?”

Looking slightly disappointed, Corvus explained, “This area here in Dee’s brain is her visual cortex. The dolphin’s visual cortex is here.” Andy tapped the laptop’s screen hard enough to make it wobble on the edge of the desk.

“They both light up at the same time,” Yeager realized.

“Right! That means they’re both seeing the same thing at the same time!”

Yeager rubbed his stubbly jaw thoughtfully. “I don’t know if you could say that, Andy. I don’t think you’ve got enough evidence to make that stick.”

“That’s why I called you. Can you help me?”

“Me? I’m not a neurotechnician.”

“But you’ve got a lot of experience with sensors and transducers. I looked up your dossier, you know.”

Yeager almost smiled. “My experience is with electronics and optronics equipment, not brains. There are lots of people who know a helluva lot more about this than I do.”

“Is there anybody on the team with you that can help me?” Corvus’s voice was almost pleading.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to take these brain scans and convert them into visual imagery. I want to put what Baby and Dee were seeing into images that you and I can see.”

Yeager gave out a low whistle. “That’s a tall order, pal. I don’t know if anybody knows how to do that.”

“Well, then we’ll be the first!”

Shaking his head, Yeager said, “You want to take the electrical impulses flickering through a brain and turn them into visual pictures?”

“Right!” Corvus bobbed his head up and down so hard his hair flopped down over his forehead. Pawing at it, he explained, “The brain receives electrical impulses along the nerve path from the retinas of the eyes. It transmutes those impulses into visual imagery. Pictures. Why can’t we do that with the data we’ve got from their brain scans?”

Yeager looked around for a place to sit down. There was none. The bed was covered with gadgetry. The other chairs in the compartment were also loaded with junk. Corvus himself was sitting on the only available chair.

Looking down at Andy, Yeager said, “You’re dealing with the difference between the brain and the mind.”

Corvus nodded.

“We can scan the electrical activity of the brain. Been doing that for more than a century. But how those pulses get translated into pictures is something that the human mind does, and we don’t have any idea of how that works.”

“Not just the human mind,” Corvus maintained. “The dolphins see pictures in their heads, too.”

“You have any hard data to back up that statement?” Yeager demanded.

“Behavioral data.”

Shaking his head, the engineer objected, “Not good enough, friend. You don’t know what goes on in a dolphin’s mind. You’ll probably never know.”

Almost defensively, Corvus said, “Well, that’s what I want to find out. We’ve got to figure out a way to do it. How can we ever make any meaningful contact with the leviathans if we can’t even make real contact with a species from our own planet?”

Yeager shook his head sadly. “Beats me, Andy. Beats the hell out of me.”

INFIRMARY

“I infected you?” Dr. Pohan slowly rose from behind his desk, like a cloud of smoke boiling up. “You accuse me of deliberately infecting you?”

“Not deliberately, perhaps,” Deirdre said placatingly.

Dorn, sitting beside her, was unimpressed with the doctor’s ire. “How else could she be infected, except by the needle you injected into her arm? Her skin hasn’t been broken by anything else.”

Visibly trembling, the doctor hissed, “This accusation is monstrous. Outrageous!”

Deirdre could see that Dr. Pohan’s face had turned beet red. His mustache fairly quivered with fury.

“You told me,” she said, in a low, calm voice, “that another passenger had died on the trip between Selene and Chrysalis II.”

Slowly settling back in his chair, Dr. Pohan glared at the two of them. Finally he nodded curtly. “That is true.”

“I’ve been aboard this ship since it left lunar orbit,” Dorn said. “I’ve heard nothing about a passenger dying.”

His voice dripping with scorn, Dr. Pohan said, “Do you think that we would advertise the death of a passenger? Our executives in Selene ordered us to keep it as quiet as possible, while we and they investigate the circumstances of the unfortunate woman’s death.”

Unmoved, Dorn said, “May we see her file?”

“To what purpose?”

“To prove to ourselves that she existed.”

Deirdre expected the doctor to explode again. Instead, he simply glared at Dorn for a long, fuming moment. Then he snapped, “Computer. Display file of Frieda Nordstrum.”

The screen on the bulkhead to one side of Dr. Pohan’s desk glowed to life. It showed an ID image of a blond, ruddy-faced woman. Deirdre thought she looked at least twenty years older than herself, although with modern rejuvenation therapies it was difficult to guess ages. The dossier accompanying the image said that she was a Norwegian microbiologist, aged thirty-eight, a graduate of Uppsala University in Sweden. She had left her most recent post at Selene University, on the Moon, to accept a position on the research staff at station Thomas Gold, in Jupiter orbit.

“And she died?” Deirdre asked.

“Aboard this ship,” said Dr. Pohan. “Under my care.”

“Of rabies.”

The doctor glowered at Deirdre, but called out, “Computer, display medical record of Frieda Nordstrum.”

The dossier disappeared in an eyeblink, replaced by a brief medical record, which ended in a death certificate. Deirdre supposed that the signature scrawled at its bottom was Dr. Pohan’s.

“Are you satisfied now?” Dr. Pohan growled.

Dorn said nothing, but Deirdre got to her feet as she apologized, “I’m sorry we bothered you, Doctor. It’s just that … none of this makes sense!”

Dr. Pohan rose also. In a gentler tone he said, “I know it must be very frightening to you. But we will have your condition under control within the next twenty-four hours.”

Under control doesn’t mean cured, Deirdre thought.

Standing up beside her, Dorn said, “This still doesn’t explain how Ms. Ambrose contracted rabies.”

The doctor’s face flushed momentarily, but he brought himself under control with an obvious effort. “I have no explanation as yet,” he said stiffly. “It seems clear that Dr. Nordstrum was infected while visiting Earth and carried the infection back to Selene where she boarded this ship before her illness was detected.”

Turning toward Deirdre, Dorn began, “But how—”

“How Ms. Ambrose was infected is under investigation, intense investigation. Perhaps the virus has found a new pathway between one victim and another. A new vector. I am studying that possibility, with consultation by the corporation’s medical staff in Selene.”

“I see,” said Dorn.

Leaning the knuckles of both hands on his desktop, Dr. Pohan said firmly, “I can assure you, I do not appreciate being accused of infecting my patient, either accidentally or deliberately.”

“I understand,” Deirdre said. With that, she and Dorn left the doctor’s office.

Once outside the infirmary, in the passageway leading to the elevators, Deirdre said, “He’s doing his best to track down the way the virus infected me.”

Dorn seemed unimpressed. “Perhaps he sees a chance to make an important discovery, tracking down a new vector for the rabies virus. It could be a considerable feather in his cap.”

“You think that’s what he’s after?”

“It could be a considerable feather in his cap,” Dorn repeated.

Deirdre broke into a giggle. “He won’t get any feathers in his cap if he doesn’t learn how to control his anger. I thought he’d have a stroke!”

Nodding thoughtfully, Dorn agreed, “He did get very incensed, didn’t he?”

“Well, we did accuse him of deliberately infecting me. I don’t blame him for getting furious.”

“Methinks,” Dorn muttered, “that he doth protest too much.”

KATHERINE WESTFALL’S SUITE

Katherine Westfall did not like having this excitable little man in her sitting room, but she felt that it was better to see him face-to-face rather than communicate over the ship’s phone system. Phone conversations are supposed to be private, she knew, but they go through the ship’s communications system and systems can always be tapped.

Dr. Pohan could not sit still. Katherine had offered him a glass of wine, even poured him a long-stemmed goblet of beautiful Sancerre with her own hand, but the doctor hardly took a sip before he bounced to his feet and began pacing across the thick carpeting.

“They know!” he said, mopping his bald pate with one hand while his other nearly spilled the wine, it was shaking so badly.

“They know nothing,” Westfall said calmly.

“But they suspect! They accused me of infecting her! In my own office! She and that lumbering cyborg, they realize that the only way she could be infected was by the needle I used to take her blood sample.”

He looks ridiculous, she thought, a stubby little bald man with that ludicrous mustache, his clothes all wrinkled and sweaty. Struggling inwardly to hide her disdain, Westfall replied, “You showed them the Nordstrum dossier?”

Dr. Pohan stopped his pacing. “Yes. That seemed to placate them. For the moment.”

With an unruffled smile, Westfall said, “There you are. Crisis resolved.”

“Is it?” Dr. Pohan returned to the sculpted chair facing Westfall’s but stopped short of sitting in it. “How long do you think it will take them to think of checking with Selene University? How long before they find that Frieda Nordstrum never suffered from an animal bite, that she did not contract rabies until she came aboard this ship! How long before they discover that the woman died of a genetically engineered mutation of the virus!”

Katherine took a sip of her wine as she thought about that. Putting the stemmed glass down on the little table beside her chair, she said, “I can see to it that the university’s personnel files are unavailable for their scrutiny. Privacy laws and all that. The ship’s files, as well. They’ll never be able to find that she wasn’t infected while visiting Earth, that she wasn’t carrying the virus in her when she came aboard this vessel.”

The doctor wagged his head. “We committed murder!”

“You conducted an experiment,” Westfall countered. “The experimental subject died. It happens all the time. Scientists are always doing things like that.”

Dr. Pohan looked horrified. “But you … you told me … you ordered me…”

With the sincerest smile she could generate, Katherine Westfall said reassuringly, “As long as you keep Ms. Ambrose’s condition under control she will be satisfied. You’ve told her that the medical staff at Gold has the facilities to cure her?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let her continue to think that. Once we get to Jupiter she’ll find out differently, but by then she’ll no longer be your problem.”

The doctor stared at her perplexedly. For several heartbeats he said nothing. Then, “May I ask … why are you doing this? Why did you have me infect her? After all, rabies can be dangerous.…”

Smiling truly now, Katherine Westfall said, “Not as dangerous as curiosity, Doctor.”

Dr. Pohan’s eyes went wide. He understands my meaning, Westfall saw. He understands me perfectly.

Max Yeager was glad to be out of Andy’s junkyard of a compartment. The two men were in the dining room, munching on soymeat patties as they argued about Corvus’s hopes.

“The human mind is the transducer,” Yeager was saying, waving a forkful of salad in midair. “It takes the electrical impulses from the eyes and makes pictures out of them.”

Corvus shook his head. “But how? How does it work? How can the brain turn electrical impulses into visual imagery?”

“We do it with display screens,” Yeager mused. “Electrons paint pictures on the screens.”

“Is that how it’s done in the visual cortex?”

“How would I know?”

Corvus began to reply, but as he looked up from his dinner plate he saw Deirdre and Dorn heading toward their table.

Once they were seated and had spoken their dinner orders to the robot that had immediately rolled up to the table, Corvus and Yeager fell into their argument again.

“It can’t be done,” Yeager insisted.

“You mean you don’t know how to do it,” said Corvus.

“Same thing,” Yeager rejoined, with a knowing grin. “If I don’t know how to do it, nobody knows how to do it.”

“Do what?” Dorn asked.

“Translate the electrical activity in Dee’s brain into visual imagery while she’s in contact with Baby,” Corvus explained.

The argument between the two men swirled on. It wasn’t until their desserts were served that Deirdre said, “Maybe we can go around the problem.”

“Go around it?” Corvus and Yeager asked in unison.

Deirdre hesitated a moment. “This may be silly…”

“Go ahead,” said Corvus. “We’re open to any and all ideas.”

“Well, why don’t I just tell you what I’m seeing while I’m in contact with Baby?”

Dorn objected, “But you seemed to be sleeping when you made contact with the dolphin.”

“If I could stay awake,” Deirdre said, “I could tell you what I’m seeing while you’re recording my brain wave patterns. That would help, wouldn’t it?”

“It sure would!” Andy said.

“But you weren’t awake,” Yeager objected. “Not fully conscious, anyway.”

Deirdre said, “Well, that was just my first experience with the equipment. Maybe with practice I could stay conscious, aware.”

“Come to think of it,” Corvus said, “I stayed conscious when I was in contact with the elephant, back Earthside.”

Yeager objected, “But here with the dolphins you both went into a trance.”

“Yeah, but that might just be an initiation reaction.”

“You think with practice you could stay awake?” Yeager asked, looking from Corvus to Deirdre and back again.

Corvus shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

With a nod, Yeager agreed. “What’ve we got to lose?”

Katherine Westfall felt relieved when Dr. Pohan finally left her quarters. He’s on the verge of babbling it all out to that Ambrose woman and her friend, she thought. But I can’t get rid of him, it would look too suspicious.

No, she told herself as she got up from her chair and headed for the bedroom, I’ll have to keep bucking him up and showing him that Deirdre Ambrose is no threat to him. As long as he keeps her condition under control, she’ll be satisfied. She won’t snoop any farther. Even if she tries to contact Selene to check on Dr. Nordstrum’s medical file, all she’ll get is a polite refusal to show faculty records.

Then she got a better idea. Freeze her! Tell her the treatment isn’t working and she’ll have to be frozen until we reach Jupiter and the research station. It would only be for a little more than a week. That would keep her from snooping around and satisfy Pohan that he’s not under any threat from her.

Nodding happily as she headed for her closet, Westfall told herself, Keep her frozen and we’ll be all right until we reach the Gold station. Once we’re there, I’ll have young Ms. Ambrose revived and totally under my control.

Katherine Westfall smiled at that thought as she began to dress for her dinner with Captain Guerra.

DOLPHIN TANK

Andy Corvus stood disconsolately over Deirdre, who appeared to be dozing as she sat on Andy’s big aluminum case, the optronics circlet over her auburn hair. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slow and regular, her hands relaxed in her lap.

Standing beside Corvus, Dorn said, “Has she made contact again?”

Andy said nothing, but pointed to the two laptop screens on the deck at Deirdre’s feet. Each showed an image of a brain: Deirdre’s and the dolphin Baby’s. Each image flickered with electrical activity, in close unison.

“Looks that way,” Corvus said forlornly.

“That’s good, then,” said Dorn.

With a shrug of his shoulders that seemed to flex his entire arms and his whole back, Corvus replied, “She can’t seem to stay conscious while she’s in contact.”

Dorn nodded.

“That means she can’t tell us what she’s seeing, what she’s experiencing. Not in real time.”

“She’ll tell us when she regains consciousness.”

Shaking his head, Corvus murmured, “Not good enough. All we’ll have is anecdotal evidence. She could be making up the whole thing.”

“You don’t believe her?” Dorn challenged, a hint of truculence in his voice.

“I believe her, but the scientific community’s going to want more than her unsubstantiated word. If she could stay awake and give us a real-time narrative, then we could compare her time line with her brain activity and Baby’s. That would be real proof that she’s in contact with the dolphin.”

Dorn rubbed the flesh side of his jaw. “Andy, are you interested in making meaningful contact with the dolphins or in publishing a paper that will enhance your scientific reputation?”

“Both,” Corvus answered without a flicker of hesitation.

“You may have to settle for just the one of them.”

“You don’t understand,” Corvus said earnestly. “Science depends on publishing your results so others can duplicate them. Every observation, every measurement, every claim has to be subject to test. You publish something new and the rest of the community tries to duplicate what you’ve done. If they can get the same results you did, your work becomes an accepted part of science. If they can’t, if they don’t get the same results that you reported, your work goes into the trash bin.”

“But the important thing,” Dorn insisted, “is that she is making meaningful contact with the dolphin. Which means your equipment might allow you to make meaningful contact with the leviathans, once we reach Jupiter.”

“The important thing,” Corvus replied, “is that the scientific community believes that I’ve done it. I can spend the rest of my life chatting with those giant whales on Jupiter, but if the scientific community doesn’t believe I’ve done it, what good is it?”

“What good is it to who? You personally? The scientific community? The human race in general?”

Corvus rolled his eyes heavenward. “Look, Dorn, my work won’t do the human race any good at all if the scientific community says it’s doggie doo.”

For an instant Dorn said nothing. Then he broke into a deep, chuckling laugh. “Doggie doo? Is that the technical name for it?”

Corvus grinned back at him sheepishly. “You know what I mean.”

At that moment, both laptops chimed and they turned to look down at Deirdre. She stirred, her eyelids fluttered, then she opened her eyes fully. Corvus realized for the first time that there were glints of amber in her light brown eyes. Beautiful eyes, he thought.

“I fell asleep,” Deirdre said apologetically.

“That’s all right,” said Dorn, extending his human hand to help her to her feet.

“You made contact again?” Corvus asked.

Deirdre nodded absently. “Baby’s mother told us a story.”

“What?”

“A story?”

“It was kind of strange,” Deirdre said. “Not like a story so much as a … a prediction, I guess you’d call it. Maybe a warning.”

Swimming effortlessly in the tank, Deirdre heard Mother’s clicks and whistles as if the dolphin were talking to her.

It seems safe and easy now, Mother was saying, in this water where there are no sharks to threaten us and the fish are always close to our teeth.

But sometime we may find our way out to the true waters again, the waters where our mothers and fathers of old swam and hunted. Waters that are so deep they have no bottom. Waters that have treacherous currents that can carry you far, far away.

The sharks are always there, waiting for a lone dolphin with their sharp teeth. They are always hungry. They never rest.

Baby flipped her tail and rose gracefully to the surface for a gulp of air. Mother followed her while Father swam below.

You must be ready to face the sharks. Ready to swim in the big water. Ready to hunt. Now the fish have nowhere to hide from us. But in the big water the fish can run far, far away.

How big is the big water? Baby asked.

A hundred feedings would cover only a small part of it, Mother replied.

Have you seen this?

Mother said, I have seen bigger water than we are in now, but no, I have not swum in the truly big water. My mother, and her mother, and their mother’s mothers have told about it.

Schools of fish that blot out the light, Baby said.

Yes, and sharks that eat baby dolphins.

Baby said, Sharks are bad.

Very bad, Mother agreed. My sister lived in the big water long ago. She was attacked by sharks. The others of the family tried to drive the sharks away but we were too late. They killed her.

Sharks are bad, Baby repeated.

Very bad. Be on your guard against them.

But there are no sharks in this water.

Not now. But they could come to this water. And they like to eat nothing better than baby dolphins.

“The mother was warning Baby about sharks?” Corvus asked.

“Yes,” said Deirdre. “I don’t think Baby believed her. At least, I didn’t feel any sense of fear in Baby.”

Dorn said, “Perhaps you could check the mother’s history and see if she had a sister who was attacked by sharks. That could verify Deirdre’s contact, couldn’t it?”

Andy grinned brightly. “It might at that.”

INFIRMARY

It was two days later when Deirdre sat on the medical couch in the infirmary waiting for her daily injection from Dr. Pohan, still wondering about how she might have contracted rabies.

Dr. Nordstrum was from Earth, she thought. She worked at Selene, but she could’ve gone back to visit Earth easily enough; it’s only a few hours’ flight. Okay, she might have been bitten or scratched by some rabid animal. There’s all sorts of wild animals on Earth. Twenty billion people and woods and grasslands and everyplace teeming with bacteria and feral beasts. Earth is like a zoo. A jungle.

But then she reasoned, Still, if Nordstrum was a microbiologist, wouldn’t she have recognized the symptoms of rabies? Especially if she’d been bitten by an animal out in the wild. Wouldn’t she have taken the precaution of the proper treatment instead of letting the infection grow in her body until it killed her?

Maybe she was so eager to get out to the research station at Jupiter that she ignored the early symptoms. They’re not much. Just a rash, according to what the medical files say. Maybe some mood changes; irritability. Maybe that’s what made her ignore—

The accordion-fold door to the treatment cubicle clattered open and Dr. Pohan stepped in. Deirdre saw that he wasn’t smiling.

“Good morning,” the doctor said flatly.

“I’m ready for my injection,” said Deirdre, pushing up the sleeve of her blouse.

Dr. Pohan shook his head as he commanded, “Computer, display Deirdre Ambrose’s record.”

The screen on the partition beside the couch showed a single rising red curve against a grid of thin yellow lines.

“The treatment is not working,” said Dr. Pohan. “At least, it is not working fast enough.”

Deirdre stared at the curve. The virus is growing inside me, she realized. Multiplying.

“What should we do?” she asked, suddenly breathless with anxiety.

Tugging at one end of his mustache, the doctor replied curtly, “Freeze you.”

“Freeze me? Cryonics?”

Dr. Pohan raised both his chubby little hands. “No, no, no. Not cryonics. Not liquid nitrogen. We only have to chill you down enough to slow your body functions sufficiently so that the disease will not grow while we’re in transit to Jupiter. A matter of some nine days, that’s all.”

“Will I be conscious?”

Shaking his head slightly, the doctor said, “You will be asleep. Your metabolic functions will slow to less than one-third of their normal pace. You will be fed intravenously.”

“I see,” Deirdre said. But she had her doubts about the procedure.

Dr. Pohan put on a reassuring smile. “It will be like taking a long, refreshing nap. When you wake up you will be aboard station Gold, where the medical staff has much better facilities for your treatment.”

“I see,” Deirdre said again. But she still felt terribly unsure about the entire matter.

Pohan slid the door back again. Two white-smocked medical technicians were waiting there, both women, both short, slender Asians. The whole crew must be Asian, Deirdre thought idly as they wheeled up a gurney and helped her lie down on it.

Andy Corvus was in his quarters, reviewing Deirdre’s last session with the dolphins. Max Yeager was sitting on one of the cluttered room’s chairs; he had cleared the junk Corvus had deposited on the chair and simply dumped it on the thickly carpeted floor.

“So you can get Dee to narrate what she experienced and play her words alongside the DBS data,” Yeager was saying.

“That’s the best we can do,” Corvus said despondently, “unless we can figure out how to visualize these nerve impulses.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Yeager said.

“Not much,” Corvus said.

“You’ve checked about the sister that was killed by sharks?”

Nodding, Corvus said, “They’re checking the files back Earthside, but if it happened in the wild they probably won’t have any record of it.”

“Well, you’ve got Dee’s narration.”

“I don’t see how—”

Corvus’s pocketphone jingled. Yeager thought the tune it played sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

Andy flicked the phone open and pointed it at the compartment’s wall screen. Deirdre’s lovely face appeared. She looked distraught.

Without preamble she said, “Andy, I won’t be able to work with the dolphins today.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to be frozen.”

“Frozen?” Yeager and Corvus yelped together.

“To slow down the rabies,” she said. “I’ll be kept frozen until we reach Jupiter.”

Leaping to his feet, Corvus shouted into the phone, “Don’t let them touch you! I’ll be right down there.” Then his brows shot toward his scalp and he asked somewhat sheepishly, “Uh … where are you?”

Yeager went with Corvus. The two men hurried down the passageway toward the elevator, grasping the big aluminum crate between them. They put it down on the deck as they waited for the elevator.

Once the doors slid open they saw that Dorn was already in the cab.

“What’s happening with Deirdre?” he asked as Corvus and Yeager tugged the box into the elevator with them.

They swiftly explained. “I can put her under with the DBS equipment,” Corvus said, almost breathless with exertion and excitement. “I don’t want them to freeze her if they don’t have to.”

Dorn thought about it as the elevator rose toward the infirmary’s level. “The brain stimulator can put her into a comatose state,” he said calmly, “but will it slow her metabolic rate?”

“Huh?” Corvus blinked. “No, it won’t.”

“That’s why they want to freeze her, isn’t it? To slow her metabolism so the disease doesn’t spread inside her body.”

Yeager looked digusted. “We didn’t think of that.”

“We just wanted to save her from being frozen,” Corvus muttered.

Dorn shook his head. “Good intentions. But it won’t help her.”

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. Dorn bent down and lifted the aluminum box in one hand while his two friends watched glumly.

INFIRMARY

Dr. Pohan was not happy to see the three of them as they burst into the infirmary, Dorn lugging the aluminum box under his prosthetic arm.

“This is a restricted area!” he snapped at them. “No visitors allowed.”

Before either of the others could reply, Yeager said firmly, “We’re friends of your patient and we’re not leaving until we see her.”

Pohan tried to glare at them, but he was too small to be intimidating. The three men towered over him. Yeager could see beads of perspiration break out on the doctor’s bald pate.

“Very well,” Pohan said, almost in a whisper. “Just for a moment.”

The cubicle was small and felt chilly. It smelled of disinfectant and something with a flat, acrid tang to it. Deirdre was lying on what looked to Andy Corvus like a high-tech couch. Three sides of the bed were surrounded by blinking, beeping electronics gear. Off in the corner a white boxy refrigerator gave off a faint wisp of condensation. Two Asian women in white medical gowns and soft blue masks stood to one side, silent, their dark eyes appraising the trio of interlopers.

Deirdre smiled up at them. “Hi,” she said groggily.

Dr. Pohan half whispered, “She has already been sedated. She will lose consciousness soon.”

Awkwardly bending his lanky frame over Deirdre, Corvus asked, “How d’you feel, Dee?”

“Sleepy.”

“Are you all right?” Yeager asked.

“Guess so.”

Dorn stepped up, still grasping Corvus’s equipment box in his prosthetic arm, and offered his human hand to her. She reached up and clasped it.

“We’ll be waiting for you,” he said. Then, looking sternly at Dr. Pohan, he added, “We’ll be right here when you wake up.”

Dierdre smiled at the three of them. “Good,” she whispered. “Good.”

She closed her eyes and her face relaxed into sleep.

Dr. Pohan hissed, “She is sedated. Now go! We have work to do.”

Dorn glanced at his two companions, then said to the doctor, “One of us will be here in your infirmary at all times.”

“Impossible!” snapped Pohan. “We have no waiting room, no facilities for—”

Yeager interrupted him. “At all times, like the man said. Even if we have to wait out in the passageway.”

“Yeah,” said Andy. “We’ll keep watch over her night and day.”

Dr. Pohan looked as if he might burst: red-faced, mustache quivering, scalp covered with beads of perspiration. But he admitted defeat. “Out in the passageway, then. Do not interfere with medical procedures.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it,” said Yeager, straight-faced.

“We merely want to look in on our friend from time to time,” said Dorn.

“Every day,” Corvus emphasized.

LEVIATHAN

Leviathan’s eye parts could see the darters clearly now, a huge swarm of them lurking upcurrent, between the Kin and the flow of food sifting down weakly from the cold abyss above.

Darters had never done this before, as far as Leviathan knew. They hunted in small packs and attacked individual members of the Kin, usually when one went off alone to dissociate and bud. But now the darters had grouped together and were apparently willing to attack the Kin en masse.

It flashed a question to the Elders, deep in the core of the Kin’s formation. Have the darters ever shown this behavior before? Have they ever displayed such planning, such cunning?

Leviathan’s question was relayed from one member of the Kin to another, inward toward the Elders. Leviathan watched the displays flashing yellow and green, briefly lighting the water, fainter and fainter as the message moved inward toward the Elders. Waiting, Leviathan saw that the darters were trying to cut the Kin off from the flow of food. If they wished to reach the downcurrent they would have to fight their way past the darters.

And if they failed to reach the flow of food, members of the Kin would begin to disintegrate involuntarily, hunger driving their primeval instinct to dissociate and reproduce. Then the darters would feast.

At last the Elders’ answer flashed from the display of the member nearest Leviathan. None of the Elders could recall the darters showing such organization and forethought before. Not even the most senior of the Elders had seen anything like this, even from its first budding, long ages ago.

Something new! Despite the danger Leviathan thrilled at the concept. Something new and different was happening. Perhaps it would lead the Elders to change their ancient ways.

Another message flashed from the display cells of the member nearest Leviathan. The Elders have decided that the Kin will turn away from the darters.

Leave the food stream? Leviathan was stunned by the Elders’ decision. Before it could question the command, though, the message from the Elders continued:

There are other food streams. The world is wide. There is no need to confront the darters over this one stream. We will find another.

As the huge spherical formation of the Kin slowly turned away, Leviathan wondered if the Elders knew what they were doing. The darters aren’t going to remain where they are and let us get away from them. They will follow us and attack, sooner or later.

Leviathan flashed that message inward toward the Elders. In time their reply flared from the hide of the member nearest it. The darters would never dare to attack the assembled Kin. We would destroy them and they know it. Stay together and we will leave them far behind us while we find another food stream.

Leviathan wondered about that. The darters have changed their ways, but the Elders do not recognize it. Nor do they realize that we must change our ways, as well.

But decisions of the Elders must be obeyed, or the Symmetry will be damaged beyond repair. Reluctantly, Leviathan swam with the rest of the Kin, away from the food stream, away from the waiting darters.

Its eye parts saw that the darters turned, too, and began to follow the Kin on their new course. They could be patient, Leviathan thought, and wait until starvation forces us to begin dissociating.