Invested capital, expertise, trade; this was the carrot, and a big one. Clearly if the Galileans accepted it, the tendrils of association with Mars would be there, and Jackie could then follow that up with political alliances of various sorts; and pull the Jovian moons into her web. This eventuality was as clear to the Jovians as it was to anyone, however, and they were doing what they could to get what they wanted without giving too much in return. No doubt they would soon be playing the Martians off against similar offers from the Terfan exmetas and other organizations.
This was where Zo came in; she was the stick. Public carrot, private stick; this was Jackie’s method, in all phases of life.
Zo revealed Jackie’s threats in tiny indirect glimpses, to make them seem even more threatening. Brief meeting with officials from lo: the ecopoetic plan, Zo said to them, casually, seemed far too slow. It would be thousands of years before their bacteria chewed the sulfur into useful gases, and meanwhile Jupiter’s intense radio field, which enveloped lo and added to its problems, would mutate the bacteria beyond recognition. They needed an ionosphere, they needed water, it was possible they even needed to think about pulling the moon out into a higher orbit around their great gas god. Mars, home of terraforming expertise and the healthiest wealthiest civilization in the solar system, could help them with all that, give them special help. Or even discuss with the other Galileans the notion of taking over the project, in order to bring it up to speed.
After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice Galileans: in cocktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, walking in groups along Lake Geneva’s signature lakefront promenade, under the sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates from lo, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.
Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the grassy streets of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape outside the tent gave an indication of its nature — a glacier covering a whole world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.
On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake’s ice bottom, tinted yellow by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinprick lanterns.
They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgrass gleamed greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars’s military might, mentioned again that lo was considering defection from their league.
The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.
“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.
“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”
“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”
Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.
“Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone,” Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge over a white-bottomed canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to come around into view.”
The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut la/y spirals up near the tent frame. Zo watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives greyhounding past — “You really are more interested in rocks than people,” Zo said, half-admiring, half-irritated.
Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the arm, pulled her along. “The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years old, they’ve lived in point-one g all their lives, they don’t care about Earth or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five thousand years. They’re the next step in evolution, for ka’s sake, and here you are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this galaxy. You’re just as crazy as they said.”
This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underbill.”
Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”
“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.
Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a muffled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the locals, “This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Europa who talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don’t know if they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk, like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Stellariz-ing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you needed then.”
“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.
“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”
“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.
“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”
Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.