The director actually smiled. “A good question. An excellent question!”
Grant waited for more.
“Zheng He was a great explorer. Commander of the Ming emperor’s navy in the fifteenth century. Fifty years before Columbus and his pitiful little boats crossed the Atlantic, Zheng He’s treasure fleets sailed all across the Indian Ocean, to Africa, Arabia, the islands of the East Indies, even to Australia.”
“I never heard about that,” Grant said.
“Great ships, ten times bigger than the Spanish caravels,” Wo continued. “Hundreds of ships! Thousands of sailors! Half the world was in China’s sway while the Europeans still believed the Earth was flat!”
“Then why—”
“But the emperor Zhu Di died, and his successor had the great ships burned. They destroyed the fleet! They forbade exploration and commerce! China turned inward and decayed. By the time the Europeans reached China’s shores, the Empire of Heaven was weak, poor, divided, easily conquered.”
He fell silent. Grant thought over what Wo had just told him, then said, “It could have been the other way around, then, couldn’t it? If they had allowed Zheng He to continue, China could have conquered Europe.”
“Easily.”
“Why did they stop?”
Wo took a deep breath and ran a weary hand over his eyes. “Zheng He was a eunuch.”
Grant felt shocked. “You mean he’d been castrated?”
“Many were, in those days. In Europe, also. Boys with sweet singing voices were castrated well into the nineteenth century, I believe.”
“Zheng He was a eunuch,” Grant repeated in a whisper.
“Most of the palace officials who promoted his fleet were eunuchs. The Confucian bureaucrats who ran the rest of the government opposed the eunuch’s position of power with the emperor.”
“Palace politics.”
“Yes,” said Wo. “Palace politics. And the losers were often executed.”
“The Confucians won?”
“Eventually. When the emperor Zhu Di died, the Confucians tightened their grip on his successor. The great treasure fleet of Zheng He was destroyed.”
“And China crumbled.”
“It took China more than five hundred years to recover. Even today China is not as rich or powerful as it could have been.”
“It was lucky for the Europeans, then.”
“Yes, very fortunate for them,” Wo grumbled.
Grant tried to lighten the mood. “But today we’re beyond all that. Asians and Europeans and Africans— we’re all working together.”
“Are we?”
“Aren’t we?”
“If your Zealots had their way, this station would be closed … destroyed just the way Zheng He’s fleet was destroyed.”
“They’re not my Zealots,” Grant retorted, as firmly as he could manage.
“I feel very close to the spirit of Zheng He,” Wo said, closing his eyes. “His spirit touches my own.”
Grant said nothing.
“In a way, I am also a eunuch. My manhood was destroyed in the accident.”
“I didn’t know,” Grant blurted.
“So I sit here, weak and helpless, while others sail into the unknown sea.”
“You’re not helpless.”
“They blame Krebs for the accident. It was really my fault. I panicked.”
“I never heard that,” said Grant.
“Krebs is too loyal to reveal it. She has taken the blame so that I could remain as director.”
“What happened?”
Wo waved a hand. “What does it matter? Now I sit here and wait for word from them.”
“They should be in the ocean by now,” Grant mused.
“Yes. And while we struggle to explore, the Confucians, the bureaucrats who have the positions of power back on Earth, are on their way here to destroy us. They fear what we are doing here. They despise us.”
“They can’t stop us. We’re doing what we came here to do.”
“I should be down there with them.”
Grant looked at the older man’s tired, dejected face. Lines of fatigue and worry and self-doubt were etched into his flesh.
“If it weren’t for you, sir,” he said, “they wouldn’t be out there exploring the ocean at all. None of us would be here.”
And he realized as he said it that he himself would probably be back on Earth, or at Farside, if it weren’t for Wo’s monomaniacal determination to find intelligent life in Jupiter’s vast ocean.
Yet, for the first time, Grant felt that he’d rather be here—even as a lowly grad student—than anywhere else. Wo’s passion has infected me, he realized.
LEVIATHAN
Weakened by its battle against the Darters, slowly starving in this barren region of the sea, Leviathan allowed the powerful currents surging out of the eternal storm to drive it farther from the towering, roaring wall of seething water and its menacing bolts of lightning.
Its wounded members flared with pain signals. Leviathan needed food, and plenty of it, to heal the flesh torn and shredded by the Darters’ teeth. Yet there was no food to be found.
At least there were no Darters in this empty part of the ocean. Leviathan doubted its members would have the strength to fight them. Food. Leviathan had to find food. Which meant it had to circle the immense storm, return to the side where the currents flowed into it and the food streamed thickly.
Riding the circling currents, drifting rather than propelling itself through the ocean, Leviathan wondered if there might be some food—any food—up higher. It was dangerous to rise too high into the cold abyss above, but Leviathan knew it would be death to remain at this depth, where no food at all was available.
Slowly, cautiously, Leviathan made its flotation members expand. The immense creature drifted higher, nearing exhaustion, nearing the moment when its members would instinctively disintegrate and begin their individual buddings, in the last desperate hope of survival by spawning offspring.
The old instincts would be of no avail now, Leviathan knew. The members could separate and reproduce themselves in the hope of uniting into renewed assemblies, but what good would that do where there was not enough food even for one? Even if a few individual members survived temporarily, how could they live without the unity of all the others? Apart they were helpless. What could flagella members do without a brain to guide them? How could a brain member exist without sensor members and digestive members and—
Leviathan halted its pointless musing. There was food drifting in the currents above. The sensor members felt its faint echo vibrating through the water. The storm’s merciless flow swept the particles into its own mindless vortex before they could sift down to the comfortable level where Leviathan swam.
It would be cold up there, numbingly cold. Leviathan’s kind traced tales of foolish youngsters who rose too high in their haughty search to outdo their elders and never returned, disintegrated by the cold and their members devoured by Darters or the eerie creatures that haunted the abyss above.
But remaining at this level meant starvation. Leviathan needed enough food to allow it to circle around the great storm and return to the familiar region where the food rained down without fail.
Upward Leviathan rose, straining against the growing cold, heading toward the meager trickle of food that its sensor members had detected.
It was not food, Leviathan realized. Despite the numbing cold and the continuing pain signals from its wounded members, Leviathan’s eye parts showed that the echoes the sensors detected came not from a thin stream of food particles but from one single particle, much larger than any food it had ever known, yet puny compared to Leviathan or even to the Darters.