I don't know. Wrong with what?
He smiled again, protectively. My darling Snowy. There's so much to show you. Here, come fly with me. He reached out with an open hand.
Impenetrable night folded about her, then the stars came out one by one. There was no horizon, when she looked down there was no ground. Drifting in space. Five slender silvery booms extended out from her, probing the vacuum.
These are the Kiley flight memories, Royan said. The approach phase. There, see?
In front of her was a bright orange-brown dot, its glow somehow malevolent. She could hear its cry over the radio bands, a crackling roar. Lonely, random.
A stillborn star weeping, Royan whispered reverently. Can you imagine what we have missed? Can you imagine the beauty of a double sunrise?
Kiley, it's back now isn't it? It came back.
Hush, Snowy. Watch, learn.
Jupiter grew, becoming a salmon-pink disc, distinct cloud-bands hovering on the edge of resolution. Moons expanded from dark stars to solid worlds, coloured grey and brown, mottled and streaked. New senses swept in, magnetic, particle, electromagnetic, overlaying the basic image with bolder shadings. Jupiter nestled at the centre of colossal energy storms. Pellucid petals of blue and pink light whorled protectively around the gas giant, the white halo of it's plasma torus, intangible sleet of ions blowing outward.
The electric gusts flowed around her, soothing her thoughts, lost in marvel.
What would our world be like, Snowy, if we could perceive it with these senses? How colourful and exciting.
Why did you come here? she asked. And why alone? I would have shared all this, I would have been a part of it with you.
Because it is I who was a part of you, Snowy. I have been since the day you rescued me. I guess I make a bad prince consort after all.
You had everything.
I had everything you gave me. This—Jupiter, Kiley—was my chance for the roles to be reversed.
To make it on your own?
Yes. To be your equal.
You always were.
No. Not really. With or without me, you would still have achieved what you have today.
You brought me the electron-compression data.
If not me, then your money would have found a way. It always does.
What did you hope to achieve? How would this space probe give you equality?
The microbes, Snowy. As soon as I heard of the Matoyaii results I knew they were genuine, that the sensor results weren't an aberration. They existed, I could feel it. Just like Greg and his intuition. They were real, alive, waiting for me. It was like being born again, I'd been given a purpose to live.
They were inside the orbit of Io now, Kiley sliding through the penumbra, falling in towards the gas giant. Perspective altered, Jupiter was definitely below now. Something so vast could never be overhead. Its curvature was flattening out, edges merging with distance, cloudscape expanding into an unending plane. if she looked up she could see Io; a volcano's mushroom fountain of sulphur just north of the equator belching upwards. A cold dragon flame cascading in glorious low gravity slow motion.
The stormband below Kiley was a pallid rust-yellow, ocean-sized elliptical cyclones and anti-cyclones of ammonium hydrosulfide grinding in conflict, buffeted by supersonic jetstreams. Clots of white cloud bloomed as whirlwind vortices sucked frozen ammonia crystals up from the hidden depths. They spilled into the churning cyclone walls like cream into coffee, diffusing and dispersing.
Then the terminator was ahead of them, a shadow straddling the nearly flat horizon. Firefly lights twinkled beyond.
Was I such a challenge to you? Julia asked sadly. I thought you were the one person in the world who saw me as me, as Snowy, not some plutocrat bitch. I was alive then, when you held me.
Your heritage is the challenge, the barrier. Not you. You, Snowy, you I love. Did you need to be told that?
I could give it all up. For you.
No, no, no.
No.
You are the one who is complete, Snowy. I envy you that. Me, I still have to find your peak And I can. I can.
Kiley glided into the umbra. It was night below, but not dark. Lightning twisted between the imperious cloud mountains, tattered dazzling streamers that illuminated thousands of square kilometres with each elemental discharge. Comets sank down gracefully amid the storms, rocky detritus from the rings sucked in by the monstrous gravity field, braked by the ionosphere, flaring purple, spitting a tail of, slowly dimming sparks.
Kiley began its deceleration burn, sending out a five-hundred-metre spear of plasma. The top of the atmosphere was only seventy-five kilometres below now. Julia could sense the massive flux currents seething through the thin fog of molecules, glowing red veins pulsing strongly.
The burn ended abruptly. The image juddered as explosive bolts fired. Empty spherical hydrogen tanks and lenticular giga-conductor cells separated, tumbling away. Small chemical thrusters fired, stabilizing the modules which remained. Kiley began its coast up to the rings.
Do you see now, Snowy? The silent savagery of this place, its hostility. Yet amid all this, there is life.
Kiley found the microbes?
Oh, yes.
Is that all it found?
How could there be more?
A spaceship, a starship.
No. Is that what you are dealing with, a starship? Your trouble.
I don't know, Royan, I really don't. I've got people working on it, Greg, Victor, Suzi.
The old team. That's nice. They're good, they'll find you an answer.
They need to find you, Royan. Where are you?
I don't know. How could I?
Then why were you left in storage? What are you here to warn me about?
Potential. The potential of the microbes. But I was so sure. I had it all worked out.
Show me.
The rock reminded her of Phobos. It had that same barren grey-yellow colour, a battered potato outline. Except it was much smaller, barely a hundred metres long, sixty wide. Kiley hovered beside it, optical sensor images degraded by the dry mist of ring particles. Wavering braids of dust motes and sulphur atoms shimmered in the raw sunlight, moving sluggishly.
Jupiter's crescent eclipsed the starfield a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away. Even from this height, the dancing lights of the darkside were easily seen. Like Earth's cities, she thought, the idea momentarily distorting scale.
Kiley's close-range sensors were stirring, focusing on the rock. It had worn down over the aeons, its surface abraded by the gentle unceasing caress of dust. Impact craters and jagged fracture cliffs smoothed down to soft curves. One end was scarred by a white, splash-pattern of methane frost, tapering rays extending their grip over a third of its length.
Lasers swept the rock from end to end, building a cartographic profile within the on-board lightware processors.
Cold gas precision positioning thrusters fired, moving the probe closer in centimetre increments. When it hovered a metre above the rock, microfocus photon amps telescoped out of their cruise phase sheaths, aligning themselves on the surface.
The image changed, a lunar mare strewn with boulders; Julia knew she was seeing the dust motes sticking to the rock. Kiley's lightware processors began to run a spectrographic analysis program. She watched the image alter, as if it had been overlaid with a grid of square lenses. Data began to flow back into the probe's lightware as the blurred squares were examined one by one.
Kiley's photon amps quartered a square metre of the rock's surface a millimetre at a time, then it fired its cold gas thrusters and moved to the next section. Again. Again.
The fourth time, one of the photon-amp grid squares flared red. The eight surrounding ones were immediately reviewed by the spectrographic program. It registered carbon, hydrogen, and various trace minerals.