2061: Odyssey Three (2 page)

When he was born, William Tsung had been called ‘the most expensive baby in the world’; he held the title for only two years before it was claimed by his sister. She still held it, and now that the Family Laws had been repealed, it would never be challenged.

Their father, the legendary Sir Lawrence, had been born when China had re-instituted the stringent ‘One Child, One Family’ rule; his generation had provided psychologists and social scientists with material for endless studies. Having no brothers or sisters - and in many cases, no uncles or aunts - it was unique in human history. Whether credit was due to the resilience of the species or the merit of the Chinese ‘extended family’ system would probably never be settled. The fact remained that the children of that strange time were remarkably free from scars; but they were certainly not unaffected, and Sir Lawrence had done his somewhat spectacular best to make up for the isolation of his infancy.

When his second child was born in ‘22, the licensing system had become law. You could have as many children as you wished, provided only that you paid the appropriate fee. (The surviving old guard communists were not the only ones who thought the whole scheme perfectly appalling, but they were outvoted by their pragmatic colleagues in the fledgling congress of the People’s Democratic Republic.)

Numbers one and two were free. Number three cost a million sols. Number four was two million. Number five was four million, and so on. The fact that, in theory, there were no capitalists in the People’s Republic was cheerfully ignored.

Young Mr Tsung (that was years, of course, before King Edward gave him his KBE) never revealed if he had any target in mind; he was still a fairly poor millionaire when his fifth child was born. But he was still only forty, and when the purchase of Hong Kong did not take quite as much of his capital as he had feared, he discovered that he had a considerable amount of small change in hand.

So ran the legend - but, like many other stories about Sir Lawrence, it was hard to distinguish fact from mythology. There was certainly no truth in the persistent rumour that he had made his first fortune through the famous shoe-box-sized pirate edition of the Library of Congress. The whole Molecular Memory Module racket was an off-Earth operation, made possible by the United States’ failure to sign the Lunar Treaty.

Even though Sir Lawrence was not a multitrillionaire, the complex of corporations he had built up made him the greatest financial power on earth - no small achievement for the son of a humble videocassette peddler in what was still known as the New Territories. He probably never noticed the eight million for Child Number Six, or even the thirty-two for Number Eight. The sixty-four he had to advance on Number Nine attracted world publicity, and after Number Ten the bets placed on his future plans may well have exceeded the two hundred and fifty-six million the next child would have cost him. However, at that point the Lady Jasmine, who combined the best properties of steel and silk in exquisite proportion, decided that the Tsung dynasty was adequately established.

It was quite by chance (if there is such a thing) that Sir Lawrence became personally involved in the space business. He had, of course, extensive maritime and aeronautical interests, but these were handled by his five sons and their associates. Sir Lawrence’s real love was communications - newspapers (those few that were left), books, magazines (paper and electronic) and, above all, the global television networks.

Then he had bought the magnificent old Peninsular Hotel, which to a poor Chinese boy had once seemed the very symbol of wealth and power, and turned it into his residence and main office. He surrounded it by a beautiful park, by the simple expedient of pushing the huge shopping centres underground (his newly formed Laser Excavation Corporation made a fortune in the process, and set a precedent for many other cities).

One day, as he was admiring the unparalleled skyline of the city across the harbour, he decided that a further improvement was necessary. The view from the lower floors of the Peninsular had been blocked for decades by a large building looking like a squashed golfball. This, Sir Lawrence decided, would have to go.

The Director of the Hong Kong Planetarium - widely considered to be among the five best in the world - had other ideas, and very soon Sir Lawrence was delighted to discover someone he could not buy at any price. The two men became firm friends; but when Dr Hessenstein arranged a special presentation for Sir Lawrence’s sixtieth birthday, he did not know that he would help to change the history of the Solar System.

More than a hundred years after Zeiss had built the first prototype in Jena in 1924, there were still a few optical planetarium projectors in use, looming dramatically over their audiences. But Hong Kong had retired its third-generation instrument decades ago, in favour of the far more versatile electronic system. The whole of the great dome was, essentially, a giant television screen, made up of thousands of separate panels, on which any conceivable image could be displayed.

The programme had opened - inevitably - with a tribute to the unknown inventor of the rocket, somewhere in China during the thirteenth century. The first five minutes were a high-speed historical survey, giving perhaps less than due credit to the Russian, German and American pioneers in order to concentrate on the career of Dr Hsue-Shen Tsien. His countrymen could be excused, in such a time and place, if they made him appear as important in the history of rocket development as Goddard, von Braun, or Koroylev. And they certainly had just grounds for indignation at his arrest on trumped-up charges in the United States when, after helping to establish the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory and being appointed Caltech’s first Goddard Professor, he decided to return to his homeland.

The launching of the first Chinese satellite by the ‘Long March 1′ rocket in 1970 was barely mentioned, perhaps because at that time the Americans were already walking on the Moon. Indeed, the rest of the twentieth century was dismissed in a few minutes, to take the story up to 2007 and the construction of the spaceship Tsien.

The narrator did not gloat unduly over the consternation of the other spacefaring powers, when a presumed Chinese space station suddenly blasted out of orbit and headed for Jupiter, to overtake the Russian-American mission aboard the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The story was dramatic - and tragic - enough to require no embellishment.

Unfortunately, there was very little authentic visual material to illustrate it: the programme had to rely largely on special effects and intelligent reconstruction from later, long-range photo-surveys. During their brief sojourn on the icy surface of Europa, Tsien’s crew had been far too busy to make television documentaries, or even set up an unattended camera.

Nevertheless, the words spoken at the time conveyed much of the drama of that first landing on the moons of Jupiter. The commentary broadcast from the approaching Leonov by Heywood Floyd served admirably to set the scene, and there were plenty of library shots of Europa to illustrate it:

‘At this very moment I’m looking at it through the most powerful of the ship’s telescopes; under this magnification, it’s ten times larger than the Moon as you see it with the naked eye. And it’s a really weird sight.

‘The surface is a uniform pink, with a few small brown patches. It’s covered with an intricate network of narrow lines, curling and weaving in all directions. In fact, it looks very much like a photo from a medical textbook, showing a pattern of veins and arteries.

‘A few of these features are hundreds - or even thousands - of kilometres long, and look rather like the illusory canals that Percival Lowell and other early-twentieth-century astronomers imagined they’d seen on Mars.

‘But Europa’s canals aren’t an illusion, though of course they’re not artificial. What’s more, they do contain water - or at least ice. For the satellite is almost entirely covered by ocean, averaging fifty kilometres deep.

‘Because it’s so far from the Sun, Europa’s surface temperature is extremely low - about a hundred and fifty degrees below freezing. So one might expect its single ocean to be a solid block of ice.

‘Surprisingly, that isn’t the case because there’s a lot of heat generated inside Europa by tidal forces - the same forces that drive the great volcanoes on neighbouring Io.

‘So the ice is continually melting, breaking up and freezing, forming cracks and lanes like those in the floating ice sheets in our own polar regions. It’s that intricate tracery of cracks I’m seeing now; most of them are dark and very ancient - perhaps millions of years old. But a few are almost pure white; they’re the new ones that have just opened up, and have a crust only a few centimetres thick.

‘Tsien has landed right beside one of these white streaks - the fifteen-hundred-kilometre-long feature that’s been christened the Grand Canal. Presumably the Chinese intend to pump its water into their propellant tanks, so that they can explore the Jovian satellite system and then return to Earth. That may not be easy, but they’ll certainly have studied the landing site with great care, and must know what they’re doing.

‘It’s obvious, now, why they’ve taken such a risk - and why they claim Europa. As a refuelling point, it could be the key to the entire Solar System…’

But it hadn’t worked out that way, thought Sir Lawrence, as he reclined in his luxurious chair beneath the streaked and mottled disc that filled his artificial sky. The oceans of Europa were still inaccessible to mankind, for reasons which were still a mystery. And not only inaccessible, but invisible: since Jupiter had become a sun, both its inner satellites had vanished beneath clouds of vapour boiling out from their interiors. He was looking at Europa as it had been back in 2010 - not as it was today.

He had been little more than a boy then, but could still remember the pride he felt in knowing that his countrymen - however much he disapproved of their politics - were about to make the first landing on a virgin world.

There had been no camera there, of course, to record that landing, but the reconstruction was superbly done. He could really believe that was the doomed spaceship dropping silently out of the jetblack sky towards the Europan icescape, and coming to rest beside the discoloured band of recently frozen water that had been christened the Grand Canal.

Everyone knew what had happened next; perhaps wisely, there had been no attempt to reproduce it visually. Instead, the image of Europa faded, to be replaced by a portrait as familiar to every Chinese as Yuri Gagarin’s was to every Russian.

The first photograph showed Rupert Chang on his graduation day in 1989 - the earnest young scholar, indistinguishable from a million others, utter1y unaware of his appointment with history two decades in the future.

Briefly, to a background of subdued music, the commentator summed up the highlights of Dr Chang’s career, until his appointment as Science Officer aboard Tsien. Cross-sections in time, the photographs grew older, until the last one, taken immediately before the mission.

Sir Lawrence was glad of the planetarium’s darkness; both his friends and his enemies would have been surprised to see the moisture gathering in his eyes as he listened to the message that Dr Chang had aimed towards the approaching Leonov, never knowing if it would be received.

‘… know you are aboard Leonov… may not have much time… aiming my suit antenna where I think…’

The signal vanished for agonizing seconds, then came back much clearer, though not appreciably louder.

‘… relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I’m only survivor. Using my suit radio - no idea if it has enough range, but it’s the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA…

The signal faded again.

‘… soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadily and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out to check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands - stood - about thirty metres from the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go directly from it and down through the ice. Very thin - not safe to walk on. The warm upwelling…’

Again a long silence.

‘… no problem - five kilowatts of lighting strung up on the ship. Like a Christmas tree - beautiful, shining right through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first - a huge dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it was a school of fish - too large for a single organism - then it started to break through the ice.

‘… like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera - I stayed to watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was - I’ve seen pictures of the kelp forests off California - but I was quite wrong…

I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn’t possibly survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved forward - bits were breaking off like glass - but it was still advancing towards the ship - a black tidal wave, slowing down all the time.

‘I was still so surprised that I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t imagine what it was trying to do.

‘… climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold - the way termites protect themselves from Sunlight with their little corridors of mud.

‘… tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle - all in slow motion, like a dream.

‘Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the thing was trying to do - and then it was too late. We could have saved ourselves - if we’d only switched off those lights.

‘Perhaps it’s a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered by the Sunlight that filters through the ice. Or it could have been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must have been more brilliant than anything that Europa has ever known.

‘Then the ship crashed. I saw the hull split, a cloud of snowflakes form as moisture condensed. All the lights went out, except for one, swinging back and forth on a cable a couple of metres above the ground.

‘I don’t know what happened immediately after that. The next thing I remember, I was standing under the light, beside the wreck of the ship, with a fine powdering of fresh snow all around me. I could see my footsteps in it very clearly… I must have run there; perhaps only a minute or two had elapsed…

‘The plant - I still thought of it as a plant - was motionless. I wondered if it had been damaged by the impact; large sections - as thick as a man’s arm -had splintered off, like broken twigs.

‘Then the main trunk started to move again. It pulled away from the hull, and began to crawl towards me. That was when I knew for certain that the thing was light-sensitive: I was standing immediately under the thousand-watt lamp, which had stopped swinging now.

‘Imagine an oak tree - better still, a banyan with its multiple trunks and roots - flattened out by gravity and trying to creep along the ground. It got to within five metres of the light, then started to spread out until it had made a perfect circle around me. Presumably that was the limit of its tolerance -the point at which photo-attraction turned to repulsion. After that, nothing happened for several minutes. I wondered if it was dead - frozen solid at last.

‘Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers opening. In fact I thought they were flowers - each about as big as a man’s head.

‘Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to unfold. Even then, it occurred to me that no-one - no thing - could ever have seen these colours before; they had no existence until we brought our lights - our fatal lights - to this world.

‘Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly… I walked over to the living wall that surrounded me, so that I would see exactly what was happening. Neither then, or at any other time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain that it was not malevolent - if indeed it was conscious at all.

‘There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of unfolding. Now, they reminded me of butterflies, just emerging from the chrysalis… wings crumpled, still feeble… I was getting closer and closer to the truth.

‘But they were freezing - dying as quickly as they formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like fish stranded on dry land - and at last I realized exactly what they were. Those membranes weren’t petals - they were fins, or their equivalent. This was the free-swimming, larval stage of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on the seabed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of new territory. Just like the corals of Earth’s oceans.

‘I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now, to a drab brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly, and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it sensed my presence.

‘Then I noticed that the stamens - as I’d called them - all carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny star sapphires - or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop - aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I watched, the vivid blue faded, the sapphires became dull, ordinary stones…

‘Dr Floyd - or anyone else who is listening - I haven’t much more time - Jupiter will soon block my signal. But I’ve almost finished.

‘I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand-watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.

‘I wondered if it was too late. For a few minutes, nothing happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches around me, and kicked it.

‘Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to retreat back to the Canal. There was plenty of light - I could see everything perfectly. Ganymede and Callisto were in the sky - Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent - and there was a big auroral display on the nightside, at the Jovian end of the Io flux tube. There was no need to use my helmet light.

‘I followed the creature all the way back to the water, encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down, feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath my boots… As it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain strength and energy, as if it knew that it was approaching its natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.

‘It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bubbled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to see if there was anything to salvage - I don’t want to talk about that…