Farthest Reef (2 page)

Both men laughed. “Well, it wasn’t an in-depth report. Just an overview,” said the civvie. “Mel Bohannon, at your service. Honored to meet you, Rose.”

Lt. Kernes started to explain the layout of the
Enceladus
until Alex informed him that it wasn’t necessary. “Then all you need to know is that your compartment is number one – usually reserved for the brass,” said the officer.

“I’m honored,” said Alex. “Is there a phone?”

Kernes nodded. “And a holo-booth. Plus a library of vids, books and music. Anything you want can be downloaded. Just ask. Meals are free. Drinks …”

“Pay first, right?”

“You know the drill, I guess. So … you served on this ship? What was your duty?”

“Io Miner and … bone collector.”

The lieutenant looked at Alex darkly. “Not Ra Patera, I hope.”

“Last I heard, all those bones are still on Io,” said Alex. He looked around the compartment. “We used to stack the dead in here.”

“Oh.”

That seemed to end the discussion. The officer told Alex to call if he needed anything and excused himself.

“Is that a fact?” said the passenger. “Or were you just sick of the lieut?”

“Just a fact,” said Alex. “’course it wasn’t partitioned this way. The ship has been refitted. Hope I didn’t spook you.”

“So you’re the guy that discovered that reef on Jupiter,” Mel said, stepping back and giving Alex a critical once over. “Didn’t you travel with a Sensor? Mary Seventeen?”

“Read the Galactic Geographic lately, have you?” Alex tried not to sound too cynical.

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

Mel seemed personable enough, but Alex was in no mood to talk. He excused himself, saying he had to make a quick call. He took care not to offend the man. It would be a long trip to Mars.

“When ya gotta go …” said Mel cheerfully as he maneuvered his weightless body into a seat next to a window. Outside, Alex caught a glimpse of Ganymede. It looked smaller and farther away than he expected, but Jupiter’s overwhelming size dwarfed everything in its vicinity.

4
Alex’s quarters were disappointingly small, but he was used to living in mouseholes. Every square inch of metal, air, fuel, or flesh costs money to send somewhere. Pounds of cargo or foot pounds of energy, it made no difference to the accountants or the physicists.

Since the flat screen on the wall was glowing softly Alex knew the holophone system was already activated. He strapped into a cell-foam sofa and took a deep breath. “Computer …” he said, looking around, unsure of where to direct his orders. “Direct connect to Gannytown … uh … Ganymede Prime … Level 5 … uh … GIG … 717 … Mary Seventeen Rose.”

It took a while for the call to connect. When he did get though to Mary, she wasn’t feeling well. Her new internal systems were making her nauseous, she said, and ran toward the bathroom, promising to call him back. He wanted to see Mary, to look at her lovely face, her snow white hair, her perfect body. But not while she was throwing up. “Later’s fine, my love,” he said, switching off the monitor.

Alex considered joining the other passengers in the section marked ‘CLUB’, but he wasn’t really in the mood. And it was likely, in this neck of the woods, that several of the passengers would know who he was. Not that he wasn’t proud of his accomplishments, but the details of
Diver’s
two descents into Jupiter’s Reef were well documented and, in the five years since the last mission they had been thoroughly picked over by the curious, the obsessed, or the just plain crazy. He’d gotten love letters from ladies looking to snuggle with a latter day Columbus and hate mail from their husbands. Or from evangelists who thought the flower-like clicker men of Jupiter were angels and accused Alex of violating their Heaven. Xeno-ecologists had berated him for destroying a pristine environment, while sporting enthusiasts tried to enlist his help opening parts of the reef for hunting. If he hadn’t known it before, he soon found out that fame and infamy are nearly synonymous. He and Mary changed address and phone three times before they got a private line with special permission from GannyCorp.

Alex had taken it all in stride, but it was Mary that he worried about. She was tired of the default limelight status of her existence as a Sensor. She wanted to run a pet shop and enjoy the life of a real person. After enduring two harrowing trips to the Reef where her Sensor’s sensitivities had been strained to the maximum, she’d earned it.

Part of Alex had actually enjoyed his life as a miner, but after refitting and stealing a Corp ship he had been transformed into a spacer. Now, his curiosity satisfied, he was back working the mines with a crew of Ganny grunts. He was enjoying it now, and not just because he was mining seam ice in glittering caverns instead of precious metals in some volcanic cauldron. Now that he knew that his hunch about life existing on Jupiter was right, Alex was, for the first time in his life, at peace. His sandy hair was beginning to tinge with gray, but he felt younger. He was free.

Also, though he never said so to anyone but Mary, Alex was simply glad NOT to be in prison for hijacking a ship. The hand of fate had swept away any proof of that, but he found it much harder to erase from his memory.

He thought of
Diver
, his light cruiser, now docked in a hangar on Ganymede. He’d only taken her out once in the last year. When he thought of the ship he also thought of Mary. The ship was, after all, as much a part of her as it was of Alex. How often had he and Mary made love aboard
Diver
? The flight to Mars … to Earth. Back to Jupiter. Each flight had taken weeks. He smiled. “Too many to count,” he whispered. “Never enough.”

5
Alex was watching a documentary about the asteroid strike credited with forcing mankind into space. More specifically, into the business of asteroid hunting. It was old news, a hundred and fifty years old, but the destruction of Bombay in a searing fireball had become a cornerstone of modern history. It had happened in front of all the world’s eyes and cameras, the best documented disaster in history. There was even a hyper slow camera broadcasting from the central market at the time of impact. They had a day to prepare. Not enough time to evacuate but plenty of time to set up remotes. The
Enceladus
had a good library and he had time to kill. Alex had never actually seen the vid, just clips. Time to do some literary catch-up.

The holoframe blinked and Mary’s face appeared on the screen, superimposed on a freeze frame of a flaming palm tree. “I’ll accept the call,” he said, not waiting for the computer announcement. The screen went blank, and then she was back. She was holding Inky.

“Better now. But I threw up on Inky. He was … well … a mess.”

“That’s a switch,” said Alex. “Inky usually throws up on me.” He laughed, then slapped a hand on his mouth. “Sorry for laughin’, Mary my love. Dingers. I was hoping you’d be feeling better by now.”

“Anyway …” Mary held up the cat. “He’s all clean and I’m drugged up. How’re you, sweety? I’ll bet you’re horny already. I know I am.”

“Mary …” Alex was going to berate her for using the ship’s phones to send such a message but realized it was the drug he was hearing. He knew the med patches by heart. The red one made the pain go away but it threw her inhibitions aside as well.

“What?” said Mary.

“I miss you.”

“You’re damned right, you do.”

“The rest of the ship is probably looking at those tits, my love,” said Alex calmly. “Is that the plan?”

“Your titties,” said Mary, pinching her nipples. “Alex’s little playthings.”

“Dingers,” said Alex.

“Dingers,” she said teasingly. “Things that poke holes in ships. I’ve got those dingers right here.”

“Okay.” Alex took a deep breath. “Stop it, now. No more cybersex … please. I’ve hardly gotten off the ground. Give a lover a break. Tell me what’s doing on Ganymede. Any mail?”

“Stubbs called,” answered Mary, looking disappointed. “He forgot you were already en route to Mars. He said plans have changed a bit. He’ll fill you in, he said.”

“Changed?” Alex screwed up his face. “That sounds like Stubbs, all right.” He could see Mary’s full figure, meaning she was up and walking around, at least.

“He said I was going along, too.” Mary pulled her bathrobe over her shoulders. At the same time the transmission started breaking up. The computer froze the last clean image of Mary pouting at him with her robe slightly off one shoulder. He thought it would make good wallpaper.

“Going where? You’re breaking up.”

“I am? In what way?”

“The transmission.”

“Oh.” Mary’s image was back and moving. She was bent over, toweling off the cat’s rump. “Stubbs said I’d be going along … that was all he said. Except, he’d tell me more later.”

The transmission suddenly got worse. Alex glanced out his cabin window and saw Ganymede moving slowly behind Jupiter’s horizon. Reluctantly, he and Mary said their goodbyes. After disconnecting he resumed his vid but couldn’t concentrate on it. There were too many questions flooding his mind.

6
Alex had never trusted the Corporations that administrated the outer colonies, but he knew they were guided by the same code of honor that he and every other spacer adhered to. He called it the Spacer’s Code. MarsCorp called it the Principle of Synergy. However it was viewed, it meant that people needed to work together, and that generally required honesty.

But the desire to prove his hunch about the reef had made Alex violate the code he believed in so strongly. Inside, where it mattered most, he felt like a hypocrite. After
Diver
had taken him and Mary into the reef, his ego and curiosity had been appeased but his self-esteem had taken a beating. He had broken the law, and he hadn’t done it alone. If the Corp ever wanted to bury him, among their charges would be abducting a Sensor. Sure, it was Mary’s decision to share in his adventure, and it was her choice to pull free of the duties she had been bioengineered to perform, but the Corp didn’t have to see it that way. And they wouldn’t have, if his hunch hadn’t resulted in what the world now called the discovery of the century.

Now he had it all: his ship, his freedom, and his Mary. But he wasn’t sure if he still had his soul. Perhaps he’d left it with the clicker men of Jupiter’s reef. Often he longed to be back there, floating through the arteries that permeated the fabric of the reef. If only he could have had a real dialogue with those ethereal lifeforms that floated enigmatically inside their golden spherical nests.

When asked how he made his discovery, he always said that the reef had called to him. But had it really, or was that a fantasy? Certainly, down there in the reef he’d often had the feeling he had been drawn there. As Stubbs had pointed out many times, though, however things may appear it takes scientific inquiry before one can be certain of anything. All Alex knew was that life existed where science had least expected to find it, inside the biggest hurricane in the solar system.

But had they found intelligence? Professors Stubbs and John Baltadonis, the two men who had planned the second mission to the reef, contended that the clicker men had demonstrated curiosity but not necessarily intelligence. Mary didn’t agree. The clicker men had talked to her, but she couldn’t prove it. It was something she knew inside, and science had nothing to do with it.

Now that his data had been handed over to EarthCorp, Alex couldn’t ignore the possibility that he had erred on a scale that transcended mere human morality. He had violated a closed biological system and brought mankind to Jupiter’s reef. Would that cause its destruction? Would history see him as a discoverer or a destroyer of worlds?

He thought of his final futile act after leaving the reef, the destruction of the sample canisters and all they contained. How long would that hold mankind at bay? Johnny had said that it didn’t matter, his spectrographic and bio-sniffer records contained samples aplenty. Those, combined with the terabytes of records, would give scientists material for years of analysis.

Alex remembered Professor Baltadonis patting him on the shoulder sympathetically as he said: “Well, the good news is that we won’t be needing to visit the reef any time soon.” But that was over three years ago. For all he knew they had been back, maybe even planted a sub-station there somehow. It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could do to protect the reef. He had followed his heart and found his heart’s desire, but the reef still haunted him, and only Mary’s arms and the ice mines of Ganymede provided respite from his conscience.

Tony Sciarra was the only human to ever actually wade in the reef, and he had nearly become slug food in the process. At the end of the mission he told Alex: “Face it, Rose. You got lucky.”

Stubbs had assured him they would study the contamination question very seriously before proceeding with any comprehensive study of the reef. but those were EarthCorp assurances, made by bureaucrats. All Alex had ever wanted to know was whether the reef was there, a living, floating mat of material that had evolved over millions of years, a reef bigger than two Earths. But he hadn’t considered what it would be like
after
he found it. “Take the credit and run,” was how he might have said it. Now he didn’t know what to say.

What haunted him most was the sound they had heard as
Diver
lifted out of the reef, fifty miles below the clouds of Jupiter. With lightning and phosphorescent creatures glowing all around them, everyone aboard had heard it clearly, blended with the incessant radio static of the reef: Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
. Not even Stubbs doubted it when he heard the tape. The reef had sung to the invaders from Earth one of humankind’s loftiest melodies.

No intelligence? Alex wondered if the whole reef was intelligent. After all, something had been calling to him all those years. Something had made him secretly outfit a ship.

Perhaps Mary, in her own way, had given him the most reassurance. “You did what you could, Alex,” she had said one night after he woke from a nightmare in a cold sweat. “You did what you had to do. So did I. And so did Stubbs.” Now Stubbs seemed to be playing games. Why had he told Mary she was “going along” and said nothing to Alex? And what did he mean by that? Going where? Back to the reef?