Jupiter's Reef (4 page)

“Or more,” added old Johnny, stroking his short beard and looking out the window.

“Gowaan. Everyone’s got an angle, if there’s profit in it,” said Alex. “Lying is a human thing.”

“Is everyone from Io like you?” said Johnny.

Alex smiled. “Only the smart ones.”

Johnny hung his head for a moment and closed his eyes. “I gave you a ship, Alex. And your freedom. There was no profit in it. Tell me. Was that stupid?”

“In a way,” said Alex. “But there was profit in it for you. You wanted off Mars.”

Alex looked out at the Martian sky. Portions of the insulated spaceport glass were frosting from the intense cold outside.

Alex pondered his fate had they come to rest out on the Polar Steppes. How long would it take to freeze to death at 180° below? Or would asphyxiation kill you quicker? Alex looked back at Professor Baltadonis.

“But I can see why you want off this world,” continued Alex. “You say you’re interested in science ... okay ... science is inquiry ... that’s your muse. But you also will be going to Earth. Am I right?”

The old man shook his head. “I understand the gravity on Earth is twice that of Mars,” said Johnny. “I’m an old guy. I’m not eager to pull two gees every time I move. No, Alex. What’s pulling me is ... your reef.”

4
Professor Baltadonis laughed as they sat down at an Isidis Spaceport restaurant. Johnny said there was a chickafilly special all night at Mama’s Bird Restaurant & Bar. Somehow, the fact that Alex and Mary had tried to jump planet didn’t really seem to bother him. Instead of plying Alex with sincerity, he dove into the science of Alex’s discovery. As he spoke, he was very careful to refer to it as ‘Alex’s discovery’ and to himself as the ‘scientific spectator’.

Halfway though dinner Professor Baltadonis said he was grateful that fate kept Alex and Mary on Mars and raised a glass of vintage Mars Turnip wine to the ‘clicker men of Jupiter’.’

There were several others within earshot and gave the old guy a strange look. But he caught their eye. “You’ll know soon enough what I’m talking about,” Johnny said.

Alex wasn’t drinking liquor. He wanted only caffeine, even if it was synthetic. A tall pitcher of coffee sat before him on the table. When Johnny turned back to face them his hand accidentally sent the pitcher flying to the floor.

“Been a while since you’ve celebrated, eh, Johnny?” said Alex, righting the pitcher and daubing up coffee with his napkin. A waiter came to their table and began mopping up the mess. He suggested they all move to another table. As they settled in, Alex reminded Johnny that he wanted to be the one to personally notify the world of his discovery. He suggested that any concrete plans should be made in a business-like way. “I think if we’d done that before we wouldn’t be here now, distrusting one another.”

“A contract. Involving colonial lawyers ... paperwork, right?” said the Professor.

“A contract,” suggested Alex. “Between us. We’ve come this far ... and you want to assure us of your sincerity. Let’s go the distance. Besides, our ship will be ready soon and the Spaceport says we have an Earth window ’til next week.”

Alex and Mary returned to check on
Diver
after dinner. While they’d been offered emergency accommodations at the Spaceport Commons, they opted to remain aboard their ship. Before they slept they speculated about Johnny and his motives.

“He’s so nice,” said Mary, “and I’m not getting any hostility from him ... only concern. As I see it we’re the ones who are being hostile. I really think we surprised him so much he refused to believe we were running.”

“It’s no fun winning if the other one isn’t playing,” said Alex. “I have so much trouble disliking him. That’s the problem. Somehow he reminds me of my dad.”

Mary looked at Alex quizzically. “Your dad was a drunkard; a laborer from Earth ... never trusted anyone. Had a dark beard. I don’t see a connection.”

“I know,” said Alex.

Alex and Mary slept fitfully that night, waking every hour as though an alarm had gone off. The spaceport can be a noisy place, but their ship, while modest in size, was well built and amply insulated. The polyceramic hull, the latest thing in molecular manufacturing, was a closed cell foam ceramic that would deflect intermediate sized space debris and 98% of all electromagnetic radiation.

Alex had fitted
Diver
with a Null-Gee field effect generator which could literally nullify the ship’s mass for speed and maneuverability at near-relativistic speeds.
Diver
was as secure sleeping quarters as could be found on a planet with no breathable atmosphere. But to Alex it was his only connection to a future. Call it what he would,
Diver
was a stolen ship, and the only reason he wasn’t in jail was that a disaster of gargantuan proportions had erased his records at his assigned mining base on Jupiter’s moon, Io. Ra Patera base was Io’s primary supplier of hydrogen, nitrogen and helium, and Alex was a grunt, a man entrusted to follow orders.

Alex had broken every rule, but he had done it quietly and cunningly. His nights had been spent studying the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and planning a means to explore it.

The result of two years work was
Diver
, formerly the Dover; a medium class gas cracker that was derelict and slated to be scrapped. Alex had persuaded a mechanics chief to let him ‘tinker’ with her. It went on a long time and the friend was killed in what they called a blue flame geyser accident. His scout craft was caught in a jet of gas that came from the bowels of the moon. Squeezed and heated by Io’s magma, these jets would burst unexpectedly and violently, often launching boulders into orbit. It was one such jet that caught the chief’s vessel amidships and sent him to a grave on the frozen sulphur flats of Io.

Alex had never told the man why he wanted to work on the ship, and with the man’s death the ship was effectively his. At least there was no one to stand in his way.

Alex had seen so much death on Io. He had served on too many rescue missions and seen men die in bizarre ways: from those that had been exposed to the vacuum of space to those that had sunk into molten black sulphur. Getting them out was hardest ... they’d been frozen and roasted at the same time. The memories of those incidents were part of what compelled Alex to focus on his belief that a vast reef of life gave the Great Red Spot its stability and longevity. Everyone called it a Jupiter-sized hurricane; everyone but Alex. He had wondered why it had its strange color, why it didn’t just blow away, and why it never changed its shape.

The idea had hit him as he watched a whirlpool in a flooding river back on Earth. He watched debris collect in the vortex and stay there until it sank.

In the back of his mind he began developing his idea. What if ...

He had shared the idea with his mentor Harry Stubbs, Professor Emeritus at MIT on Earth, saying he believed that the massive vortex of gas and cloud had been a collecting place for organic material for a billion years, allowing time enough for the evolution of a unique ecology. The Professor had been kind enough to answer all of his letters but never shared his views. In the end only Mary trusted his logic and his plans. She trusted them with her life.

Alex awoke in
Diver
’s pilot seat. His coverall underwear was soaked with sweat. He didn’t know what woke him but he looked over at the co-pilot’s chair. Mary wasn’t there.

Suppressing his urge to jump, Alex lifted carefully from his chair. The low Martian gravity made it possible for him to spring into the air just using his arms, but many unpleasant experiences in low gravity had taught him to resist such urges.

“Mary?”

“Are you hungry?” she called from the shower/bath at the rear of the cabin. “I’ll be dry in a minute. I can fix us hot sweetweets ... or maybe baconeggs?”

“Coffee,” said Alex reflexively.

Mary sensed his mood and invited Alex into the shower-mister. They lingered long enough for him to forget everything except how much he loved his Mary Seventeen. The first time they’d made love was no different than the last. Each time Alex felt privileged to be with someone so special, and she felt his desire to cherish and protect her. A sensor was clone-perfect but rarely thought of as fully human. As constructs of genetic engineering, clones were by default second class citizens, despite their enormous value.

Only Alex treated her as an equal. That’s why she first invited him to touch her intimately and she never regretted it.

Neither did Alex. He knew that deep within her body and integrated with her nervous system was a mechanism that allowed her to send and receive radio by thought alone. Her Corporate Special Abilities Profile described her as a Deep Space Liaison. But her duties could include getting a doomed crew’s last wishes broadcast to home if the ship’s radio was destroyed.

The only time she’d done that was after the Ra Patera disaster. She and Alex had flown out of Jupiter’s reef when the first emergency calls went out from the base, but it happened too fast for the doomed colonists to escape or be saved.

Diver
arrived as the entire base was sinking into a lake of sulphurous lava. All Alex and Mary could do was watch it sink on the viewscreen and listen to dying colonists plead for salvation. Mary felt obliged to relay the messages.

That incident shook Mary to the core, and Alex guessed that it changed her, too. When they went off to explore Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Mary was an adventurer, willing to put the past aside. But after Ra Patera she seemed more independent and ready to abandon her job altogether. That made him happy but he knew she’d been ‘built’ for a purpose, and he wondered if it was so much a part of her that she’d never be free.

It hadn’t been long since Alex learned the depth of Mary’s abilities. Deep in the heart of Jupiter’s Reef, Mary had demonstrated a unique ability to read more than radio signals. He believed she had communed with alien intelligences on Jupiter. But now that was all so far away as to be almost the stuff of myth. This was Mars, the only solar planet that anyone believed might hold out hope for an ever expanding human race. Here, Mary Seventeen was a showpiece, not an explorer. Her biomechanical abilities were noteworthy, perhaps legendary, among those she called the normals.

Mary had been taught all her life that having been engineered was a privilege. But that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted more. Even as a youth she was that way. Her ‘mother’, Mary One, had nicknamed her ‘Mary Searcher’. Alex thought it fit her perfectly.

Mary Seventeen didn’t want people thinking of her as a computer or as a freak. Until she met Alex, that’s all she ever got from the normals. But she knew she had been designed to do a job and if she rebelled, it was anyone’s guess what the Corporation would do about it.

Alex had never thought much about clones before he met Mary. He’d heard it said that clones were the key to the stars. Only specialized humans could ever hope to endure long deep space missions. And only through the use of clones could the terraforming effort on Mars be implemented and maintained. Everyone agreed that clones, bred to live a lifetime of unquestioning service, had made colonization possible.

But, valuable and specialized and perfect as clones were, they were always thought of as a sub-species, and the religious right saw them as abominations against God himself. So it was rare though not forbidden for normals and clones to fall in love.

By some people’s definition, Alex was doing the unthinkable – cohabitating with a clone.

But Alex refused to see it that way. When a close friend advised him to “Fuck her and forget her” Alex said “No. Fuck you!” and promptly forgot the friend.

Alex and Mary felt like they simply belonged together. That being true, everything else just came naturally.

Alex reached under his pilot’s seat and pulled out a small metallic disk. He placed it a depression on
Diver
’s dash and it sank into the ship’s data reader. Moments later he was offered a selection of files that he had made during their trip into Jupiter’s Reef. As soon as he saw the very first images he was back on Jupiter and everything he and Mary witnessed came back to him. His discovery was real. He ejected the disk and returned it to its case, then slipped it back under the seat. His knuckle hit something cold and heavy and wrapped in a cloth.

He pulled out the object and unfolded the fabric. “Look, Mary,” he said. “Landon Bradshaw’s pinger. I’d forgotten we had it.”

Mary was sipping some soup in the co-pilot’s seat and watching teev on
Diver
’s big viewscreen. She glanced at the weapon and frowned.

“I hope it isn’t charged,” she said. “You can put it away now.”

Alex noticed a green light come on as he squeezed the pinger’s handle.

“Wow,” he said. “It’s one of the new models. Only powers up when you hold it. Nasty. And the counter says 900. It must have a hyper-charger in it. Dingers, this could hold off an army.”

“Fascinating, Alex,” said Mary. “Now put your toy away before you blow your leg off.”

Alex swiveled in his char and aimed the pistol at various objects at the rear of the cabin. He took aim at a squeezer of water Mary had left there and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud ‘pop’ as a compressed pocket of sonic waves missed the bottle and impacted a metal cabinet. Chips of metallic paint flew from the depression in the cabinet but there was no other damage.

Mary yelled a protest, but it was too late. Alex’s next shot showered both of them with a fine mist of water.

“Amazing,” said Alex wiping his face. “Well, we know it works.”

Mary folded her arms across her chest angrily. “Okay, junior, now put away your pop gun.”

Alex grinned and put the gun back under the seat. Then he walked to the rear of the cabin, removed a Vac-broom from a storage closet, and started cleaning up puddles.

Mary watched the muscles of his thighs and buttocks moving under the wet spacesuit leggings. She slipped her arms across his bare chest.

“Just got in the mood, is all,” she explained as she pulled down his pants.

5
The clanging below decks woke Alex first. Mary didn’t jump to a standing position like Alex but she began breathing hard almost immediately.