55 – Lucifer Rising

   Fifty times more brilliant than the full Moon, Lucifer had transformed the skies of Earth, virtually banishing night for months at a time. Despite its sinister connotations, the name was inevitable; and indeed 'Light-bringer' had brought evil as well as good. Only the centuries and the millennia would show in which direction the balance tilted.
   On the credit side, the end of night had vastly extended the scope of human activity, especially in the less-developed countries. Everywhere, the need for artificial lighting had been substantially reduced, with resulting huge savings in electrical power. It was as if a giant lamp had been hoisted into space, to shine upon half the globe. Even in daytime Lucifer was a dazzling object, casting distinct shadows.
   Farmers, mayors; city managers, police, seamen, and almost all those engaged in outdoor activities – especially in remote areas – welcomed Lucifer; it had made their lives much safer and easier. But it was hated by lovers, criminals, naturalists, and astronomers.
   The first two groups found their activities seriously restricted, while naturalists were concerned about Lucifer's impact upon animal life. Many nocturnal creatures had been seriously affected, while others had managed to adapt. The Pacific grunion, whose celebrated mating pattern was locked to high tides and moonless nights, was in grave trouble, and seemed to be heading for rapid extinction.
   And so, it seemed, were Earth-based astronomers. That was not such a scientific catastrophe as it would once have been, for more than fifty per cent of astronomical research depended upon instruments in space or on the Moon. They could be easily shielded from Lucifer's glare; but terrestrial observatories were seriously inconvenienced by the new sun in what had once been the night sky.
   The human race would adapt, as it had done to so many changes in the past. A generation would soon be born that had never known a world without Lucifer; but that brightest of all stars would be an eternal question to every thinking man and woman.
   Why had Jupiter been sacrificed – and how long would the new sun radiate? Would it burn out quickly, or would it maintain its power for thousands of years– perhaps for the lifetime of the human race? Above all, why the interdiction upon Europa, a world now as cloud-covered as Venus?
   There must be answers to those questions; and Mankind would never be satisfied until it had found them.

Epilogue: 20,001

   And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
   Only during the last few generations have the Europans ventured into the Farside, beyond the light and warmth of their never-setting sun, into the wilderness where the ice that once covered all their world may still be found. And even fewer have remained there to face the brief and fearful night that comes, when the brilliant but powerless Cold Sun sinks below the horizon.
   Yet already, those few hardy explorers have discovered that the Universe around them is stranger than they ever imagined. The sensitive eyes they developed in the dim oceans still serve them well; they can see the stars and the other bodies moving in their sky. They have begun to lay the foundations of astronomy, and some daring thinkers have, even surmised that the great world of Europa is not the whole of creation.
   Very soon after they had emerged from the ocean, during the explosively swift evolution forced upon them by the melting of the ice, they had realized that the objects in the sky fell into three distinct classes. Most important, of course, was the sun. Some legends – though few took them seriously – claimed that it had not always been there, but had appeared suddenly, heralding a brief, cataclysmic age of transformation, when much of Europa's teeming life had been destroyed. If that was indeed true, it was a small price to pay for the benefits that poured down from the tiny, inexhaustible source of energy that hung unmoving in the sky.
   Perhaps the Cold Sun was its distant brother, banished for some crime and condemned to march forever around the vault of heaven. It was of no importance except to those peculiar Europans who were always asking questions about matters that all sensible folk took for granted.
   Still, it must be admitted that those cranks had made some interesting discoveries during their excursions into the darkness of Farside. They claimed – though this was hard to believe – that the whole sky was sprinkled with uncountable myriads of tiny lights, even smaller and feebler than the Cold Sun. They varied greatly in brilliance; and though they rose and set, they never moved from their fixed positions.
   Against this background, there were three objects that did move, apparently obeying complex laws that no one had yet been able to fathom. And unlike all the others in the sky, they were quite large – though both shape and size varied continually. Sometimes they were disks, sometimes half-circles, sometimes slim crescents. They were obviously closer than all the other bodies in the Universe, for their surfaces showed an immense wealth of complex and ever-changing detail.
   The theory that they were indeed other worlds had at last been accepted – though no one except a few fanatics believed that they could be anything like as large, or as important, as Europa. One lay toward the Sun, and was in a constant state of turmoil. On its nightside could be seen the glow of great fires – a phenomenon still beyond the understanding of the Europans, for their atmosphere, as yet, contains no oxygen. And sometimes vast explosions hurl clouds of debris up from the surface; if the sunward globe is indeed a world, it must be a very unpleasant place to live. Perhaps even worse than the nightside of Europa.
   The two outer, and more distant, spheres seem to be much less violent places, yet in some ways they are even more mysterious. When darkness falls upon their surfaces, they too show patches of light, but these are very different from the swiftly changing fires of the turbulent inner world. They burn with an almost steady brilliance, and are concentrated in a few small areas – though over the generations, these areas have grown, and multiplied.
   But strangest of all are the lights, fierce as tiny suns, that can often be observed moving across the darkness between these other worlds. Once, recalling the bioluminescence of their own seas, some Europans had speculated that these might indeed be living creatures; but their intensity makes that almost incredible. Nevertheless, more and more thinkers believe that these lights – the fixed patterns, and moving suns – must be some strange manifestation of life.
   Against this, however, there is one very potent argument. If they are living things, why do they never come to Europa?
   Yet there are legends. Thousands of generations ago, soon after the conquest of the land, it is said that some of those lights came very close indeed – but they always exploded in sky-filling blasts that far outshone the Sun. And strange, hard metals rained down upon the land; some of them are still worshipped to this day.
   None is as holy, though, as the huge, black monolith that stands on the frontier of eternal day, one side forever turned to the unmoving Sun, the other facing into the land of night. Ten times the height of the tallest Europan – even when he raises his tendrils to the fullest extent – it is the very symbol of mystery and unattainability. For it has never been touched; it can only be worshipped from afar. Around it lies the Circle of Power, which repels all who try to approach.
   It is that same power, many believe, that keeps at bay those moving lights in the sky. If it ever fails, they will descend upon the virgin continents and shrinking seas of Europa, and their purpose will be revealed at last.
   The Europans would be surprised to know with what intensity and baffled wonder that black monolith is also studied by the minds behind those moving lights. For centuries now their automatic probes have made a cautious descent from orbit – always with the same disastrous result. For until the time is ripe, the monolith will permit no contact.
   When that time comes – when, perhaps, the Europans have invented radio and discovered the messages continually bombarding them from so close at hand – the monolith may change its strategy. It may – or it may not – choose to release the entities who slumber within it, so that they can bridge the gulf between the Europans and the race to which they once held allegiance.
   And it may be that no such bridge is possible, and that two such alien forms of consciousness can never coexist. If this is so, then only one of them can inherit the Solar System.
   Which it will be, not even the Gods know – yet

Acknowledgements

   My first thanks, of course, must go to Stanley Kubrick, who a rather long time ago wrote to ask if I had any ideas for the 'proverbial good science-fiction movie'.
   Next, my appreciation to my friend and agent (the two are not always synonymous) Scott Meredith, for perceiving that a ten-page movie outline I sent him as an intellectual exercise had rather wider possibilities, and that I owed it to posterity, etc., etc.
   Other thanks are due to:
   Señor Jorge Luiz Calife of Rio de Janeiro, for a letter which started me thinking seriously about a possible sequel (after I'd said for years that one was clearly impossible).
   Dr Bruce Murray, past Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, and Dr Frank Jordan, also of JPL, for computing the Lagrange-1 position in the Io-Jupiter system. Oddly enough, I had made identical calculations thirty-four years earlier for the colinear Earth-Moon Lagrange points ('Stationary Orbits', Journal of the British Astronomical Association, December 1947) but I no longer trust my ability to solve quintic equations, even with the help of HAL, Jr., my trusty H/P 91OOA.
   New American Library and Hutchinson & Co., publishers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for permission to use the material in Chapter 51 (Chapter 37 of 2001: A Space Odyssey) and also quotations in Chapters 30 and 40.
   General Potter, US Army Corps of Engineers, for finding time in his busy schedule to show me around EPCOT in 1969 – when it was only a few large holes in the ground.
   Wendell Solomons, for help with Russian (and Russlish).
   Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and the incomparable John Williams, for inspiration whenever it was needed.
   C. P. Cavafy for 'Waiting for the Barbarians'.
   While writing this book, I discovered that the concept of refuelling on Europa had been discussed in a paper, 'Outer planet satellite return missions using in situ propellant production', by Ash, Stancati, Niehoff, and Cuda (Acta Astronautica VIII, 5-6, May-June 1981).
   The idea of automatically exponentiating systems (von Neumann machines) for extraterrestrial mining has been seriously developed by von Tiesenhausen and Darbro at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (see 'Self-Replicating Systems' – NASA Technical Memorandum 78304). If anyone doubts the power of such systems to cope with Jupiter, I refer them to the study showing how self-replicating factories could cut production time for a solar power collector from 60,000 years to a mere twenty.
   The startling idea that gas giants might have diamond cores has been seriously put forward by M. Ross and F. Ree of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, University of California, for the cases of Uranus and Neptune. It seems to me that anything they can do, Jupiter could do better. De Beers shareholders, please note.
   For more details on the aerial life forms that might exist in the Jovian atmosphere, see my story 'A Meeting With Medusa' (in The Wind From the Sun). Such creatures have been beautifully depicted by Adolf Schaller in Part 2 of Carl Sagan's Cosmos ('One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue'), both book and TV series.
   The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa, beneath ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian tidal forces that heat Io, was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland in the magazine Star and Sky ('The Europa Enigma', January 1980). This quite brilliant concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably NASA's Institute of Space Studies' Dr Robert Jastrow), and may provide one of the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission.
   And finally: Valerie and Hector, for providing the life-support system; Cherene, for punctuating every chapter with sticky kisses; Steve, for being here.
   COLOMBO, SRI LANKA JULY 1981-MARCH 1982
   This book was written on an Archives III microcomputer with Word Star software and sent from Colombo to New York on one five-inch diskette. Last-minute corrections were transmitted through the Padukka Earth Station and the Indian Ocean Intelsat V.

2061: Odyssey Three

Arthur C. Clarke


Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke,
Author's Note
I – THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
1 – The Frozen Years
2 – First Sight
3 – Re-entry
4 – Tycoon
5 – Out of the Ice
6 – The Greening of Ganymede
7 – Transit
8 – Starfleet
9 – Mount Zeus
10 – Ship of Fools
11 – The Lie
12 – Oom Paul
13 – 'No-one told us to bring swimsuits...'
14 – Search
II – THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK SNOW
15 – Rendezvous
16 – Touchdown
17 – The Valley of Black Snow
18 – 'Old Faithful'
19 – At the End of the Tunnel
20 – Recall
III – EUROPAN ROULETTE
21 – The Politics of Exile
22 – Hazardous Cargo
23 – Inferno
24 – Shaka the Great
25 – The Shrouded World
26 – Night Watch
27 – Rosie
28 – Dialogue
29 – Descent
30 – Galaxy Down
31 – The Sea of Galilee
IV – AT THE WATER HOLE
32 – Diversion
33 – Pit Stop
34 – Car Wash
35 – Adrift
36 – The Alien Shore
V – THROUGH THE ASTEROIDS
37 – Star
38 – Icebergs of Space
39 – The Captain's Table
40 – Monsters from Earth
41 – Memoirs of a Centenarian
42 – Minilith
VI – HAVEN
43 – Salvage
44 – Endurance
45 – Mission
46 – Shuttle
47 – Shards
48 – Lucy
VII – THE GREAT WALL
49 – Shrine
50 – Open City
51 – Phantom
52 – On the Couch
53 – Pressure Cooker
54 – Reunion
55 – Magma
56 – Perturbation Theory
57 – Interlude on Ganymede
VIII – THE KINGDOM OF SULPHUR
58 – Fire and Ice
59 – Trinity
IX – 3001
60 – Midnight in the Plaza
Acknowledgements

Arthur C. Clarke,
2061: ODYSSEY THREE

Author's Note

   Just as 2010: Odyssey Two was not a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so this book is not a linear sequel to 2010. They must all be considered as variations on the same theme, involving many of the same characters and situations, but not necessarily happening in the same universe.
   Developments since Stanley Kubrick suggested in 1964 (five years before men landed on the Moon!) that we should attempt 'the proverbial good science-fiction movie' make total consistency impossible, as the later stories incorporate discoveries and events that had not even taken place when the earlier books were written. 2010 was made possible by the brilliantly successful 1979 Voyager flybys of Jupiter, and I had not intended to return to that territory until the results of the even more ambitious Galileo Mission were in.
   Galileo would have dropped a probe into the Jovian atmosphere, while spending almost two years visiting all the major satellites. It should have been launched from the space shuttle in May 1986, and would have reached its objective by December 1988. So around 1990 I hoped to take advantage of the flood of new information from Jupiter and its moons...
   Alas, the Challenger tragedy eliminated that scenario; Galileo – now sitting in its clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – must now find another launch vehicle. It will be lucky if it arrives at Jupiter merely seven years behind schedule.
   I have decided not to wait.
   Colombo, Sri Lanka,
   April 1987

I – THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

1 – The Frozen Years

   'For a man of seventy, you're in extremely good shape,' remarked Dr Glazunov, looking up from the Medcom's final print-out. 'I'd have put you down as not more than sixty-five.'
   'Happy to hear it, Oleg. Especially as I'm a hundred and three – as you know perfectly well.'
   'Here we go again! Anyone would think you've never read Professor Rudenko's book.'
   'Dear old Katerina! We'd planned a get-together on her hundredth birthday. I was so sorry she never made it – that's what comes of spending too much time on Earth.'
   'Ironic, since she was the one who coined that famous slogan "Gravity is the bringer of old age."'
   Dr Heywood Floyd stared thoughtfully at the ever-changing panorama of the beautiful planet, only six thousand kilometres away, on which he could never walk again. It was even more ironic that, through the most stupid accident of his life, he was still in excellent health when virtually all his old friends were dead.
   He had been back on Earth only a week when, despite all the warnings and his own determination that nothing of the sort would ever happen to him, he had stepped off that second-storey balcony. (Yes, he had been celebrating: but he had earned it – he was a hero on the new world to which Leonov had returned.) The multiple fractures had led to complications, which could best be handled in the Pasteur Space Hospital.
   That had been in 2015. And now – he could not really believe it, but there was the calendar on the wall – it was 2061.
   For Heywood Floyd, the biological clock had not merely been slowed down by the one-sixth Earth gravity of the hospital; twice in his life it had actually been reversed. It was now generally believed – though some authorities disputed it – that hibernation did more than merely stop the ageing process; it encouraged rejuvenation. Floyd had actually become younger on his voyage to Jupiter and back.
   'So you really think it's safe for me to go?'
   'Nothing in this Universe is safe, Heywood. All I can say is that there are no physiological objections. After all, your environment will be virtually the same aboard Universe as it is here. She may not have quite the standard of – ah – superlative medical expertise we can provide at Pasteur, but Dr Mahindran is a good man. If there's any problem he can't cope with, he can put you into hibernation again, and ship you back to us, COD.'
   It was the verdict that Floyd had hoped for, yet somehow his pleasure was alloyed with sadness. He would be away for weeks from his home of almost half a century, and the new friends of his later years. And although Universe was a luxury liner compared with the primitive Leonov (now hovering high above Farside as one of the main exhibits at the Lagrange Museum) there was still some element of risk in any extended space voyage. Especially like the pioneering one on which he was now preparing to embark.

   Yet that, perhaps, was exactly what he was seeking – even at a hundred and three (or, according to the complex geriatric accounting of the late Professor Katerina Rudenko, a hale and hearty sixty-five.) During the last decade, he had become aware of an increasing restlessness and a vague dissatisfaction with a life that was too comfortable and well-ordered.
   Despite all the exciting projects now in progress around the Solar System – the Mars Renewal, the establishment of the Mercury Base, the Greening of Ganymede – there had been no goal on which he could really focus his interests and his still considerable energies. Two centuries ago, one of the first poets of the Scientific Era had summed up his feelings perfectly, speaking through the lips of Odysseus/Ulysses:



Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one of me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things: and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.


   'Three suns', indeed! It was more than forty:
   Ulysses would have been ashamed of him. But the next verse – which he knew so well – was even more appropriate:



It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


   'To seek, to find...' Well, now he knew what he was going to seek, and to find – because he knew exactly where it would be. Short of some catastrophic accident, there was no way in which it could possibly elude him.
   It was not a goal he had ever consciously had in mind, and even now he was not quite sure why it had become so suddenly dominant. He would have thought himself immune to the fever which was once again infecting mankind – for the second time in his life! – but perhaps he was mistaken. Or it could have been that the unexpected invitation to join the short list of distinguished guests aboard Universe had fired his imagination, and awakened an enthusiasm he had not even known he possessed.
   There was another possibility. After all these years, he could still remember what an anticlimax the 1985/6 encounter had been to the general public. Now was a chance – the last for him, and the first for humanity – to more than make up for any previous disappointment.
   Back in the twentieth century, only flybys had been possible. This time, there would be an actual landing, as pioneering in its way as Armstrong's and Aldrin's first steps on the Moon.
   Dr Heywood Floyd, veteran of the 2010-15 mission to Jupiter, let his imagination fly outwards to the ghostly visitor once again returning from the deeps of space, gaining speed second by second as it prepared to round the Sun. And between the orbits of Earth and Venus the most famous of all comets would meet the still uncompleted space-liner Universe, on her maiden flight.
   The exact point of rendezvous was not yet settled, but his decision was already made.
   'Halley – here I come...' whispered Heywood Floyd.

2 – First Sight

   It is not true that one must leave Earth to appreciate the full splendour of the heavens. Not even in space is the starry sky more glorious than when viewed from a high mountain, on a perfectly clear night, far from any source of artificial illumination. Even though the stars appear brighter beyond the atmosphere, the eye cannot really appreciate the difference; and the overwhelming spectacle of half the celestial sphere at a single glance is something that no observation window can provide.
   But Heywood Floyd was more than content with his private view of the Universe, especially during the times when the residential zone was on the shadow side of the slowly revolving space hospital. Then there would be nothing in his rectangular field of view but stars, planets, nebulae – and occasionally, drowning out all else, the unblinking glare of Lucifer, new rival to the Sun.
   About ten minutes before the beginning of his artificial night, he would switch off all the cabin lights – even the red emergency standby – so that he could become completely dark-adapted. A little late in life for a space engineer, he had learned the pleasures of naked-eye astronomy, and could now identify virtually any constellation, even if he could glimpse only a small portion of it.
   Almost every 'night' that May, as the comet was passing inside the orbit of Mars, he had checked its location on the star charts. Although it was an easy object with a good pair of binoculars, Floyd had stubbornly resisted their aid; he was playing a little game, seeing how well his ageing eyes would respond to the challenge. Though two astronomers on Mauna Kea already claimed to have observed the comet visually, no-one believed them, and similar assertions from other residents of Pasteur had been treated with even greater scepticism.
   But tonight, a magnitude of at least six was predicted; he might be in luck. He traced the line from Gamma to Epsilon, and stared towards the apex of an imaginary equilateral triangle set upon it – almost as if he could focus his vision across the Solar System by a sheer effort of will.
   And there it was! – just as he had first seen it, seventy-six years ago, inconspicuous but unmistakable. If he had not known exactly where to look, he would not even have noticed it, or would have dismissed it as some distant nebula.
   To his naked eye it was merely a tiny, perfectly circular blob of mist; strain as he would, he was unable to detect any trace of a tail. But the small flotilla of probes that had been escorting the comet for months had already recorded the first outbursts of dust and gas that would soon create a glowing plume across the stars, pointing directly away from its creator, the Sun,
   Like everyone else, Heywood Floyd had watched the transformation of the cold, dark – no, almost black – nucleus as it entered the inner Solar System. After seventy years of deepfreeze, the complex mixture of water, ammonia and other ices was beginning to thaw and bubble. A flying mountain, roughly the shape – and size – of the island of Manhattan was turning on a cosmic spit every fifty-three hours; as the heat of the Sun seeped through the insulating crust, the vaporizing gases were making Halley's Comet behave like a leaking steam-boiler. Jets of water vapour, mixed with dust and a witch's brew of organic chemicals, were bursting out from half a dozen small craters; the largest – about the size of a football field – erupted regularly about two hours after local dawn. It looked exactly like a terrestrial geyser, and had been promptly christened 'Old Faithful'.
   Already, he had fantasies of standing on the rim of that crater, waiting for the Sun to rise above the dark, contorted landscape which he already knew well through the images from space. True, the contract said nothing about passengers – as opposed to crew and scientific personnel – going outside the ship when it landed on Halley.
   On the other hand, there was also nothing in the small print that specifically forbade it.
   They'll have a job to stop me, thought Heywood Floyd. I'm sure I can still handle a spacesuit. And if I'm wrong...
   He remembered reading that a visitor to the Taj Mahal had once remarked: 'I'd die tomorrow for a monument like this.'
   He would gladly settle for Halley's Comet.

3 – Re-entry

   Even apart from that embarrassing accident, the return to Earth had not been easy.
   The first shock had come soon after revival, when Dr Rudenko had woken him from his long sleep. Walter Curnow was hovering beside her, and even in his semi-conscious state he could tell that something was wrong; their pleasure at seeing him awake was a little too exaggerated, and failed to conceal a sense of strain. Not until he was fully recovered did they let him know that Dr Chandra was no longer with them.
   Somewhere beyond Mars, so imperceptibly that the monitors could not pinpoint the time, he had simply ceased to live. His body, set adrift in space, had continued unchecked along Leonov's orbit, and had long since been consumed by the fires of the Sun.
   The cause of death was totally unknown, but Max Brailovsky expressed a view that, highly unscientific though it was, not even Surgeon-Commander Katerina Rudenko attempted to refute.
   'He couldn't live without Hal.'
   Walter Curnow, of all people, added another thought.
   'I wonder how Hal will take it?' he asked. 'Something out there must be monitoring all our broadcasts. Sooner or later, he'll know.'

   And now Curnow was gone too – so were they all except little Zenia. He had not seen her for twenty years, but her card arrived punctually every Christmas. The last one was still pinned above his desk; it showed a troika laden with gifts speeding through the snows of a Russian winter, watched by extremely hungry-looking wolves.
   Forty-five years! Sometimes it seemed only yesterday that Leonov had returned to Earth orbit, and the applause of all mankind. Yet it had been a curiously subdued applause, respectful but lacking genuine enthusiasm. The mission to Jupiter had been altogether too much of a success; it had opened a Pandora's box, the full contents of which had yet to be disclosed.
   When the black monolith known as Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One had been excavated on the Moon, only a handful of men knew of its existence. Not until after Discovery's ill-fated voyage to Jupiter did the world learn that, four million years ago, another intelligence had passed through the Solar System, and left its calling card. The news was a revelation – but not a surprise; something of the sort had been expected for decades.
   And it had all happened long before the human race existed. Although some mysterious accident had befallen Discovery out round Jupiter, there was no real evidence that it involved anything more than a shipboard malfunction. Although the philosophical consequences of TMA 1 were profound, for all practical purposes mankind was still alone in the Universe.
   Now that was no longer true. Only light minutes away – a mere stone's throw in the Cosmos – was an intelligence that could create a star, and, for its own inscrutable purpose, destroy a planet a thousand times the size of Earth. Even more ominous was the fact that it had shown awareness of mankind, through the last message that Discovery had beamed back from the moons of Jupiter just before the fiery birth of Lucifer had destroyed it:

   ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA.
   ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

   The brilliant new star, which had banished night except for the few months in each year when it was passing behind the Sun, had brought both hope and fear to mankind. Fear – because the Unknown, especially when it appeared linked with omnipotence – could not fail to rouse such primeval emotions. Hope – because of the transformation it had wrought in global politics.
   It had often been said that the only thing that could unite mankind was a threat from space. Whether Lucifer was a threat, no-one knew; but it was certainly a challenge. And that, as it turned out, was enough.
   Heywood Floyd had watched the geopolitical changes from his vantage point on Pasteur, almost as if he was an alien observer himself. At first, he had no intention of remaining in space, once his recovery was complete. To the baffled annoyance of his doctors, that took an altogether unreasonable length of time.
   Looking back from the tranquillity of later years, Floyd knew exactly why his bones refused to mend.
   He simply did not wish to return to Earth: there was nothing for him, down on the dazzling blue and white globe that filled his sky. There were times when he could well understand how Chandra might have lost the will to live.
   It was pure chance that he had not been with his first wife on that flight to Europe. Now Marion was part of another life, that might have belonged to someone else, and their two daughters were amiable strangers with families of their own.
   But he had lost Caroline through his own actions, even though he had no real choice in the matter. She had never understood (had he really done so himself?) why he had left the beautiful home they had made together, to exile himself for years in the cold wastes far from the Sun.
   Though he had known, even before the mission was half over, that Caroline would not wait, he had hoped desperately that Chris would forgive him. But even this consolation had been denied; his son had been without a father for too long. By the time that Floyd returned, he had found another, in the man who had taken his place in Caroline's life. The estrangement was complete; he thought he would never get over it, but of course he did – after a fashion.
   His body had cunningly conspired with his unconscious desires. When at last he returned to Earth, after his protracted convalescence in Pasteur, he promptly developed such alarming symptoms – including something suspiciously like bone necrosis – that he was immediately rushed back to orbit. And there he had stayed, apart from a few excursions to the Moon, completely adapted to living in the zero to one-sixth gravity regime of the slowly rotating space hospital.
   He was not a recluse – far from it. Even while he was convalescing, he was dictating reports, giving evidence to endless commissions, being interviewed by media representatives. He was a famous man, and enjoyed the experience – while it lasted. It helped to compensate for his inner wounds.
   The first complete decade – 2020 to 2030 – seemed to have passed so swiftly that he now found it difficult to focus upon it. There were the usual crises, scandals, crimes, catastrophes – notably the Great Californian Earthquake, whose aftermath he had watched with fascinated horror through the station's monitor screens. Under their greatest magnification, in favourable conditions, they could show individual human beings; but from his God's-eye-view it had been impossible to identify with the scurrying dots fleeing from the burning cities. Only the ground cameras revealed the true horror.
   During that decade, though the results would not be apparent until later, the political tectonic plates were moving as inexorably as the geological ones – yet in the opposite sense, as if time was running backwards. For in the beginning, the Earth had possessed the single supercontinent of Pangaea, which over the aeons had split asunder. So had the human species, into innumerable tribes and nations; now it was merging together, as the old linguistic and cultural divisions began to blur.
   Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it had begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered an explosion of global tourism. At almost the same time – it was not, of course, a coincidence – satellites and fibre optics had revolutionized communications. With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.
   Like most families, it was not always a peaceful one, but its disputes no longer threatened the entire planet. The second – and last – nuclear war saw the use in combat of no more bombs than the first: precisely two. And though the kilotonnage was greater, the casualties were far fewer, as both were used against sparsely populated oil installations. At that point the Big Three of China, the US and the USSR moved with commendable speed and wisdom, sealing off the battle zone until the surviving combatants had come to their senses.
   By the decade of 2020-30, a major war between the Great Powers was as unthinkable as one between Canada and the United States had been in the century before. This was not due to any vast improvement in human nature, or indeed to any single factor except the normal preference of life over death. Much of the machinery of peace was not even consciously planned: before the politicians realized what had happened, they discovered that it was in place, and functioning well...
   No statesman, no idealist of any persuasion invented the 'Peace Hostage' movement; the very name was not coined until well after someone had noticed that at any given moment there were a hundred thousand Russian tourists in the United States – and half a million Americans in the Soviet Union, most of them engaged in their traditional pastime of complaining about the plumbing. And perhaps even more to the point, both groups contained a disproportionately large number of highly non-expendable individuals – the sons and daughters of wealth, privilege and political power.
   And even if one wished, it was no longer possible to plan a large-scale war. The Age of Transparency had dawned in the 1990s, when enterprising news media had started to launch photographic satellites with resolutions comparable to those that the military had possessed for three decades. The Pentagon and the Kremlin were furious; but they were no match for Reuters, Associated Press and the unsleeping, twenty-four-hours-a-day cameras of the Orbital News Service.
   By 2060, even though the world had not been completely disarmed, it had been effectively pacified, and the fifty remaining nuclear weapons were all under international control. There was surprisingly little opposition when that popular monarch, Edward VIII, was elected the first Planetary President, only a dozen states dissenting. They ranged in size and importance from the still stubbornly neutral Swiss (whose restaurants and hotels nevertheless greeted the new bureaucracy with open arms) to the even more fanatically independent Malvinians, who now resisted all attempts by the exasperated British and Argentines to foist them off on each other.
   The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented – sometimes, indeed, unhealthy – boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole – or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world.
   And building new ones. Now indeed mankind had found the 'moral equivalent of war', and a challenge that could absorb the surplus energies of the race – for as many millennia ahead as anyone dared to dream.

4 – Tycoon

   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.

5 – Out of the Ice

   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...
   'I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me.
   'And – when the next ship comes home – ask them to take our bones back to China..
   'Jupiter will be cutting us off in a few minutes. I wish I knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I'll repeat this message when we're in line of sight again – if my suit's life-support system lasts that long.
   'This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the destruction of spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice...'
   The signal faded abruptly, came back for a moment, then disappeared completely below the noise level. There would never be any further message from Professor Chang; but it had already deflected Lawrence Tsung's ambitions into space.