To Danny and T.J., my favorite “Jovians.” To Thomas Cold, who would rather be wrong than dull. And to Barbara, always and forever.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Mark Chartrand, George W. Ferguson, and Frederic B. Jueneman, who offered invaluable advice and assistance in writing this novel. The technical accuracy of this story is due in large part to their generous assistance; any inaccuracies stem from my stretching the known facts.
Details of the life of Zheng He and the Ming Empire’s “treasure fleet” can be found in Louise Levathe’s fine book, When China Ruled the Seas, published in 1994 by Simon & Schuster.
The rash assertion that “God made man in His own image” is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.
-Arthur C. Clarke
JUPITER
PROLOGUE
ORBITAL STATION GOLD
It took six of them to drown him.
Reluctantly, grudgingly, Grant Archer had stripped himself naked, as they had ordered him to do. But once they pushed him to the edge of the big tank, he knew he would not go into it without a fight. The augmented gorilla grabbed Grant’s right arm; she was careful not to snap his bones, but her powerful grip was painful all the same. Two of the human guards held his left arm while a third wrapped him around the middle and still another lifted his bare feet off the deck so he couldn’t get any leverage for his wild-eyed struggles.
All this in nearly total silence. Grant didn’t scream or roar at them, he didn’t plead or curse. The only sounds were the scuffing of the guards’ boots on the cold metal deck plates, the hard gasps of their labored breathing, and Grant’s own panicked, desperate panting.
The guard captain grimly, efficiently grasped Grant’s depilated head in both big meaty hands and pushed his face into the tank of thick, oily liquid.
Grant squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath until his chest felt as if it would burst. He was burning inside, suffocating, drowning. The pain was unbearable. He couldn’t breathe. He dared not breathe. No matter what they had told him, he knew down at the deepest level of his being that this was going to kill him. No air! Can’t breathe!
Reflex overpowered his mind. Despite himself, despite his terror, he sucked in a breath. And gagged. He tried to scream, to cry out, to beg for help or mercy. His lungs filled with the icy liquid. His whole body spasmed, shuddered with the last hope of life as they pushed his naked body all the way into the tank with a final pitiless shove and he sank down, deeper and deeper.
He opened his eyes. There were lights down there. He was breathing! Coughing, choking, his body racked with uncontrollable spasms. But he was breathing. The liquid filled his lungs and he could breathe it. Just like regular air, they had told him. A lie, a vicious lie. It was cold and thick, utterly foreign, alien, slimy and horrible.
But he could breathe.
He sank toward the lights. Blinking, squinting in their glare, he saw that there were other naked hairless bodies down there waiting for him.
“Welcome to the team,” a sarcastic voice boomed in his ears, deep, slow, reverberating.
Another voice, not as loud but even more basso profundo, said, “Okay, let’s get him prepped for the surgery.”
BOOK I
My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.
-PSALM 22
GRANT ARMSTRONG ARCHER III
Despite being born into one of the oldest families in Oregon, Grant Archer grew up in an environment that was far from affluent. His earliest memories were of watching his mother rummaging through piles of hand-me-down clothes at the Goodwill shop, looking for sweaters and gym shoes that weren’t too shabby to wear to school. His father was a Methodist minister in the little suburb of Salem where Grant grew up, respected as a man of the cloth but not taken too seriously in the community because he was, in the words of one of the golf club widows, “churchmouse poor.”
Poor as far as money was concerned, but Grant’s mother always told him that he was rich in the gift of intelligence. It was his mother, who worked in one of the multifarious offices of the New Morality in the state capital, who encouraged Grant’s interest in science.