And there would have been a double irony. Perhaps the naming of the Grannymede’s only luxury suite was inevitable, but it had been a real shock to meet an ancient life-size holo of his old shipmate, in full-dress uniform, as he was led into – the Bowman Suite. Poole even recognized the image: his own official portrait had been made at the same time, a few days before the mission began.
He soon discovered that most of his Goliath crewmates had domestic arrangements in Anubis, and were anxious for him to meet their Significant Others during the ship’s planned twenty-day stop. Almost immediately he was caught up in the social and professional life of this frontier settlement, and it was Africa Tower that now seemed a distant dream.
Like many Americans, in their secret hearts, Poole had a nostalgic affection for small communities where everyone knew everyone else – in the real world, and not the virtual one of cyberspace. Anubis, with a resident population less than that of his remembered Flagstaff, was not a bad approximation to this ideal.
The three main pressure domes, each two kilometres in diameter, stood on a plateau overlooking an ice-field which stretched unbroken to the horizon. Ganymede’s second sun
– once known as Jupiter – would never give sufficient heat to melt the polar caps. This was the principal reason for establishing Anubis in such an inhospitable spot: the city’s foundations were not likely to collapse for at least several centuries.
And inside the domes, it was easy to be completely indifferent to the outside world. Poole, when he had mastered the mechanisms of the Bowman Suite, discovered that he had a limited but impressive choice of environments. He could sit beneath palm trees on a Pacific beach, listening to the gentle murmur of the waves – or, if he preferred, the roar of a tropical hurricane. He could fly slowly along the peaks of the Himalayas, or down the immense canyons of Mariner Valley. He could walk through the gardens of Versailles or down the streets of half a dozen great cities, at several widely spaced times in their history. Even if the Hotel Grannymede was not one of the Solar System’s most highly acclaimed resorts, it boasted facilities which would have astounded all its more famous predecessors on Earth.
But it was ridiculous to indulge in terrestrial nostalgia, when he had come halfway across the Solar System to visit a strange new world. After some experimenting, Poole arranged a compromise, for enjoyment – and inspiration -during his steadily fewer moments of leisure.
To his great regret, he had never been to Egypt, so it was delightful to relax beneath the gaze of the Sphinx – as it was before its controversial ‘restoration’ – and to watch tourists scrambling up the massive blocks of the Great Pyramid. The illusion was perfect, apart from the no-man’s-land where the desert clashed with the (slightly worn) carpet of the Bowman Suite.
The sky, however, was one that no human eyes had seen until five thousand years after the last stone was laid at Giza. But it was not an illusion; it was the complex and ever-changing reality of Ganymede.
Because this world – like its companions – had been robbed of its spin aeons ago by the tidal drag of Jupiter, the new sun born from the giant planet hung motionless in its sky. One side of Ganymede was in perpetual Lucifer-light – and although the other hemisphere was often referred to as the ‘Night Land’, that designation was as misleading as the much earlier phrase ‘The dark side of the Moon’. Like the lunar Farside, Ganymede’s ‘Night Land’ had the brilliant light of old Sol for half of its long day.
By a coincidence more confusing than useful, Ganymede took almost exactly one week – seven days, three hours -to orbit its primary. Attempts to create a ‘One Mede day = one Earth week’ calendar had generated so much chaos that they had been abandoned centuries ago. Like all the other residents of the Solar System, the locals employed Universal Time, identifying their twenty-four-hour standard days by numbers rather than names.
Since Ganymede’s newborn atmosphere was still extremely thin and almost cloudless, the parade of heavenly bodies provided a never-ending spectacle. At their closest, Io and Callisto each appeared about half the size of the Moon as seen from Earth – but that was the only thing they had in common. Io was so close to Lucifer that it took less than two days to race around its orbit, and showed visible movement even in a matter of minutes. Callisto, at over four times Io’s distance, required two Mede days – or sixteen Earth ones – to complete its leisurely circuit.
The physical contrast between the two worlds was even more remarkable. Deep-frozen Callisto had been almost unchanged by Jupiter’s conversion into a mini-sun: it was still a wasteland of shallow ice craters, so closely packed that there was not a single spot on the entire satellite that had escaped from multiple impacts, in the days when Jupiter’s enormous gravity field was competing with Saturn’s to gather up the debris of the outer Solar System. Since then, apart from a few stray shots, nothing had happened for several billion years.
On Io, something was happening every week. As a local wit had remarked, before the creation of Lucifer it had been Hell – now it was Hell warmed up.
Often, Poole would zoom into that burning landscape and look into the sulphurous throats of volcanoes that were continually reshaping an area larger than Africa. Sometimes incandescent fountains would soar briefly hundreds of kilometres into space, like gigantic trees of fire growing on a lifeless world.
As the floods of molten sulphur spread out from volcanoes and vents, the versatile element changed through a narrow spectrum of reds and oranges and yellows when, chameleon-like, it was transformed into its vari-coloured allotropes. Before the dawn of the Space Age, no one had ever imagined that such a world existed. Fascinating though it was to observe it from his comfortable vantage point, Poole found it hard to believe that men had ever risked landing there, where even robots feared to tread… His main interest, however, was Europa, which at its closest appeared almost exactly the same size as Earth’s solitary Moon, but raced through its phases in only four days. Though Poole had been quite unconscious of the symbolism when he chose his private landscape, it now seemed wholly appropriate that Europa should hang in the sky above another great enigma – the Sphinx.
Even with no magnification, when he requested the naked-eye view, Poole could see how greatly Europa had changed in the thousand years since Discovery had set out for Jupiter. The spider’s web of narrow bands and lines that had once completely enveloped the smallest of the four Galilean satellites had vanished, except around the poles. Here the global crust of kilometre-thick ice remained unmelted by the warmth of Europa’s new sun: elsewhere, virgin oceans seethed and boiled in the thin atmosphere, at what would have been comfortable room temperature on Earth.
It was also a comfortable temperature to the creatures who had emerged, after the melting of the unbroken ice shield that had both trapped and protected them. Orbiting spysats, showing details only centimetres across, had watched one Europan species starting to evolve into an amphibious stage: though they still spent much of their time underwater, the ‘Europs’ had even begun the construction of simple buildings.
That this could happen in a mere thousand years was astonishing, but no one doubted that the explanation lay in the last and greatest of the Monoliths – the many-kilometre-long ‘Great Wall’ standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
And no one doubted that, in its own mysterious way, it was watching over the experiment it had started on this world – as it had done on Earth four million years before.
19
The Madness of Mankind
MISS PRINGLE
FILE INDRA
My dear Indra – sorry I’ve not even voice-mailed you before – usual excuse, of course, so I won’t bother to give it.
To answer your question – yes, I’m now feeling quite at home at the Grannymede, but am spending less and less time there, though I’ve been enjoying the sky display I’ve had piped into my suite. Last night the Io flux-tube put on a fine performance – that’s a kind of lightning discharge between Io and Jupiter – I mean Lucifer. Rather like Earth’s aurora, but much more spectacular. Discovered by the radio astronomers even before I was born.
And talking about ancient times – did you know that Anubis has a Sheriff? I think that’s overdoing the frontier spirit. Reminds me of the stories my grandfather used to tell me about Arizona… Must try some of them on the Medes…
This may sound silly – I’m still not used to being in the Bowman Suite. I keep looking over my shoulder…