"You dumb shit." She reached up and grabbed him by the chin, forcing his head around until he was facing her. "You've got someone!"
He closed his eyes, almost involuntarily. "Yeah. So they tell me," he said, thinking, A small share of what they say comes in unlimited quantities but never does. "Sometimes I wish I'd let you come out here alone."
Vana released him and, after a while, got up, got dressed, and left the room, leaving him with his bitter imaginings.
From orbit, Aello was even more of a disappointment than Podarge had been. It was tiny, only a little more than four hundred kilometers in diameter, about the size of one of the larger asteroids. It had never been hot enough to melt any of its volatile constituents, so no regional differences were noticeable even in enhanced view. The primary surface was neon, for as Iris cooled from its initial contraction the last particles to be welded into the small gobs that rained down on the satellites were the most volatile. While Ocypete and Podarge were the result of aeons of geologic activity which had long ended, Aello was that asterologist's dream, a world on which the great majority of materials had never been processed by an active geology. Most things were still almost identical to the way they had been in the very earliest stages of planetary formations. In the Solar System, scientists had looked for such a world in vain. As they moved outward from the sun, the promise of tiny, cold, pristine bodies was shattered by the increasing amounts of volatile material scattered through them. Even the surfaces of Pluto and Charon had been melted in their early history, and still outgassed and changed when they were at perihelion. There were plenty of really small bodies that were in an unaltered state, but finding materials that had been emplaced on the surface of a moon-sized world at its birth had been the quest of scientists since the first days of the Apollo Moon landings. Aello was that world.
It looked much like Mimas: a small, spherical worldlet punched open by deeply inset bowllike craters. Unlike those on Podarge, the craters were deep enough relative to the curvature of the satellite to show perceptible shadows well away from the terminator, making the moon appear even more ravaged. There was a disproportionately large crater on its leading hemisphere. It was not so relatively large as Herschel, Mimas' great eye, but it still stood out from the rest, had stared at them as Polaris closed in. They remembered how Jana had remarked that this crater, Sayyarrin byname, was unusual not only in its size but in its shallowness, given the fact that Aello had no viscous relaxation to buoy up the middle. Now Sayyarrin was over the limb, in night. Here too, orbiting was a very inefficient process, and they were accelerating downward, watching the broken surface come up to eclipse the large blue circle that was the
"day" side of Iris.
"Not very impressive, huh?" said Brendan,
"I don't know," said Krzakwa. "Maybe our expectations were just too high. After Podarge, I'm developing a more philosophical approach."
Sealock stared at the cold, dim worldlet through the ship optics for a while, then said, "We're going down, this time. That should be something."
"Are you kidding? This is it, Bren! We're going down onto that most elusive of all things, a primordial world. What we'll be seeing down there has never been seen before."
"Come on!" said Sealock, grinning as he continued to inspect the vista that was unfolding below them.
"That's a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. I mean, you can have all the planetesimals you want out in the Oort belt—what difference does it make if we pick them up here?" Krzakwa wondered if Sealock meant what he'd said or was merely being aggravating. He decided it didn't matter. "Well, Iris doesn't have a cometary ring, for one thing, so this is it as far as Iridean planetesimals go ... but it's more than that: this isn't even a piece of the Solar System! Aello not only has all of its materials intact, but they are laid down in the same order they originally came in. It's like a Grand Canyon—you can dig directly into the history of Aello and, in effect, into the history of the formation of Iris and its moons. Things are disturbed by the craters, but only a bit."
"OK. I give up. I'm impressed. So what do you want to do?" he asked, sitting back in his harness.
"Looking at this thing, I begin to realize just how difficult it would be to land our ship. It'd be pretty hard to come down with the engines flaming. On H2vent-thrust only, I guess, we could . . ." Krzakwa cut him off. "I've been thinking about it," he said.
"How does this sound: we suit up, eliminate radiation from the worksuits, and jump . . ." Sealock suddenly stopped moving, staring into dead space for a second, then he turned to look at the Selenite again, his eyes seeming to glow. "You son of a bitch. Sure! Like that boil-gliding business ..." His imagination chewed at the details of the notion: "I'll put her in a low orbit, maybe half a kilometer up. The jump won't kill us. We use pressurized O2from our life-support systems like jets to get back." He sat back in his couch, gloating to himself. "And we make a suit-instrumented rendezvous with Polaris at the end of it all. . . . Hell, this is really going to be fun!"
Aello spun underneath them as Brendan maneuvered the ship down into an orbit so low that they could make out the unmistakable shadow of the craft near the huge, uneven horizon. Even with the weak gravity, this deep in her gravity well Aello effectively swept them along, and the wells of shadow that were craters moved under them quickly. Brendan was fully engrossed in his piloting, plugged into systems that effectively made him an incredibly sensitive receptor. He rushed along, sensing his passage with radar, and could feel the gravitational anomalies caused by variations in the moon's shape and constituents as a series of small velocity changes. He cataloged them as he flew, feeding data to the calculations that Krzakwa was making, fine-tuning their notions about how the orbit of the ship would precess while they were down on the moon. They needed to know. As he delved deeper into the substance of the world, reading it carefully, all the while avoiding an intense radiation flux that would disturb sensitive materials, his eyes became totally blind to the bottomless craters that were calling forth the nightside.
He was just about to disconnect from his systems, in preparation for going down, when something in the residuals of the newest ship computational ephemeris caught his attention. He checked a map and saw that they were passing over the very center of Sayyarrin. This is some kind of a weird little anomaly, all right, he thought. Really weird . . .
"Tem," he said, "are you monitoring the external sensor returns?"
"Uh-huh," said Krzakwa, "what is it?"
"You're the physicist, buddy, you tell me."
Tem studied the figures of the ephemeris in his head, brought in a calc overlay, and spent a full minute processing. Finally he said. "I think we must've put one of our machines together backward. It's a glitch."
"Oh, yeah? OK. Here's an updated computation, seven seconds old. If that's a glitch it's got a sense of humor."
" Materi bogu!There's some kind of void down there, under the ice."
"Impossible. It's not a void, it's a shell of some kind. A thin layer of mass around an almost massless core. Now what in the fuck could cause that?"
"Speculation, you mean? Some kind of hollow meteorite?" As he said it, he realized how unlikely a thing that was. It could happen, yes, but on this scale?
Sealock said: "But look at the size, the dimensions. This is not exactly a high-resolution picture—but even the parameters of the orbit suggest something more like ..."
Krzakwa shook his head. This was ridiculous. There were explanations. Besides . . . "There's nothing in the view that suggests anything unusual. There are volcanic chambers all over the outer Solar System." He marked the spot, now rapidly disappearing behind them, with a bright optical V. In the deep IR