Absurdly, she felt her throat tightening; she found it difficult to pull her gaze away from that drifting particle of home.
There was a hand on her arm, its weight barely registering through the numbing, stiff fabric of the suit. Spinner smiled. “I know how you feel.”
Louise peered through the faceplate at this odd girl-woman, with her glinting spectacles and her round, childish face.
After Spinner’s father had wrecked the Interface — and with it, any chance of getting home again — Louise had offered Spinner and her people AS-treatment. And, looking at Spinner now, fifty years later, it was hard to remember that this was no longer a child, but a sixty-five-year-old woman.
“I doubt you know how I feel,” she said coldly. “I doubt it very much.”
Spinner studied her for a few moments, her painted face expressionless behind her plate.
They climbed back into the pod.
The little ship rose to a height of a mile, then levelled off and coasted parallel to the surface. Louise looked back. Their landing jets had blown a wide, shallow crater in the ice; it marred a plain which stretched, seamless and featureless, to the close horizon.
Louise sat in her seat; surrounded by the disconcertingly transparent hull, she felt — as always, in these pods — as if she were suspended in space. Below them the Callisto plain was a geometrical abstraction; above them. Northern climbed patiently past the deep, gleaming rings of Jupiter, a spark against those smooth arcs.
The main activity on Callisto was centered around Morrow’s excavation site on the far side of the moon, the Jupiter-facing side. The purpose of this jaunt was to have a general scout, and to give Spinner-of-Rope some more experience of working outside the ship, the feel of standing on a planet surface… Even, Louise thought, a surface so featureless, and with a sky so bare, that the moon had become almost an abstract representation of a planet.
Still, Louise knew it did her good to get away from the ship that had been her home, and prison, for so many centuries — and which, barring a miracle, was going to have to sustain her and her people for the rest of her life. Callisto was — had been — Jupiter’s eighth moon, one of the four big Galilean satellites. At the time of Northern’s launch Callisto had been a ball of water ice and rock, heavily cratered. Debris had been sprayed across the mysterious surface from the bright cores of the impact craters; from space, Callisto had looked like a sphere of glass peppered by gunshots. One basin — called Valhalla — had been four hundred miles across, an immense amphitheater surrounded by concentric terrace-like walls.
Louise remembered how human cities, feeding on Callisto’s ancient water, had glinted in the shadows of Valhalla’s walls, shining like multicolored jewels.
Well, the craters had gone now — as had Valhalla, and all the cities. Gone without trace, it seemed. Callisto had been wiped smooth, unblemished save for her own footsteps.
During, or after, the depopulation, Callisto had been caused to melt. And, when the moon froze once more, something had been trapped in the ice…
The pod skimmed around the smooth limb of the moon. They were heading over the moon’s north pole, and soon, Louise realized, they would be passing over the sharp terminator and into daylight.
…Or what passed for daylight, in these straitened times, she thought.
Beside her, Spinner fitted her faceplate over her head, leaving it open below her mouth. She peered around, through the flimsy walls of the pod. From the absent, unfocused expression in her eyes, Louise could tell she was using the plate’s enhancement and magnification features.
“I can see moons,” Spinner said. “A sky full of moons.”
“Nice for you,” Louise said drily. “There should be eight — there used to be eight beyond Callisto. Small, irregular: probably captured asteroids. The outer four of them were retrograde, moving backwards compared to the planet’s own rotation.”
“I’m surprised any moons survived the destruction of the planet.”
Louise shrugged. “The nearest of the outer moons was a hundred and fifty Jovian radii from the primary, before the planet imploded… even Callisto survived, remember, and that was a mere twenty-six radii out.” The orbits of the surviving moons had been disturbed by the Jovian event, of course; the implosion had sent them scattering with a shock of gravity waves, and now they swooped around their shattered parent along orbits of high eccentricity, like birds disturbed by earth tremors.
Within the orbit of Callisto, nothing had survived.
Now, as the pod passed over the pole, the Jovian ring system unfolded like a huge floor before Louise, infinite-flat and streaked with shadows.
This new ring system, the debris of worlds, lay in what had been Jupiter’s equatorial plane — the plane once occupied by the vanished moons. Callisto still lay in the equatorial plane, patiently circling the site of the giant planet just outside the ring system, so that the disc of ring material — if it had stretched out so far — would have bisected Callisto neatly.
The ring system didn’t terminate at a sharp inner boundary, like Saturn’s. Instead the creamy, smoothed-out material stretched inwards — this system was actually more a disc than a ring system, Louise realized slowly. As her eyes tracked in toward the center the system’s texture slowly changed — becoming more rough, Louise saw, with knots of high density locked into the churning surface, orbiting through tight circles, swirling visibly.
The whole assemblage was stained crimson by scattered sunlight.
The rings were almost featureless — bland, without the complex colors and braids which characterized Saturn’s system. Louise sighed. The gravitational interaction of moons had provided Saturn’s rings with their fantastic structure. The trouble was that Jupiter’s remaining moons simply weren’t up to the job of shepherding the rings. For poor, dead Jupiter, only a single dark streak marked the orbital resonance of Callisto itself.
Now, the center of the ring-disc rose above Callisto’s sharp horizon. Louise could clearly see inhomogeneities churning around the geometric center of the disc, twisting through their crowded, tortured orbits. But the disc center itself was unspectacular — just a brighter patch, spinning with the rest of the disc. It was somehow frustrating, as if there were something missing.
Spinner sounded disappointed. “I can’t see anything in the middle. Where the planet used to be.”
Louise grinned. “You’d hardly expect to. A black hole with Jupiter’s mass would have a diameter of just twenty feet or so…”
“There’s plenty to see in higher frequencies,” Mark cut in. “The X-ray, and higher…
“Toward the heart of the system we have a true accretion disc,” he went on, “with matter being heated tremendously before falling into the black hole itself. It’s small, but there’s a lot of structure there, if you look at it in the right bands.”
Spinner, with apparent eagerness, adjusted her plate over her face, and Mark told her how to fix the settings. Soon, Spinner’s eyes assumed that unfocused look again as they adjusted to the enhanced imagery.
Louise left her own visor in her lap; the black hole, and its huge, milky ring, depressed her enough in visible light.
Jupiter’s new ring system, with its bland paleness, and the jostling, crowding swirl at the center, was far from beautiful, on any wavelength. It was too obviously a place of wreckage, of destruction — a destruction which was visibly continuing, as the black hole gnawed at its accretion disc. And, to Louise’s engineer’s eye, with its empty center the system had something of an unfinished, provisional look. There was no soul to this system, she thought, no balance to the scale of the rings: by comparison, Saturn’s rings had been an adornment, a necklace of ice and rock around the throat of an already beautiful world.