Martin sighed. Another 48 hours. This was not a long time compared to the year they had needed to get here. What will the ocean under the ice reveal to us? he wondered. The exobiologists hoped for primitive cells like the ones that existed in hot vents at the bottom of Earth’s oceans. The result of the ELF probe had been, as they say, open to interpretation. A dead hare would be interpreted as a proof of life by any examiner. A frozen single-celled organism, if it was differentiated enough, was only a clear indication. The risk of a chance discovery was low, as the probe had identified several identical specimens. Yet despite all the complexity, those could still be the results of a chemical or geological process that was just unknown on Earth. They could only be sure if they caught life red-handed, when it was currently growing and multiplying.
In two days, their search for life would begin.
December 18, 2046, Valkyrie
Martin had felt as if they would never get through the ice. Of course the instruments had shown they would soon break through into the ocean—radar, lidar, even by the speedometer. With increasing temperatures, the ice had become softer by the hour. At first it had been harder than steel, then like limestone, and finally the jets had cut through it like butter, which saved them two full hours at the end.
They did not see the new world, though, until it happened.
Martin heard it, even before Francesca could tell him. The jets had abruptly become much quieter. They had completely changed their mode of operation. Instead of ejecting hot water, they now sucked in the salty ocean water. And instead of using the energy of the water to generate electricity, the blades of the generator now functioned as a propeller driving the ship ahead, still fed by the laser beam from space. At a signal from the on-board AI, the mothership had reduced the power of the laser, since they needed much less for navigating in water.
It was time to look around. The vehicle activated powerful flashlights that illuminated their surroundings in various wavelengths. Radar and lidar recorded the structure of the ice layer above them, though these sensors did not reach to the bottom of the ocean from here.
The first images started to appear on the large display that substituted for a window at the bow. Francesca looked at Martin. She is as impressed as I am, he noticed. Above them, somebody had built an ice palace. Trenches, ridges, craters, walls, columns, mountains—the lower aspect of the ice seemed to mirror the shapes on the surface. All that was missing was a copy of the lander. An exotic mirror country stretched above them far into the distance—shiny, crazy, and clinically pure. Even the water appeared to be clear as crystal.
Martin remembered his last visit to a cave on Earth. Wherever I looked, life was spreading. Moss, lichen, layers of bacteria, primitive plants—even under such unfavorable conditions, they displayed a great variety. Nothing like that can be seen here. They were moving through an amazing but apparently sterile world that might even be hostile to life.
With mouths agape, they continued to watch new, seemingly impossible structures, while Valkyrie drove like a submarine toward the South Pole. The work of art above them was art for art’s sake, as the searchlights of Valkyrie were doubtless shining light on them for the very first time in their existence. It appeared Francesca and Martin were the first intelligent beings in the universe allowed to marvel at this masterpiece of sculpture. This is an incredible gift, one that will always connect me to the pilot and to this moon, he mused.
Soon the on-board AI started its automatic search routine. The two astronauts did not have much to do. The first images were sent—via the laser uplink—to the spaceship, and then they left this world. A few hours later the first congratulatory messages arrived from Earth, though worded rather cautiously, particularly when exobiologists had sent them. After all, they said, they had not expected to find a second Earth here. What the experts did not add was, but it would have been nice, of course.
The two astronauts were not bothered by this. The searchlights were first switched to infrared and then to ultraviolet, and each brought more fascinating effects. Now they observed ribbon structures they believed to be different phases of the ice. Martin spent half an hour describing to Jiaying via a dedicated line what splendors he was seeing. Shortly before the end of their conversation, she told him she had kept the channel open for Hayato, so he could listen in. Martin did not mind. He gladly shared what he was experiencing.
After twelve kilometers below the ice, the sensors reported increasing currents. The engines could easily handle this, though. They appeared to be approaching one of the Tiger Stripes, the source of the ice geysers that made Enceladus such a unique place in the solar system.
The abyss opened at kilometer 14.8. It was a deep structure that looked like it was cut by a knife. The searchlights did not reach the bottom—if there was one. It must be at least 750 meters downward, Martin estimated. At the edge of the area lit by the searchlights they saw hints that the ice was not perfectly clear everywhere. They could not be sure, but those areas might be deposits of organic material. Jiaying urged them to go there right away, and a few hours later the scientists on Earth concurred emphatically. However, the two astronauts stuck to the plan—first explore the surroundings, then set priorities, and only afterward decide to follow up on specific phenomena.
Valkyrie followed a curving course and finally returned to its starting point. The vehicle plowed through the ocean like a whale. The water streaming through its engines was examined in all wavelengths. For each cubic meter, a milliliter was sent to a rapid analyzer. This allowed the AI to create a rough map of chemical distributions. The water was very salty indeed, much more so than in the oceans on Earth. Even though the salt water looked clear, it contained a certain percentage of organic material that might be of chemical or biological origin. The consistency was not uniform, as there was a gradient that increased with depth, and a second one that correlated to their nearness to the Tiger Stripes.
In general, the water did not contain a lot of minerals, except near the currents leading to the stripes. It appeared logical to the scientists that the mineral content would rise with increasing depth, as this is where the ocean met the rocks. Nowhere else could salts be dissolved into the water. The collective exobiologists on Earth could not agree on what further course Valkyrie should take, so Martin and Francesca went to sleep, leaving the exobiologists to argue among themselves.
Age of Questions, Point
There is:
The I.
The all.
The warmth.