In that way, it genuinely was a sun. Like a beacon or a lamp, it drew her closer.
The creature disappeared, edging behind a bump of rock. Vonnie paced toward it, sweeping her radar and X-ray up the cavern wall. Where had it gone? The wall was pocked with fissures and holes.
As she paused at a hundred meters, thinking again of Lam, she realized the carvings they’d found were literal portrayals of these creatures’ bodies. They’d thought each eight-armed sun was a letter or a word. Instead, the shapes were three dimensional images of the carvers themselves.
Searching the wall, she discovered a crevice teeming with warm bodies, eight of them — the number eight again — and yet she saw no exhalations in infrared.
Vonnie forgot everything else, although she made sure not to let her smile show inside her visor. Teeth might be threatening. She moved gently even as her head raced with astonishment and delight. She knelt to make herself smaller. Then she drew one finger in the dust, merely trying to communicate the idea of communicating. She must be a surprise to them.
I’m a friend, she thought.
Furless, streamlined, they had almost certainly evolved in water. They had no bones, only strands of cartilage through their bodies and arms. They also had no front or back that she could see, no eyes, no nose, nothing to differentiate one side from another.
On top, their albino skin was peppered with spines. Some of those defensive needles were colored with a tinge of yellow or red, likely from sulfur or mineral absorption. They had no need for pigmentation in this lightless world.
Underneath, their arms were lined with gripping nubs and richly laid bands of tube feet and pedicellaria — fine, clasping tendrils in the thousands. Some were as delicate as her hair. Others were short cords like wire.
Their squirming whiskers gave them personality. Hanging on the rock, clinging in a group, most of the creatures held up one or two arms to show their undersides, and Vonnie’s sensors let her see through their bodies in any case. They wriggled and flexed.
Are they communicating with each other? she thought. How? By touch?
They danced with their arms, brushing against each other. Vonnie imagined they used physical contact like a combination of sign language and Braille. They might read their carvings in the same way — and everything inside Europa — as they groped through the dark.
Ears were their only visible sensory organs. In the grooves between their arms, protected by knuckle-like muscles, were sphincters that opened to short auditory canals. Following their ears into their bodies, Vonnie’s X-rays lit up dense, specialized cochlear and bundles of nerves. She also saw complex fatty lobes associated with the same nerves. What were those for? The fatty structures augmented their hearing somehow.
Otherwise they had no orifices of any kind except on their bellies. Vonnie noted a few slits which she suspected were well-protected gills and genitals. Each creature also had a snub beak evidently used both as mouth and anus. Her initial scans revealed a very basic digestive system, four lungs, two hearts, two hypertrophied kidneys, a huge liver, and more brain tissue than she would have envisioned in a meter-wide creature.
You’re perfect, she thought.
They were small enough to subsist on minimal food, yet large enough to build. Lungs and gills also allowed them to travel in any medium. Did they still make their homes in water? Where were their children?
“What should we call you?” she asked, forgetting herself and speaking out loud.
She remembered her friends’ energized laughter. Bauman might have called the natives octopods or aquatic mammals. More politically minded, Lam would have said Europans.
“Sunfish,” Vonnie said.
Naming them, she felt wistful and right. Sunfish was pretty. It was poetry. They looked like giant starfish, but starfish would have been demeaning.
These weren’t simple, mindless sea creatures. They were clever and brave. For the sunfish to cover as much distance as they had to the top of the ice was remarkable. It spoke again of strategy, organization, and engineering. That they’d mastered this environment was even more impressive because their lungs were too compact to hold air for long. They must have evolved some trick of oxygen compression… saturating their blood… breathing water or good air before leaving one safe zone for another…
The air locks implied they weren’t nomads. Instead, they constructed strongholds.
Am I near their home? she thought.
Then she was out of time. The sunfish leapt at her and Vonnie stepped back, stunned, as they burst off the cavern wall like shrapnel.
The sunfish were spectacular in flight. Four of them ricocheted through the crags overhead, banging into spaces she hadn’t noticed until they darted in and out. The others kicked off the tunnel floor. As soon as they were airborne, they somersaulted, leading now with their undersides and their beaks. They came in a swarm with all arms outstretched.
In that split second, Vonnie realized their carvings were a lie. The shapes etched into the trench had been smooth, stylized, and immaculate. Those carvings showed the top portions of sunfish without age or injuries, when in reality their undersides were rough with scar tissue and missing hunks of pedicellaria.
Their true selves were as grotesque as those wounds.
The first sunfish struck her helmet off-center, attacking her gear block. Others collided with her arms and chest, trying to bring her down. Vonnie staggered, but her suit kept her upright.
Her retreat was confused. She tripped over a boulder and fell as three bodies clawed at her.
She stood like a drunk, flailing with adrenaline. Many of them seemed to have disappeared. She struck wildly at the sunfish hooked around her face.
They dropped the ceiling on her. A hundred flecks of rock clattered against her suit, and she looked up as a ragged hunk as big as a car slammed down. When most of the sunfish had bounced away from her, they’d leapt up and scrabbled at the rock, digging and prying, using themselves as pistons to accelerate their weapon.
They were ruthless. Impact killed one of their own and hurt three more. It also destroyed her.
Inside her helmet, her skull whacked against the buckling armor, where torn circuitry scraped open one of her corneas. Then she hit the ground. Systems failure was total for 3.1 seconds and Vonnie sprawled in the dark, bleeding and twitching.
12.
“Are you there?” she gasped, blinded by a wet mask of gore.
—Online.
“Run! Get me up!”
She felt the sunfish against her suit, snaking through the rubble to reach her foot, her arm, her shoulder. Their arms beat at her like clubs.
Pain speared through her elbow as the suit twisted free. She rose. Inside her helmet, she shook her head, squeezing her left eye shut, but her vision wouldn’t focus and she couldn’t get her other eyelid to close at all. That eye was a numb, oozing bag mashed in a crater of flesh.
I can’t see, she realized.
Her fear became a firebrand, scalding her brain. She couldn’t think. “Run,” she said, but the ghost needed more information.
—Destination?
Something hit the back of her head. More impacts dropped her to her knees, and she screamed, “Run! Run!”
—Destination?
Vonnie summoned the words she needed. “Retrace my path for two kilometers! Retrace my path exactly! Run into the lava tunnel!”