“We’ll be ready,” Frerotte said.
“Thank you.”
“Thank me, too,” Metzler said, nudging her again. “I’ve got big news. Eat lunch with me and I’ll show you. Otherwise you have to wait for the group presentation tonight.”
Vonnie smiled. “Tell me now or I’ll break your arm.”
Do we have at least this much in common with the sunfish? she wondered. Sex affects everything we do even when those urges are subliminal. It’s part of our self-absorption, I think. We can’t leave each other alone.
I like it. I like watching him and feeling him watching me. It’s a distraction, but it gives us energy, too.
I want him to want me.
Looking at her three friends, Vonnie saw the same spark in Ash’s face. They were young, in close quarters, and subjected to unending stress and excitement. Pheromones were merely part of the spell. The ape in them yearned for physical contact, grooming, and reassurance.
Gene smithing also made their society more free in its sexual norms. Western Europe had already been more sophisticated than most of Earth’s cultures, placing few taboos on nudity or female equality. By the twenty-second century, the defeat of venereal diseases and infallible birth control had led to an era called the Age of Love. Sharing partners, threesomes, and group sex were common experiences for young men and women in the European Union.
Vonnie’s main consideration now, away from Earth, was to avoid disrupting her professional relationships. None of them wanted to waste time on jealousy or drama.
“We can have lunch,” she promised. “Don’t make me wait if you’ve had a breakthrough.”
“Well, sort of. The fucking Brazilians are causing problems we don’t need,” Metzler said. Was he posturing for her benefit? “The explosions scared off most of the lifeforms in the area, so it’s taken longer than we anticipated finding sunfish. The good news is we think we’re near a colony because Tom came back again this morning.”
“I love Tom!” Vonnie said, yelling in celebration.
Tom was the name they’d bestowed upon the most easily identifiable sunfish. Others were Jack and Jill and Hans and Sue.
One of Tom’s arm tips had healed in a whorl after a partial amputation. His deformity made him unique. It seemed to have affected his thinking. He was the only sunfish who’d signaled their probes instead of attacking. Then he’d run from them. With further contact, they hoped to coax Tom into a dialogue… opening the door to meaningful contact between humans and sunfish…
Vonnie kissed Metzler’s cheek, smelling the faint, pleasant salt of his skin. He touched the back of her neck. His fingertips caused an erotic thrill. Beside her, Vonnie saw Ash glance at Frerotte, and she knew they all felt the same adult heat.
We have this lander to ourselves, she thought. We could do whatever we want in here.
30.
“Uh, let me show you the latest sims,” Metzler said, rubbing his face where she’d kissed him. He tried to cover the gesture by looking for his pad, but he couldn’t find it, flustered by the two women.
Ash had blushed. Vonnie felt a similar warmth in her cheeks. Even adapted to Europa’s gravity, their hearts were too strong not to betray their arousal. Vonnie basked in it. She enjoyed feeling healthy even if she hadn’t gotten over the fear of making herself vulnerable.
Be patient with me, she thought.
Metzler was a good man. He acted as if he’d heard her say it. Maybe her anxiety showed in her eyes. He linked his pad to the wall display and said, “Look at this,” drawing everyone’s attention away from Vonnie.
Four days ago, ESA Probes 112 and 113 had stolen into a branch of catacombs occupied by the smaller breed of sunfish. Each probe carried a dozen spies with it, like beetles clinging to its top, because spies weren’t capable of covering as much ground as probes yet were better suited for surveillance.
Spreading through the ice and rock, patiently forming themselves into a dish-like array, the spies had watched the sunfish for fifty-two hours before Probes 112 and 113 emerged from hiding.
Technically, it wasn’t Second Contact. The Americans had pursued two groups of sunfish into the ice. They’d also reported more carvings, fungus, bacterial mats, and eel-like fish in a cavern half-flooded by a fresh water sea. More startling, the Americans had also found a vein of shells and dirt suspended in the ice with the corpse of what appeared to be a warm-blooded, shell-eating creature like a ferret. The corpse had been ravaged by compression, but it was unquestionably a fur-bearing animal — an eight-legged thing with beaver-like teeth, talons, and an elongated body made for burrowing and climbing.
If the Chinese were having similar success, they’d made no announcements. Vonnie thought the Brazilians must have encountered sunfish even if their focus had turned to destroying Lam. The FNEE mecha were too deep. At the very least, they must have found carvings or ruins.
In both of their encounters, NASA’s probes had been attacked. The first time, NASA rolled its mecha into balls, meekly accepting the sunfishes’ beatings. That had cost them every probe in the scout team, which they deemed an acceptable loss. Vonnie fretted it sent the wrong message. She’d told a NASA biologist that now the sunfish thought their metal doppelgangers were easy prey. “No,” the biologist said. “Now they know the probes are inedible and nonaggressive. Next time they might accept us.”
The next time, the sunfish had dropped three tons of rock on NASA’s probes before swarming the sole survivor. Attempts to communicate via sonar and the sunfishes’ shaped-based language were ignored.
NASA had tagged four sunfish with nano darts, expecting to monitor the tribe with these beacons… but the sunfish tore open the infinitesimal holes in their skin, then bared their wounds to their comrades, who chewed into their flesh before regurgitating the gory meat. The biologists agreed the sunfish were extremely sensitive to parasites. That indicated a prevalence of other bugs or microorganisms as yet undiscovered. On Europa, it appeared, pests and disease were as virulent as the higher lifeforms. Contagion and blight might have done as much damage to the sunfish empire as volcanic upheavals.
“Here’s what’s driving me crazy,” Metzler said, opening a sim full of mathematics. Vonnie recognized some of the data as Lam’s.
“There’s not enough food in the biosphere for predators their size,” she said.
“Not by a third.”
“We know they’re omnivores. They could get a lot of the mass they need from vegetation.”
“What kind of vegetation? We haven’t found anything more advanced than fungi, and I don’t think we will. Not without photosynthesis. There won’t be anything like terrestrial plants or algae.”
“Maybe sunfish don’t need as many calories as we would if we were their size,” Ash said. “Couldn’t their intake be explained by a difference in Europan metabolism?”
“If they hibernated for extended periods, I’d say yes,” Metzler said, “but their genome doesn’t show protein expression patterns that resemble anything like hibernating species on Earth. The only behavior we’ve recorded has been sustained activity. They never stop. They don’t even sleep.”
“I’ve seen them rest,” Vonnie said, remembering the very first group of sunfish she’d met.
“That was in a low-atmosphere environment with almost zero oxygen,” Metzler said. “We think they were harvesting fungal spores from the rock. They were moving at half-speed to conserve their time in the area. Uh, they also might have bled one of their friends for the oxygen in his system.”