“Nothing so dramatic is necessary,” Dawson said. “Jupiter’s magnetic field is, in essence, a gigantic particle accelerator. It blasts Europa’s surface with octillions of high-speed ions and electrons every hour.”
“They don’t live on the surface,” Vonnie said. “They’re safe inside the ice.”
“No. The ice shields them from the primary radiation, but there are elements dissolved in the ice like iodine and potassium. When those elements are bombarded, they turn into short-period isotopes, which are sinister little poisons. Churn brings the hazardous material down into the ice. Periods of violent churn exacerbate the contamination.”
“It’s still too fast,” Vonnie said, running a calculation in her head. If the lifespan of a sunfish was twenty years… “It’s only been five hundred generations since they were writing.”
“I’m afraid it’s more than that,” Dawson said. “Male sunfish don’t mature until six years of age. Until then, they may be expendable, leaving only the hardiest to procreate. But their females reach adolescence at two years. They’re fertile at three. It’s been four thousand generations since the carvings.”
“Where’s the evolutionary pressure to give up their intelligence?” Metzler said. “Sentience is the greatest weapon any species can develop.”
“Not necessarily. As nourishment became more difficult to find, they grew more instinctive — more aware in other ways — trading their intelligence for improved sonar and detection. It all fits. We know they’re severely limited genetically. There’s been inbreeding. Unfavorable mutations took hold because those adaptations serve them well. They don’t need intelligence to roam the ice. In fact, their self-awareness worked against them, making them all too conscious of what they’d lost in the turmoil of Europa’s crust. They suffer less without their intelligence, and we should feel lucky indeed at this twist of fate.”
“What do you mean?” Koebsch said.
“Our ancestors had scarcely invented the most primitive forms of agriculture and herding when the sunfish began their decline. Their empire fell. Then they regressed. Otherwise they might have traveled to our world before we visited theirs.”
34.
“Imagine if a superior race had landed among us when we were tribal nomads without science, only fire and spears,” Dawson said. “That’s why the sunfish run away. That’s why they fight us even though they’re impossibly outmatched.”
Silence filled the group feed. Brooding, Vonnie saw troubled looks in her crew mates.
The far-away feeling she’d experienced weeks ago when the Chinese rover discovered the first carvings was with her again now, richer and more poignant.
How close did we come to exchanging destinies with the sunfish? she thought. If there had been more supervolcanoes on Earth… If another meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs had pushed us to the brink while the sunfish were given another 10,000 years of peace… What if they’d discovered iron and steam power, then steel, electronics, and finally the atom? We might have been a few starving bands of cavemen when they brought spacecraft to Earth.
“I have to admit I’m disappointed in how the sunfish have responded,” Koebsch said.
“Sir, we’ve only been here for six weeks,” Metzler said. “I know you’re under a lot of scrutiny from Berlin, but I think we’ve made inroads.”
“Really?” Dawson said. “All I’ve noticed are the same attacks on our mecha.”
“He’s right,” Koebsch said.
“We should capture some of them,” Dawson said, and Vonnie exploded: “You son of a bitch! People stopped hunting whales because they’re too close to sentience to treat like cows or sheep. Even if you’re right about the sunfish, the same principle applies here.”
“I don’t want to eat them,” Dawson said with his elfin smile.
“But you want to take them apart! Who have you been talking to? Is there a gene corp offering you money or a job?”
“That’s offensive.”
“So is pushing us to treat the sunfish like a commodity. You’re demonizing them.”
“It’s ludicrous to expect a single lab to sequence and develop the material we’ve gathered thus far,” Dawson said. “There aren’t enough of us. We need to send tissue samples to Earth — dozens if not hundreds of samples. Live specimens would serve even better.”
“I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this bullshit from the rest of us.”
Koebsch said, “Look, Von, let’s calm down—”
“I am calm!”
“—and maybe get some lunch,” Koebsch said. “We can talk again later. Let’s meet again on the group feed in an hour. Frerotte, I want to talk to you on Channel Thirty.”
“I need to talk to you, too,” Vonnie said.
“Not now,” Koebsch said, cutting his connection with the group feed.
Vonnie stayed online, watching Dawson, who ignored her as he closed his sims. If he had more to say to the group, she wanted to hear it. But he signed off.
“Sorry, Von,” Frerotte said. He lifted a privacy screen on his station. From the outside, the screen left Frerotte visible yet fuzzy as his display components turned to gray blotches, including his link to Koebsch. The privacy screen also canceled their voices.
Vonnie paced in the confines of data/comm. Metzler tried to make room for her, clearing his station and hanging back. Ash wasn’t so tolerant. Ash took her hand and dragged her into the ready room, where Vonnie at least had space to wave her arms.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Walk it off,” Ash said. “Just walk a little.”
Metzler followed them into the L-shaped area between the lockers and the empty scout suits. “Don’t let Dawson get to you,” he said. “We’ve only had a few encounters with the sunfish, and most of those were with different tribes. It’s been like starting from square one every time.”
Vonnie shook her head. “Dawson’s an asshole, but he’s right that we can’t keep repeating the same cycle. We approach, they attack. We approach, they attack. There has to be some way to get through to them.”
She laid a hand on her suit — a new suit calibrated to her biometrics. Then she turned abruptly. Metzler and Ash both pretended they hadn’t been watching her.
They were nice to worry. Vonnie wanted to promise she was fine, but she was afraid they’d see right through her.
She felt estranged and shut out.
“Let’s get to work on the new probes,” she said. “If we can make them lighter, that might help. Maybe the sunfish won’t know they’re fakes.”
“The only way to reduce the probes’ weight is to pull their radar and X-ray,” Ash said. “Koebsch won’t like it.”
“Koebsch has different objectives than we do. He has to pay attention to the budget. You noticed how Dawson got fussy about how much the mecha cost? He was sucking up to Koebsch. But we don’t need more maps. We don’t need more body scans, either. We need to convince the sunfish to listen to us before glory hounds like Dawson decide they belong in a zoo.”
“Or on a menu,” Ash said with a glint in her hazel eyes.
Vonnie laughed, glad for any chance to break the tension. “I’ll put you on a menu,” she said.
Metzler draped his arms around both women. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I’ll make lunch. No sunfish. Then I want to go over Dawson’s sims. Maybe I can shoot some holes in his data.”
“Marry me,” Vonnie said, laughing again, but Metzler nodded sincerely.
“Be careful what you ask for,” he said.
They left the ready room. In data/comm, Frerotte continued to talk inside his privacy screen. Vonnie took the next station and unfolded the chair. Ash sat beside her, glancing after Metzler as he ducked into the next compartment. Now the young woman’s eyes were characteristically shrewd.