In front of the camera, six meters of ice bulged. Gas spewed upward. There was pelting hail. Then the blow-out was over, revealing a trench in the ice. Its roof had thinned with age. Otherwise the rover might have crossed safely, never marking this hollow as anything except another frigid, empty branch of an inactive vent. Instead, the rover extended a wire probe down into the shadows, confirming a glimpse of repetitive shapes molded from the ice.
In radar, the carvings were stark, extraordinary artifacts.
“What if everything down there was killed when the air went out?” Vonnie asked, thinking like an engineer, but Bauman said, “No, this trench is abandoned. It’s isolated. ”
“She’s right,” Lam agreed.
Vonnie smiled, glad for their excitement. Then she saw Lam’s face and frowned, feeling one step behind.
“Look,” he said as he ducked his eyes in disappointment.
“This is good, isn’t it?” Vonnie said. “There’s no way the bugs cut those patterns in the ice. That means there’s something else on Europa — something bigger.”
“Yes.” But he was unhappy.
Puzzled, Vonnie turned back to the display, trying to see what Lam had seen.
The carvings repeated one shape over and over in eight vertical columns of four apiece, a form much like an eight-pointed star. From tip to tip, each symbol measured 1.2 meters wide. Each one was set deep enough in the ice that it was half a meter thick through its middle, like small domes with tapered limbs.
Every arm was knuckled and bent seemingly at random. Vonnie thought the carvings could be a sun calendar. She started to say so, then stopped herself.
Jupiter was five times farther from the sun than Earth. Their star would look like a compact spark in Europa’s sky. Because its atmosphere was nonexistent compared to Earth’s, with no clouds or moisture to deflect sunlight, Europa’s surface would actually appear brighter than a summer day in Germany… and yet she’d soaked up enough biology from Lam to realize there had never been anything walking on top of the ice.
Is he mad at what people are saying? she wondered.
The first theories from Earth dismissed the carvings as the result of hive behavior by the bugs. They cited termite mounds, ant mounds, spider pits, and even the mud nests of cliff swallows.
The math in the carvings implied something more. Eight times four times eight looked like a pattern that had been done on purpose, but many insects on Earth created symmetrical designs. Some biologists proposed the carvings were territorial markings or an attempt to reinforce the tunnel wall with interlocking shapes. A species whose existence depended upon the ice could have developed construction techniques like gophers or ants. The symmetry might be incidental.
No one was ready to go on record that the carvings were a written language, although efforts to translate the wall were percolating on the net. Early human civilizations had used repetitive symbols such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics before developing alphabets. Some people insisted the carvings held a message. There were too many exact, subtle alignments among the sun-shapes’ two hundred and fifty-six arms.
Regardless, the growing consensus was that the carvings demonstrated at least chimpanzee-equivalent intelligence.
“Why are you upset?” Vonnie asked.
“Because we missed them,” Lam said. “We’re too late.”
“There could be inhabited chambers nearby. You don’t know what’s down there.”
Lam shook his head, scrolling through their displays. “The trench is older than you think,” he said. “Too old. Look at the drift.”
The three columns furthest to the east side appeared sloppy, as if they’d been carved in a hurry, but that was because the ice had swelled, deforming the trench — and in this safe zone, the surface tides could be measured in millimeters per century.
Vonnie felt a weird quiver down her spine. Were the carvings actually words? If so, the message was more ancient than the dim, half-forgotten histories recorded in the Bible.
“Cheer up,” Bauman said. “Even if we don’t find anything except bones, this will be the greatest archeological dig of all time.”
“We’ll be on the cover of every ’zine in the system,” Vonnie said, trying to make Lam smile, but he only grimaced and looked away.
“Whoever made those carvings has been dead for ten thousand years,” he said.
8.
Vonnie landed their slowboat on Europa a week before the new high-gee launches would arrive, each carrying new teams of eight to twenty-four people sent by the Brazilians, the Chinese, NASA, and the ESA.
Seven days should have been enough for Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam to begin exploring the site. Wire probes had confirmed that one end of the trench slumped deep into the ice, becoming a tunnel. It crooked sideways and down before shrinking into a series of pockets and holes too dense for their radar arrays to penetrate. For all anyone knew, there were more carvings farther down, but they were directed to wait. The larger ships carried many of the experts who hadn’t been picked the first time. Also included were a number of bureaucrats.
There was no question that this crowd would be better able to process the trench, so Vonnie and Bauman spent their time prepping gear and fielding media requests while Lam hid away with his data.
They were celebrities. For an engineer and a gene smith, playing at being popular was a fun diversion. Vonnie showed off their non-proprietary hardware and public maps of the ice while Bauman talked about the sexier aspects of gene splicing like metabolic chargers. Together they were worth a sixty-second update every day on the same news feeds that had rarely mentioned their mission during the long, tedious journey to Europa. Now they were a hot pick — girl explorers on an alien moon — and the ESA and NASA administrators allowed them to say almost anything. Both women were jubilant and loud. It was topnotch media.
Meanwhile, Lam smoldered. “You see what’s happening,” he said one day before breakfast, standing with his back to the hab module window as if testing himself.
Vonnie couldn’t leave the viewport alone. Bauman constantly made her wipe off her fingerprints. Outside, their mecha wandered across the frozen plain, glinting in the vivid, reflected glow of Jupiter. “I know it’s tough to wait,” Vonnie said without looking at him.
“You sound just like them,” he said.
“Hey, easy. I’m on your side.”
“You think I’m worried because they might grab some of the glory? Because I had to live in a box with two attractive women for eleven weeks?”
Vonnie turned at attractive, feeling a little wary. So far, Lam had been scrupulous about keeping his distance.
“You’ve seen their org chart,” he said. “Who do you think’s in charge, the people like you and me?” His brown eyes searched her face, then shifted to the viewport behind her. “It’s being politicized,” he said. “The fuel. The water. You have to listen to what they’re really saying.”
The ice. A few Earth governments had called for an end to the mining. Others had too much invested in their colonies and fleets to shut down their supplies of deuterium, hydrogen, and bulk water. Away from the pole, the mining continued. Even now, a PSSC robot ship was carefully unfolding in orbit. The mecha it carried had been funded years ago and the ship had been in transit for months. That kind of inertia was fundamental to nearly every aspect of modern civilization.
The ice. Normal water held no more than .015% deuterium, but the precious gas could be separated, compressed and pumped into containers, then lobbed out of Europa’s weak gravity. The tankers filled faster than they could be built, and escaping Jupiter wasn’t expensive, diving in close and slinging away. The old god was well-positioned to feed the inner planets. In recent years, some of the catapults on Europa’s surface had begun hurling containers equipped with nothing more than radio beacons into slow, sunward trajectories. If those containers didn’t arrive for years, even if one or two went missing, no problem, they were lined up like an endless supply train and as cheap as dirt.