Cold as Ice Read online

  The melody of Jupiter itself. Her piloting of the submersible became unconscious as she allowed the theme to grow, shaping and reshaping in long, cantabile phrases while the Leda slid around and beneath the cloud base. She exulted as the tune soared higher, rising as majestic as the helical cloud in front of her. Like the starting point for all of her compositions, its arrival came as a complete surprise. Two minutes earlier she could have offered no hint of form, tempo, or key—or even predicted that anything creative was on the way. Everything else in a composition could be produced by thought and hard work, but melody remained aloof, beyond conscious control. And this one, she knew already, was a beauty.

  "That will do." Tristan Morgan's voice entered from a million miles outside, touching but not breaking the creative spell. "I know you've decided you can fly blindfolded, but bring it out now."

  "Okay." The rolling cloud vanished behind as Wilsa changed course; it was replaced by streaks that ran across the whole field of view. East-west. She recalled Tristan Morgan's earlier warning: "Don't forget that the small-scale shear is all east-west. And don't forget that any one of those little pencil lines holds enough energy to tear the ship in two."

  But the black, broken striations on the horizon carried another message. They initiated a persistent little sawtooth of a tune, running as an ostinato counterpoint to the earlier theme. Wilsa wove the two together, feeling out the harmony. Then, as an experiment, she transposed the whole thing to the key of G Major. Not so good. She had been right the first time. E-flat was much better.

  "One-three-two-two," said the depth monitor suddenly.

  "Wilsa, your brain's on autopilot again." Tristan's voice was sharp. "Stop the turn and look half-left. You'll see three Von Neumanns—no, make that two. The other one's got a full cargo and it's starting to ascend. If you don't hurry, you'll miss it."

  "I'm not sleeping. I'm working." But as she snapped back her answer and tucked the nascent composition safely away in the back of her mind—there was no danger that she would forget it—Wilsa was scanning the atmosphere ahead for her first sight of a Jovian Von Neumann.

  There. And not far from it, a second one. But the third that Tristan had mentioned was already far above, rising through the atmosphere on the smoky column of its Moby drive. In twenty minutes it would pass through the colorless layers of ammonium hydrosulfate to reach the base of blue-white ammonia clouds. Fifteen minutes more and the Von Neumann would be at full thrust, striving upward to break the great planet's gravitational bonds.

  The other two were quietly harvesting. Monstrous intake venturis, hundreds of meters across, sucked Jupiter's atmosphere into their broad, beetle-shaped interiors. Hydrogen was vented at the rear, except for the tiny amount needed to supply the Moby fusion drive. Traces of sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, and metals were separated and hoarded, awaiting the time when enough of those raw materials had been collected. Then the Von Neumann would create an exact copy of itself, and release it.

  Helium, a quarter of the mass of the Jovian atmosphere, remained to be processed. Most of it, like the dross of a mining operation, was of no interest. The precious nugget was the isotope helium-3, ten thousand times as rare as helium-4. The Von Neumanns painstakingly separated the two components, vented the common isotope and stored the lighter molecules in liquid form. When a hundred tons had been collected, the storage tanks would be full and the Von Neumann ready to begin its long ascent to planetary escape.

  But that triumphant exit was not the event that Wilsa had come to witness. Anomalous signals had been arriving at Hebe Station, orbiting Jupiter half a million kilometers above the highest cloud layers. Tristan Morgan had pinpointed the signals as deriving from one of the Von Neumanns now ahead of the Leda. As the submersible closed on the beetle-backed collection vehicle, Wilsa could see the source of the problem. Intense heat—presumably a lightning bolt—had fused and deformed one set of intake Venturis and storage tanks. The Von Neumann rode lopsided, a pale exhaust of escaping hydrogen hissing out of its base.

  Wilsa steered the Leda to within a hundred meters and matched their paths. The Von Neumann was descending at a rate of about a kilometer a minute. She focused the imaging systems on the crippled side.

  "Pretty bad." Tristan Morgan was inspecting the damage. "In fact, worse than I thought. With that loss of hydrogen, we could fly as far as the upper edge of the atmosphere, replacing as we went. But it would never make escape velocity."

  "What can we do?"

  "Not a thing. Unless it reaches orbit, there's no way to perform repairs. We have to write this one off."

  Wilsa stared out at the doomed machine. Suddenly it seemed to be alive and suffering, despite Tristan's assurance that it was of very restricted function and intelligence. "You mean we just leave it here crippled, and it floats around forever?"

  "That won't happen. It will keep sinking down to greater pressures and temperatures. Look at the depth gauge. You're at one-three-two-seven now. By the time the Von Neumann reaches six or seven thousand kilometers, the temperature will be up over two thousand Celsius. It will melt and disperse, and its elements will go back into the planetary pool."

  His voice was casual, but Wilsa could not help contemplating a more personal vision. How did he know that the temperature would keep rising, and know that the Von Neumann had no feelings? Suppose that it was self-aware. And suppose that it was doomed to remain functioning and to drop forever, through increasingly dense layers.

  She told herself that it could not be forever. Seventeen thousand kilometers down, according to Tristan Morgan, Jupiter had pressures of three million Earth atmospheres, and hydrogen changed from a gaseous to a metallic form. No matter what happened at higher altitudes, the Von Neumann could not survive that transition.

  Music began again inside Wilsa's head, grave and cadenced. A C-minor dirge. Pavane for a dead Von Neumann. It built for a full ten minutes, until it was interrupted by Tristan Morgan's thin, far-off voice.

  "Unless you're proposing to ride all the way down together, I suggest a little action. You're at thirteen-thirty-seven. Want to return to a higher level, and cruise some more? Or do you want to come all the way back? I ought to mention that you've had a call from your agent."

  "Magnus? What did he say?"

  "No message. He's still on Ganymede, and he wants you to return his call. At once."

  "Damn that man. Why does he always think he has to talk to me, instead of leaving word telling what he wants?" Wilsa lifted the gauntlets, allowing the automatic control system of the Leda to take over and cruise at constant isobaric depth. "All right. Bring me back. And slowly this time."

  "No can do. Not set up that way. Hold tight."

  The transition was painfully abrupt. One moment Wilsa was staring out of the Leda's port at Jupiter's roiling interior. The next moment she was sitting stunned in the control chair on Hebe Station, blinking her eyes at the bright lights. The headset had slipped upward by itself, and the gauntlets had relaxed their hold on her hands and forearms.

  "So. Did you get what you hoped you would?"

  Tristan Morgan was bending over her. He did not match the cool, distant voice that had reached her over the headset. The man in person was tall, bright-eyed and intense, with bulging chipmunk cheeks and a broad smile. Like everyone else in the Jovian system, he had ideas of personal space that did not match the preference of an individual raised in the Belt.

  Wilsa leaned away from him by habit, although she did not feel at all uncomfortable. "I got more than I hoped for, a lot more."

  "I thought you seemed a bit far-gone some of the time down there. New material?"

  "New, and first-rate. At least the themes. I still have a lot more working-out to do. Jupiter is a wonderfully stimulating environment. Pity I didn't make a trip before, when I was working on the suite."

  "Change it. There's still time."

  "Maybe." Wilsa stood up, went across to one of the ports and stared out. The banded orange-and-brown face of Jupiter l
oomed large, spread across fifteen degrees of the sky of Hebe Station. She gazed upon the monster planet and called into her mind the feeling of the budding new composition.

  She shook her head. "Maybe, but no."

  "Not as good as you thought at first?"

  "Better. That's not the problem. It's a question of scale. Being down there makes you think big."

  "People always miss the point with Jupiter. They know that it's three hundred and twenty times Earth mass, but that's the wrong number to use. The volume of the Jupiter atmosphere, from the upper clouds down to the metallic hydrogen interface, is half a million times as big as Earth's biosphere. That's the comparison to make."

  "You get it right when you're flying through it. If I tried to incorporate my new themes and ideas into the suite, they would distort it, no matter how good they turn out to be. They just don't fit."

  "Like Beethoven, wanting to make the Grosse Fuge the last movement of the B-flat string quartet? It never works when they play it that way, because it's such a brute. It's out of proportion."

  "That's exactly what I mean."

  In talking with Wilsa, Tristan Morgan had at first insisted that he knew nothing about music and was not interested in it. She had believed him when she arrived on Ganymede and ran into him at a concert reception. But as time went on, he had lost credibility. For one thing, he somehow managed to be at every musical event that she attended. For another, he seemed to be on friendly terms with everyone on Ganymede who played, wrote, or cared about music.

  It had taken Magnus Klein, monitoring everything that might affect Wilsa's life and career, to put his finger on the obvious and to disapprove of it. "How old is Morgan?"

  "He's thirty-three. What does that have to do with anything?"

  "He loves music, and with anyone else he'd admit it. He's chasing after you, you know."

  "But why?" Wilsa was intrigued by Tristan, more than she was willing to admit.

  Magnus raised a bushy eyebrow. "That's a dumb question. Because you fascinate him, that's why. But you have him intimidated. He knows that you're seven years younger, and yet no matter what he does, he'll always be your musical inferior. He'll never have your critical ability, or your memory, or a thousandth of your creativity."

  "Oh, nonsense. I couldn't intimidate anyone. He's just shy."

  She didn't understand Magnus's skeptical shrug. Wilsa's talent had been recognized early by the Belt's foundling education system. Before she was three years old, she had been assigned to live in a music creche, where everyone was a musical prodigy in outsider terms—and the word "prodigy" was never mentioned. Perfect pitch was taken for granted—it was as natural as having two ears—and the teachers expected you to read music before you could read words.

  Surrounded by her peers, Wilsa thought herself perfectly ordinary. At twelve years old, her unusual talent for composition was discovered and encouraged; but by that time, Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Stravinsky had become her constant companions. Comparing herself with the immortals, she knew she was nothing.

  It had taken another ten years, plus concert exposure to the "real" world, for her to learn that although she might be nothing, one day she could be something. And two more years to appreciate that musical talents were not the only important ones, perhaps not the most important ones.

  In the days after her conversation with Magnus, Wilsa had watched and listened. She decided that, as usual when it came to people and motivation, he was right. Tristan Morgan was confident and relaxed and talkative with everyone and about everything—except when he was face-to-face with Wilsa. Then it was hard to force more than a few words out of him.

  She hated that. It offended her self-image. With time to spare while Magnus Klein haggled contracts, Wilsa had reversed the roles for the past week. She had pursued Tristan, tracking him to his meetings on Ganymede, eating at the same times and places he did, and at last having the inspiration to sit down in front of him and ask about Project Starseed.

  And then the words had poured out. He told her of the grand design, more than a century old, to send an unmanned, fusion-powered ship to the stars. "We changed the name, and the old-timers would have boggled at our technology, but they'd have been right at home with the physics. We fuse a helium-3/deuterium mixture—"

  But when he wanted to give her details, she had outmaneuvered him. She had, she said, at least a week free. Why not let her see things, rather than just hearing about them?

  He seemed hesitant again. She had to coax him along. First she persuaded him to take her to a small deuterium-separation facility right there on Ganymede, and then to the main one on a big ice fragment beyond Callisto. From that point it seemed natural for them to travel inward, together with a load of deuterium, to the construction program on the orbiting Starseed base and watch the Von Neumanns soar up to dock, discharge their helium-3 cargo and drop back to repeat the cycle. The final step had been the visit she had wangled to Hebe Station.

  The vicarious cruise in the Leda through Jupiter's depths, to watch the Von Neumanns mining for fusion fuels within Jupiter's cloud layers, had been part of the same strategy. The music that flooded into her head while she did it had been a long shot, a bonus benefit. New stimulation usually led to new composition, but there were no guarantees.

  Her plan had worked. Tristan would at last speak freely to her. He would even offer comments on music, on other people's music. The only thing he would not do was to discuss her works. Wilsa realized that she wanted that more than anything, but she had not yet understood why it was important . . . although she had noticed that it pleased her rather than distressed her when Tristan Morgan stood, as he was standing now, two feet closer than Belt politeness permitted.

  She turned from the port, stretching arms and shoulders that had been too long in one position. He moved to her side, towering over her. He had a lanky, lean build, and one of the first things that she had noticed about him was his hands and their long, pale, flexible fingers. She coveted them through the eyes of a professional keyboard player. He could probably span a twelfth with no difficulty. Her own coffee-colored little hands struggled to play a ninth.

  She visualized a keyboard, and in the same moment realized that she had forgotten all about her agent's call. "Did you tell Magnus when I'd be able to get back to him?"

  "No. He was being pushy, so I told him you weren't here, that you were a thousand kilometers away, down in the guts of Jupiter. He didn't like that at all. Probably thinks his precious ten percent might be in danger."

  So the disdain between the two ran both ways. Wilsa sighed and scanned the chamber. "Can I put in a call to him from here?"

  "Sure. I've got it set up for Call Back. Press the send button and you'll have a direct circuit to Klein on Ganymede." He looked across at a chronometer. "You should do it soon, though, while the geometry's good. No relay station is needed if you act now, and there's less than a four-second, round-trip travel time for signals."

  Wilsa pressed the button at once. The time to pick-up somehow seemed less than four seconds. Magnus Klein must have been sitting right by his receiver.

  "WhereyoubeenforGodsake?" said a grating voice. "Get your butt over here."

  "Why? What happened?"

  A longer delay. "What do you think happened? What I said would happen. We're signed—for your Galileian Suite. System premiere performance nine days from now. That's what I've been doing while you Were goofing off. Hurry up back."

  "What terms?" asked Wilsa. But while she was waiting for her words to laser out to Ganymede and the reply to return to Hebe Station, Tristan Morgan was shaking his head. "What a bastard."

  "A bastard doesn't do anything except have the wrong parents."

  "Worse than a bastard, then. Why do you let a jerk like Magnus Klein push you around? He's just taking advantage—"

  "Eighty thousand for the first performance," broke in the harsh voice from the speaker. "Option for four more at thirty thousand per—which I'm sure we'll get.
We keep recording rights for all but the first performance. I figured you'd be better on the second or third night. We split broadcast royalties with them for the premiere."

  "That's why." Wilsa patted the speaker and made no attempt to lower her voice as she went on. "Magnus is a real tough son of a bitch. He told me he'd get that, but I didn't believe him."

  She winked at Tristan and waited through another four-second silence.

  "Well, you damn well should have," said the voice, louder and angrier than ever. "I always deliver what I say. I told you, I know these guys better than they know themselves. Hell, I was raised here. So you get your ass back to Ganymede. Sharpish, or I'll be an even tougher son of a bitch."

  The line went dead and the Connect light blinked out. Wilsa shrugged. "The Master's Voice."

  "You're going to take orders from that little monster?"

  "He's half a head taller than I am. Tristan, I have to go. As soon as possible. I've got a concert in nine days, including the first performance of my new suite. It's my biggest chance anywhere outside the Belt halls, and my reputation in the whole Jovian system will be on the line. I have to practice 'til I bleed."

  She did her best to sound worried, and reluctant to leave. But deep inside, she was bubbling over. She had poured her heart into the Galileian Suite for over a year, slaved over it, living on Vesta but dreaming of the chance to give the first performance out on the big Jovian satellites. Ganymede of course for preference, but she would have settled for Callisto.

  It had been a wild dream. Now—in only nine days—it would be reality. On Ganymede. Nine days! Wilsa shivered, and decided that she was more worried than she was willing to admit.

  * * *

  While Wilsa exulted and trembled, four hundred million kilometers away Camille Hamilton waited and worried. Through the two weeks since David Lammerman had left DOS Center for Earth, she had been braced for a blow that never came.

  The first full tests of the Distributed Observation System had been mind-blowing. Camille and David's hard work on calibration had paid off, and the system exceeded specifications. The best images were already showing city-like features on a planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Other images had revealed thousands of mysterious reflecting spheres, each perfectly round and the size of Earth's moon, orbiting a star in one of the Virgo cluster's prominent galaxies. That oddity alone was worth the whole price of DOS.