The Mandel Files (137 page)

Two sources. Two aliens?

She let the real world claim her back. Her personality package had returned to the terminal. She scanned the read-out and laughed. It had squirted itself out of the bank’s mainframe by transferring nine hundred thousand Eurofrancs from Leol Reiger’s account back to Event Horizon’s finance division. There was a total of fifty-seven Eurofrancs left in his account.

You have an evil mind, Juliet, even in its salami version.

And who did I inherit it from?

She began to read Reiger’s account statement. The last deposit had been made two days ago, for two hundred and fifty thousand Eurofrancs. There was no name, just an account number for another Zurich bank, the Eienso.

We have a result from the memory core of bay F37, NN core one reported. There was a strange sense of confusion and high spirits in the tone. You’ll want to access this.

Wait one, Julia said. She reprogrammed her personality package, and squirted it into the Eienso’s mainframe. Go ahead.

There was a data package waiting in the manor’s ‘ware for her. Its guardian program was solid, no probe programs could break in.

Most of the files listed as stored in the assembly bay’s memory core are fabrications, NN core one said. According to the Institute’s administrative records, bay F37 was being used to assemble a fish breeding pen filter for New London during the time Kiley was being built. But when we opened a channel direct to the bay’s core to access the suspect files, we found the package stored inside. It squirted directly into Wilholm’s ‘ware, knew all the third-level access codes.

Query identity? she shot at the quiescent package.

Request Snowy access, it replied.

“Royan.” She said it out loud, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. Sorry, Grandpa, I need the processor capacity.

Yeah, all right, he grumbled. But you still owe me a visit to the gardens, and a hug for each of the children.

I won’t forget. Wipe OtherEyes. She felt him go, a spectre slipping out of her consciousness. His absence left her with a slight taste of regret in her mind. Initiate Processor Node One Data Isolation/Examination Procedure. Load Data Package.

The package squirted into her processor node, and the interfaces sealed, isolating it inside. She had written the data-bus guardian program herself, if anything tried to broach the barrier the processor would wipe instantly. Her three memory nodes contained a vast amount of confidential data, as well as indexing the personal recollections she treasured, she wasn’t about to risk any kind of virus attack.

Open Integrity Monitored Link to Processor Node One.

It would mean a millisecond delay in communication while her second processor node analysed the package’s output, searching the downloaded bytes for a Trojan program.

She ran a quick review of processor node one’s management layout. The package had expanded to fill all the available capacity, but there had been no attempt to insinuate itself in the management routines.

Hello, Royan, she sent.

Snowy His smile filled her mind, flooding her synapses with warmth and longing, triggering a cascade of poignant associations. She sagged in the study’s chair, sniffing hard.

He stood behind the smile, wearing the leather flying jacket she had bought for him. His arms lifted from his side in a gesture of helplessness, lips puckering up. The movement, like a lot of his mannerisms, had been copied from one of his physiotherapists who always shrugged like that when he asked how much longer he would have to stay in the clinic.

Well, here I am, trapped like a bug in amber, Royan said. You write good guardian programs.

I had the best teacher. I’m sorry I can’t let you out. There are just so many unknowns about my current situation, I can’t take the risk you are a Trojan. Not that you could do any real damage to my nodes, but I’d hate to lose the memories, and then there’s the time it would take to write an antithesis to purge any virus.

You sound paranoid.

I don’t know what your situation is, so I can’t judge objectively.

Things getting bad, are they?

Yes. But I’m coping.

I wish I could help, but I’ve been in the assembly bay’s memory core since April. No current data.

Why were you left in storage?

A fallback, a warning if anything went wrong. I presume something has, else you wouldn’t have come looking.

I don’t know. Wrong with what?

He smiled again, protectively. My darling Snowy. There’s so much to show you. Here, come fly with me. He reached out with an open hand.

Impenetrable night folded about her, then the stars came out one by one. There was no horizon, when she looked down there was no ground. Drifting in space. Five slender silvery booms extended out from her, probing the vacuum.

These are the Kiley flight memories, Royan said. The approach phase. There, see?

In front of her was a bright orange-brown dot, its glow somehow malevolent. She could hear its cry over the radio bands, a crackling roar. Lonely, random.

A stillborn star weeping, Royan whispered reverently. Can you imagine what we have missed? Can you imagine the beauty of a double sunrise?

Kiley, it’s back now isn’t it? It came back.

Hush, Snowy. Watch, learn.

Jupiter grew, becoming a salmon-pink disc, distinct cloud-bands hovering on the edge of resolution. Moons expanded from dark stars to solid worlds, coloured grey and brown, mottled and streaked. New senses swept in, magnetic, particle, electromagnetic, overlaying the basic image with bolder shadings. Jupiter nestled at the centre of colossal energy storms. Pellucid petals of blue and pink light whorled protectively around the gas giant, the white halo of it’s plasma torus, intangible sleet of ions blowing outward.

The electric gusts flowed around her, soothing her thoughts, lost in marvel.

What would our world be like, Snowy, if we could perceive it with these senses? How colourful and exciting.

Why did you come here? she asked. And why alone? I would have shared all this, I would have been a part of it with you.

Because it is I who was a part of you, Snowy. I have been since the day you rescued me. I guess I make a bad prince consort after all.

You had everything.

I had everything you gave me. This—Jupiter, KiIey—was my chance for the roles to be reversed.

To make it on your own?

Yes. To be your equal.

You always were.

No. Not really. With or without me, you would still have achieved what you have today.

You brought me the electron-compression data.

If not me, then your money would have found a way. It always does.

What did you hope to achieve? How would this space probe give you equality?

The microbes, Snowy. As soon as I heard of the Matoyaii results I knew they were genuine, that the sensor results weren’t an aberration. They existed, I could feel it. Just like Greg and his intuition. They were real, alive, waiting for me.

It was like being born again, I’d been given a purpose to live.

They were inside the orbit of Io now, Kiley sliding through the penumbra, falling in towards the gas giant. Perspective altered, Jupiter was definitely below now. Something so vast could never be overhead. Its curvature was flattening out, edges merging with distance, cloudscape expanding into an unending plane. if she looked up she could see Io; a volcano’s mushroom fountain of sulphur just north of the equator belching upwards. A cold dragon flame cascading in glorious low gravity slow motion.

The stormband below Kiley was a pallid rust-yellow, ocean-sized elliptical cyclones and anti-cyclones of ammonium hydrosulfide grinding in conflict, buffeted by supersonic jetstreams. Clots of white cloud bloomed as whirlwind vortices sucked frozen ammonia crystals up from the hidden depths. They spilled into the churning cyclone walls like cream into coffee, diffusing and dispersing.

Then the terminator was ahead of them, a shadow straddling the nearly flat horizon. Firefly lights twinkled beyond.

Was I such a challenge to you? Julia asked sadly. I thought you were the one person in the world who saw me as me, as Snowy, not some plutocrat bitch. I was alive then, when you held me.

Your heritage is the challenge, the barrier. Not you. You, Snowy, you I love. Did you need to be told that?

I could give it all up. For you.

No, no, no.

No.

You are the one who is complete, Snowy. I envy you that. Me, I still have to find your peak And I can. I can.

Kiley glided into the umbra. It was night below, but not dark. Lightning twisted between the imperious cloud mountains, tattered dazzling streamers that illuminated thousands of square kilometres with each elemental discharge. Comets sank down gracefully amid the storms, rocky detritus from the rings sucked in by the monstrous gravity field, braked by the ionosphere, flaring purple, spitting a tail of, slowly dimming sparks.

Kiley began its deceleration burn, sending out a five-hundred-metre spear of plasma. The top of the atmosphere was only seventy-five kilometres below now. Julia could sense the massive flux currents seething through the thin fog of molecules, glowing red veins pulsing strongly.

The burn ended abruptly. The image juddered as explosive bolts fired. Empty spherical hydrogen tanks and lenticular giga-conductor cells separated, tumbling away. Small chemical thrusters fired, stabilizing the modules which remained. Kiley began its coast up to the rings.

Do you see now, Snowy? The silent savagery of this place, its hostility. Yet amid all this, there is life.

Kiley found the microbes?

Oh, yes.

Is that all it found?

How could there be more?

A spaceship, a starship.

No. Is that what you are dealing with, a starship? Your trouble.

I don’t know, Royan, I really don’t. I’ve got people working on it, Greg, Victor, Suzi.

The old team. That’s nice. They’re good, they’ll find you an answer.

They need to find you, Royan. Where are you?

I don’t know. How could I?

Then why were you left in storage? What are you here to warn me about?

Potential. The potential of the microbes. But I was so sure. I had it all worked out.

Show me.

The rock reminded her of Phobos. It had that same barren grey-yellow colour, a battered potato outline. Except it was much smaller, barely a hundred metres long, sixty wide. Kiley hovered beside it, optical sensor images degraded by the dry mist of ring particles. Wavering braids of dust motes and sulphur atoms shimmered in the raw sunlight, moving sluggishly.

Jupiter’s crescent eclipsed the starfield a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away. Even from this height, the dancing lights of the darkside were easily seen. Like Earth’s cities, she thought, the idea momentarily distorting scale.

Kiley’s close-range sensors were stirring, focusing on the rock. It had worn down over the aeons, its surface abraded by the gentle unceasing caress of dust. Impact craters and jagged fracture cliffs smoothed down to soft curves. One end was scarred by a white, splash-pattern of methane frost, tapering rays extending their grip over a third of its length.

Lasers swept the rock from end to end, building a cartographic profile within the on-board lightware processors.

Cold gas precision positioning thrusters fired, moving the probe closer in centimetre increments. When it hovered a metre above the rock, microfocus photon amps telescoped out of their cruise phase sheaths, aligning themselves on the surface.

The image changed, a lunar mare strewn with boulders; Julia knew she was seeing the dust motes sticking to the rock. Kiley’s lightware processors began to run a spectrographic analysis program. She watched the image alter, as if it had been overlaid with a grid of square lenses. Data began to flow back into the probe’s lightware as the blurred squares were examined one by one.

Kiley’s photon amps quartered a square metre of the rock’s surface a millimetre at a time, then it fired its cold gas thrusters and moved to the next section. Again. Again.

The fourth time, one of the photon-amp grid squares flared red. The eight surrounding ones were immediately reviewed by the spectrographic program. It registered carbon, hydrogen, and various trace minerals.

The block of squares expanded to fill her vision, regaining their focus.

There, Royan said in awe. In the middle of a desolation more profound than Gomorrah: life itseif. And what life.

The photon-amp focus was at its ultimate resolution, centred on a clump of microbes. They looked like a smear of caviare, tiny spheres, tar-black, sticky; they glistened with a dull pink light thrown by Jupiter’s albedo.

Call it Jesus, call it Gaia, call it Allah, said Royan. Whatever name you wish to bestow, but don’t tell me God doesn’t exist. The true miracle of this universe is life itseif. Left to fate, to random chance groupings of amino acids in the primal soup, it could never happen. Never! We may evolve as Darwin said, man may not have been made in GOD’s image; but that spark, that very first spark of origin from which we grew, that was not nature. That was a blessing. We are not a side product of an uncaring cosmos, a chemical joke.

You’re preaching to the converted, remember? She wasn’t surprised by his outburst, nor its intensity; both of them had a strong quasi-religious background; her at the First Salvation Church, him with the Trinities, it was another thread in their bond.

Kiley’s sampling waldo slid out, micromanipulator claws closing around the clump of microbes. It retracted and placed them delicately inside the probe’s collection flask.

Cold gas thrusters fired again, backing Kiley away from the rock. The lightware processors began to check over the propulsion systems.

You did this for me? Julia asked.

I did. Do you see now, Snowy? Do you see the why of it?

Kiley’s chemical thrusters fired for a long time, lifting it out of the ring’s inclination, into free space where the plasma drive could be used. Star trackers locked on to their target constellations, orientating the probe for its flyby manoeuvre burns.

No, she said, inexplicably humbled by the admission. She could sit and think, run a logic matrix, tear the problem apart. Answers never eluded her when she was in that state, a determined computer/human fusion. But somehow just the thought of expending all that effort inhibited her. Perhaps this appalling vastness of the gas giant’s domain had numbed her into dormancy.