The Ophiuchi Hotline (10 page)

They were strange children. But then, she thought, they would have to be different. Many of them were growing up with brothers or sisters. How different that could make a child Lilo could barely imagine. And she finally did get a real shock when she saw one child strike a smaller one. Cathay did nothing, so she started to move in.

“Leave them alone,” Cathay warned. “There’s nothing you can do about that.”

“But…”

“I know. It was very hard for me at first. But look. It’s settled, isn’t it?”

The fight had not gone very far, she was glad to see. But she felt strongly that the smaller one had been wronged, and said so.

“Of course he was. And he had to demean himself, back away from the fight, because he’s little. You’ve got to understand that I’m the
only
teacher for this entire group. I can do just so much, and I’ve found I should concentrate on teaching them to resolve their own conflicts. It’s rough justice, but so far no one’s been killed.”

Lilo began to understand just how different these children were.

Cathay had been a victory of sorts for the people of Poseidon. It did not show too much on the surface, but Poseidon had an extremely brutal social order. Its inhabitants had come there through abduction, or as the only alternative to death. Once there, they quickly understood that they were expected to work, and that little else mattered. The only rules were to do what you were told, and not attempt to escape. The only punishment for infractions was death.

Other than that, Tweed did not care what they did. The Vaffas conducted a constant patrol for evidence of someone trying to build a rocket drive or a radio. The first was so difficult and would take so much time and stealth that it had only been attempted once. The second was suicide, though Tweed did not rule it out. It was
true that if the Eight Worlds ever heard about Poseidon, Tweed should be damned. But it would also mean the death of everyone living there. Even the abductees were illegal clones. The confederation would have to dispose of them, regretfully, because only one person could legally exist with any given set of genes. Vaffa had never found a transmitter.

The pace of research was slow. Tweed had no intention of advertising his presence to the Invaders and the Jovians. Jupiter was watched constantly with every instrument known to science, and from time to time a probe was sent into the atmosphere. The scientists on Poseidon knew more about the giant planet than anyone in the system, but it was still not much.

The second aspect of the work on Poseidon was the search for new weapons that might be effective in the future war with the Invaders.

There was a lot of free time. The inmates were free to spend it as they wished. Eventually they began to have children, as it became clear they were there for the rest of their lives. And in time, someone had the radical notion that she didn’t need to stop with one child.

Tweed had been delighted. He even sent a sociologist to study the only unlimited-breeding society outside the Rings. He hoped to use what he learned as a template for the society to come, on Earth, after the defeat of the Invaders.

But the children had caused the only organized resistance that ever had any effect. The parents got together and told Tweed they wanted teachers, or there would be no more work. The first and only strike was organized. They asked for twenty teachers. What they got was Cathay, and a promise that if they ever went on strike again they would all be killed. Tweed could do it and replace them all with a second set of clones exactly like them, but he was reluctant to do so. It would mean the loss of knowledge and skills acquired by the inmates since their last recordings.

“They tried to persuade me to be cloned, like Vaffa,”
Cathay said. “I’m sure it’s the practical solution, but I couldn’t do it. The whole idea made me sick. I don’t want to be a dozen people.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Lilo said, with a shiver. “It gives me the creeps, too.”

A group of five silvery children came rocketing down the corridor. They stopped long enough for Cathay to introduce them.

“…Olympica, Cypris, and the tiny one over there is Iseult. The handsome one standing over there is my child, Cass.”

Cass was a tall child. Lilo guessed his age at about twelve, then had to look closely to be sure if he was a boy, while wondering if it would ever be easy to see people whose bodies were curved mirrors. She was getting anxious to be inside again, in the air. She had not seen the faces of any of the children, only twisted reflections.

Cathay noticed her discomfort and led her back through the maze to the inhabited corridors. Lilo took a deep breath—her first in over an hour.

There was a male Vaffa waiting for them. He was idly patting his holstered weapon, and seemed to know who he was looking for.

“You’re to start work this shift,” he said. “Follow me, and I’ll show you what I want done.”

Tweed must have chosen me as some sort of wild card. I couldn’t see what possible use I might be to his plans. Not that I was upset about it; I had no burning urge to help him defeat the Invaders. I suppose I sympathized with the goal, on an abstract level, but I just did not think it was possible. Fighting Invaders is like repealing the law of gravity.

There were workers who had much more meaningful work than I did, however. If you call that meaningful. I was shown drawings and small demonstration models of some new weapons systems that were ready to go into production, awaiting only Tweed’s reelection and access to the government blank checks he had once controlled. There were some frightening new applications of nullfield theory, for instance, including one device which could project a spherical field at great distances. The idea was to enclose an Invader in one, then contract the field down to about one atomic diameter. It was hard to imagine a creature that could survive that. Then you turn off the field. Presto: a pocket H-bomb.

I saw blueprints for ships of war, the kind that hadn’t been built since pre-Invasion days. And all the other bric-a-brac of warfare, from servo-powered fighting suits, to rifles and tanks and grenades, to fusion bombs and neutronium bombs. On paper, Poseidon could have outgunned any member planet of the Eight Worlds.

But what would we be shooting at?

Lilo was able to get her real work out of the way in about an hour each day. At that, she often stayed in her lab more for appearances than anyting.

The first month had been interesting, from an academic standpoint. There was a backlog of atmospheric samples awaiting analysis. Lilo knew a little about the types of organic materials to be found in the Jovian atmosphere from reading about ancient research conducted before the Invasion. The chemists and planetologists on Poseidon had added to that body of information, and had picked up some spores and microorganisms. Then, about a year ago, something had impacted the scoop of the robot probe. It wasn’t very big; it had massed about as much as an adult mouse. Anything larger would have wrecked the probe.

There was not much left of it on a structural level. It was a glob of jelly frozen in methane and ammonia. But on a cellular level there was much to be learned. Lilo got that out of the way in the first week, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days. She mapped the chromosomal structure present in the undamaged cells. The organism was similar in many ways to the upper-atmosphere animals that had been collected by probes on Uranus.

She worked with Chea, the inorganic specialist, to learn the chemical properties to be expected from the organism. In common with certain higher Martian life forms, upper-layer gas giant creatures had been found to utilize catalysts and polymers in ways that had been accomplished on Earth only in refineries. Her specimen was no exception. She managed to clone one of the cells at the end of her third week, when she found remnants of a reproductive system. The cell grew into a gauzy sphere filled with hydrogen that lived for a few hours in her jury-rigged Jove Chamber, then collapsed. The balloon was made of a vinyl plastic. On the underside was a thin cross-shaped swelling, which contained a bony structure.

Having done that, the rest of her work was routine. She established a tissue culture from the remains of the specimen and set about finding ways of killing it. It was
completely hit-or-miss. If she had been working with a creature using a water-oxygen economy she could have found a dozen ways to attack it merely by studying its genes and synthesizing a virus. But no work had been done on genetic structures of Jovian organisms. Almost all her work on terrestrial life was done with computer calculations, and there were no programs for nonterrestrial genes. To attack them, she had to make changes almost at random at different points on the gene, then sit back to see what happened.

“But Tweed wants some kind of bug that will kill Jovians,” Chea pointed out one day. “Is this going to find one?”

Lilo shrugged. “It’s as likely to as anything else. But no, it’s not very likely. I might come up with something that would kill
these
things. But not Jovians, if you mean the intelligent creatures down there.”

She was in the farm tank with Chea, Cathay, and Jasmine, who was the chief planetologist. They were all getting their hands dirty with the new strain of pork trees Lilo had made which yielded bacon superior to what they had been eating. They knelt on the warm, black dirt and talked as they transplanted the tiny seedlings. Overhead was the brilliant central core of the farm, while beyond that was the far side of the spinning cylinder. They all wore dark goggles and their bodies were coated with UV-screening lotion and sweat. It was a happy time for all of them.

Lilo was spending most of her time farming—in the hydroponic nursery and outside on a plot of ground she had prepared to take the vacuum-resistant plants she was making. The food was already better, and she had become something of a hero with the inmates. Lilo loved working with plants, but was not so fond of cooking. She was teaching Cass and three other children how to do that. They were coming along fine, but in the meantime there were hardly enough hours in a standard day.

“You mean you don’t think the Jovians are like this creature?” Cathay asked.

“I have no reason to think so,” Lilo said. “And
Jasmine could probably give you plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t expect it.”

Jasmine got another plant from the bucket and started digging a hole. She was a small woman with wide eyes and large, capable hands. She wore her blond hair in thick braids and had a collar of fur around her neck—her only surgical alteration. Cathay had been sharing a room with Jasmine for two years before Lilo arrived, and the two of them had expressed an interest in inviting Lilo to join them. Lilo wasn’t sure. She had been doing well rooming with Chea, who was as capable a co-worker as she had ever found. But that phase of their relationship had ended when they finished their work on the Jovian organism. Chea was doing other work now, work that didn’t involve Lilo. Since then he had not been around as much as she could have wished.

“There’s no way to know for sure yet,” Jasmine said, patting the dirt around the roots of her plant. “I mean if what Lilo’s learning about the upper organisms will have any bearing on the ones who live deeper. But it’s unlikely.”

“How come?” Cathay was the perpetual straight man when the discussions got into science, but he didn’t mind. He cheerfully admitted that he knew next to nothing about it. He was not a teacher of skills or knowledge, but a primary teacher: one who led children into exploring themselves, discovering and developing their aptitudes.

“We know a lot about the nature of the Jovian atmosphere,” Jasmine said. “It’s stratified. Hydrogen on top, then under that ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, water, and liquid hydrogen, all of them in various crystalline states, or melted, or diffused through each other. There’s no reason to think the creature Lilo has could survive if it dropped a few hundred kilometers.”

“And plenty of reason to think it couldn’t,” Lilo added.

“You say this thing had a hydrogen gasbag,” Cathay said. “How could that keep it up if it floated in hydrogen?”

Lilo laughed. “Good question. I wondered about that
myself, and I’m really not sure. I think I might have seen it in an early stage. Maybe it’s born in a lower layer, makes hydrogen to fill its balloon, and rises to the sunlight. After that, it would need a new method of staying in the air. There’s plenty of energy it could tap. It’s a violent place.”

“It’s possible that Jupiter has several biospheres,” Jasmine said. “They might mix a little, like Lilo’s suggestion that her critter might be born at a lower level and rise to the top. But it’s going to be tough to study it, especially down at the lowest levels where the Jovians probably are.”

“Why do you think they’re down there?”

“Well, I…you’re right. They might live in the upper layers. But it’s unlikely, I think, if only on straight probability. There are so many strata they could occupy. The probes I’ve sent in have identified thirty-seven distinct environments, like layers of an onion. Some of them mix in different weather conditions, which makes even more possibilities. But it’s hard to imagine anything that could live in all of them. Down there at the bottom, just before my probes stop sending, is a core of hot metallic hydrogen. I don’t know if anything could live in
that
, but I wouldn’t take any bets that it’s impossible to live in the layer just above.”