‘I’ll leave being psychotic to you, Marius — you’re so much better at it.’
Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all day.
They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear, tuning his holographically inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms; lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner’s passengers was a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag — nothing incriminating there, no gadgets or weapons — and exited the flitter, stepping through the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin, stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.
To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly poor. Vargovic’s cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals: businesspeople like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics beyond their personal space: machine-generated hallucinations decoded by the implant hugging Vargovic’s optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes that subtly altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists — antlered brats from Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: to squalid-looking Maunder refugees who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found themselves within a huge geodesic dome resting above the ice on refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops, boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slither-walks and spiral stairways descending to the nadir where a quincunx of fluted marble cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly arrived were queuing for elevators that terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and waited.
‘First time in Cadmus-Asterius?’ asked the bearded man ahead of him, iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions from Sirikit’s Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.
‘First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full story.’
‘Down-system?’
‘Mars.’
The man nodded gravely. ‘Hear it’s tough.’
‘You’re not kidding.’ And he wasn’t. Since the sun had dimmed — the second Maunder Minimum, repeating the behaviour the sun had exhibited in the seventeenth century — the entire balance of power in the First System had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it difficult to adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers — the Demarchy, which controlled Europa and Io, and Gilgamesh Isis, which controlled Ganymede and parts of Callisto — were vying for dominance.
The man smiled keenly. ‘Here for anything special?’
‘Surgery,’ Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the earliest juncture. ‘Very extensive anatomical surgery.’
They hadn’t told him much.
‘Her name is Cholok,’ Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the dossiers back in the caverns that housed the Covert Operations section of Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. ‘We recruited her ten years ago, when she was on Phobos.’
‘And now she’s Demarchy?’
Control had nodded. ‘She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder Two began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy — and us, of course — snapped up the brightest.’
‘And also one of our sleepers.’ Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousy to him, with a permanent bone-deep severity of expression.
‘Cheer up,’ Control said. ‘I’m asking you to contact her, not sleep with her.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Just tell me her background.’
‘Biotech.’ Control nodded at the dossier. ‘On Phobos she led one of the teams working in aquatic transform work — modifying the human form for submarine operations.’
Vargovic nodded diligently. ‘Go on.’
‘Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities.’
‘Mm.’ Vargovic was getting the thread now. ‘By which time we’d already recruited her.’
‘Right,’ Control said, ‘except we had no obvious use for her.’
‘Then why this conversation?’
Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of subservience. ‘We’re having it because our sleeper won’t lie down.’ Then Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak. What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept: something Gilgamesh had captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.
She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She was talking rapidly from a white room, inert medical servitors behind her. Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.
‘Cholok contacted us a month ago,’ Control said. ‘The room’s part of her clinic.’
‘She’s using Phrase-Embedded Three,’ Vargovic said, listening to her speech patterns, siphoning content from otherwise normal Canasian.
‘Last code we taught her.’
‘All right. What’s her angle?’
Control chose his words — skating around the information excised from Cholok’s message. ‘She wants to give us something,’ he said. ‘Something valuable. She’s acquired it accidentally. Someone good has to smuggle it out.’
‘Flattery will get you everywhere, Control.’
The muzak rose to a carefully timed crescendo as the elevator plunged through the final layer of ice. The view around and below was literally dizzying, and Vargovic registered exactly as much awe as befitted his Martian guise. He knew the Demarchy’s history, of course — how the hanging cities had begun as points of entry into the ocean; air-filled observation cupolas linked to the surface by narrow access shafts sunk through the kilometre-thick crustal ice. Scientists had studied the unusual smoothness of the crust, noting that its fracture patterns echoed those on Earth’s ice shelves, implying the presence of a water ocean. Europa was further from the sun than Earth, but something other than solar energy maintained the ocean’s liquidity. Instead, the moon’s orbit around Jupiter created stresses that flexed the moon’s silicate core, tectonic heat bleeding into the ocean via hydrothermal vents.
Descending into the city was a little like entering an amphitheatre — except that there was no stage; merely an endless succession of steeply tiered lower balconies. They converged towards a light-filled infinity, seven or eight kilometres below, where the city’s conic shape constricted to a point. The opposite side was half a kilometre away, levels rising like geologic strata. A wide glass tower threaded the atrium from top to bottom, aglow with smoky- green ocean and a mass of kelp-like flora, cultured by gilly swimmers. Artificial sun lamps burned in the kelp like Christmas tree lights. Above, the tower branched, peristaltic feeds reaching out to the ocean proper. Offices, shops, restaurants and residential units were stacked atop each other, or teetered into the abyss on elegant balconies, spun from lustrous sheets of bulk-chitin polymer, the Demarchy’s major construction material. Gossamer bridges arced across the atrium space, dodging banners, projections and vast translucent sculptures moulded from a silky variant of the same chitin polymer. Every visible surface was overlaid by neon, holographics and entoptics. People were everywhere, and in every face Vargovic detected a slight absence, as if their minds were not entirely focused on the here and now. No wonder: all citizens had an implant that constantly interrogated them, eliciting their opinions on every aspect of Demarchy life, both within Cadmus-Asterius and beyond. Eventually, it was said, the implant’s nagging presence faded from consciousness, until the act of democratic participation became near- involuntary.
It revolted Vargovic as much as it intrigued him.
