Carbide Tipped Pens Part 31

Sometimes too, Paris hears s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation. Mostly convos from the bar the night before, repeated over and over, fragments, a private tte--tte he didn't overhear at the time.

Creepy.

Paris asks other technicians if they're picking up extraneous sonic phenomena.

Nance has, and two or three of the others. Like Paris, they a.s.sume it is a glitch in the system, or in their own heads.

None of their miners have noticed anything.

He wonders if the Montys have.

He writes up a report. Reads it. Re-reads it. Deletes it. It makes him sound crazy.

Which he is beginning to feel he might be. That Jewel, she doesn't give him a flick of an eyelash. Ten hours linked to someone, breathing with them, feeling every surge and twitch, responsible for their life and death, and you are dead to them. It's soul-destroying.

He misses Billy. He used to look forward to the end of each shift, wait for Bill to come in, help him strip off the gear, all sweaty, Paris never cared. Licked Billy's neck, tasting salt. Ran his fingers around the whorls of Billy's perfect ears. Lying together afterward, pillow-talk, drifting into sleep. The s.e.x ... they could almost read each other's minds. The technological link was part of that, built that connection.

It could be that way with Jewel too.

The song in his head/ear right now is a sad one. Big hit two years ago, just before Paris left Earth for Europa. Sad, sad song.

Prince is listening.

He lies back and his hands gesture as if conducting.

He listens to sounds from deep within the moon, sounds that deep sensors transmit to him. Sounds from the hundred-kilometer-deep ocean that lies just beneath this granite-hard icy crust.

Someone or something or many someones are singing.

Or rather, perhaps, the moon is singing.

He posits: First, there was sound. And the sound was good.

Then, possibly, something Prince calls "the Europaeans" (a shorthand; he doesn't really believe there are individual alien beings on this moon, little green aquatic men) began to evolve. Bacteria, perhaps-the sea is warm enough-possibly subsisting on oxygen formed when hydrogen peroxide, found all over Europa's surface, mixes with the liquid ocean beneath the ice.

Until now, they would have lived in perfect isolation. There would be little sonic interference save the odd barrage of meteoroids from s.p.a.ce, and flexing and eruptions caused by tidal heating (a consequence of Europa's slightly eccentric orbit and orbital resonance with the other Galilean moons).

Such a deep and salty ocean is able to hold and carry sound to an extraordinary degree. For, possibly, billions of years, complex sonic structures existed here unmolested, distributing themselves over an astonishing range of frequencies.

Prince's first concrete breakthrough stemmed from the moment he was able to detect repeats of Terran sounds. Echoes, sure. But more than that. The sounds were being amplified, repeated, altered.

The sounds were being creatively investigated.

It seems to Prince, and his shadowy backers, that Europaean sonic structures are reproducing, entropy-resisting, and self-organizing.

Life is matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates.

Could sound be a form of life? No, of course not. Unless it is a form of life so alien that we can't at first recognize it as life. Or, perhaps even plausibly, something along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis: Europa as a single organism maintaining and building itself as a totality.

Prince listens, he waves his hands, he sinks deeper into the music. Almost ... almost ... he can almost understand what they are sing-no. What is being sung.

Close Encounter #3 at the Only. They lean right in, arms and shoulders touching, Caps and Montys be d.a.m.ned. But not looking at each other's faces. It feels more intimate, somehow, not to.

Rudo asks Jewel what happened to her adoptive parents.

She draws spirals on top of the bar. "They died. Two years ago."

"Radiation?"

She nods. The cool green of Washington state; how she misses the turquoise rivers, mountains, the rolling sea, the smell of her mother's clothes, the soft spot under the beard of her father where a little girl could nestle her head.

She feels like crying. It must be Rudo. She doesn't cry, doesn't think about this.

"That land is poisoned."

"Not the West Coast," Jewel replies. "It's supposed to be safe." Poor bombed Beijing and DC, poor retaliation-bombed North Korea, almost fifty years ago now. She herself carries the seeds inside her, cancers, poisons of fallout. They all do.

"It's a good thing it happened," comes Larry, and Jewel jumps; she'd been lost, forgotten she and Rudo were in the bar.

"What the f.u.c.k," she asks.

"The bombing, the war. It's lucky."

"Oh, don't cheer us up, you insane person."

"Imagine," Larry insists. "If it hadn't happened, we would have just kept going the way we were."

"What'd be wrong with that."

Larry smiles. "Look at what we got. Global cooling, ma.s.s starvation, extinctions, poisoned water, horror, devastation, and," he holds up his hand to forestall interruption, "we finally saw the Earth as a delicate thing. Pa.s.sed global laws about corporate environmental responsibility, cradle-to-grave legislation. Made it too expensive to mine on Earth because corporations were, for the first time, fully responsible for reparations. Developed s.p.a.ce-flight and wet-socket mining technologies. Trained you, and you." He stretches, pushes off from the bar. "And gave you, and you, and me, these wonderful jobs which will lead, after a paltry five years including travel time, to a lifetime of moneyed leisure."

"If we survive," Rudo says without emotion.

"Oh, I won't. Not for long." Larry's still smiling. "I'm a cancer baby."

Jewel and Rudo are silent.

Jewel clears her throat. "How long do you have."

"A year. Maybe."

"I am sorry," Rudo rumbles.

"Well. You have to die from something, right?"

Larry begins a move up the bar, then returns. He winks.

"I like you kids. Don't ask me why. I just do."

And with that, Larry drifts up the bar to serve the ma.s.sed Montys, who are growing restive.

Rudo gazes after Larry. "There is something courageous about his self-absorbed nihilism."

Jewel longs to talk to Rudo, talk more, tell him ... something, she doesn't know what, anything. But he has to go. They've been talking, they've been seen, the boys are glaring down the bar.

Every step he takes away from her makes her feel like her body is stretching and breaking from the inside out.

Montys and Caps.

Enemies forever.

Jewel watches. She watches Rudo working, she creeps him on Nurse, she waits for him downtime, at the bar. Larry notices, Larry smiles, Larry asks.

"You two done the deed yet?"

She is shocked. But the place is near-empty, no one has heard.

She shakes her head.

"No! That surprises me."

"Under other circ.u.mstances..."

"No doubt."

"But here."

Larry makes a noise of disgust with his lips. "f.u.c.king fake corporate compet.i.tion. It's so transparent. Gives them something to swoon over back home, gives you guys something to distract you from the terrible attrition rate up here."

"You think they do it on purpose."

"They do."

"Who is they."

He smiles at her curt barrage of uninflective questions, almost laughs. "Those guys? The actual leaders? You know who they are?"

Jewel shakes her head.

Larry leans in and whispers. "That's right. No one does. Or almost no one. Well, my boss works for them."

"Prince."

Nod. "You think he's here to run a bar?"

Pause.

"Since the war and the breakdown of government, food sources are controlled by two main corporations. The Caps are descended from Nabisco. The Montys are the core of Monsanto."

"I know."

"Two families." Larry lowers his voice further, and wipes at a nonexistent spot on the ice bar. "Two families run everything. Chinese and Euro: the Jiangs and the Contis. Rivals for what's left of the bounty."

"You sound like a conspiracy theorist."

"And all this"-he gestures around the ice-bar, and Jewel knows he's taking in the whole moon, Jupiter above, the entire Solar System-"is theirs. But I'll tell you one thing," and his voice is so quiet Jewel can barely hear it now. "Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they don't own love. They don't own your heart."

"Larry." Jewel flashes her best smile. "Are you counseling me to go f.u.c.k that beautiful boy."

"Jewel, I am."

She stares at him. The ecstasy/terror builds.

"I'm sick of this s.h.i.t," Larry declares. "f.u.c.k him and show the world you love him."

Prince listens.

Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they don't own love. They don't own your heart. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they don't own love. They don't own your heart. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they don't own love. They don't own your heart.

Deep below, in the limitless sea, the words build and multiply, the intonation, the music of the barkeep's voice. Over and over, becoming something beautiful and large and strange, so very strange.

She is back on Earth. A wide, empty street at night. Trees, tall ones with leaves, bend overhead. Houses, shuttered, silent, on either side. Two dark riders gallop toward her. A voice through a loudspeaker: Clear the streets! The streets must remain clear! She runs and hides in some cedar bushes as the shielded and mounted police gallop past. Echoes of their hoofbeats die. Then she realizes that of course she has wandered into a radiation zone. She will die.

And that's when she finds him by the road. Lips cold, jaw slack, eyes rolled back. Big, beautiful hands, palms upward, fingers curled.

She wakes, heart pounding.

Rudo is stroking her hair. Long, soft, gentle strokes, over and over.

She sees him looking down at her and wants to cry.

What is it about him? She is lost, lost and in love.

They lie in one of Larry's storerooms, behind the bar. The ice floor is covered with the high-tech, high-pile fabric they call "fur" up here: soft, warm. Light pulses gently in the walls.

It's secret. Safe.

"My alarm went off, Jewel."