No Life But This (14 page)

‘That’s because they’re morons!’ Quin told me roughly.

‘Hey!’ Moriko said, rather reasonably. ‘We just watch it. We’re not the ones with the cameras, and we’re not the
ones who put the records on Europa Net. If you’ve got a problem, take it up with Europa HN.’

Quin snorted, sat back, and simmered. He knew as well as I that discussing the matter with Europa HoloNetwork would be a waste of valuable oxygen. Everything on the colonies was owned by one subsidiary or another of UniCorp. There was no getting around it. We may not be treated as slaves in the sense
of being made to labour in the fields, but we were owned, patented, monitored hybrids, and UniCorp could do with our records what they pleased. If that included turning our lives into a reality holoshow on Europa, we had no say in the matter.

(
Ha!)

Despite 42’s opinion of the subject.

‘What …
cretin
came up with this burned idea?’ Quin snapped.

‘I don’t know. We’re new to it,’ Moriko said.
‘We only came to Europa a year and a half ago.’

‘Two years,’ Kenji corrected her.

‘The travel time doesn’t count,’ Moriko said, annoyed. ‘Anyway. I think it’s because they don’t have celebrities up here. I mean, not home-grown ones. And there you are on Earth, and it’s where everyone wants to be, but you’re quintessentially Europan!’

‘No,’ Quin said with an evil smirk. ‘Just me.’

Moriko grinned
at him. ‘You were always my favourite,’ she said. ‘I’m a follower of Quin’sQuad.’

‘Excuse me?’ he asked, rather politely, I thought.

‘It’s one of the net forums,’ Kenji said. ‘But I’m more into 32 and the sports.’

‘Are you.’ Rose said flatly.

Something about her voice made all the rest of us turn to look at her. It was the first time she’d spoken since the show started playing. There was
a long pause as she stared at Moriko. ‘So I’m in these shows,’ Rose said finally. I blushed as I realized, if they had Quin saving me, they must have had Rose and me in the pool beforehand. Granted, what we were doing was more cerebral than physical, but it was supposed to have been personal. I knew Rose felt as violated as I did.

‘Yeah! Ratings went right up when you came on … the … scene …’
Moriko began. She stopped, sensing something was wrong. The silence lay heavy in the dome as Rose’s pale face hardened like crystal.

‘Find another fandom,’ she said finally. Her voice was very hard and very quiet. ‘I suggest the band
Overwrought
. The EP Kids show will no longer be airing on Europa HN.’

‘The updates say the first of the new episodes will be airing next month,’ said Kenji, still
oblivious.

Rose shifted her flinty gaze to him. ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘It will not.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because before I leave here, I intend to have a meeting with Europa HN. I very much suggest the two of you find another fandom to waste your time on.’

Kenji swallowed. Rose’s personality had suddenly seemed to fill the room, and I wondered what her infamous father had been like when he
got angry. He must have been formidable. I did not envy the producers at Europa HN. They’d be lucky to get out of the room with their souls.

‘You tell them, Briar Rose,’
I signed at her, and I grinned. Rose’s eyes shot to me and she visibly shrank. It wasn’t just because her anger had been spent. She blushed and looked down. I realized it was the first time I’d said anything actually
to
her since
the ill-fated kiss. We’d avoided each other for the last two out-of-stasis days on the ship, and when we were in a room together, we spoke to everyone around us, not to each other.

I sighed, and shrank my signs, until they were harder to read. I doubted Moriko or Kenji knew enough sign to eavesdrop, but I didn’t want to draw Quin’s attention. He seemed to be watching the planet, but it was hard
to be sure. ‘
This is stupid,’
I told Rose. ‘
I miss you.’

She shook her head, and I realized she didn’t know the sign for ‘miss.’ I spelled it out for her with one hand, and her blush went from pink to crimson. ‘
Me two,’
she signed, and I tried not to laugh at her mistranslation. It made me smile, though.

‘Otto,’ Quin said quietly, interrupting us. I turned to look at him, but he wasn’t looking
at me. I followed his gaze and finally saw, twisting into our view as the shuttle changed angles, the icy cracked sphere of Europa.

I’d seen pictures of her, of course, but it simply isn’t the same as looking out through super-thick NeoGlass at the real thing. The giant snowball that was the moon of my origin was white and smooth, with flowing streaks of red.

‘Finally!’ Moriko said. ‘We got
another hour of this before we make it to the elevator.’

‘Did you bring any crisps?’ Kenji asked.

‘You just ate!’

‘I’m hungry again.’

They continued on like this for a while, until Quin couldn’t take it anymore. ‘Do me a favour,’ he said. ‘Do yourselves a favour. If the two of you shut up long enough, you just might be able to hear us not giving a damn.’

‘You know, you’re not as nice as I
thought you were,’ Moriko said.

I laughed. So did Rose, but she covered it quickly. Quin? Nice?

Quin glared at the twins. ‘You don’t even know me. I’ve been aggravating people since I was four. I don’t actually care what those peeping toms have edited for your entertainment. It is not my job to live up to your expectations of me.’

‘I thought you were clever. But you’re just mean.’

‘I’m violent
too,’ Quin said, his eyes sparking flame. ‘They’ve diagnosed me with Belligerent Development Disorder and impulse control problems. Bet they don’t show that on your weekly hits tape.’ Moriko suddenly looked scared, and I didn’t blame her. I knew exactly how dangerous Quin could be when he lost it. ‘What else have they shown, eh? Do they edit selections of us in the bathroom for the perverts of
Europa to peruse at their pleasure?’

‘Quin?’ Rose said.

Quin turned his ire on her. ‘And what do you want, princess? My brother’s attentions not enough for you? How many Eepies do you need in your bed at one time?’

Rose blushed, but she kept her back straight, and her voice was pristine. ‘I just thought you might want to ask Moriko and Kenji why they came to Europa in the first place.’

‘What?
You mean it wasn’t to follow popular net feeds?’

‘No,’ Kenji said evenly. ‘It was because of Dad’s work.’

‘He’s not a holoeditor, is he?’ Quin asked.

‘No,’ Moriko said, sounding defiant. ‘He’s a cellular researcher.’

‘Dad’s working on the microbes, like the ones that made you,’ Kenji said.

‘What made him want to study the M9s?’ Rose asked.

‘Well, he studies cellular communication, and the
plankton does more communication to more different types of cells than almost anything, anywhere. He says he’s studying how they communicate. He’s managed to keep them alive for up to fourteen days in a tank.’

That was impressive.

‘There. Isn’t that great, Quin?’ Rose asked.

‘Why?’

Rose indicated me with her eyes, and stared at him. Quin’s face softened very slightly. Quin looked at the twins,
and then at me and Rose. ‘Just keep ’em quiet,’ he said sullenly. ‘My threshold for enduring idiots has narrowed yet again during the course of this interminable journey.’ He glared at the twins. ‘Which I had been hoping to enjoy in awestruck peace and quiet, but god forbid you do anything against your religion, like keep your burned mouths shut for ten seconds.’ He turned to look back out of
the window at Europa.

She approached faster than I would have thought possible, but the Jovian shuttles were built for high speed. As we zoomed in towards the surface of Europa, the gravity in the shuttle shifted as the gravity of the moon warred with the polarity of the gravity mats at our feet. Rose turned so pale she looked green. Suddenly she stood up and headed for the hatch.

‘Rose?’ Moriko
asked, but I was already on my feet.

‘I need to find the vacuum drift,’ she said, pushing past me. I caught a flash of thought as she passed. Nausea. The gravity shifts were wreaking havoc on her weakened system.

About ten minutes later Rose slipped back through the hatch. I was waiting for her. I caught her arms as she dipped with the gravity shift again, and held her steady for a long moment.

‘You okay?’
I asked her.

She nodded. ‘I don’t think gravity shifts agree with me,’ she said. She coughed a little, as if making sure her throat still worked. She moved all her fingers and stretched her feet out, wiggling the toes inside her shoes. Her body was still recovering from her long stint in stasis – her doctors had said she might never fully recover – and it was not used to such massive
changes.

But then she looked behind me, and she stopped worrying about her body. ‘Otto,’ she whispered to me. ‘Look.’

I turned to where she had indicated, and then gripped her hand tightly. We were low enough now to see the surface of the planet. It felt like waking from a dream. Or maybe falling into one.

The glacial ice floes surrounded the entire moon. The images of the moon from a distance
made it look so smooth and spherical, like a blue billiard ball, but down here, inside the thin atmosphere, the crags and mountains became clear. They shone silver and red in the strange light. The thin atmosphere turned the sky a deep blue-black, with a pale pinprick of a sun in the middle, and several of the brighter stars still visible, even though it was the Europan equivalent of ‘day’. And
still, dominating the view, the crown of Jupiter himself, red and raging, taking up what seemed like half the sky. We could not see his famous ‘red spot’ from our position, but his heavy presence was overwhelming nevertheless. It was strange to realize that he would never move from that spot in the sky. The tidally locked Europa did not move the way Luna did around the Earth. There he was, a king
on his throne, never blinking, never moving.

The surface of the moon was terrifying and beautiful. It made me feel giddy. Sudden planes of smooth red ice like lava floes had bloomed from cracks in the icy crust and made the moon seem like she was bleeding. This rusty red bled, they told me, out of the plankton. There was a rumour that evidence of ‘life’ had been found the moment the settlers
arrived on Europa, and the information was suppressed until UniCorp could figure out how to exploit it. This didn’t surprise me. If UniCorp couldn’t make money, it would do nothing. If the scientists had discovered life before UniCorp had mapped and patented and made it theirs, they might have demanded ecological surveys, endangered species regulations, contamination procedures. In short, it would
have damaged the bottom line.

Rose knelt on one of the seats and stared out of the window at the ice glaciers below us. I sat beside her, and also turned to watch. We did not let go of each other’s hands.

The light was dim, and cast blurred shadows over the glaciers. Then, in the distance, a black hole opened into the ice. This hole grew bigger, resolving into a cavern, an open maw with myriad
lights that dragged the shuttle inside and swallowed her whole.

The interior of the cavern was clearly manmade. Radiation shielded rooms dotted the corners. The lights flashed and the shuttle quietly hummed, setting itself down with a deep clunk.

‘This is where we’re going?’ Rose asked.

‘No,’ said Moriko. ‘This is just the elevator. This isn’t even a place. No one’s up here. Only a crew of
twelve man the top of the elevator.’

‘Because if there are only twelve of them, they don’t count as “people”,’ Quin said scathingly. ‘Now I get it.’

The view out of the NeoGlass window changed as the lights went out. Then, with a deep hum, a large square out of the landing bay began to descend, our shuttle with it. The first few metres were metal, but soon the metal walls vanished, replaced
by the smooth shine of polished ice. The lights of the ship were the only illumination.

‘Is this safe?’ Rose asked, echoing my own fears.

‘Oh, you mean the ice?’ Moriko said. ‘It’s heavy ice, melted and refrozen to form the shaft. It’s perfectly safe. Stronger than steel in this environment.’

‘Yes! Heed the words of the expert,’ Quin said to Moriko with a reverent bow. ‘Those words, perfectly
safe. The
Titanic
. GMOs. Marmots. All of them are perfectly safe.’ He gave a mad grin, and Moriko cringed. I wasn’t convinced either, but the ship was going slowly down and down, and I had no choice but to trust it.

The trip down, however, seemed much slower than the journey from the orbital dock. There was nothing to look at out of the window. Rose asked Kenji and Moriko about where we were
headed.

‘One of the old ice villages,’ Moriko said. ‘Mostly they’re tourist destinations, now. There’s six of them. We’re headed to the Crystal Village. They all have different themes. There’s Ice Palace, Hoarfrost Forest, the Diamond Caverns, Star Fields and Frozen Fantasy. We’ve only stayed at Diamond Caverns before now. They left that looking like a cave, all icicles and little tunnels.’

‘It’s not all tourist stuff,’ Kenji said looking at Quin. He must have seen his expression. ‘The villages have to keep running. They’re needed to maintain the elevators and the tubes for the icebreakers. The tourist stuff just makes it so they have enough income to make it worth while.’

‘When will we get there?’ Rose asked.

‘About another forty minutes,’ Kenji said.

Quin put his cell in his
ear and listened silently to some music.

Rose looked at me and sighed. She squeezed my hand.
‘I’m sorry,’
she told me.

‘Me too.’

And that was really all the words we needed. I chuckled at how simple it all was suddenly. ‘
I love it when you laugh,’
she told me. ‘
I wish you’d do it more often.’

‘
It tends to kill all the other laughter in a room,’
I told her. I expected her to try and tell me
something else, but she was tired. Gently, like a child, she nuzzled my shoulder. Her thoughts were wordless, but clear. Her muscles ached. The strange gravity was making her ill, and she was worried about her nanos – tiny machines that were keeping her heart and kidneys functioning normally.