A cosmologist and a cetologist walk into a bar. The bartender says, “I’ll give a free drink to whichever of you can do my hair and nails… Ten minutes later, a shriek is heard from the back room. “Hey, get your finger out of my blowhole!”
Act 1: The 46th and a Half Century
You can call me Bo. Or whatever you want to call me. But Bo is the name I have gone by for most of my twenty-six Earth years. When I turned twenty-four Earth years, I went on a Quest. Now, let’s back up. I don’t live on Earth, the so-called dwelling place of mortals, although I am certainly mortal. I am neither immortal nor ubiquitous. I live deep under the frozen surface of the 100 kilometer deep ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa, in a spherical object constructed of trillions of tiny triangles made of respiring diamond.
The Sphere is enormous. Around the year 4,000, dated arbitrarily from an ancient Earth religion still practiced by some, a semi-biological, semi-intelligent drone ship sent by Earthlings arrived in orbit around Europa with a crew of just visible robots, each equipped with a tiny drill bit or cutting head. Europa had been extensively surveyed for decades by a variety of equipment, and the data had been sent back to Earth for intensive analysis. A complete digital replica of everything known about the place had been constructed on a DNA/quantum synthetic intelligence, and people had even been living out substantial portions of their lives inside a simulation of Europa to prepare for an ultimate journey there, where they would plan to carry out the rest of their physical lives.
Europa is a water planetoid, thick and incredibly smooth ice at the surface, deep, jet black, mostly liquid water underneath. The surface of the ice is extraordinarily smooth, looking like an endless porcelain dinner plate curving off to meet the horizon, under Jupiter’s ringed gaze, the king of the gods himself. Europa is wet. And deep. And black. And ice cold. In fact, it is so ice cold it should consist entirely of ice, but the tidal forces created by Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull kept the water moving, and this keeps it from freezing solid.
The water had been sampled and analyzed for decades, at points and depths all over the planetoid, and no traces of life had been found. The ice was around 10 kilometers thick in most places, but there were thinner spots, and it was through one of these that the microscopic robots drilled in preparation for insertion of the Sphere. It was an engineering challenge to keep the ice hole open, but the bots were up to that, simply coating cylindrical edges and keeping them just above the freezing point. The sphere had been dropped into the unfathomable depths of the alien ocean, and that had been all for the time being. Humans arrived in orbit later.
***
On my 24th birthday, I was still in my phase 1 education. School had been exciting early on. I was able to explore almost any topic in almost any depth I wanted, and in any way I wanted. “Lord of the Flies School”, some of the elders had called it derisively early on, referring to an ancient tome nobody else remembered, but over time the concept had stuck and gained steam. All the adults in the station were happy to stop by and share knowledge, expertise, and accumulated wisdom, centuries worth in some cases. Most kids would stay at the school for 20 years or so, but there were no rules about that. You could stay as long as you wanted, or not at all, or your entire life. Most moved on at some point to a Quest. This was the Sphere’s coming-of-age ritual, a challenge that young adults would take on, the equivalent of a season spent in the wilderness puffing on some ancient pipe.
This was school in the 46th and a half century. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted, tap into any of the solar system’s knowledge you wanted, talk to an expert on anything you wanted, and do this as long as you wanted. You were supposed to focus on building knowledge and teaching yourself to think. Applied skills and specialization could come later. Or you could become an artist or a philosopher, wandering through the Sphere asking questions of beautiful young (or old) people you chanced to encounter. Socrates would have been proud, and there were no hemlock cups in evidence, although the angst of 46th and a half century life did lead to the very occasional suicide. Most people were smart enough to turn to friendlier drugs than hemlock long before it came to that.
You could even talk to dead people, after a fashion. We lived a long time compared to our ancestors, but eventually our biological brains reached the limit of their usefulness. When I was five Earth years old, my bone marrow had been irradiated, killed, and replaced with synthetic, mutation-resistant cells. This process had to be repeated every 20 Earth years or so if you wanted to live a long time in a standard body. Virtually any of the mechanical human body parts and organs could be regenerated, renewed, or replaced as needed, but we had never figured out the secret of moving consciousness from one brain to another. Your consciousness resided in your physical human brain, and that was that. Nobody was too excited about the idea of trying to move it. Even if it could be replicated elsewhere, you just weren’t sure if you would still be you, and most people were not okay altering the carbon they were born into like that.
All that said, most people had their brains scanned non-invasively and periodically. Most people had a complete record of the three-dimensional structure of their brains stored in the DNA/quantum synthetic intelligence. This was typically kept inactive, “on ice” as it were, but after a person’s physical brain death was confirmed it could be activated. You couldn’t exactly have a conversation with that person, but that person’s memories and knowledge were accessible to the synthetic intelligence after a fashion, and you could have a conversation with it.
***
I had chosen to do a massive, multi-year project on the Five Great Collapses on Earth leading up to the founding of the Sphere on Europa. First, beginning in the late 21st century, human civilization on Earth had lost many of the natural structures and processes it had come to rely on without even realizing it, thinking all along of these as “free”. In retrospect, it turned out they had been very dear indeed. Both polar ice caps, the glaciers, the groundwater supply, the insects and birds and mammals and frogs, and finally the composition of the oceans and the atmosphere itself. They had lost the ability to feed themselves. Their technology had been good, but not good enough, and not shared enough.
Second, the breaking of the taboo on “tactical” nuclear weapons in 2298. Third, the Plague Century of 3040-3150. Fourth, the First Space War of 3600 – and yes, they just went ahead and called it the first space war assuming there would be more to come. Finally, the Great Interplanetary Plague (what name to use next time?)
The Kardashev Breakthrough of 4408 had at last enabled widespread space travel two millennia after man had first dreamed of such a thing. The resulting euphoria had been punctured by the gut punch of the Great Interplanetary Plague.
Most plagues were either extremely contagious, or extremely deadly, but rarely both. The successive waves of contagion in the Plague Century had been deadly to the very old, the very sick, and, tragically, the very young. In the end it had carried off half a billion souls, an unprecedented tragedy, but the species had bounced back in equal numbers.
There was speculation that the Great Interplanetary Plague not been the work of nature alone. Some believed it was an engineered virus within a virus. In ancient Earth history, the Soviet Empire had first tried something like this, embedding deadly “rabbit fever” inside a contagious but nuisance level respiratory virus. They hadn’t had the technology to pull it off at the time, but after a handful of centuries passed, the technology had become accessible to every pimply teenager in every rigged up basement biocontainment laboratory on Earth. First it had spread undetected to most humans on the planet, with no ill effects for nearly a decade. At most, a sniffle and low fever that people recovered from. Then the deadly secondary infection had begun to kick in, and by the time anyone figured out what had happened it was too late, even if coordinated global action had been in the political cards, which it had not. It had spread to the fledgling bases on the Moon and Mars, with devastating results. This one left less than a tenth of humanity intact. Civilization was still clawing its way out of that abyss.
Vowing “never again” (not the first or last “never again” in human history, of course,) the fragments of the remaining civilizations on Earth had pulled together and devised a system of colonies scattered here and there in the Solar System. The network was constructed so that no individual or government knew exactly where all these settlements were. The people who knew about one settlement would know about two and only two others. Bio-containment and quarantine measures for arriving passengers were to be extreme.
During the space journey, you were pretty much just a brain on ice. Sure, your body was along for the ride, but pretty much all of it was reconstituted on the other end of the journey. You were regrown from the stem cells up. Brine shrimp and tardigrades could mummify and spend decades in stand-by mode before being rehydrated and continuing on, no worse for the wear. But that was never the right model for humans, because hey, organs. The squirrels and bears on Earth could hibernate at pretty cold temperatures, slowing down their bodies and waiting for warmth to return. For that matter, snakes and alligators could enter a state of near-death when there was no food around, and in their case the important thing was to keep warm. The key turned out to be frogs though. Some could freeze solid, letting ice crystals form harmlessly in the interstices between their cells, stay that way indefinitely, and come back to life no worse for the wear. Frogs had brains, and hearts, and lungs, and nerves, and bones and muscles and ligaments and pretty much all the other things we had. If frogs could do it, so could humans, the thinking went. And after a century or so of trial and some particularly horrific errors, it had been figured out. So we became frog people. Not the lizard people of some 21st century fever dream. Frog people looked just like normal people, but we had the important fragment of frog DNA carried into our stem cells by a cooperative virus, and after a few months of regrowth, we had the ability to go into a state of suspended animation. The doctors would give you a cocktail designed to block any pain and produce pleasant dreams during the freezing process, and years later you would wake up somewhere new. Many of your body parts would be new following the bio-containment protocols, but you were still you. Or so I had heard. I had the genes, but I was born on Europa, so I had never actually experienced any of this firsthand.
***
In the Earth media, Europa had been voted “Jovian Moon Most Likely to Succeed as a Colony” nine years running. Only a select few humans, outside of Europa, knew that a Europa colony had actually been constructed.
The Underwater Fuller Sphere had been based on an ancient design for a dome intended to be constructed over Earth cities. The idea was that as the composition of the atmosphere began to go south, and the weather became more unpredictable, cities could simply be enclosed, sealed off. The domes were to have been made of millions of tiny triangular glass panels. The idea had never been tried at scale on Earth, but it had become the basis for many a colony elsewhere in the solar system. Only now, the panels were made of diamonds, constructed by clouds of “foglets”, nanobots of the type that had briefly encircled the sun, programmed to intercept any desired fraction of its energy and beam it to a designated location, before their built-in kill switches had been allowed to execute as time expired.
The Sphere was powered by a dense focus plasma reactor, so-called “cold fusion”, which of course was not all that cold. The reactor could generate all the light and heat needed by the colony even in the blind depths of the Europan sea. It could generate all the oxygen needed to sustain humans, by electrolyzing water molecules, but that was only a backup because the Sphere had the ability to diffuse oxygen directly out of the alien ocean itself.
There were bugs in the Sphere. That might sound crazy, when all the food people needed could be synthesized from genetically modified yeast, but they were there on purpose. People needed to see plants and animals. Plants needed insects, and insects needed plants and other insects, and spiders needed insects, and birds needed insects, and so on up the chain. Parts of the Sphere were essentially wild ecosystems, guided gently but not managed, and you could wander through them either in transparent climate controlled tunnels or, if you were brave, on foot outside the tunnels.
Light, air, warmth, and food were all good things, of course. But people needed more. They needed some variation in their days, they needed some greenery, and most of all they needed some space to wander and explore and discover. The Sphere provided these things. It was simply huge. To wander from one end to the other by foot could take years. There were various forms of mechanical transport available, but most people did in fact choose to wander on foot. That was the simplest form of Quest, to wander the Sphere for a year, or five, or ten, and simply see what you could see and who you could find. The supposed idea of a quest was to find yourself, to grow and mature, to show that you had gained some degree of wisdom.
***
The pleasures of the mind were many, and some people stayed in school indefinitely. They became professional teachers, not in authority to direct their students, but wells of wisdom available to tap when desired. But physical life in the Sphere was easy, and there came a point where most people began to reach a stage of boredom and burnout, and realized it was just time to move on.
I found I was getting into arguments. One day it was about the best way to check the temperature of a fusion core, the next day it was about the meaning of our existence out here on Europa, and whether we should just all pack up and insist on returning to Earth. A few years earlier, and for many years before that, these had been a fun philosophical dialog among friends, even if they occasionally became, uh, passionate. We would listen to each other’s positions, try to fully understand them, even try to argue for each other’s positions, and finally try to come to some consensus on the matter. Sometimes that was possible, and sometimes we just agreed to disagree.
But lately it was different. The dialog had turned into arguments, and the arguments were personal. I had found myself in a knock-down, drag-out screaming match (although no physical violence took place) about whether the Europa colonists had the right to abandon their post and return to Earth. My position was that no, we were here to act as seeds to continue humanity in the case a plague or other disaster wiped out all humans on Earth and other colonies. Our moral duty was about more than ourselves, and we were not 100% free as a result. The counter-argument was that we were in fact free beings from Earth, the ancestral home of all mortal beings that we knew of, and we had a right to Earth, especially considering it was our ancestors in most cases who had made the decision to journey to Europa, and we had had no part in this decision.
We are citizens of wherever we are born, I countered. It had always been that way. Human beings were never 100% free, they were just free to play the hand they had been dealt in the most gainful way they could manage.
Like I said, these arguments used to be fun, but they weren’t fun any more. My counterparts seemed like they were actually considering the trip to Earth. What were they going to do, kidnap all of us, commandeer the ship in orbit, and force everyone to go with them, leaving the Europa Sphere to its fate?
When you find yourself arguing at length about nothing in particular, it is a sign that it is time to move on from whatever you are arguing about. Life was short, even if it wasn’t as short as it used to be.
***
I talked over my idea with Olga and Hilda, my two favorite classmates. Olga was probably 50 Earth years old or so, and on her second or third significant body reconstitution. She had opted for freckles this time. Hilda, who knew how old she actually was, but she was playful enough. There wasn’t enough serious work to do in the 46th and a half century so you had to be creative and playful or it was hard to pass the time.
Olga, Hilda, and I proposed our Quest to the class in the way we did when there was something important to be decided. We had mutually elected to follow an ancient system from Earth where each person gets to have their say for as long as they would like, beginning with the youngest and proceeding to the eldest in the group. This helped to reduce group think, as the younger members could be ensured of having a voice, but could not just go along with whatever the elders were saying. It tended to give the elders the greatest weight, if they hadn’t had it already, because they went last and tended to be the best remembered.
Everyone was in agreement regarding the Quest Olga, Hilda and I were proposing as it turned out. After everyone had their say, there was a limited amount of questioning and respectful dialog, and then we were off to see Dr. Dimpelson.
Act 2: The Quest
Dr. Dimpelson was one of the elders, and an odd one. He was probably 700 years old, but you really couldn’t be sure. He was only a little over four feet tall, had bright red dimples for cheeks, a long furry white beard, and a pointy hat. I had seen pictures in my studies of 19th century Earth history of fictional characters called witches and wizards, and the wizard look seemed to be what he was going for..
I stopped by one of our fine Sphere cantinas, Europan to Possibilities, to fortify myself for the upcoming conversation. You’re open, I’m open, we’re all open to possibilities, I thought to myself.
Forty Earth minutes later, there I was with Dimpelson. “I understand you are interested in going on a Quest,” said Dr. D., beaming.
“Yes sir,” said I, “I have been feeling a bit burned out in my studies.”
I was nervous, because I wanted a Quest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be assigned to the Ultimate Quest. The Ultimate Quest was the round trip to Earth itself. It could take the better part of several decades or even centuries, and there was no telling that the people you cared about would still be around when you got back, and if you got back.
“What you may not know,” continued Dr. D., “is that many of your colleagues feel similarly. Folks your age need a challenge, and life has become awfully soft and easy nowadays here in the Sphere.”
I swallowed.
“You will discover that for which you do not seek,” said Dr. D.
Find what you do not seek you will, I thought to myself with an internal chuckle. Dr. D. raised an eyebrow as though he might have read my thoughts, and I was not 100% sure that was not the case.
“Your objective is simply to catch a glimpse of the white whale,” said Dr. D.
“Ah, the proverbial white whale,” I sighed, knowingly. You mean I have to figure out what my own personal monomania is in life, then pursue it?
“Heavens no,” laughed Dr. D. “You are going to look for an actual, honest to god white whale in the depths of the European sea!”
***
You might think my white whale story is not original, that it echoes some 19th century Earth novel. Certainly, my story is a pale imitation, a pathetic echo of that long ago tome. But the rumor was that someone had purposely created a semi-biological, semi-mechanical white whale-like creature in the shadow of that novel, with full knowledge of that novel’s existence, in an alien ocean orbiting the planet Jupiter in the 46th and a half century.
Like any good White Whale story, there were rumors that there might be more than one. Or that the same one had been sighted in different places at the same time. U-goddamn-biquitous, I thought to myself. Ubiquity, of course, was immortality of space, as someone wiser than me had once said. Or was it the other way around, immortality being ubiquity of time? In my youth, I fancied myself quite the philosopher.
My wandering attention snapped back. “You will be outfitted as a porpoise,” Dr. D. was saying, with the requisite twinkle in the corner of his eye. Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow.
***
Over a period of about six Earth months, my body parts were very slowly and methodically swapped out for those of a porpoise. I am well aware how crazy it sounds, but by the 46th and a half century, it could be done. For space travel, much of your body was removed, and then in most cases it was regrown at the other end in roughly the same form you left behind. But it didn’t have to be that way. Essentially, your body could be augmented in pretty much any way you wanted as long as your brain was left intact. Other body parts could be repaired, renewed, regenerated, even swapped out pretty much with no limits, but the brain was the weak link. Sure, there were things that could be done to limit the plaque development and subsequent dementia that had afflicted our human ancestors after 120 years or so. 1,000 years was the rough limit now, although that was enough time that your risk of a serious accident tended to accumulate, and even if it didn’t many people just decided it was time to fade away quietly around that point.
Just because your body could be augmented at will didn’t mean it was an easy process. My brain had to be very carefully preserved. I was knocked out on a variety of hallucinogenic drugs, and had some interesting dreams. My legs were amputated and a tail grown, my legs were swapped for fins, and so forth.
Now, I say a “porpoise” because that is the closest Earth analog for what I was to become. But what I had to become was not exactly an Earth porpoise. The Europan sea was unfathomably dark, cold, and under enormous pressure. And I couldn’t exactly chip my way through miles of ice to breath air at the surface (surprisingly, there actually was breathable air), and even if the unshielded radiation at the surface wouldn’t have killed me in fairly short order. I was fitted with something much more like gills, which would allow me to stay underwater indefinitely. The gills were certainly an interesting feeling when I woke up fully, as was the blowhole and the apparatus for making whale songs.
I was somewhat bemused to realize that I had a porpoise penis. Now, for the last thousand years or so you could pick pretty much whatever genitalia you wanted, and you could switch back and forth between types if you wanted. And before you ask, yes, you could be a hermaphrodite if you wanted to. That fad had come and gone a couple times, meaning all the cool kids had tried it around the same time. Lots of people still tried it once, and a few stuck with it. Overall though, the majority of people tended to return to whatever set of genitals they had been born with. Anyway, my porpoise penis could become quite large on the rare occasions I had a use for it – think arm size, with a little hook-like thing at the end. It was quite solid, not spongy like I might have expected (as though I had ever spent one Earth second thinking about what to expect in this department.) But it tucked up neatly into a convenient body cavity during the 99.9 percent of the time I had no use for it. In terms of erotic positions, Hilda, Olga and I found that a “T” formation seemed to align things the best. At first, it was quite hard to keep moving in the same direction at the same speed like this, but you got the hang of it after a few tries.
***
Olga, Hilda and I had made a chart of where we wanted to go. Paper was still available, but we went for one of the three-dimensional holographs, then ran a few immersive simulations of what we might find out there. The Europan sea was unimaginably vast, but we figured it wouldn’t be too hard to keep track of where we were and where we were headed, and to find our way back when we were ready.
***
The inky black water was so cold it seemed like it could crystallize into blackberry jelly at any moment. It was a good thing we had blubber, plus some kind of internal energy source that went far beyond the mere biological.
We had eyes of course, but our eyes weren’t much help in the obsidian blackness of the watery expanse.
I was surprised to find I had sonar. Earth porpoises did not, but I was not subject to the various constraints placed upon Earth porpoises by millennia of evolution. Olga, who was a modified blue whale (she was enormous!), and Hilda, who was an orca, also had sonar. We found we could communicate just fine with a system of squeaks, trills and pings. Somehow, this translated to standard Solar English in our brains.
“Call me Ishmael,” I joked.
“More like a fish meal,” Hilda retorted.
And the banter continued like that, filling the endless hours cruising the black depths.
***
We cruised upward and had a look at the underside of the ice, surprisingly smooth and cool white in the slight glimmer of light. There were supposedly rare gaps in the ice, but as far as we could tell it was unbroken and impenetrable to the horizon in every direction.
***
You might be wondering if we had to stop to eat, or sleep. This is where the biology of our whale bodies became less like an actual biological whale. There weren’t just schools of fish in the Europan sea. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be any life at all, even though there was plenty of oxygen to support it. It was cold, sure, and the pressure was immense, but life did exist on Earth under such extreme conditions. There was always debate about whether humanity should seed planets like this with life, and just let it take its course from there over the eons. It seemed an okay thing to do, morally speaking, as long as we could be sure there wasn’t any life there to begin with. We had looked extensively, drone submarines trolling the depths of Europa, sucking in water like clams and testing it all over the moon. We had found no evidence of microbial life (or anything larger). But how could we be sure? You couldn’t prove a negative, so we could never be absolutely sure. People had been cautious so far, at least on Europa. There was always the possibility that life would be seeded by accident, of course, but that hadn’t happened so far, at least not in an obviously detectable way.
Anyway, there was a reactor inside each of us that generated the energy our bodies needed to keep going. When it came to human habitation in space, it was always easier to stay warm in a cold environment than to cool down in a hot environment. Much like an olden times Swiss ski chalet, all you needed was a combination of energy and good insulation. Energy could melt the ice and light the darkness. On the other hand, there was no insulation in the universe that could survive the heat and radiation of even a low-grade star.
To be honest, I did miss eating though.
***
We discovered something curious along the way. It seemed to be cloaked somehow, resistant to our sonar pings and too far away to see with our eyes. But it seemed to be an enormous round object about the size of the Sphere itself. Could there be another Sphere out here in the deep black sea?
We knew there was a smaller Sphere about 10 kilometers from Europa. Most of us had never visited, because this one was used to house the sick and the quarantined. Under strict biocontainment, anyone who was newly arrived, or if there was any suspicion they were infected with anything at all originating off world, had to spend a full Earth year in this mini-Sphere and receive a clean bill of health following a comprehensive medical examination, before they were allowed into the Sphere. Occasionally, something would break out in the main Sphere and entire groups of people would be removed to quarantine for a year. It wasn’t so bad, with most of the amenities of the larger sphere, just on a smaller scale, and with constant communications and virtual reality connections.
And if this was another Sphere, was it inhabited by another billion souls unbeknownst to the billion we knew about? And if so, did our elders know? Did someone on Earth know? The mysterious object, immense as it was, seemed to shimmer and then blink out of existence after we had spent some minutes, something less than one Earth hour, contemplating what it might be.
***
We slowly made our way deeper and deeper, feeling the pressure increase until it would have crushed ordinary bones, even those of a leviathan. Of course, we were built for this. After days of slowly drifting downward, we saw the bottom for the first time.
Something was down here. At first, we thought it was just an underwater rock formation, maybe pushed up by millennia ago tectonic activity. No, it was long, like an entire mountain chain swallowed by a stone anaconda. I pinged it gently. Then Olga, Hilda, and I pinged it harder. There, below the head of the anaconda, we could make out the unmistakable protruding lower jaw of a sperm whale. But this was far larger than any biological whale could be, the physics of the universe being the same everywhere, as far as we knew.
It was white. The whiteness of the thing, there on the bottom of the jet black alien sea, was simply appalling. It just didn’t belong.
How did I know it was white, you ask, when I keep telling you that everything in this watery alien world was pitch black? Well, remember that I was not entirely biological myself. I had a sort of nuclear reactor inside me, and between my eyes I could switch on what amounted to a powerful search light.
For several long moments, nothing happened. Then, just the slightest movement in the periphery of my vision. A tiny swirling dust devil of sediment eddied upward from the bottom murk of the hundred kilometer sea.
Then, an Eye. It opened, and it was enormous. No Eye was supposed to be that big. How long had this particular eye been closed, slumbering under the sands at the bottom of the ink black sea?
We all began to slowly turn and paddle away.
A fluidic explosion! Something so big and so powerful displacing so much water as it exploded upward, that we were sucked into its wake, then engulfed by the random vortices left behind, completely helpless in their grip. I was completely disoriented for several minutes, with no idea which way was up or down.
When I got my bearings once again, the White Whale was nowhere to be seen. We sent out pings again, in all directions, and figured out which way it had gone. It was moving fast. After some hasty discussion, we decided to give chase. I supposed this was the adventure I had signed up for, wasn’t it?
It was moving fast, but we were also fast. Porpoise, orca, and blue whale muscles are quite large, and we found that by moving in a sort of loose triangular formation we could reduce the drag of the inky sea around us.
***
After trailing the White Whale for a time, and somehow doing some navigational calculations deep in our cetacean brains, we realized the Whale was on a collision course with the Sphere. And we had no way of warning them.
We could all commit suicide, but what would that accomplish? Olga was the fattest whale among us, the only one big enough that blocking the White Whale’s path might stop it or divert it from its course. It was one soul for a billion.
I have to talk to her, I thought to myself. It took me a couple days to think over the words I would use, cruising there in the White Whale’s wake. We had time.
I decided on the direct approach. “Olga,” I said, “I love you. We all love you. I think you know what you have to do.”
Whales don’t really have expressions. They do have faces of a sort, but though I watched her face I was not able to ascertain the emotions taking place inside that vast cetacean brain. Once I thought I saw a tear welling up, but of course that was utterly ridiculous.
***
The White Whale was fast, but our top cruising speed was just a bit faster. It took all our energy and concentration to maintain this speed, so there wasn’t much interaction between us. We spent several days gradually gaining a lead on the White Whale.
Finally, it was time to say our goodbyes, and time for Olga to position herself in the whale’s path.
***
And then, there was the Eye. It was enormous, unblinking, alien. Was this a machine? Some blend of machine and flesh, most likely. A squid eye. But then, it winked. Or so I think when I remember it. I fainted.
I thought I saw a flash of beard, a dimple, a twinkling eye inside the whale’s eye as it turned on a dime and simply vanished into the murk.
The vortex hit us like a dust devil and we swirled and whirled for hours. The Sphere’s automatic stabilizers kicked in. We learned later that a few bumps and bruises had resulted inside, but slowly the spinning stopped and things returned to normal.
Act 3: Home Again
What I ultimately discovered on the Quest was different from what I had sought. I sought a White Whale, and I was not the first person to do so. I discovered that I had the ability to push a friend in front of a speeding locomotive if that is what it would take to save a billion lives. I wasn’t particularly proud of that, but Olga seemed to understand and bear me no ill will. Would I have pushed the fattest whale around in front of the trolley to save a million lives? Probably. A hundred strangers? Now the question started to get more difficult. Maybe I would be a Sphere elder some day where I would have to make such a decision. I hoped not, not wishing for that sort of responsibility.
I thought that a more technical specialty might be in my future, or at least my next step. Having a fusion core inside me had piqued my interest in this sort of technology. The synthetic intelligence took pretty good care of our fusion core, of course, but it was important to have humans around who could troubleshoot if something went wrong. I could focus on the machine and not worry about the politics. Then again, with the synthetic intelligence taking an active role in the functioning of the colony, its inner workings could be seen as political after all.
There was the question of the phantom sphere. If it was indeed another sphere, who or what had created it? Were some of the other colonies here on Europa? Some people did go on repeated quests, striking out each time they became a bit burnt out with the cushy life of the 46th and a half century. I had to be careful though. None of us had mentioned our discovery even to Dr. D., although we suspected that he had some inkling of it. Only a tiny handful of elders was supposed to know the secrets of the other colonies. Could I become one of those elders? I was not sure I wanted that responsibility either.
There was also the possibility of establishing new Spheres, either elsewhere on Europa or moon- or planet-hopping. We didn’t know how many colonies were out there, but each new one increased the odds of the human species and our current civilization surviving for the long term in something resembling its current form.
I also realized now that our Sphere, seemingly so isolated and well protected, was vulnerable to the elements. Nobody knew exactly what elements might be out there, but now we knew they included at least one biomechanical whale of immense size and power with the potential to smash a hole in our little world and cause it to fill like a water balloon, spinning off gently in an endless gyre of zero buoyancy for all eternity, its billion human charges floating in an icy watery coffin, until one day it would slowly burrow into the muck at the bottom of the hundred kilometer sea.
I learned that a quiet, comfortable life is a good life. But as even ancient humans had known, that routine had to be punctuated by breaks in order to stay fresh. My own sabbatical had taken me to the dark depths of an alien moon, while other’s took them to our home planet Earth, which it was now likely I would never lay eyes on. That made me a bit sad to think of, that I might never breathe the sublime air produced by the living things on the cradle of life. Well, with luck I would have a thousand years or so to contemplate that journey.
***
One Earth year after my homecoming, to the day, I was sitting in my quarters, enjoying the full range of motion offered by my human arms and legs, enjoying a pipe of a socially acceptable recreational substance, when I heard the sound of clopping boots coming down the corridor, followed by a knock upon my chamber door. With many communication options open to us in the 46th and a half century, knocks were in fact quite rare. Doors for that matter were unnecessary, because nobody could sneak up on you without your being alerted, but they had persisted through the millennia for purely psychological reasons, as far as I could tell.
For some moments, I was alarmed. Soon the twinkling eyes, the merry dimples, gave me to know I had nothing to dread. Minutes later, I had a chance to ask Dr. D. what I had been pondering for the past twelve months. “I think perhaps, sir, you may have had a hand in the positive outcome?”
Dr D. chuckled and said, “you probably thought your Quest to be quite unique and profound at the time, I suppose?”
And I thought to myself that although my adventures had indeed seemed quite profound at the time, perhaps I was just one small mammal, sometimes mistaken for a fish, in a very wide pond after all.