XVIII

Angus McNeil, designated ship’s doctor, found himself rig­ging two life-support systems in the ship’s tiny gym, which doubled as the clinic. Bill Hawkins, still wearing his sweat-stinking spacesuit, glued himself to a monitor screen in the wardroom, watching McNeil work, until Jo Walsh finally talked him into getting out of his suit and into fresh clothes.

Tony Groves was staying out of Hawkins’s way. Hawkins blamed Groves for what had happened—he’d persuaded the captain to let them crash—and for that matter, Groves blamed himself.

Force against duration, that was the critical curve, and Groves thought he’d blown it. The fluffy sublimed stuff on the moon’s surface hadn’t been deep enough; the underlying ice had been too hard; the capsule had stopped too fast. Worst of all, the retrorocket hadn’t fired. The cynical faith that Groves and McNeil had expressed—that Mays had planned it all, that he knew exactly what he was doing—had apparently been misplaced.

Hawkins, meanwhile, was driving himself into ecstasies of despair. Unable to help or even get close to the clinic, given the cramped quarters, he was calling up the entries under “kinetic trauma” from the wardroom’s library, trying to make himself an expert.

Case histories, garnered from accident reports in over a century’s worth of space travel, made grim reading: “Onset of 8,500 gees per second averaged to 96 gees in an exposure lasting 0.192 seconds was fatal within 4 hours with massive gross pathology. . . . The 8,500-gee per second rise time to 96 peak is 0.011 second, corresponding to 23 Hertz, which excites whole-body resonance. . . . Orientation of impact force applied to the body relates to axes of internal organ displacements, hydraulic pressure pulsation in blood vessels, and interaction of head, thorax and pelvic masses between spinal couplings. . . .”

Mays had gotten the worst of it, with a broken neck and lower spine and a severed spinal cord. Marianne, lighter, younger—and shorter—therefore less massive and more flex­ible, had broken no bones. But her internal organs had suffered as Mays’s had, having been subjected to “whole-body resonance.”

Hawkins couldn’t bring himself to care if Mays died. But Marianne’s death would desolate him, and for that he would blame himself.


The Manta was coming up from below. Once clear of the boiling core and its turbulence, with communication between the Ventris and the Manta restored, Blake and the professor had been able to monitor events overhead.

The submarine rose from the seething surface of Amal­thea and made its way unaided through the cloying mists of the vacuum, using short bursts of its auxiliary rockets, to the hold of the Ventris. They managed to dock the awk­ward little makeshift spacecraft—which had never been intended to be one for more than a few seconds at a time—without incident. Through the mists, the copper sky above the Ventris held a bright new object, a Space Board cutter keeping station in Amalthea’s wake.

Blake and Forster got through the equipment bay airlock in time to hear the announcement from the ship’s computer over the intercom: CWSS 9, Board of Space Control, now holding in orbit. Inspector Ellen Troy requests permission to board Ventris.

Up on the flight deck, Jo Walsh said, “Permission granted. Advise Inspector Troy to use the main airlock.”

I’m already here, Sparta’s voice on her suitcomm came over the cabin speakers. Outside your door. Any problem coming inside?

“Come aboard,” said Walsh.

Blake and the professor climbed onto the flight deck as Sparta came through the overhead hatch, helmet in hand. “What’s the condition of the casualties?” she asked.

“Not good, Inspector,” said Walsh. “Your timing is ex­cellent, though”—suspiciously excellent, she didn’t bother to add. “We need to get them aboard that cutter of yours and into first-rate medical facilities.”

“Sorry, too late,” said Sparta.

“What do you mean, too late?” Walsh glared at her.

“Cutter’s on its way home.” Sparta nodded toward the navigation flatscreen. At that moment the blip of the cutter brightened and the screen displayed the fast-rising trajec­tory of the departing ship.

“What’s this all about?” Forster demanded.

“The quarantine of Amalthea is officially ended,” Sparta said to Forster. “We’re on our own here, Professor. I urgently need to have a word with you in private.”

Walsh interrupted him before he could reply. “I don’t know what the politics of this are, but I guess they must be pretty important,” said Walsh, who’d put in tens of thousands of hours on the flight decks of Space Board cut­ters. “I hope you’re prepared to accept responsibility for the deaths of those two people, Inspector. You’ve sent away their only good chance to survive.”

Sparta faced her old acquaintance, who managed to con­tain her anger only because her discipline was greater than her pride. “I do take responsibility, Jo. If there’s anything I can do to prevent it, they won’t die.”


Inside the makeshift clinic there was barely enough room for both crash victims. Loose straps kept them from floating away from their pallets in the near-zero gravity, although they would not have gotten far, entangled in webs of tubes and wires that monitored heart rhythms, brain rhythms, lung function, circulatory system, nervous system, diges­tion, chemical and hormonal balances. . . .

On top of damage from torn tissues, broken bones, and displaced internal organs, Mays and Mitchell were suffering from the effects of ionizing radiation absorbed in a lightly shielded capsule during more than eight hours inside Jupi­ter’s radiation belt. That damage posed more of a problem than fractured bones, ruptured flesh, or severed nerves.

Through tubes of microscopic diameter, pre-packaged molecules entered their bodies to course like emergency ve­hicles through their bloodstream. Some were natural bioch­emicals, others were tiny artificial structures, “tailored nanocytes,” that worked not by snipping and pinching and whirring, not like Lilliputian machines, but by lightning catalysis, the complexification and decomplexification of in­terlocking molecules. Frayed muscles and ligaments and organ flesh, torn nerve fibers, fractured bones were sought out; damaged bits were gobbled away and digested, the waste products scavenged for their constituent molecules; replacements were constructed on site from the sea of bal­anced nutrients in which they swam by incalculable swarms of natural and artificial proteins and nucleic acids. . . .

Sparta joined them in the clinic and stayed there the whole time, with the PIN spines beneath her fingers extended and inserted into the ports of the machine monitors. Beneath her forehead, the dense tissue of her soul’s eye reviewed the analyses, partly smelling the complex equations that presented themselves for her mental inspection, partly seeing them written out on the screen of her consciousness. From time to time, several times a second, she made subtle adjustments to the chemical recipe.

Six hours passed—less than half a circuit of Jupiter, for Amalthea was less massive now and had gradually moved itself into a higher, slower orbit.

Life-signs monitors went to yellow: the patients were out of danger. They’d be tired and sore when they woke up, and it would take some getting used to the stiffness of their repaired flesh, but in every measurable respect they were well on their way to good health. Sparta had known it before the monitors announced it. She had already gone to the cabin they’d assigned her and was sound asleep, uncon­scious from exhaustion.


Blake was there when she woke up. It was his cabin too.

She was still wearing the velvety black tunic and pants she’d favored since their reunion on Ganymede. In Blake’s eyes she’d always looked sexy, wearing her usual shiny don’t-touch-me suit or even in a spacesuit, a bag of canvas and metal, but these days she was starting to dress like she didn’t mind people thinking so. It was less a surprise than it might have been when she smiled wearily and began tak­ing off her crushed and slept-in clothes.

“What’s it about . . . Linda?”

Naked now, she sat on the bunk facing him, folding her bare legs into lotus position. “It’s about the Knowledge, and what it really means.” She easily resumed the conversation they’d begun on Ganymede as if no time had passed.

He nodded. “I knew it was something like that.”

“I was never initiated, you know. I was never Free Spirit or Salamander. It’s only from your initiation that I know whatever details I do.”

“I always thought the main thing to know about that was that they really would have let me die—and anybody else who couldn’t get through it.”

“They were looking for supermen,” she said. “But there must have been more to it than pride. Back at the Lodge I spent hours quizzing my father and the commander and the kids on the staff, finding out what they knew of Free Spirit practices, what they had learned of the Knowledge, how they interpreted what they knew. I tried to see if it fit with my own understanding of the Knowledge. I was never taught, you know; they programmed it right into the neu­rons.”

“That’s what they were trying to wipe out?”

She nodded. “I learned a lot this year, some from other people but most from self-guided deep probes of my own memory. But the most insistent image came from me: a vivid experience I had when I was . . . crazy. There was a moment in the darkness in the crypt under Kingman’s place, St. Joseph’s Hall—when I looked into the pit—under the ceiling map of Crux. There was a head of Medusa on the stone that covered it.”

“The Goddess as Death. You told me.”

“In a dream I had, my name was Circe. She was Death, too.”

“You still see yourself that way?” he asked carefully.

“We’re many things, Blake, both of us. In the pit, there were scrolls and the chip of Falcon’s reconstruction and a bronze image of the Thunderer, but what I see whenever I think of that moment are the two little skeletons, so deli­cate—so yellow and old. Infants, identical in size. I knew immediately that they must have been twins. And I knew what they symbolized. Like the king and queen of the al­chemists, they were the Heavenly Twins—and the Heavenly Parents—Gold and Silver, the male Sun and the female Moon.”

“Yes, that’s what Salamander say,” Blake said.

She smiled. “I warned you it was a long story.”

“You’re getting to the part I love. The old-book part.”

“All right. The point is that for thousands of years there’s been a cult of Knowledge, using lots of different names to hide its existence. Free Spirit is a pretty recent one, from the 12th or 13th century. And for all those centuries they’ve been busy putting out false knowledge, to screen their pre­cious truth.”

Blake couldn’t restrain himself. “Egyptian, Mesopota­mian, Greek mythology, it’s loaded with hints. It’s there right in Herodotus, those tales of the Persian Magi—they were the historical adepts of the Knowledge. And Hermes Trismegistus, those books that were supposedly priestly revelations of the ancient Egyptians but were really Hellenistic fictions concocted by worshippers of the Pancreator to put people off the track. Weren’t they marvelous fantasies though, wonderfully vague and suggestive? Some people still believe that stuff today! And the so-called great relig­ions . . . Don’t get me started.”

She smiled. “I’ll try not to.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was a lie,” he said vehemently. “The original Free Spirit heresy itself—poor people thumbing their noses at the church and getting crucified—but those were just the shock troops. Half the prophetae by night were cardinals and bishops by day.” He paused and saw her smiling at him. He laughed and shook his head. “Sorry. You’re supposed to be telling it.”

“You probably know more details than I do. It was al­chemy that intrigued me—all those undecipherable alchem­ical texts going all the way back to Roman times, senseless either as theory or as practice . . . But finally I realized it was as if they were refracting real traditions, horrible traditions, through a distorting lens.” She began to recite then, her voice taking on a raspy, menacing monotone:

“Hail beautiful lamp of heaven,
shining light of the world. Here
thou art united with the moon, here
ariseth the bond
of Mars, and the
conjunction with Mercury. . . . When
these three shall have dissolved not
into rain water but into mercurial
water, into this our blessed gum
which dissolves of itself and is
named the Sperm of the Philosophers.
Now he makes haste to bind and
betroth himself to the virgin bride . . .
and so on.”

“You’ve figured out what that means?” Blake asked.

“The worst of it, anyway. The cult has been building temple planetariums since Neolithic times—in the alchemical writings the temples are disguised as the alembic, the sealed reaction vessel—and to dedicate the foundations, the adepts of the Knowledge would kill and eat a pair of male and female infants, fraternal twins . . . children of cult members, if they could get them. The twins were surrogates for the spiritual leader.”

“They would have eaten him instead?”

“Or her,” Sparta replied. “In the end, there was supposed to be only one such person, who would unite in his or her body the male and female principles; it was the task of the highest circle to bring this sacred and magical creature into being. In every age the Free Spirit has tried, using the most advanced crafts of their own times, to create the perfect human being.”

“The Emperor of the Last Days,” said Blake.

“Yes, and you were the first to tell me about the Emperor of the Last Days—that when the Pancreator returned from the farthest reaches of heaven, from the home star in Crux, the Emperor was expected to sacrifice himself—or herself, if she was the Empress—for the sake of the prophetae.”

“Yeah, the Pancreator is some benefactor,” Blake said. “Like the god of the Bible. A Jealous God, who demands death as a down payment.”

Sparta said, “The ancient symbol of the Emperor, this sacred and perfected personality, was the snake devouring itself—with the legend ‘If you have not All, All is Nothing.’ ”

“All will be well,” Blake murmured.

“They distorted what had once been a reassurance into something sinister. I think the practice of twin sacrifice didn’t stop until the 18th century—when modern science finally started to make an impression on the cult—and it is still echoed in the ritual meals of the knights and elders. The self-sacrifice of the Emperor or Empress, however, is not supposed to be symbolic. . . .”

“But we haven’t heard a peep from the Free Spirit since we squashed the Kon-Tiki mutiny,” Blake said. “We cut the head off that particular snake.”

“They failed because they misinterpreted the Knowledge. When they tried to make me into the Empress, they made plenty of mistakes. I’ve corrected them.”

He studied her, suddenly unnerved. “What you showed me . . . ?”

“I have no intention of sacrificing myself. But Blake, to my own surprise—reviewing everything I’ve been taught and what I’ve learned since—I find that I’ve recovered my belief in the Pancreator. The Pancreator is real. And I think we will soon meet . . . her, or him, or it.”

“That’s superstition,” he said quietly, growing increas­ingly uneasy. “We all think we’re going to find remnants of Culture X—it’s an open secret by now. The Pancreator is a myth.”

“I have no truck with the Free Spirit. Don’t worry. But I am still the Empress.” Her smile had an edge, and her eyes gleamed like sapphires. “And you are my twin.”


Forster assembled the others in the wardroom.

“Angus, will you please tell us what you found inside the capsule?”

The engineer’s face was as stern as a cop’s at an inquest. “Both the communication and ranging systems were delib­erately put out of commission. Someone with a good knowl­edge of celestial navigation reprogrammed the capsule’s guidance computer to depart from the planned trajectory during close approach to Io . . .”

“What are you saying, McNeil?” Hawkins interrupted. “That they tried to kill themselves?”

“. . . specifically in order to rendezvous with Amalthea,” McNeil continued, acknowledging Hawkins’s interruption with a single slow shake of his head. “With the intention of making a soft landing. That part of the rewrite seems to have been a bit miscalculated. On the basis of Doppler input, the main engine did in fact retrofire—unfortunately, a few sec­onds late to do them any good. They’d already hit the ice.”

Jo Walsh grunted, a sound of reluctant satisfaction. “You were right, Tony.”

“Wish I could take comfort in that, but I can’t,” Groves said. “It was a hard, hard landing.”

“If they were dead now, you’d be calling it more than a hard landing,” Hawkins said angrily.

“No more interruptions,” Forster said sternly, fixing Hawkins with a hot and bristling stare. “Everyone will have a chance to speak. For my part, it’s my opinion that Tony’s initial analysis of the situation was accurate. Mays planned the thing carefully. And even without main-engine retrofire, he and his”—Forster’s glance flickered back to the distraught Hawkins—“no doubt innocent companion survived.”

Hawkins’s face was a study in conflict.

Forster went on hastily. “Josepha, make sure we have complete records, safely stored, of everything that has oc­curred. Especially everything that Angus found. Check the monitoring functions regularly.”

“Sir.” Walsh was too cool to show surprise. Everything that had happened was recorded; Board of Space Control regulations required it, and the ship’s automated systems virtually prevented anyone from disobeying. Forster evi­dently expected sabotage.

“It’s my opinion that if Mays’s plan had succeeded, he would have reprogrammed his computer—or perhaps de­stroyed it, if necessary—and claimed that the crash had been caused by malfunction. He is here for one reason, and that is to spy upon us.” For a moment the professor withdrew into his own thoughts. Then he said, “All right. Let me have your comments.”

“They’re going to wake up within the hour, Professor,” said Groves. “They’ll be hungry and curious and eager to get rid of those tubes and wires and straps. How do you want us to handle the moment when it arrives?”

“We have an impossible job to do, and only a few days in which to do it,” Forster said. “I can think of no way that Sir Randolph Mays, once he is awake and mobile, can be prevented from learning what we learn, almost as fast as we learn it.”

“I suppose we can’t keep them tied up?” McNeil said hopefully.

“Out of the question. I want this clearly understood: no one among us is to behave other than according to the high­est dictates of ethics and space law.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll just have to find a way to keep him and his young friend busy.”