Sanchez and Jason sat together on the bridge as the Argo once again sailed the Black Sea, accelerating constantly under the pressure of the sunlight on her great gossamer sail. The aluminium-coated mylar was ripped in spots, and the image on the sail's face had faded with age, but the five intersecting rings were still faintly visible.
"I still can't believe you managed to build a trading civilization on these old Olympic yachts," Sanchez said. "I thought the Polynesians were intrepid, but you..."
"The Polynesians?"
"A people on Earth. They sailed halfway across the planet on fragile little rafts, navigating by nothing more than their knowledge of the stars, and the clouds, and the birds."
Jason had recently seen his first image of the Pacific Ocean, and he still found it beyond belief. "Well, a lot of Belters died in space," he said. "But the populations of our little islands were growing again and there was a lot of pressure to expand."
"You were lucky to have these ships," said Sanchez. "I remember the Interplanetary Olympics the year before we shipped out to Tau Ceti. The whole Belt was obsessed with the yacht races. Every little tin-can colony had one. Sweet little ships, though. Simple to sail and maintain. Standardized design by interplanetary rule. Low-tech throughout to test the crew's skill, except for the on-board computer. And I must say, Athena, your series has really exceeded its warranty."
"Thank you, Sanchez." Athena's dulcet voice filled the cabin as the computer screen sorted through data and images with dizzying speed. "But my job was relatively simple, and one that I was created for: astrogation and companionship. It was the island computers, designed for little more than traffic-control and life-support maintenance, who had to learn how to run whole societies in strict quarantine, with high technology collapsing all about them. It was no wonder that so many went mad from first-directive stress." The memory of her own madness had been completely erased.
"Well," Sanchez laughed, "you did manage to bring the Argonauts through the Wandering Rocks to awaken the Earthborn Men, didn't you? Now, if you can get us to Jupiter, we might get our hands on enough fuel to get the Aries running again, so we can find out what the hell we've done to the solar system. Here's the results you wanted, Jason."
Jason peered at the screen. "So that’s Chiron."
"Yes. An asteroid between Jupiter and Saturn, just as you were told. It’s extremely isolated, which may be why your mentor survived the plague. Then again, he may have been immune, or his cyborg systems may have kept him alive. Data from Chiron stopped coming shortly after the second wave, so I suspect there’s nobody alive there now. But we have employment records from that time, and there are a number of cyborg pilots listed..."
"That's him," Jason said. A picture of his beloved mentor, much younger and with fewer artificial parts, had appeared on the screen. The boy’s eyes filled with tears.
Sanchez put a hand on his shoulder. "When we get around to putting up statues," she said, "we’ll have to put up one of him. Because without him, the Earthborn Men would be dying in their sleep."
***
Jupiter, as Davis described it to Hercules, was not a god, but a world--a world of cloud surrounded by lesser worlds of fire and ice. Davis described a thriving civilization that consisted mostly of robots, which Hercules had always considered mythological in nature. Jupiter, it seemed, was a vast fuel-depot, for its atmosphere was made of the stuff that ships like Aries burned in their furnaces. One of the moons, Io, was a chemical factory, so disturbed by its nearness to Jupiter that it turned itself inside-out with regularity, as chemicals from the interior constantly bubbled up from the depths and exploded across the surface. The other major moons were vast icefields. The ice itself was valuable enough to be mined, but its impurities were even more so, for metals and hydrocarbons of all sorts had been bombarding the moons' surfaces for billions of years.
But these moons lay under a lethal rain of radioactivity, certain death to humans without heavy shielding. Except for tunnels deep under the ice of the major moons, and residential islands in distant orbit, the Jovian system belonged to robots.
Robots, that is, and men like Hercules.
"Jupiter's magnetic field," Davis said, "is offset from its geometric figure, creating an eccentric cam effect. As a result, there's a radiation-free zone extending about 7000 kilometres above the cloud-tops on one side of the planet. There is a colony, if it hasn't been lost, whose orbit is calculated to reach perijove in that zone and apojove near Callisto. It's only at these two points that small vehicles can arrive or depart safely. The rest of the time, the colony is bathed in 35 MeV radiation and only its heavy shielding protects the inhabitants. The gravity in the lowest level of the colony is 2.7 gees, the same as that of Jupiter's, and at Tiryns, your home island."
"This can't be a co-incidence," Hercules said.
"It's not. Tiryns was founded to breed Jovian cloudminers--people with the bone-structure and muscle mass to support their weight in a 2.7 gravity field without cyborg limbs or the kind of power-suit that I'd have to wear. You can't do delicate work in a power-suit, and cyborgs were becoming scarce in my day."
"Why?"
"Because people learned how to avoid the sort of accidents that necessitated the replacement of limbs by mechanical contrivance, and doctors learned how to grow new ones. Purposely sacrificing limbs to advance one’s career became unfashionable, while breeding children to work in high gravity became acceptable." Davis shrugged. "In another day, the opposite might have been true."
Hercules shook his head in wonder. "Then, cyborgs like Chiron are not the demonic spawn of illicit embraces with robots."
"Nope. Afraid not."
"I owe an apology to Jason. And all the Herculean sacraments--the Serpent Ceremonies, the Lion Ceremony, the Thespian and Hylasian Rites, the Twelve Labours, Omphalian Service, the Deianiran Rites, and the final sacraments of Cremation and Apotheosis--they really did come from Jupiter, but not in the sense I always understood."
"Sorry about that," Davis laughed. "If you want your faith renewed, talk to Hassan. He says Jupiter was created by God to be the fuel source for the solar system, and the asteroid belt to replenish the resources Earth used up in getting to space. Of course, he also said that God put the stars light-years apart as a quarantine measure, but that didn't stop him from going to Tau Ceti and bringing back... What the hell is Omphalian Service? Do you have to wear a dress?"
"Sorry. Secret rites. Can't talk about it."
***
"You'll find that all artificial intelligence programming is based on these three laws," Federova said, "whether it's the simplest manufacturing robot, the most complex ship's brain, or the most sophisticated android." Atalanta gazed at her teacher, the figures on the screen forgotten. "The first law is so powerful that a robot can't even contemplate harm coming to a human being without psychological disturbance. The original idea was to prevent robots from injuring human beings by accident, and to stop their use in war, but the result is that certain hazardous environments are forbidden to human beings entirely because robots can't function when human beings are present. They have to delegate work, solve problems, repair and replace themselves without human help, so what you have is a robot society. In my day, the solar system was full of them.
"The second and third laws are less powerful, but still important. A robot is an expensive item and has to preserve its own existence, but sometimes they have to perform tasks which will result in their own destruction. Some of the simpler robots are programmed to shut themselves off before reaching that point, however, so some stupid human won't destroy an entire operation with a thoughtless command.
"An android, of course, is a general-purpose robot so human that it even looks human. They have been banned at certain times in certain places, out of fear that they would be mistaken for human beings--by other human beings of course. A robot can always tell. In other societies, they were given political rights and treated in most ways like humans. Where I came from, it was considered improper to ask if someone was real or artificial."
"There ought to be basic laws for human beings," Atalanta said. "If no human being could allow another to come to harm, the Aries crew couldn't have deserted and spread the plague."
Fedorova nodded agreement. "The Captain once said all philosophy and religion is a search for rules the study of robotics began with. I confess I wish my fellow human beings were as easy to understand as robots and computers."
Atalanta studied Fedorova's delicate and perfect profile. Yes, she thought, you would prefer machines as companions, the way many Arcadians like myself prefer the company of animals. Professor Fedorova possessed flawless beauty, a lovely voice, great intelligence and poise and dexterity, but she seemed awkward and uncomfortable in social settings.
"Sleeping Beauty," Atalanta said.
Fedorova looked at her. "Pardon me?"
Atalanta blushed. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking of the little girl aboard your ship. The one we called Medea. She thought you were Sleeping Beauty and expected Jason to wake you with a kiss."
"Why?" Fedorova's gaze was penetrating; those blue eyes missed little. "Is he the handsome prince?"
Atalanta found herself blushing again. "No. Not to me. He might be able to beat me in the footrace, but he's not my type." She hesitated for a moment, then placed her hand on Fedorova's cool shoulder in a gesture that was both casual and intimate.
Fedorova seemed about to speak but turned back to the screen in apparent confusion and went on with the lesson.
***
Jason was alone on the bridge, trying to understand some of the incredible mountain of data Captain Wang had given Athena for the Argonauts to study, when Orpheus appeared on the screen from the Aries. Jason was still amazed at the way the Earthborn Men conversed so casually over great distances, like the Guardians they had created in their own image, but Orpheus had adapted instantly. His keyboard could be used to access the vast library of the Aries, and the bard was beside himself.
"Argo," he said, "this is Aries. We are transferring Doctor Singh's last medical log entry." Captain Wang and Doctor Hassan were visible behind him, hard at work on their own stations. "Jason," he added, "you should listen to this."
The face of the man called Doctor Singh appeared on the screen, looking so haggard and worn as to seem on the verge of death, which he was--centuries ago.
"Captain," he said, "by now you are aware of the technical details. The plague virus was brought aboard in a slow-moving sloth-like creature with an extremely long lifespan. Unfortunately, cryogenic hibernation reduced the human metabolism to levels which could support a mutated form of the virus with an incubation period of 55 years. And you know the details of how quarantine was broken by members of my own staff. You know better than I the implications for the solar system, because I will be mercifully dead in a matter of hours, and you, if you are listening to this, will have been awakened some considerable time in the future. Hecate promises to keep you alive as long as possible; the other cryogenics systems have been infected, but yours has not--at least, not yet.
"You have awakened to a hell of a shock. When we began our journey, we knew that everyone we left behind would be dead when we returned, and we had been told that society would have changed. But we had every reason to believe that our fellow crewmembers would be awakened with us, and that the solar system would still be civilized. Instead, you are alone, and the worlds you left behind may have fallen into barbarism or worse. Judging by the number of naturally immune individuals among this crew, affected populations may have been reduced below survival numbers.
"You can expect to be profoundly affected psychologically by this, but there are a few points I want to emphasize. You cannot be blamed for this catastrophe. Our journey was a system-wide project, supported by almost everyone, and the dangers had been well debated. We were chosen for our positions on board because we were the best at what we do. The alien life-forms we brought back were exhaustively studied and shown to be harmless. That some stray cosmic ray happened to penetrate our shielding and mutate some virus to a form that could affect human beings, that cryogenics gave it enough time to evolve into something lethal, that it was immune to every countermeasure our medics could bring to bear upon it, and that some of the crew panicked and broke quarantine--none of this is your fault.
"It was my decision not to waken you or anyone else. In the end, events moved too fast for us, and cryogenics was infected. It was only the ship's design that kept you isolated. Possibly, your authority could have kept the deserters from jumping ship for a while, for as long as you remained alive. As far as I can see, the only thing you could have done would have been to vaporize the ship and everyone aboard. I don't know if you could have given that order. My own opinion is that by the time it became clear that such a step would have to be taken, it would have been too late.
“So, I want to tell you that you are not to blame for having survived, and that it is imperative you do so now--you and anyone who may have been revived with you.
"We were trained to study unknown solar-systems and alien life. We all spent our youth in this endeavour, and some of us a good part of middle-age too. You thought your fieldwork was done and you were coming home to a quiet life of lecturing and research. But you have a new solar-system to explore--your own. Aries has to be repaired, re-fuelled, and re-companied, and it has to be taken to Earth, where millions may have survived. If they have lost space-travel, they will never regain it, for Earth has no metals or energy left that do not come from space.
“This ship may be the only functioning hospital, the only complete library, the only fusion-power plant, the only source of technological knowledge in the solar system. And you and whatever may exist of your crew are the only people in existence who know how to make it work. If there is to be a Renaissance, it will have to begin with you." He sat for a moment in silence. "My symptoms are becoming worse. I will be stepping out an airlock soon, as that is a much faster way to go. Good luck, Captain." He reached forward and signed off.
Profoundly affected, Jason turned and drifted down the corridor toward his bunk. As he passed by the open hatch of the Earth-born's cabin, he saw Davis and Sanchez, as naked as he had first seen them in cryo-sleep, coupling silently in the air. Davis' hirsute bulk and Sanchez' smooth, illustrated muscles glistened with perspiration in the dim light. They were glorious, godlike, and exquisitely beautiful creatures.
Behind them, he saw Fedorova at work at her station, oblivious to the feral drama being played out behind her, until Sanchez reached out with one hand and said, "Nadia, come." Without a word, she left her station and slipped gracefully out of her ship-suit in a single, fluid, tumbling motion. Sanchez turned in Davis' great arms to welcome her with parting lips.
Jason had never been told that watching was impolite. What followed was a profound revelation to him. Fedorova's movements were balletic and graceful, Sanchez was catlike and ferocious, and Davis was both tender and fiercely possessive.
Jason retired with mixed emotions. He was thoroughly aroused, and yet he felt deeply lonely, and yet again he was profoundly joyful at the Earthborn's libidinous defiance of the near extinction of their race.