Divisions (2009)
“‘I always imagined Jupiter from Callisto would fill half the sky, and that everything else would be dark.’ ‘You’re getting blasé, girl,’ I told her. ‘Jupiter’s more than a million miles away, and it still looks big enough to me.’ It was 08.48 GMT on the tenth day. We were in a low orbit around Callisto, its surface of cratered ice with its characteristic appearance of pelletstruck glass. Valhalla’s bull’s-eye shock-rings slid by below us, giant Jove rose above the horizon in front of us. On bot...h bodies the works of mind were evident: the honeycomb upwellings of the Jovian hive, still monstrous to my eyes after two centuries; on Callisto the bright green-and-gold bubbles of the equatorial crater villages, the dark towers of the defence-lasers, the long white lines of the mass-driver tracks along which blocks of ice were hurtled into space. Callisto has four times more water in its icy crust than Earth has in all its oceans; slingshot around Jupiter, those blocks of ice were sent on slow transfer orbits to the Inner System—the water we’d picked up in Earth orbit had come all the way from here, and it was still worth doing; far more efficient than hauling water up Earth’s deep gravity-well or scraping frost from Luna’s polar shadows.MoreLess
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