Mahnmut, who had never experienced a gravity-load greater than Europa’s less than one-seventh Earth-g, tried to imagine 21,000 such g’s. He couldn’t.

“During acceleration, the ship, including The Dark Lady, will be packed with gel,” said Orphu of Io. “We’ll be as comfy as circuit chips in a gelatin mold.” It was obvious that Orphu had been involved in planning the spacecraft and Ri Po in observing the two worlds. Koros III had probably had advance warning about his command role in such an expedition. It seemed to Mahnmut that only he had been left out of the preparation for this mission, probably because his role—driving The Dark Lady through the Martian seas—was so unimportant. Perhaps, he thought, I should opt out of this expedition after all.

Proust? he tightbeamed the big Ionian.

Too bad we aren’t going to Earth, my friend. We could visit Stratford-on-Avon. Buy a souvenir mug.

It was an old joke between them, but in the present context, it seemed funny again. Mahnmut tightbeamed a decent simulacrum of Orphu’s heavy laughter and the big construct rumbled so heavily in return that all four of the others could hear it through the thick air.

Ri Po was not laughing. He was obviously computing. “Such a scissors’ fling would give us an initial velocity of almost two-tenths light speed, and even after drastic magnetic scoop deceleration in-system, we’ll have an approach velocity of about one-thousandth light speed—more than 300 kilometers per second. We’ll get to Mars quickly enough, even while it’s on the far side of the sun as it is now. But has anyone given any thought as to how we might slow down once we get there?”

“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, his rumbling abating. “We’ve given that some thought.”

Even after thirty Jovian years of existence, Mahnmut had no one to say good-bye to on Europa. His exploration partner, Urtzweil, had been destroyed in a closing lead near Pwyll Crater eighteen J-years earlier, and Mahnmut had grown close to no other conscious entity since then.

Sixteen hours after the conference, Conamara Chaos Central ordered dedicated orbital tugs to lift The Dark Lady out of an open lead and boost it into orbit, where hard-vac moravecs, supervised by Orphu of Io, tucked the submersible into the waiting Marscraft and let ancient inter-lunar induction haulers truck the stack downhill to Io. Mahnmut and the other three expedition moravecs had briefly discussed naming the spacecraft, but imagination failed them, the impulse faded, and from that point on they referred to it only as “the ship.”

Like most spacecraft constructed by moravecs in the thousands of years since spacefaring began, the ship was something less than elegant, at least by classical standards. It was one hundred and fifteen meters long and was comprised primarily of buckycarbon girders, with wrinkled radiation-shield fabric wrapped around module niches, semiautonomous sniffer probes, scores of antennae, sensors, and cables. This ship was notably different from Jovian-system machines primarily because of its gleaming magnetic dipole core and its sporty outrider deflectors. Packed away in its lumpy snout were four fusion engine bells and the five horns of the Matloff/Fennelly scoop. A ten-meter-wide pimple on the stern held the folded boron sail. Neither scoop nor sail would be needed until the deceleration part of the journey and the fusion engines had nothing to do with the acceleration phase of the mission.

Mahnmut stayed inside The Dark Lady—now packed with gel—while Koros III and Ri Po rode sixty meters away in the forward control module they’d come to call the bridge. The plan was for Ri Po to handle all navigation chores during their brief mad-mouse ride in, while Koros III served as titular commander of the expedition. The plan also called for the Ganymedan to transfer to Mahnmut’s submersible shortly before The Dark Lady—emptied of its gel—was to be dropped into the Martian atmosphere. Once in the oceans of Mars, Mahnmut was to serve as a taxi driver—delivering Koros III to whatever landing point the commanding Ganymedan chose for his land-based spying. Koros had been downloaded various specifics of the mission that would not concern Mahnmut.

Orphu of Io had installed himself in his crèche on the outer shell of the ship behind the ten solenoid toruses and in front of the sail-cable struts, and was connected to the bridge and the submersible by every sort of voice, data, and comm link imaginable. Most of his nontechnical conversation was with Mahnmut.

I’m still most interested in your theory of the dramatic construct of the sonnets, my friend. I hope we live long enough for you to analyze more of the cycle.

But Proust! responded Mahnmut. Why Proust when you can spend all of your existence studying Shakespeare?

Proust was perhaps the ultimate explorer of time, memory, and perception, replied Orphu.

Mahnmut made a static sound.

The scarred Ionian sent his rumble through the audio line. “I look forward to convincing you that both can be enjoyed and learned from, Mahnmut, my friend.”

Koros III’s message came over the common line—Everyone might want to raise bandwidth on the visual lines. We’re approaching Io’s plasma torus.

Mahnmut opened all visual feeds as requested. He preferred to watch external events through Orphu of Io’s lenses, but at the moment the more interesting views were from the forward ship cameras, and not necessarily in the visible-light spectra.

They were accelerating toward the great red-and-yellow-blotched face of Io, coming at the moon from below the plane of the ecliptic and making ready to pass over its northern pole just before flying into the Io–Jupiter flux tube.

During the short trip in from Europa, Orphu and Ri Po had downloaded pertinent information about this region of Jupiter space. A creature of Europa, Mahnmut had always focused primarily on sonar and some visual-light perception within the black oceans there, but now he perceived the Jovian magnetosphere as the loud, crowded place it was. Looking ahead on the decametric radio bandwidths, he could see Io’s Jupiter-thick plasma torus and, at right angles to the torus, Io’s flux tube running like wide horns to Jupiter’s north and south poles. Far beyond Jupiter and its moons, beyond the magnetopause, Mahnmut could sense the bow shock turbulence crashing like great white waves on a hidden reef, could hear the upstream Langmuir waves singing in the magnetic darkness past that reef, and could pick out the ion acoustic waves crackling after their long voyage uphill from the sun. The sun itself was little more than a very bright star from Jupiter space.

Now, as the ship swept up and over Io and into the flux tube, Mahnmut could hear the Whistler-mode chorus and hiss that the little moon made as it plowed through its own plasma torus, eating its own tail, as it were. He could see the deep bands of equatorial emissions and had to tone down the decametric and kilometric radio roar coming from the flux tube itself. All of Galilean space was a furnace of hard radiation and electromagnetic activity—Mahnmut had spent his whole existence with its background roar in his virtual ears—but passing from torus to flux tube so close to Jupiter sent violent cascades of tortured electrons hissing around their ship like banshees screaming to be let in a beleaguered house. It was a new experience and Mahnmut found it a bit unnerving.

Then they were in the flux tube and Koros III shouted “Hang on!” before sound channels were drowned out by the hurricane roar.

The Io plasma torus was a giant doughnut of charged particles stirred up within the trail of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases left behind—and then accumulated again—by Orphu’s violent home moon. As Io sped in its fast 1.77-day orbit around Jupiter, slicing through the gas giant’s magnetic field and plowing into its own plasma torus, it created a huge electrical current between Jupiter and itself, a double-horned cylinder of incredibly concentrated magnetic surges called the Io flux tube. The tube connected to Jupiter’s north and south magnetic poles and created wild auroras there, while the horns of the flux tube itself carried a constant current of some five megaamperes and constantly produced more than two trillion watts of energy.