Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [141]
The Interdict had never applied to the gasbags. They had insisted on exploring the entire solar system, and had granted equal rights to the pioneers in Fomal-haut. Their surveying craft had often studied the Earth. They made no attempt to contact the local primitives. They had satisfied themselves that the planet was harmless and had returned in utter disinterest. With his two companions, Lindsay had assumed his ultimate disguise. He was passing himself off as an alien, in an attempt to deceive the entire Schisma-trix.
Excitement and triumph had stripped decades from Lindsay. He had turned up his chest cuirass so that his heart could labor in time with his feelings. The forearm monitor embedded in his arm glowed amber with adrenaline. The spacecraft skipped above the bloated South Atlantic and sank deep within the atmosphere at the twilight line. Deceleration pressed Lindsay into the straps of his skeletal chair.
The Lobsters had done a quick, primitive job. The three-man crew was crammed into a ribbed lozenge four meters across. It held two air-frames, a recy-cler, and three acceleration couches, of black elastic webbing over iron frames epoxied to the floor. The rest of the craft was taken up by engines and a garage-like specimen hold. In the hold crouched a surveyor robot, one of the Europan submarine probes.
The dead astronaut's former orifices had been stripped of tissue and outfitted with cameras and scanning systems. The specimen hold had a hatchway installed, but there was no room for an airlock in the crew's compartment. The three of them had been welded in.
Pilot hadn't liked it. Pilot could be trusted, though. He cared nothing for Europa or their plans, but he relished the chance to count coup on the ancestral gravity well. He had been everywhere, from the turbulent fringes of the solar corona to the cometary Oort Cloud at the edge of circumsolar space. He was not human, but for the time being he was one of them. The scanners began to clear. Deceleration faded into the heavy tug of Earth gravity. Lindsay slumped in his seat, wheezing as the cuirass pumped his lungs. "Look what this muck is doing to the stars," Pilot complained melodiously.
Vera reached beside her chair and unfolded her tight-packed accordioned screens. She straightened the videoboard with a pop and smoothed out the creases. "Look, Abelard. There's so much air above us that it's blurring the stars. Think how much air. It's fantastic."
Lindsay stirred himself and examined the view from the aft camera. Behind them, a wall of thunderheads towered to the limits of the troposphere. Black roots furred with rain rose to white anvil heads glowing in the last of twilight. This was one outstretched arm of the storm zone of permanent tempests that girdled the planet's equator.
He expanded the aft view to fill the whole videoboard. What he saw awed him. "Look aft at the storm clouds," he said. "Huge streaks of fire are leaping out of them. What could be burning?"
"Chunks of vegetation?" Vera said.
"Wait. No. It's lightning," Lindsay said. "As in the old phrase,
'thunder and lightning.' " He stared in utter fascination.
"Lightning bolts are supposed to be red, with jagged edges," Vera said.
"These are like thin white branches."
"The disaster must have changed their form," Lindsay said. The storm vanished over the horizon. "Coastline coming up," Pilot said. Sunset fell; they switched to infrareds. "This is part of America," Lindsay concluded. "It was called Mexico, or possibly Texico. The coastline looked different before the ice caps melted. I don't recognize any of this." Pilot struggled with the controls. Vera said, "We're going faster than the movement of sound in this atmosphere. Slow down, Pilot."
"Muck," Pilot complained. "Do you really want to see this? What if the locals see us?"
"They're primitives, they