Twelve

"I thought as much," said Michele.

"You mean this wall of plants defines the edge of the Red Spot?"

"They said it was the edge of their world, didn't they?"

"Then it must be this wall of plants that keeps the place calm and separated from all the storms outside."

"It's a mercy we didn't go through," said Michele, "or we'd have been goners for sure. Though I suppose it must be kilometers thick, because there's no sign of any disturbance as far in as you can see." She said to Cleopatra, "We have observed your planet from above; and if we're right, you have a wise prohibition against going through this grass; there's nothing but terrible storms on the other side."

"That is gratifying to hear," said Cleopatra, "though it simply confirms what many of us suspected from the fact of their being a prohibition."

"Can you imagine the poor people who tried to get through?" mused Michele to us. "Either they'd be trapped in the grass, or be tossed around in the tempests outside for the rest of their lives."

"And if they don't ever die," I said, "it's a version of hell that beats any I've heard on earth." We all shuddered silently.

"Shall we resume our peregrination now?" asked St. Peter. "Our destination is not inordinately far off." "We can't," said Michele. "We're stuck in the grass here."

"Ah," he said. "I was suffering under the misapprehension that you had merely paused for an examination of this peculiar attribute of our flora. But can you not extricate yourselves by tilting the top of the vehicle? It strikes me that the center of mass is outside the imprisoning vegetation."

"God help us, don't tell me that they know more physics than we do too!" said Mike. "He's right, of course. All you have to do, Michele, is fiddle with the mass-reducer of the engine on the first stage, and that'll make that end lighter, and then we'll just gently twist ourselves free."

Michele turned a dial, and the floor began to tilt. "Well, something's happening, anyway," I said. It was a good thing we were strapped to our seats, since we soon found the side wall to be underneath us, and could hear things sliding every which way above us in the first stage. But then we stopped tilting and began to move upward.

"We're free!" said Mike. "Here, let me over there, Michele, and I'll show you the readings I had on the first stage before you added mass to it." He struggled over to where she was and, half embracing her, made the proper adjustments on the mass-reducer console, and the ship righted itself and went back up to where we had been earlier. Mike then resumed his seat beside the thruster console. "Okay," he said, "ready to roll."

"If you would follow us, please," said St. Peter. "You need have no further trepidation; we will be more circumspect in our deviations from a direct course in the future."

So we "resumed our peregrination" in good spirits. Mike, in fact, had a look of almost gleeful triumph on his face for some reason. Suddenly, Cleopatra's voice came over the speaker, "I would commence a cessation of forward velocity now."

"He must have figured out how long it'll take us to stop from what we did last time," I told Mike. "I think you ought to give the same retro burst as before."

Mike did, and we began to slow down, and then drift more and more slowly along, parallel to the wall of grass, and about a kilometer or so away from it. In a matter of a couple of minutes what must have been their city began to emerge from the apparent transparency ahead of and a little above us.

Again, as with plants, there was a mat of some sort on the surface of the ocean, projecting inward from the wall of grass some thirty or forty kilometers (as we later discovered); and from this ceiling, which was a kind of off-white and reflected the light from the bottom, there hung down slender cylinders, in proportion like threads from what hung upon them, but actually about as big around as your wrist. These formed a kind of anchor or trunk to which the buildings themselves were attached at various levels, some from cantilevered projecting rods, and others either on a side of the basic cable or even with the cable going right through them.

In one sense, the principle of the tree, we discovered, was what governed the arrangement of the buildings, so that no one building stood in the shadow of others below it. Their bottoms were all opened to the light, or had--I suppose you would call it floors--that tilted at various angles to let light and shadow into different rooms in the house.

The forces on the cables were practically negligible, we found later, because the buildings' walls were made of something with cells of gaseous hydrogen in them (rather like our Styrofoam, only more flexible and not able to be dented), and were so arranged as to float under water at the depth intended for them; and since the ocean was perfectly calm, with only the minor disturbances of people swimming with perfect streamlining and the animals making rather more awkward movements, there were no lateral forces either.

Design therefore did not have to take stress into account, and as a result the shapes of the buildings was imaginative in the extreme, with aesthetics the main theoretical consideration, and movement around and within the building the practical parameters. There were gently curving walls, bowed walls with huge openings in odd places, serpentine walls, walls that reminded me of the roof of the old chapel at Xavier University in Cincinnati, which I believe was a hyperbolic paraboloid--and a few, very few squared-off buildings like ours. In a way, the effect was rather like a forest of enormous upside-down Christmas trees, with the buildings taking the place of ornaments and garlands, and a kind of tinsel formed by the orangish plants and trees growing (upside down again, of course) from mats either between buildings or on sorts of patios or porches attached to some houses.

Contrasting with the rather garish and more or less uniform orange of the plants were the colors of the walls, which were for the most part light pastels--as varied as the colors of the people, though in general lighter in tone. Interestingly, there were some that seemed to us black, which turned out (after we asked about them) to be either infrared or ultraviolet; the people there could see farther into both ends of the spectrum than we could. They said that they appeared to them to be completely different colors, totally unlike a kind of extension of either red or violet, but as different from either as red was different for us from orange. Of course, no further description of what they actually looked like was possible.

When a person wanted to build a new house, he would select an open site, and he and the neighbors around, above, and below him would get together and discuss what colors he would like the walls, how this would affect the colors of their walls, what shapes he wanted in his rooms, how this would make corridors between the buildings surrounding him, and affect movement and so on.

When I was being told about this later, I raised the question of what happened when the owner wanted something that the people around him didn't like. St. Peter said "It depends on which person feels most strongly," which I took to mean that they were in general willing to yield to each other. When I pressed him, and said, "But suppose two people really want opposite things?"

"Then we take it to court," he said, as if the answer were obvious. I thought that they must be even more litigious than we were, if matters of aesthetics were settled in court cases. "You mean," I said, "that if I want pink walls on my house and my neighbor doesn't happen to like pink walls, I have no right to have my walls pink?"

"I suppose you could phrase it that way," he answered. "on the supposition that the court's decision is in his favor; but we do not think in exactly those terms. For us, having pink walls or not is not a matter of such importance that we would consider it as falling under what I gather you mean by right--that if we did not have it, it would somehow be an injury. In the rare instances when someone does have such a strong attachment to something, it is only he who considers the matter so important, and the other party to the dispute tends to yield. Occasionally, two of the unfortunate people will be at loggerheads over some matter; but even then they tend to separate, since they know that anywhere else they will be allowed to have their own way."

However things were managed, the aesthetics of the city certainly "worked." It wasn't like Paris or Washington, which had a kind of master plan that was built on; from a distance it had the randomness of a forest or of a city like New York; but as you swam into it, you were everywhere confronted with interesting and pleasing combinations of shapes and colors--and I mean everywhere, because of course there would be buildings and plants above and below you as well as on all sides--which changed in fascinating ways as you moved through them.

One of the features of some walls which we found rather disconcerting was that they were holograms. Either the center of the planet was an immense optical pump, making all the light that came from it coherent, more or less as in a laser or series of lasers of different colors acting simultaneously, or the people of Jupiter had devised a method of holography that did not need coherent light.

In any case, on passing down a narrow corridor, as you came abreast of a wall, it would suddenly disappear into a vast forest that stretched off to infinity, or a scene of animals frozen into immobility, or even a whole series of other buildings, in perfect three dimensions which, as in holograms on earth, would change their relative orientations as you moved in front of the picture. It was quite easy to be fooled by such scenes--for us, at least--and was an extreme shock to be about to swim down a street and bump up against a solid wall. The inhabitants of the city either knew where these traps were, or the lack of any motion at all, or perhaps a somewhat greater darkness to the image than would be normal, made them aware of what was real and what was three-D imagery. At least, no one of us ever saw anyone from Jupiter make the kind of mistake that we constantly made.

That drawback aside, it was fascinating to stand off from one of these houses and be able to see perhaps two of its walls and the roof or floor, with the holographic wall opening up a space inside it that was far bigger than the house itself. It gave me the same sort of impression that I received when I looked at the old etchings by M. C. Escher, where he did tricks with perspective and made waterfalls that drove themselves, and people walking up the risers of staircases that others were walking down the treads of. The other fascinating thing was that these were all reflection holograms; the walls were actually solid and opaque, so that if you went into one of these buildings, the forest didn't exist, and there was just an ordinary wall.

Of course, there were holograms on inside walls, too--which might solve the problem, I suppose, if your neighbor liked pink walls and you hated them. You just made the wall which faced him solid with no opening, and stuck on (or however they did it) a hologram of a landscape, and as far as you were concerned inside the house, in that direction there was nothing but kilometers of open countryside. It certainly did eliminate the cramped feeling I have had in apartments in New York; holographic photo murals would put psychiatrists out of business in large cities.

All I am telling here was, naturally, the result of later acquaintance with the city. Our first impression was one of speechless awe. It was so enormous, since it extended above and below as well as laterally; and it was breathtakingly beautiful, but in so foreign a way that it made the heart ache for home. I knew what the first Westerners who penetrated Japan must have felt like, that they had stepped into another world. In our case, this was literally true, and the sublimity of it drove home to my own mind how far, how terrifyingly far, from here was earth and the flora and fauna, the people and places I knew. There was even no sky here. I had gone down to Argentina once to visit my mother's relatives, and was nonplused to find that many of the stars in the night sky were unfamiliar. But there was simply nothing here at all that was anything like anything we had any experience of; and the loneliness of this among all the people that had come over to see us was so strong that I could feel it as something physical around me.

It wasn't that depressing feeling we had at the hydrogen desert that we'd first encountered; now our minds were filled with new things to learn and new people to meet. It was, I suppose, our disorientation at the total strangeness, however interested we might have been in exploring it.

"How long do you think we can stretch our stay here?" said Michele after a long silence.

"Well," I answered, "we should be able to make the food and water last a couple of months if we're careful. Oxygen's no problem, of course; I haven't calculated it, but I'd guess there's enough in the first stage for ten years. To be on the safe side, let's shoot for a month, with a cushion in case we need it. I'll check with earth as soon as we get back into contact." We were now in one of the five-hour blackouts.

"Thank God for that asteroid or whatever it was that hit us!" she said. "I don't think I'm going to be spending much of my time inside here, except maybe to sleep and bring back specimens--if they let us have them."

"Yeah," said Mike. "Remember how the lunar astronauts were so proud of the rocks they brought back? And we have room enough up there" (he pointed to the first stage above us) "to bring back half the planet--and not just rocks this time. Who knows? We might even be able to persuade one of these clowns to come back with us."

"Don't be silly, Mike," she said. "they'd never want to come; and besides, any one of them that got in here would be an explosive mixture, with the hydrogen inside him. He'd probably die outside of hydrogen anyway."

"I thought you were the one who believes they never die. I was thinking we could stick 'em in the hydrogen tank on the third stage--we probably won't be using it. And I wouldn't be too sure they wouldn't like to come with us, at least for a while. After all, we came here."

"I don't know," she said.

Mike looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. "And, of course, if they can't be harmed against their will, then we've got no problem. If we decide to shanghai one of 'em and take him back home with us, he'll be none the worse for it."

"Of all the disgusting ideas I ever heard!"

"I knew that'd get to you!" he laughed.

It took a split second for her to realize that he had been setting her up all this time. "You rat!" she cried, looking for something to throw, when over the speaker came the St. Peter's new composite voice, "We wish to bid you welcome to--" and he flashed into the intricate series of shapes that was the name for his city.