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  I looked out the window-porthole. The plane was racing over the nether clouds, so that I could see monstrous cloud shapes passing like armies. Close clouds fascinated me; they did not exist in space or on airless moons. It was dusk at the moment at this part of Jupiter; though I could not see the direct rays of the sun, I did see the relative brightness of the cloud surface below us and the faint glow of the cloud layer above. We were zooming between the two, a sandwich of clouds, and the experience was moderately surrealistic. I could imagine us traveling forever in this limbo, traversing the vast entirety of Jupiter, never roosting, never resting. The notion had a certain muted appeal.

  Then, all too soon, we were warned to fasten our seat belts, and the deceleration and descent commenced. The airplane simply turned around and accelerated backward in the manner of a spaceship, its wings reoriented appropriately. I dare say this particular maneuver would not have been feasible in the days of the primitive aircraft of old Earth, which were strictly one-way affairs, but, of course, technology has advanced in half a millennium. For that matter our cruising velocity would have been well beyond escape velocity on Earth. But Jupiter’s escape velocity is quintuple that of Earth’s, so we were in no danger of flying free. I used to wonder how the escape velocity could be quintuple when the gee was only two and a half times Earth’s, until I realized that the total size of Jupiter’s gravity well is much larger than Earth’s; size does make a difference.

  We dropped through the turbulence of the cloud layer and homed in on the city of Ybor. This bubble seemed small, only half Nyork’s diameter and perhaps only an eighth the population, but it was still a big city. There was nothing like this out on the moons.

  Landing was routine, with similar procedure as for the shuttle. Soon Spirit and I were ensconced at a downtown hotel.

  There is no need to detail the details of our settling in. We elected not to reside in Ybor itself, as most of our lives had been spent in space, and even our planetary residence—technically the large moons of Jupiter shouldn’t be called planets, but we do think of them that way—had been in a smaller dome than this. We simply felt more comfortable in small vessels. So we checked the ads and explored the region, renting a tiny bubble-car to travel to the various addresses. For Ybor, like Nyork and the other major cities of North Jupiter, did not exist in solitude; it was the center of a metropolitan collection of bubbles of varying sizes. There was constant local traffic to and from Ybor’s nether port, and we joined it.

  Our car was only ten feet in diameter, with harnesses for five riders. Its thick hull was translucent so that we could see in every direction. It had a powerful fan that collected atmosphere from around the bubble and blasted it behind, propelling the bubble forward. There was also a compressor that operated when the fan was idle, so that gas could be ejected with much greater force for emergency use. The fan and compressor were powered by oxygen; that is, the oxygen combined with the ambient hydrogen for combustion, yielding water. The oxygen had been processed originally from water, as there is virtually no free oxygen in the Jupiter atmosphere. It is not entirely coincidence that the occupied level is right where water precipitates.

  I suppose I should clarify something here. If oxygen is the source of our power, and it requires energy to obtain it, whence comes the power to produce it? The answer is CT—contra-terrene matter, popularly called antimatter or null-matter—the same thing that powers the ships of the Navy. Rods of null-iron are merged with rods of terrene iron, converting into total energy: that is what powers our civilization. Iron is used because it can be handled magnetically; it is of course impossible to handle contra-terrene matter safely any other way. Even with magnets it’s tricky; special attract-repulse circuits are necessary to prevent the CT from flying into the magnets themselves and blowing up the entire installation. So CT power is no small-bubble matter; only major cities and military vessels use it directly, with scattered exceptions. CT merging is used to generate electricity, which is then used for most other purposes, including the production of oxygen, which is then the fuel of choice for small motors, such as this one in the car-bubble.

  And where does the CT iron come from? Well, much of the best iron comes from Mars, which was thought to be a barren desert-planet until the Moslem sheikhs discovered a huge natural cache of the power-metal. Oh, there is iron elsewhere; the rocky fragments in the vicinity of the major planets have it, and Jupiter and Saturn are major producers of it. But the iron of Mars is of high quality and easy to mine, and the Martian reserves are huge; this is the source of choice. That gives Mars economic leverage disproportionate to its physical or political importance as a planet. The pure terrene iron is processed in special gravity laboratories sponsored by Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, popularly called Black Hole Labs; the actual mechanism is beyond my understanding, but basically a rod of terrene iron is subjected to such gravitational stress that it inverts, becoming CT iron. Thus gravity-shielding technology is the ultimate source of civilized power. This, again, is no small-bubble operation; only the major planets can handle it. Thus a small planet like Mars has the leverage of the raw material, while a large planet like Jupiter has the leverage of Black Hole technology. It leads to interesting economic interactions.

  Yet power does not derive from nothing, either politically or physically. What is the ultimate source of this chain? Opinions differ; it seems that either it is the literal destruction of matter, which might have a deleterious consequence for our universe in the course of a few billion years, or it is the gravity well of the major planets, which might eventually render them into minor planets. Assuredly the human species will be long departed before anything like this occurs.

  At any rate we fanned along the highway, and it was another novel experience. The route was actually a jet of atmosphere, one of the myriad that twist along in the eddy-currents of the levels of the gale that is the Jupiter environment. Here at the southern edge of the equatorial band the turbulence was greater than at most places, but actually it wasn’t obvious; it simply meant that there were some currents that moved faster than the average, and some that moved slower, and some that twisted around like serpents. They flexed constantly, but the change in position was usually only a few feet per day, and any given jet tended to return to its original position after a few days. This made car-bubble traffic convenient; it was only a matter of blowing one’s bubble into the appropriate current, then riding the current to one’s destination. It wasn’t fast but it conserved energy.

  The channels were bounded by glowing netting, so it was impossible to get lost in the wider atmosphere. Cars thronged this one, virtually touching each other. Brightly colored police bubbles tried to keep order, but there weren’t enough of them. Private bubbles jockeyed endlessly for position, narrowly avoiding collisions. I became nervous; this was entirely too crowded.

  We passed an intersection. The two jets of atmosphere passed each other skew, not actually touching, but the netting connected so that bubbles could move from one to the other. They did so in a tangled three-dimensional cloverleaf pattern.

  We maneuvered from jet to jet, Spirit studying the map on the car’s little vid-screen while I watched the other bubbles and sought to avoid the collisions that their reckless motions threatened. The cars were of all colors, and of course had transparent domes, so that I was reminded of the strings of glistening soap bubbles we blew as children. The scene was really rather pretty when viewed that way: lines of bright spheres against the backdrop of the layer of clouds.

  After a brief trip that seemed much longer, we reached the suburb-bubble we sought. This was Pineleaf, a private development. Its radius was only one hundred feet, and its apartment cells were all on one level, so that its comfortable capacity was three hundred people. The volume of a sphere varies by the cube of its radius, so the little ones suffer. Ten one-hundred-foot spheres do not equal the capacity of one one-thousand-foot sphere. Far from it! It took a thousand of those little spheres to match the big one. That was on
e reason most people lived in the big ones: rents were cheaper. But our Navy retirement pensions put us in an income bracket that permitted upper-middle-class residence, and that meant a little bubble.

  Even so, we were surprised as we blew up to it. “It’s smaller than a spaceship,” Spirit remarked.

  Of course the larger ships of the Jupiter Navy were of entirely different construction, but I shared her impression. Residential developments were supposed to be larger than ships.

  We approached the entrance and locked on to an admission port. We opened the hatch and climbed through, into the receiving chamber of the bubble. We gave the suited attendant our car key, and he climbed into our vehicle and sealed it off. He would take it to one of the parking hooks, secure it, and return to this office; that was why he was suited. We were in atmosphere, but the pressure was five bars; we might as well have been under water. The attendant’s suit was braced for the pressure; we, as civilians, wore no protective gear. This, too, was a little eerie to one accustomed to the rigors of space duty, but I knew we would get used to it. Civilian ways are not military ways, after all; it was our job to adapt. When we were ready to leave, another attendant would bring our car around to the south pole egress for us.

  “Oops,” Spirit murmured. “I think we should have tipped him.”

  I had heard of that. Tipping was a pernicious custom that centuries of consumer dissatisfaction had not succeeded in eradicating. Employees of establishments expected to be paid token sums for performing their offices, the implication being that if such graft were not forthcoming, damage to the visitor’s property might result. But this, too, was part of civilian life.

  Inside the bubble the construction was typical but simpler than that of the big cities. There was not only an open lift for the descent to the residential cylinder, but also steps and a simple slide. We took the slide. It was banked to compensate for centrifugal acceleration; objects do not fall in an apparent straight line within a spinning sphere, as I have mentioned. This bubble completed its revolution in ten seconds, so we were picking up a lot more lateral motion than vertical. Regardless, we slid down like children, and for an instant I felt as if I were fifteen again, and Spirit twelve. Even at that age, she had been some girl.

  “Do you still have your finger-whip?” I asked her as we came to rest at the base.

  “I can get one,” she replied, laughing. The finger-whip had been a juvenile weapon, a length of nearly invisible line weighted at the end, which attached to one of her fingers. When someone attacked her, she could sling that line at his face with devastating effect. It requires skill to use such a whip well, and she had had that skill. Today, the same coordination manifested in her deadly accurate aim with a laser-pistol.

  We made our way to the registration office, which was beside a tiny park. Perhaps back on old Earth plants had been taken for granted, but here at Jupiter the semblance of nature was prized. A flower garden, a bit of lawn, some trimmed bushes, a dwarf pine tree, the smell of green, growing things—it was indeed precious. The moment we stood in that park, all four hundred square feet of it, we wanted to live here. Surely the proprietors of the Pineleaf subdivision had set up the park there for that very reason, to sweep prospective renters off their emotional feet so that they would not balk at the price. We knew that, yet we felt its impact. Man is a feeling creature more than a rational one.

  We rented an apartment of two cells. It had sanitary and cooking facilities, two beds, closet space, and a picture window looking up into the central air space of the bubble, which made it seem roomier. The feeling of elbow room is also important to the human animal, even when we know it is illusory.

  We performed the routines of settling in, getting our phone number listed, mailbox assigned, learning the peculiarities of this particular bubble, meeting our neighbors, and so on. There was just a hint of reserve in some cases, which I suspect was the covert objection of Saxons to having Hispanics in their midst. Theoretically Jupiter is an amalgamated society, free from interculture friction, but in practice it falls short, as we had seen in Nyork. Well, I hoped to do something about that, in due course. For now, we just wanted to get along.

  The routine was not completely without event. After our first night we emerged to discover the words Spic Go Home crudely lettered on our door. We made no complaint but simply got out cloths and detergent and went to work scrubbing the door clean. A neighbor lady, a retired Saxon, heard the activity, came out, perceived the situation, and spoke up. “That’s vandalism! I’ll complain to the management!”

  “No need, Señora,” Spirit said, thus deliberately emphasizing our Hispanic nature. “It is a small thing.”

  “So is burning crosses,” the woman snapped. “I want you to know that this is a decent neighborhood; we don’t condone such behavior here. I shall see that it doesn’t happen again.”

  We introduced ourselves. She was Mrs. Croft, a widow, and after she had helped us clean up the door she invited us in for tea. In our presence she called the management and described without emphasis what had occurred.

  “I will apologize to them immediately,” the manager said. “That man is Captain Hubris, the hero of the Belt; we are honored to have him here, and I am shocked that he should be treated this way here at Pineleaf!”

  Mrs. Croft terminated the call and turned to me. “You did not tell me you were a hero,” she reproved me gently.

  “I am a civilian now,” I said. “Does it make a difference?”

  She laughed. “Of course not.” Then she reconsidered. “Not to me, at any rate; I am not concerned with military matters. But perhaps the manager ...”

  We nodded. There were different types of prejudice, negative and positive. The manager might not think much of Hispanics, but he evidently did appreciate war heroes. We had not told him about my Belt connection; he must have recognized me from the news holos. It seemed that the positive more than balanced the negative, in this case. A poor, unfamous Hispanic might have triggered a different response. This, too, was part of the reality of civilian life.

  That was about all there was to the episode, and there was no repetition. But I think it correctly signaled the situation. Prejudice, racism, and unprovoked hate do exist in our society, though normally they are masked; they do their mischief in darkness. But they are more than compensated by the elements of openness, tolerance, and fairness that manifest in light. The forces of bigotry, however directed, are an evil that must be constantly curbed, but they can never be completely eradicated. I suspect they are part of the makeup of the species of man. There must be some survival potential in them, as there evidently is in the similar percentage of individuals who are left-handed, homosexual, or who have rare blood types. Nature does not encourage deviance capriciously; she always has reason, though we may not comprehend it, and we try to interfere at our peril. Actually it is dangerous to trust strangers too readily, and bigotry may be the logical extension of that natural caution, just as war is the extreme example of competitive spirit.

  Once settled in, we proceeded to our next task: the location of Megan. One might suppose that my sister would have little interest in helping me pursue a woman, but Spirit has always been my left hand. We could justify this quest in practical terms: Megan was perhaps the most knowledgeable person, politically, in the society of Jupiter who was not already committed to some other program. If I wished to enter politics with some chance of success, here was the advice that would be most useful. So I had been assured by an outfit in a position to know. It was indeed my intent to pursue a political career.

  The fact that Megan was the one woman remaining in the Solar System whom I could love was secondary—or so I told myself. After all, I had known of Megan’s existence for fifteen years and only now was following it up. But I can’t honestly assess my own emotions; my talent is assessing the natures of others, not myself. This is part of the reason I need Spirit with me. She backstops me, she understands me. She is my hidden strength in ways that others ne
ed not understand. Without Spirit I am so far diminished as to be hardly worthwhile, and perhaps it is best that others not appreciate that. The symbolism in our names is to an extent valid: I have the aspirations, the hope, while she has the courage, the spirit.

  I put in a call to a code I had memorized. The letter Q appeared on the screen. “This is Hope Hubris,” I said.

  I should say something about the entity I called. The Q stands for QYV, pronounced “Kife,” a secret organization I encountered first through Helse. She was a courier; that is, a person who carried something for QYV. She had those letters tattooed on her body at an intimate site. I lost Helse; technically I killed her. Speculation on that is futile; I did what I did and cannot now undo it, however much I wish I could. The point is, all I was able to retain of her was the key she carried for Kife, and finally I traded that key for a way out of a serious situation in the Navy. Part of that deal was Megan.

  In a moment the screen lighted with a silent schematic of what I recognized as our own Pineleaf apartment complex, with one apartment briefly highlighted. Then it faded out, and the connection broke.

  I looked at Spirit. “Here?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Yes. I thought they’d just arrange to print out the data—”

  “She’s a woman, Hope.”

  I laughed. “She’s interested in my career, not my body!”

  “So am I.”

  That gave me pause. Spirit was my closest relative, companion, and friend. Had she not been my sister I might have married her. There was nothing about each other that we did not know— as well as we cared to. She understood me perhaps better than I understood myself, in part because she was able to view me not only from the affinity of blood and culture and experience, but also from the vantage of the opposite sex. Even as children, when I had been the protector of our older sister Faith, Spirit had been my protector. There was little I would not do for her—and nothing she would not do for me. She never opposed me, but she was still my guardian, in more than the physical sense. If she likened the woman of QYV, Reba, to herself, she surely had reason.