The Cold Descent

The sun was creeping over the glittering ice-ridges of Europa’s surface when the eight trucks of the NASA Orpheus Mission convoy reached their dive point. Jupiter loomed ominously on the horizon, taking up a full third of the sky, its cream and orange ribbons boiling with the anger of some terrible magnetic storm. There, at the base of a rugged sulfur-stained ice cliff, was the pit. Ten meters wide, thirteen kilometers deep, bored by five years of orbital lasers and nuclear heat-probes, it was now finally complete, mouth grinning open to swallow its first human explorer.

In the command truck, major Natalie Griffin performed the necessary double and triple checks on her suit, her camera, her sampling equipment and listened to her briefing from mission control for the hundredth time. All of it was done rather unconsciously. Her mind was preoccupied by pure excitement, eclipsing everything like a white supernova. She was going to do it! Her! She would be up there in the pantheon of history’s great pioneers along with Magellan, Shackleton, the Apollo astronauts and the first Mars colonists. Maybe even surpass them. That is, if she found life.

Despite great initial hopes, life in earth’s cosmic neighborhood had proven more elusive than most astrobiologists thought. Mars had been exposed as an utter wasteland, thoroughly dead above and below. The phosphine signatures in the Venusian clouds turned out to be a geologic phantom. There was only one hope remaining to those who wished to find and study life within the reach of human spaceflight. The frigid, dismal outer moons: Enceladus and Europa, and the hidden oceans within.

The three technicians in the convoy helped Natalie to the edge of the pit –her suit was bulky even in one-ninth gravity– and set up a pulley and makeshift diving support station in the crushed ice around its perimeter. They attached an umbilical to her suit. Twenty kilometers long and bundled into seven trucks, it contained a fiber-optic cable for communication in addition to an oxygen tube, since radio waves could not penetrate Europa’s ice sheath.

Natalie stood at the precipice and peered down. The walls of the pit shone with ash-white ice as smooth as polished glass, dropping into absolute darkness five meters down. She looked up at the sky one last time, and to her surprise saw Jupiter’s great red spot directly in conjunction with the knife-point edge of the cliff above, glowering at her like a warning. Well whatever. She thought. You can’t stop human nature, no matter how formidable you are. Just you wait, someday we’ll get to the bottom of your clouds too, and dredge up whatever’s sulking down there. Then, eager to get on with the mission, she lowered himself into the chasm and soon was lost to sight.

The first two hours of the descent were easy. The hole led on and on, down and down and down. She let the umbilical lower her smoothly down. Like an infant carried in a raft along a lazy river. If she gave the signal, the technicians above could halt its unspooling at any time. The insipid European sunlight had disappeared within minutes of beginning her descent, but she had a powerful flashlight on her helmet, which illuminated the dank, frosty walls as bright as a midday sun in Florida. It did little to reveal the unplumbed depths below her though. As she went deeper her wild excitement gradually quieted to a temperate anticipation, and thoughts unattached to the mission began to drift unbidden into her head; thoughts of home, of her doting parents, her high school crush, summer days on the beach, warm white sand, the ice cream shop across from her house, palm trees swaying in the breeze…

~current depth: three thousand four hundred and fifty meters~ came an automatic voice inside her helmet.

At first she had been loath to leave that all behind, but the moment she had crossed the Asteroid Belt and been faced with the sublime, elder silence of the outer solar system, she had fallen under its spell. From then on she had pushed zealously forward, drawn by the lure of discovery and some other, less willful attraction to the light-forsaken depths in which she was about to trespass.

~ five thousand one hundred and twenty-seven meters~

Suddenly she noticed that the scenery around her had changed. The ice had grown semitransparent, so that she could see chunks of rock and pockets of air entombed within. But more strikingly, it was suffused with brilliant colors. A storm of violets, reds, emeralds, coppers and turquoises surrounded her, twisted into fabulous forms such as even the most intense psychedelic visions couldn’t mimic. The dreary and forbidding hole had become a painted throat of wonder. She felt a surge of awe inside her, wondering whether the chromatism was merely the result of mineral impurities or a sign of microbial life.

~ eight thousand three hundred and six meters~

Just after this announcement, the first subsurface cavern opened up beside her. For over an hour there had been no break along the rainbowed chasm walls, then all of a sudden darkness yawned on her left.

“Stop descent.” She said into her helmet.

The umbilical lowering her immediately jerked to a standstill.

“Come in major. Is everything alright down there?” A technician’s voice asked.

“Everything’s great, I just discovered an interesting structure. I’m going to check it out. Lower me three more meters.”

She was lowered to the doorstep of the cavern. She pointed her light inside and caught her breath. A hanging garden of hoary, dreamlike stalactites sparkled in the beam, their slender white forms drooping from ceiling to floor. In the background she could almost hear the slow drip-drip of mineralized water across countless dark millennia. Under a bower of stalactites at the heart of the cavern was a pool of liquid, clear as air, and speckled with strange, gelatinous growths like quicksilver flowers. Whether they were organic, she couldn’t tell. She took pictures of them and plucked one out gently, putting it in the sample container on her belt. Ripples, the first in thousands of years, expanded over the pool and died. Then she left the cavern and continued down.

After ten thousand meters more and more caverns appeared, gaping on both sides until the inside of the shaft began to look like a cross section of Swiss cheese. The chromatic patterns on the walls grew more intricate. Her wonder intensified. Then at last, at thirteen thousand meters, she reached the subsurface ocean.

She saw it rushing up beneath her, like a mirror of obsidian, but only for a moment. Then she plunged in. Even through five layers of carbon-nanofiber shielding, she felt its cold. A cold beyond human conception, a cold that only uncountable ages of darkness and stillness could produce, and following the cold, something else, something she had not yet felt at any point during her six-hundred million kilometer journey from Earth. Fear. Could there really be life in such a place? What sort of life would it be?

She swept her flashlight back and forth, but there was only blackness, blackness misted by a fine rain of falling ice crystals like some ghostly underworld snow. Above her was the underbelly of the ice-sheet. It glowed luridly with a dizzying array of squirming, melting colors, but they seemed sick and delirious in that abysmal realm, and the sheer immensity of the ice pressed down on her like the weight of a collapsing mountain. Fear rushed into her head, like a poison seeping out of the water itself, and would have turned into all out panic, if she hadn’t remembered her training at the last minute and focused on her breath until it subsided. Slowly, reluctantly, she continued to drop lower. Lower. No more thoughts strayed into her head. The darkness smothered all other memory of time and place. Darkness was all there was. Darkness was all there would ever be. But then, out of the darkness, her light glanced dazzlingly on a pallid surface, almost invisible under eons of slime, winding and widening downwards like an outgrowth of some greater mass.

“Stop” she said.

She stopped and shone her light on the thing below, and the horror that greeted her was so beyond anything in her experience or imagination that her mind was flung back to a scene from her earliest childhood. She was playing with her toys on the floor as her father stood over her, he seemed to tower infinitely high, his head lost in thundercloud.

Remember to close your closet at night, or monsters will get out. He said.

She nodded and went to check the closet, but to her dismay, it was already open, and something was squeezing its bulk through the gap.

Kilometers above, the technicians heard a scream, followed by a deep gurgling and an indescribable groan, as something immeasurably large and unspeakably old shook off its deathlike sleep.