My mission had passed its remit and I felt a sense of alarm
gathering within me. I could not help asking myself why my
assistant should feel the necessity of seeking out this observation
post - as I looked around me my eye fell on great pressure ridges
of ice dusted with what I took, in my half educated manner, to be
iron oxides, an indication, at the very least, of bacterial activity on
this Galilean satellite and worthy of a sensational tweet if I had but
the means. Though who would believe me now? Most of my tweet
stream would think I was in Brussels soaked in Flemish Red. Like
a sleeper who wakes after a hurricane has passed and begins to
observe the destruction that has been wreaked around him, I was
gradually becoming aware that my descent through Balmoral
Castle had not been as decorous as I had imagined, for to be
staked out under a relentless solar body and consumed by unfed
fire ants can only have been a type of reflex response to some
seriously irresponsible behaviour, and now this spectacular jaunt
to a Jovian moon to observe an event that was visible, though
admittedly not in such detail, from the lawns of Balmoral must
mean that special emphasis was being applied to an impending
wigging of majestic proportions. For the first time since I had
boarded Louise a few days since and yet so far away, I began to
feel that I was totally out of control.
"Take an ice throne!" commanded my Virgil. "Magnificent, isn't it?"
I was perplexed as almost anything in this astounding environment
could reasonably be described as magnificent, though I would
have characterised our immediate surroundings as stark. Without
the benefit of an academic approach there was little to do but
marvel, and such an approach to one's ambient reality is
necessarily limited even with the application of synonyms from
Earth's 6,000 or so languages. There must exist the mot juste in
Inuktitut which the Mark VI, with the minimum of prompting, could
provide for me, but without a tweet stream what, I felt, was the
point?
"Qulluagaq!" commented my companion clearly reading my efforts
to apply some cultural gloss to this lunar desolation, "and yes, we
had thought of marooning you here in a terra bubble for an
indefinite period, but the general consensus was that you wouldn't
last more than a couple of Europan orbits, even if we left you
plenty to study." My technicians were rarely given to rambling and
