My thoughts immediately turned to Heliogabalus. How he would have
loved the post-digital age, in which I so unexpectedly found myself,
quite untrammelled by the physics I had been schooled in and yet set
about with the rules of its own devising that ambushed me at every
turn. What pretty devices he could have tossed down on his guests!
What exciting new modes of suffocation to invest in! Imagine a
roomful of planetary scientists called together to examine the data of
a thousand probes only to have their initial enthusiasm for the
unprecedented quality of the imaging - and I could almost hear their
voices exclaiming in astonishment at the fascinating details revealed
in pictures that far exceeded the amazing resolution of my Hasselblad
- at the richness of the data, within which even the sounds of the ice
splintering under tidal stress were reproduced in graphs and audial
streams - at the evidence for life forms in some cases reproduced in
alarmingly realistic 3D printouts - give way to panic at the realisation
that the springs of unstoppable old-fashioned cellulose pulp (much of
it untreated to resist entomological onslaughts) bursting with
precious knowledge from the walls was arriving at a rate that
threatened their lives. This mountainous accumulation represented
merely the return from a single planetary moon, and already the vast
hall of the LUCA was banked with a mille-feuille of scientific evidence,
and as new data arrived so did the constantly unfurling paper
avalanche advance leaving me with no suitable side nook where I
could seek my gin and tonic.
It was apparent that with just three persons aboard, - though I had no
idea of the resources available to Pestit and the engineer, but I could
not believe that either of them would welcome an analogue approach
to reading diurnal temperature curves on Europan fissures for
example (just one aspect of a survey so comprehensive that there
would soon be more data assembled concerning the rarely visited
moon than existed for the whole of planet Earth throughout the full
extent of its anthropo-reflective history, and to this had to be added
the staggering realisation that the LUCA's survey was to include
every single celestial body between Jupiter and Earth which inclined
me to reflect that even Heliogabalus might consider that the joke had
gone far enough and that the most avid of celestial mechanicians
would be daunted by the plethora of material - but then again, the
