At four million atmospheres, Vinny—what was left of him—fell upon a strange world of rock and metal slightly larger than Earth. There were lakes of molten basalt wider than Colorado, and hot sulfide springs of the sort that had sustained chemosynthetic bacteria inside Europa and at the bottoms of Earth’s oceans. But the four Lunarians, had they survived, might have been disappointed to see that more than nine thousand kilometers of overlying ice and water precluded biochemistry in this world within the world. Here, where the words “rock” and “sea” took on yet another new meaning, the atmospheric pressure was so great that hydrogen atoms began to conduct electricity as effectively as copper and iron, and carbon, one of the most abundant elements in the sea, could behave only one way: by crystallizing. Where they were free of continental rift zones and pools of incandescent lava, where fine volcanic silts fell like sheets of drifting snow, Neptune’s abyssal plains sprouted large, clean crystals.

One of these had grown a brilliant sapphire blue, another ruby red; but like the refugees who had struggled in vain to reach them, they were neither rubies nor sapphires. The red crystal jutted like a mighty obelisk through the floor of a dune field; taller than the Washington Monument; and yet by the standards of Neptune it was little more than a microscopic point of glitter poised on the edge of a diamond cluster wider than the continent of Australia.

22

Face-to-Face

It was to be expected. The creatures in the ship were—ugly. Their faces and their arms were supported by a skeleture so intricate and so refined as to be disturbing to look at. And in the manner of all creatures who had evolved from a hunting existence under sunlight or moonlight, they appeared to be staring right through him.

Fascinating, yes, but not particularly pleasant. And it was an illusion: Thaw Tint need not really worry about being stared through by Hollis and Wayville. It was quite the other way around. Being a member of an eyeless species, he sensed his surroundings as faint electromagnetic pulses and radarlike reflections of his own clicks and squeals. As had been clear from all those painstakingly reconstructed TV broadcasts which had leaked out to space before Earth switched over to cable and VR, human beings, living in a world of light, viewed each other only from the outside, and had therefore developed very different standards of beauty and ugliness.

Now, for the first time, with two of them caged safely below in a bubble of air, he could see what humans were really like on the inside. There were lungs and four-chambered hearts and fascinatingly thick leg bones adapted specifically to life on the continents. But what fascinated him most was the depth and intricate perfection of their eyes, like cut and faceted stones. They seemed as unnatural to him. And they repulsed him.

Everything about these two brutes repulsed him. He could not yet force out of his mind the odor that had stained every object removed through the hatch of Alvin, a damp stench of bad breath and unwashed flesh mingled with old bilge, old clothes, and old cooking.