Dreams by Richard A. Lupoff Read Free Book Online Page B

than—she knew the cities of Earth. She had been born on the mother world but her recollections of the planet were only the vague images of a small child. Colors and sounds and odors. The feeling of her mother's arms, a flavor that she thought was that of her mother's milk. But she could not be sure.
    She had been selected as a toddler and transported to the moon for two decades of training. She had emerged at the top of her class, triumphing in the final competitive examinations over a thousand young men and women who competed for positions in the world's ongoing scientific enterprises.
    She had worked with joyous dedication on Beijing 11-11 for the past decade, observing the enigmatic activities on Yuggoth. That huge planet and its four satellites, Nithan, Zaman, Thog and Thok, rolled eternally in a counterplanar orbit, crossing the plane of the solar ecliptic only once in a thousand years. No wonder it had gone undiscovered for so long, for Earthbound planetary astronomers had long concentrated their studies on the multi-billion-mile disk that surrounded Sol, containing the four rocky planets, the four gas giants, the asteroids and plutoids and the countless meteors and comets.
    Barely a century ago Yuggoth and its moons had actually crossed the plane of the ecliptic, and thus it had been detected at last. The discovery of a new major planet had sent shockwaves through the scientific community of Earth. Probes had landed on the major solid bodies of the solar system, the four rock planets and the solid moons of the four gas giants. The variety of worlds was incredible. There were ice-covered bodies, the volcanoes, the nitrogen seas, the mountain ranges and deserts and canyon-like beds of ancient rivers, long run dry.
    Above all, there was life and the evidence of past life. Exobiologists on Earth had long given hope of such discoveries. Their mantra: Where life can exist, it does! The flaw in their argument lay in the fact that they had only a single model from which to draw their conclusion. True, life flourished in the most astonishing of environments, in water close to boiling, in fissures deep within the Earth, on ocean floors where pressure reached tons per square centimeter and where neither sunlight nor oxygen could be detected. But it was possible—it was vigorously debated—that life had originated but once upon Earth, and that all organisms, however varied their natures and locales, were descended from a single ancestor.
    It took the exploration of dozens of moons to find jungles and prairies, natural gardens of unimaginable colors and forms, schools of swimming things that were surely not fish, and flocks of flying things that were anything but birds.
    But no people. Not merely no humans like those whose robot explorers first landed on Callisto and Mimas, Miranda and Proteus and Galatea and all the others. The people of Earth both longed for and feared the discovery of alien intelligences, whether they looked like giant grasshoppers or self-conscious cabbages or whales with hands, whether they wrote epic treatises on the meaning of life or built machines to carry them across the dimensional barrier to other universes even stranger than the one from which they had come.
    No people. No intelligent cabbages or whales with hands, no ancient cities to put the monuments of Thebes to shame and to make the mysteries of Rapa Nui and Stonehenge and the riddle of Linear B look like child's play.
    Until Yuggoth.
    Until the first robotic probe had circled Yuggoth sending back to Earth images of structures that were undoubtedly artificial, yet that resembled no city ever built upon Earth. They stretched for thousands of miles across the ruddy, pulsing surface of Yuggoth. They rose for hundreds of miles into the roiling, cloudy atmosphere of the planet. At the poles of the monstrous globe black, glossy areas that must be ice caps reflected the light of a billion distant stars.
    At this distance from the sun the amount of