“My name is Orpheus.
“I approach the centre of the world: this mighty world, mightiest in the solar system.
“And I find that another world lies within.
“The existence of a solid core within Jupiter has long been theorised. The gas giant is mostly hydrogen and helium—but it must have a massive core of more complex materials deep within its heart, a core of rock and ice around which coalesced the great bloated droplet that is Jupiter, during the chaotic formation of the solar system. Later theorists have put constraints on the mass of the core and its other properties, based on observations of subtle deviations of the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, and of the trajectories of passing spacecraft.
“All this others deduced, from indirect evidence.
“I witness.
“Jupiter Within is a world in itself. A mass of stone and ice twenty times the mass of Earth. Jupiter Within alone is more massive than any other planet in the solar system save Saturn, more massive than Uranus, Neptune. It is some fourteen thousand kilometres in radius—significantly smaller than Neptune or Uranus, which gives an idea of its comparative density. At such conditions as I experience now—the pressure is over thirty million Earth atmospheres—materials behave in ways which humans, even Machines, have only fleetingly glimpsed in the laboratories. Once it was speculated that the core of Jupiter would be one immense diamond. What I witness as I descend appears much more complex than that . . .
“My observations can only be passive. I cannot sample or analyse: with my sensors I can observe, but I cannot touch. And what I see—
“There are mountains here.
“Were we expecting some blank sphere, crushed to uniformity by the terrible pressures? If so we were wrong. Mountains: I call them that; they look like tremendous quartz crystals perhaps, thrusting at angles from the broader plain. Perhaps they follow the lines of local magnetic fields; Earth’s own core has crystals of iron kilometres long drawn out in that fashion. Or this may be something stranger yet. What their substance is, I cannot speculate.
“At the feet of the mountains, a kind of landscape. Even lakes or oceans: perhaps there are seas of diamond here, rivers of buckminsterfullerene . . .
“Perhaps there is artifice.
“Perhaps there is connectivity.
“All this merely glimpsed. The core winds are wafting me towards the summit of one of the crystal mountains . . .”
* * * *
In the months and years to come, Falcon would follow the debates that raged about these words, returned from the very heart of Jupiter.
Artifice? Perhaps. But one would have to dismiss first the null hypothesis that any structure Orpheus saw was merely a product of natural forces. Was the regularity of Jupiter Within no more meaningful than the six-fold symmetry of a snowflake?
Connectivity? That was more mysterious yet. Was Orpheus referring to some global unity of the features he perceived on the planet-sized surface of Jupiter Within? But Orpheus was also equipped with accelerometers and gravity sensors. Some speculated that he had sensed some deeper connectivity—a rupturing of spacetime itself at the tortured heart of Jupiter Within, perhaps, where the temperatures rose to seventeen thousand Kelvin, the pressures to seventy million Earth atmospheres—a place where a kind of natural wormhole might be created, or a profusion of wormholes, perhaps even linking Jupiter Within to other inner worlds of its kind . . .
Falcon thought this was wild guesswork, a mountain of theorising standing on a grain of fact. But still, he would reflect, such speculation did perhaps shed some light on the meaning of Orpheus’s final enigmatic words.
Words that those listening, in Jupiter’s clouds, on Amalthea and Ganymede, on Earth and Mars, on all the worlds of mankind, would never forget.
* * * *
“The currents are washing me up the flank of one of the mountains now. The summit is flat, apparently perfectly so—like a fractured crystal. The upper surface seems quite smooth, with no erosion or damage. I wonder how old these formations are; such are the energies of this place that even a mountain system like this may be as transient as frost on Earth.
“I drift down. Down, towards the summit plateau. At the heart of Jupiter, I am now no more than a handful of diamond snow . . .
“That is strange—
“That is strange—
“That that that is strange—
“My name is Orpheus. This telemetry is being transmitted via—
“My depth perception is faulty, perhaps. There is an instrumentation glitch. Perhaps. The summit surface was close. Now it seems far away.
“As if the formation is hollow.
“As if the formation is not a mountain but a well.
“My name my my—
“My name is Orpheus.
“I am not alone.”