“There is rain here.
“A rain of helium and neon, which descends through the air-sea of metallic hydrogen. It sparkles as electric currents swirl. And all around me immense magnetic fields flap wings the size of moons . . .
“My name is Orpheus. This telemetry is being transmitted via radio signals received by Charon 3 at the plasma boundary, Charon 2 at the hydrogen gas-liquid interface, and relayed via the Ra above the thermalisation layer to Charon 1 at Station NTB-4, and then to Mission Control on Amalthea. I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally. I remain fully cognisant of and fully committed to the objectives of the mission—
“The mission—
“The mission—
“I fall unhindered, a dust mote passing through a monstrous engine.
“And if nothing else, this forty-thousand-kilometre-deep ocean of plasma is exactly that: an engine that generates Jupiter’s enormous magnetosphere, a field that envelops moons, and sends high-energy particles sleeting through the substance of unwary visitors, Machines or humans. I map the electromagnetic fields assiduously. One mission goal is to establish the coupling between this deep world engine and the external magnetosphere.
“At one level the physics are simple. The heart of the planet has remained hot since the huge violence of its formation, when it formed in the cold outer regions of the young solar system and swam briefly inwards, with Saturn, towards the fire of the Sun. And in the depths of this ocean that primordial heat drives convection currents, which in turn provide the energy for the electromagnetic fields that suffuse this vast arena.
“And yet there is more here, far more than a mere heat engine. I am becoming convinced of that. There is such detail in the swirling Maxwell-equation coupling of electricity and magnetism going on all around me—more detail, surely, than is necessary to serve as a magnetosphere motor. Detail, and more than that, beauty, even in the mathematical descriptions that scroll through my awareness.
“Sometimes I sense structures around me. A nested cascade of them reaching from the atomic—entities even smaller than me—up to much larger scales, the scales of Machines and ships and moons and planets—there is room for such a cascade, in here!
“Is this life?
“Perhaps. If life is the autocatalysis of structure fed by a flow of energy and capable of self-replication—for I have witnessed such events here, as electromagnetic field knots gather and “give birth” to more—then, yes, this is a good candidate for life, yet another layer in the great nesting that is Jupiter.
“Is there mind, though? Again, perhaps.
“But already my mind is turning to the next, and last, stage of my journey as I approach the strange heart of this strange world . . .”