Part Five: The Net

Entry 72. 2382–2388. Europa. The towns that hang. The port of leaving.

Europa builds downward.

The record has stood in most of the settled worlds' architectures by now, the buried horseshoes of Luna, the red terraces, the rings and the jars, and Europa's remains the one that stops the breath of every arrival, mine included: the towns hang. You come down through fifteen kilometers of ice in a bore elevator, and the shaft opens, and there below you, suspended from the ice ceiling like chandeliers in a dark cathedral, hang the settlements, lit and inverted, towers pointing down, their windows glowing over an ocean that goes below them for a hundred kilometers of black that has never once seen light. The engineering is honest (the ice is the only bedrock; you anchor to what holds), but no one who lives there pretends the form is only engineering. Europans call the ocean "downstairs." They speak, in every register from joke to prayer, as if the whole species were lodgers in the attic of something's house, and they keep the strictest law in the settled worlds about what may touch the water, because the maybe of Europa, the microbial maybe, contested for three centuries and unresolved still in 2382, had hardened into the one commandment every faction honored without treaty: whatever is downstairs, we did not come to be its Gray Hour.