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I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.— Allen Ginsberg
The volcanic depression—an inactive patera, sluggishly cooling, filled with molten sulfur rather than magma.
That deadly pool, larger now, closer. A dark and depthless pupil yawning wide, ready to swallow her.
Sulfur flowers crumbling to mist as Io’s surface fractured, contorting and melting under the titanic strain as black Tartarus churned beneath its icy skin.
Above, Io’s ion tube an impossible band of cold white fire, still pulsing, still shouting. Calling home.
Jupiter’s unblinking eye.
The imperfect symmetry of the sky.
Kivelsen saw it all in exquisite detail, her dying brain recording its coda with feverish focus, painting those final flashes of Io’s surface and the frothy swirls of Jupiter’s flank above in resplendent glory. There was no need to crank up the contrast in her visor. If this was to be her final moment, it would be beautiful enough to last forever. To stretch on and on, to savor, to taste. Beauty to drown in.
When she hit the pool of sulfur, there was no pain.
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Each of you, drink from it.
For this is my blood.
My sacrifice.
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Flesh died. Nerves popped and sparkled, briefly brilliant. With them went the flesh, the meat, the soft organic machinery of Kivelsen. With them went the soul, perhaps—as perhaps the pattern that dying firework flash left behind was nothing more than a pattern, an echo, a recording that could be played as a program, a bot, a doll for Io to cling to in its endless night.
Or perhaps she drank in Io’s sulfur waters, took her communion, baptized herself in them, and was born anew. And as her flesh gave out—swiftly, painlessly, the enormity of the heat too great to be felt—the fading sparkle of her thoughts danced into Io’s, joining the great luminous web of thought she had seen on the trek here.
Life. Not mobile, intelligent, organic life, but life all the same. They’d found it after all.
Hands seized her around the waist. Burton’s hands. Swung her around, lifted her up. Her body—
Her body was starlight, the warmth of Burton’s hands at her waist a memory, an impression. A shared impression. As was Burton’s easy grin, so familiar, restored in perfect detail.
“Juliet,” Martha said. You’re alive, you’re well, you’re here with me—
There was no need to speak; her thoughts flew between them, and Juliet’s bled into hers. Martha felt Juliet’s wonder—her joy, effervescent, not at being resurrected here in Io’s heart but at the thrill of discovery, of finding something unknown and unspoiled and beautiful. It was an experience they hadn’t expected to have. Desired, yes, but not expected. There was little left worth discovering on Earth.
They stood in a field of sulfur flowers that did not crumble beneath their feet. They stood, and Io with them, hallucinations made flesh. Flesh made thought. Io’s skin rippled and cracked, plumes of superheated sulfur venting into the skies as new volcanoes formed and slumped into sunken paterae just as quickly. The effort it had taken Io to send that message wrenching the moon’s surface apart with terrific violence. Erasing every trace of the lander. Every Earthly molecule of Juliet Barton and Martha Kivelsen.
They kissed, or imagined themselves kissing. The sulfur flowers at their feet shattered, gathered, bloomed again. And Io threaded through and around and over and between them, binding them one to the other, preserving and keeping them. Drinking their poetry. Sharing their life eternal.