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Jupiter orbit.
     
A Second Chance
at Eden
     
Jupiter 2090
A Second Chance at Eden
    The Ithilien decelerated into Jupiter orbit at a constant twentieth of a gee, giving us a spectacular view of the gas giant’s battling storm bands as we curved round towards the dark side. Even that’s a misnomer, there is no such thing as true darkness down there. Lightning forks whose size could put the Amazon tributary network to shame slashed between oceanic spirals of frozen ammonia. It was awesome, beautiful, and terrifyingly large.
    I had to leave the twins by themselves in the observation blister once Ithilien circularized its orbit five hundred and fifty thousand kilometres out. It took us another five hours to rendezvous with Eden; not only did we have to match orbits, but we were approaching the habitat from a high inclination as well. Captain Saldana was competent, but it was still five hours of thruster nudges, low-frequency oscillations, and transient bursts of low-gee acceleration. I spent the time strapped into my bunk, popping nausea suppressors, and trying not to analogize between Ithilien ’s jockeying and a choppy sea. It wouldn’t look good arriving at a new posting unable to retain my lunch. Security men are supposed to be unflappable, carved from granite, or some such nonsense anyway.
    Our cabin’s screen flicked through camera inputs for me. As we were still in the penumbra I got a better view of the approach via electronically amplified images than eye-balling it from the blister.
    Eden was a rust-brown cylinder with hemispherical endcaps, eight kilometres long, twenty-eight-hundred metres in diameter. But it had only been germinated in 2075, fifteen years ago. I talked to Pieter Zernov during the flight from Earth’s O’Neill Halo, he was one of the genetics team who designed the habitats for the Jovian Sky Power Corporation, and he said they expected Eden to grow out to a length of eleven kilometres eventually.
    It was orientated with the endcaps pointing north– south, so it rolled along its orbit. The polyp shell was smooth, looking more like a manufactured product than anything organic. Biology could never be that neat in nature. The only break in Eden’s symmetry I could see were two rings of onion-shaped nodules spaced around the rim of each endcap. Specialist extrusion glands, which spun out organic conductor cables. There were hundreds of them, eighty kilometres long, radiating out from the habitat like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, rotation keeping them perfectly straight. It was an induction system; the cables sliced through Jupiter’s titanic magnetosphere to produce all the power Eden needed to run its organs, as well as providing light and heat for the interior.
    ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ I said as the habitat expanded to fill the screen.
    Jocelyn grunted noncommittally, and shifted round under her bunk’s webbing. We hadn’t exchanged a hundred words in the last twenty-four hours. Not good. I had hoped the actual sight of the habitat might have lightened the atmosphere a little, raised a spark of interest. Twenty years ago, when we got married, she would have treated this appointment with boundless excitement and enthusiasm. That was a big part of her attraction, a delighted curiosity with the world and all it offered. A lot can happen in twenty years, most of it so gradual you don’t notice until it’s too late.
    I sometimes wonder what traits and foibles I’ve lost, what attitude I’ve woven into my own personality. I like to think I’m the same man, wiser but still good-humoured. Who doesn’t?
    Eden had a long silver-white counter-rotating docking spindle protruding out from the hub of its northern endcap. Ithilien was too large to dock directly; the ship was basically a grid structure, resembling the Eiffel Tower, wrapped round the long cone of the fusion drive, with tanks and cargo-pods clinging to the structure as if they were silver barnacles. The life-support capsule