The monstrous snow snake roared past Paul Levin at fantastic speed, leaving a falling mist of slush and ice behind. The mist was so dense that he couldn't even see giant Jupiter above the horizon.

The habitat could only be a few hundred meters further, Paul thought. He cautiously skied ahead, probing the ice with the tip of his ski before transferring his weight forward.

Suddenly a massive jolt shook the ice pack. He was violently thrown off his feet and tossed about. It felt as if all of Europa had shifted beneath him. He was terrified as the surface continued to tremble. As the tremors continued, Paul didn't know whether he was going to live or die.

It was only yesterday that he had been climbing the ladder to the cab of his father's harvester. From that vantage he saw four sets of snow snakes leaping near the horizon, five or six kilometers away. They were backlit by Jupiter's ruddy glow. The snakes were particularly active today, he thought, throwing their coils high into Europa's tenuous atmosphere. Four snakes at one time were far more than usual.

From their position Paul estimated that they had to be erupting from the minor cracks that branched from the thick width of the main Sarpedon Linea, the fissure the Levins had drawn for harvesting.

Paul knew that they weren't really snow snakes. They were really the plumes from the linear geysers that routinely spewed up gases, soft ice, and particulate matter from Europa's core. They were just slush thrown up as some ice floes were squeezed together by Jupiter's massive gravitational effect.

Still, he wished that the snow snakes he'd fantasized when he was younger had been real. That would have made this hideous dead moon a place more alive, more like somewhere a human being could live comfortably.

Paul squeezed though the harvester cab's narrow opening. The opening was barely wide enough to allow his bulky suit to clear the frame. He settled into the hard seat before the console. Through the thick insulation of his gloves he could feel Europa's angry song as the harvester tore at her skin, peeling away the dross of silicates to expose her pristine white skin beneath. It was a slow dirge that rang in his helmet, but so soft that he had to strain to hear it at all. For a moment he allowed himself to be immersed in the counterpoint of the harvester's mechanical beat and the moon's slow song.

"Paul, have you adjusted the blade depth yet?" The voice of his father startled him. Damn, just like his father to catch him daydreaming again!

"Working on it right now, Dad," he replied and started to crank the big wheel near his right side. About twenty turns, his father had instructed him, then he was to wait a minute and check the harvester's feed rate. Paul waited and then did so, and waited still another minute to be certain that he had gotten the blade adjusted properly. He wanted to make certain that it met his father's strict standards so he wouldn't get yelled at once again.

The feed rate was a measure of the depth the harvester's blade bit into the thin top-most crust of Europa's soft ice. The deep geysers that erupted from the major lineae, such as Sarpedon, were rich in particulates and minerals that JBI industries wanted, particularly the various forms of corundum -- mostly rubies and sapphires -- and an occasional diamond.

If the blade bit too deeply the particulate layer that the harvester scooped from the surface would be diluted by too much slush, which would overload the processors. Set it too shallow and the harvester would leave too much of the layer behind. Only by having the blade adjusted correctly to the layer the harvesters were passing through could they make JBI's quota. The layer was so variable that the harvesters required constant attention, which meant long hours working the string back and forth.

His father usually did this alone, but with the break in classes Paul was able to help out and relieve the family of some of the never-ending labor.

He checked the feed rate again, turned the wheel back a few turns, waited, and then looked at the feed rate once more. He'd learned a long time ago that he had to check everything he did for his father at least three times to be absolutely sure. His father was only interested in perfection -- anything less was failure in his eyes. He wondered if Vincent, his brother, had faced the same demanding criticism before he finally left home.

His father's approval was particularly important today, because Paul was going to ask for his permission to enter the big Aphrodite race next month, the race that would show everyone that Paul wasn't a kid anymore, that he could run the ice as well as anyone.

"Pee, why aren't you done yet?" his father barked impatiently over the laser link. "I thought you knew how to set a blade."

"I do, Dad, but I..."

"If you're finished then get over to the next one," his father barked. "We need to get all of these set right before dinner!" Paul cringed at the disapproving tone of his father's voice and knew that he'd screwed up again.

It was so unfair he thought as he climbed down and put on his skis. He was just trying to do things right.

Much later, after Paul finished adjusting the last harvester in the line, he climbed down and headed across the ice fields, pushing one ski ahead of the other in a steady, efficient distance consuming rhythm. His ears filled with Europa's song as the broad skis alternately compressed the coarse-grained ice. Here in the softer ice on the fringe of Sarpedon, her song was gentle, serenading him as he headed for the family's hab.

When he had first asked about the singing that pervaded every movement of the hab across the ice, and that reverberated in his suit whenever he skied, his mother had replied that the songs were the dragons' cries, ancient legends that they sang from their caverns far below the ice. Only the strongest and best songs reached the surface, she declared, so he must listen closely and try to understand their deeper meaning.

His mother had tried to make this place acceptable to his young mind. At nights, as they huddled in the tiny habitat, she would tell him fanciful tales of the denizens of the deep oceans within Europa, of the dragons that ate stone and spat diamonds, of snow snakes that leaped in Jupiter's light. She would weave tales of the deep forests of silicon trees and calcinate grasses, speaking of vales and meadows of metallic weeds. With her words Europa changed from a dead, frozen wilderness into a place more rich and strange. With her tales Europa had become a place of wonder.

Of course now he knew that the mythical dragons beneath his feet weren't really singing. He now knew that the song was just an effect caused by the compression of the ice, the pressure of his passage momentarily boiling the thin shell of liquid that surrounded each uniform, icy grain. It was the same effect that caused the singing and booming sands on the distant Earth that he would probably never see again, thanks to his father's decision to exile them to this cold and horrid world.

The continual deep song of Europa was caused by the violent compression of floe against floe, of one continent sized mass against another. As they ground in opposition, the vibrations thundered to the surface, there to be dissipated by the covering of snow and ice.

When the song changed, Paul knew that he had crossed over from the coarse to the fine-grained, nearly solid ice of the Cadmus region; the older glacial formation through which the Sarpedon crack ran.

The smoother, more compressed ice grains allowed Paul to ski along at a faster rate. Push, slide, push, slide, push, slide; he fell into an easy rhythm, careful not to exert too much downward pressure against the ice. He'd done that too often when he was first learning how to propel himself across Europa's endless ice fields and had paid the price with embarrassed pratfalls. Since Europa's surface gravity was only a fraction of Earth's it was all too easy to launch yourself right off the ice -- and pay the price by landing on various anatomical elements, none of which were padded with dignity.

The harvesters were now passing through an unusually level section of Cadmus, which meant that he didn't have to work his way up and down the ubiquitous pressure ridges that dominated the landscape elsewhere. He spotted his family's hab just a short distance away and stroked toward it, lessening the distance with each bar of Europa's song.

He noticed that his mother had once again let the mobile hab draw closer toward the Sarpedon fault, which probably meant that his father would raise hell with her when he got back. Safety was such a big thing that steering the hab too close to Sarpedon's instability was a sure way to raise his ire, just like that crap about having the emergency gear lying out all the time! As far as Paul was concerned all that safety gear took up too much of the severely limited living space inside. Still, his father always got his way, and his mother went along with whatever he said.

Paul hoped that he could correct the hab's drift before his father noticed. No sense listening to his safety-conscious father berate his mother yet again.

Copyright © 2001 by Bud Sparhawk