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clouds of water droplets precipitated from the gases there.
    I should explain that there is no human development on the surface of Jupiter, or on any of the gas giant planets, for a number of reasons. First, there is no surface in the Earth sense, merely a series of somewhat arbitrary boundary levels, such as the translation from molecular to metallic hydrogen. We know hydrogen, which composes ninety percent of Jupiter's atmosphere, as a gas; but as the depth and pressure increase it becomes a kind of liquid and then a kind of solid, stripped of its electrons. The pressure of that metallic stage is about three million bars, and the temperature there is about ten thousand degrees Kelvin. These extremes would not be comfortable for human beings, to understate the matter significantly. Jupiter has been considered, historically, as a cold planet; in fact, it is a hot one. Had it been larger, the internal temperature might have triggered nuclear fusion, making a third star in our System. As it is, Jupiter has more mass than the combined mass of everything else in the Solar System, excluding Nemesis and the Sun itself. Not for nothing is Jupiter called the Colossus.
    It is a colossus economically and politically, too. The Jupiter Navy, from which I had just been released, dominates space from the Belt almost to the orbit of Saturn, and the planet is the richest in resources of any in the System. The government of the United States of Jupiter hauls other governments about as arrogantly as the planet hauls other matter in the vicinity. The Jupiter standard of living is the highest in the System. This, of course, makes it the planet of choice for refugees throughout the System, refugees it repels with increasing determination that at times borders on savagery. Spirit and I were now being admitted—after a fifteen-year apprenticeship in the Jupiter Ecliptic region of space. We were now legal citizens of Jupiter, entitled to all prerogatives of citizenship, thanks to certain hardnosed negotiations and the intercession of a special agency, QYV.
    But it was not primarily the dream of sanctuary, power, or wealth that brought me here. It was Megan.
    I had one true love at age fifteen, the refugee girl Helse, then sixteen. We were to marry, but she died in her wedding dress, so that I could live. There could be no complete love for me thereafter, until I encountered the one other woman my heart could accept: Megan. I had never met her, indeed had only seen her picture as she was at age sixteen, bearing a haunting similarity to Helse. It had been a false similarity, for the picture had been five years out of date; Helse had been only eleven when it was made.
    In addition, Megan was Saxon, while Helse was Hispanic. Those were, perhaps, the least of the differences between them, and this I have always known.
    But man is not a rational creature, and the Latin temperament may be less stable than others, and I less stable and rational than most Latins. I say this with a certain bemused pride. Megan was the niece of a kindly old scientist who had helped Helse and me when we were desperate; my gratitude to him overflowed the boundaries of rationality and found a partial focus on his niece. When Helse died, that focus strengthened. I explain this objectively, but it has more power than that. Only through Megan could I recover any part of either Helse or the scientist—and I had to have that part. In Megan I might recreate my One True Love in her moment of greatest beauty and joy.
    My eyesight blurred as I stared at the savage maelstrom that was the face of Jupiter. The turbulence between the bands was at once more vast and violent than any effort of man, and more measured and lovely in its slow motion. Huge and ruthless currents played across those fringes in their gargantuan rituals. Only the surface of that three-dimensional flux was visible, yet all of it would manifest in its own time and fashion. Nothing man could do would change this