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They took off with only a pilot and crew aboard with them, and after they were cast toward the north pole, Swan and the inspector told Wahram what they had been doing since they’d left Mercury. Wahram, feeling uneasy that he could not fully reciprocate and tell them about his activities, given the council’s orders, compensated by asking them a lot of questions about the investigation and its results so far. These turned out to be very interesting, even disturbing, and Wahram pondered to the point of a certain distraction the idea that there might be someone out there killing whole terraria. That the investigation had reduced their likeliest suspect pool to the population of Earth did not strike him as remarkable progress. All trouble comes from Earth, as the saying had it.

The cloud diver was not a big ship, and though it was very fast, the trip still took long enough for Swan to begin to exhibit the signs of distress and antsiness he remembered so well. Then happily they were above Saturn’s north pole, looking down at the dark side of the rings, as it was the northern winter. From behind the sun the rings were peach in tone, the circumferential scoring so finely etched and yet so vast that one could not help being a bit taken aback. Even on their dark side the rings were far brighter than the nightside of the planet, making for an aura or halo effect of eldritch beauty, all framing the deep blue of Saturn’s winter north.

Swan stared out the window, floating in her restraints, for the moment speechless. Wahram enjoyed this response, and not just because of the relief of the sudden silence. For him the polar view of Saturn was a perpetually glorious thing, the finest view in the solar system.

Down they dove toward the big planet, until it lost its sphericity and became a gorgeous pastel cobalt-the blue floor of the universe, it seemed, with the black of space only slightly domed over it. It looked almost like two planes only slightly separated, blue and black, meeting at the horizon like planes in elliptic geometry.

Soon after that they were down among the stupendous thunderhead armadas tearing east in this particular zone, around the seventy-fifth latitude. Royal blue, turquoise, indigo, robin’s egg-an infinity of blue clouds, it seemed. In the latitudinal band farther south the wind flew hard in the opposite direction; two thousand-kilometer-per-hour jet streams were therefore running against each other, making the shear zone a wild space of whirlpooling tornadoes. It was important to keep a distance from such a violent interface, but as the latitudinal bands were thousands of kilometers wide, this was not difficult.

Unlike Jupiter, there were no radiation fields created by the smaller giant, so over years a not-insignificant population of floating ships had taken refuge in the upper clouds of Saturn; also some platform habitats, hung from immense balloons. The balloons had to be exceptionally large to provide any buoyancy, but once they did, the clouds provided shelter that was variously physical, legal, and psychological. The league kept track of these cloud floaters when possible, but if they sank deep enough in the clouds and went quiet, they could be elusive.

Now their little diver flew among thunderheads a hundred kilometers tall, and though it was a commonplace to say that perspective was lost in situations like this, such that all sizes looked much the same, it wasn’t really true: these thunderheads were clearly as big as entire asteroids, rising out of a deeper array of flatter cloud formations so that they saw below them masses of nimbus and cirrus, cumulus, festoons, barges-really the whole Howard catalog, all snarling through and over and under each other and constituting what passed for the surface of the gas giant. Off to the distant south they could still sometimes make out the nearest shear line and its ripping tornado funnels, its broad-domed hurricane tops. Sometimes in the middle of their own band they flew over a slower funnel and could look deep into the blue depths of the planet, gaseous for as far as they could see and much farther, but in appearance much like holes of mist that gathered at their bottoms to liquid. Every once in a while a high stray cloud would prove unavoidable, and the view out of the craft would suddenly reduce to a dim blue flashing, and a tumultuous tremor would buck the craft in ways that even the quickness of the pilot AIs could not entirely damp. They would tremble and toss until they regained the clear blue again, now bluer than ever. For the most part they moved downstream with the flow of the wind, but also made the occasional reach across it. Resisting the wind too much threw them around about as much as being inside a cloud.