Free Cold as Ice by Charles Sheffield

voice.
    "Unless you're proposing to ride all the way down together, I suggest a little action. You're at thirteen-thirty-seven. Want to return to a higher level, and cruise some more? Or do you want to come all the way back? I ought to mention that you've had a call from your agent."
    "Magnus? What did he say?"
    "No message. He's still on Ganymede, and he wants you to return his call. At once."
    "Damn that man. Why does he always think he has to talk to me, instead of leaving word telling what he wants?" Wilsa lifted the gauntlets, allowing the automatic control system of the Leda to take over and cruise at constant isobaric depth. "All right. Bring me back. And slowly this time."
    "No can do. Not set up that way. Hold tight."
    The transition was painfully abrupt. One moment Wilsa was staring out of the Leda 's port at Jupiter's roiling interior. The next moment she was sitting stunned in the control chair on Hebe Station, blinking her eyes at the bright lights. The headset had slipped upward by itself, and the gauntlets had relaxed their hold on her hands and forearms.
    "So. Did you get what you hoped you would?"
    Tristan Morgan was bending over her. He did not match the cool, distant voice that had reached her over the headset. The man in person was tall, bright-eyed and intense, with bulging chipmunk cheeks and a broad smile. Like everyone else in the Jovian system, he had ideas of personal space that did not match the preference of an individual raised in the Belt.
    Wilsa leaned away from him by habit, although she did not feel at all uncomfortable. "I got more than I hoped for, a lot more."
    "I thought you seemed a bit far-gone some of the time down there. New material?"
    "New, and first-rate. At least the themes. I still have a lot more working-out to do. Jupiter is a wonderfully stimulating environment. Pity I didn't make a trip before, when I was working on the suite."
    "Change it. There's still time."
    "Maybe." Wilsa stood up, went across to one of the ports and stared out. The banded orange-and-brown face of Jupiter loomed large, spread across fifteen degrees of the sky of Hebe Station. She gazed upon the monster planet and called into her mind the feeling of the budding new composition.
    She shook her head. "Maybe, but no."
    "Not as good as you thought at first?"
    "Better. That's not the problem. It's a question of scale. Being down there makes you think big."
    "People always miss the point with Jupiter. They know that it's three hundred and twenty times Earth mass, but that's the wrong number to use. The volume of the Jupiter atmosphere, from the upper clouds down to the metallic hydrogen interface, is half a million times as big as Earth's biosphere. That's the comparison to make."
    "You get it right when you're flying through it. If I tried to incorporate my new themes and ideas into the suite, they would distort it, no matter how good they turn out to be. They just don't fit."
    "Like Beethoven, wanting to make the Grosse Fuge the last movement of the B-flat string quartet? It never works when they play it that way, because it's such a brute. It's out of proportion."
    "That's exactly what I mean."
    In talking with Wilsa, Tristan Morgan had at first insisted that he knew nothing about music and was not interested in it. She had believed him when she arrived on Ganymede and ran into him at a concert reception. But as time went on, he had lost credibility. For one thing, he somehow managed to be at every musical event that she attended. For another, he seemed to be on friendly terms with everyone on Ganymede who played, wrote, or cared about music.
    It had taken Magnus Klein, monitoring everything that might affect Wilsa's life and career, to put his finger on the obvious and to disapprove of it. "How old is Morgan?"
    "He's thirty-three. What does that have to do with anything?"
    "He loves music, and with anyone else he'd admit it. He's chasing after you, you know."
    "But why ?" Wilsa was intrigued by Tristan, more