It was watching those tentacles move about that put me in mind of sign languages for the deaf, and that our Europan friends' language might be such a language. So I wrote a paper about it. So the next thing I know, I'm being flown to Nevada and being drilled as the first payload specialist in language. Then I met Jane, deaf linguist and highly articulate signer, who took me up on the challenge to scavenge some rudimentary meaning from the videos. And we immediately achieved some very gratifying results.
Finally I persuaded the gods of NASA that Jane was essential to the plan and she had to come too. Then a gaggle of spacemen and spacewomen to drive the rocket and do all the rest of the mainstream science, the physics, geology and biology, five in number.
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Who can ever forget approaching Jupiter, that bright banded star with red eye filling the sky? And touching down on Europa, a fantastic bright-white, ice-arctic landscape on a body as light as the moon? But we could not tarry on that beautiful surface, deadly with Jupiter's radioactive magnetosphere, and we quickly burrowed into the ice.
It was slow going through five miles of solid ice. Finally we penetrated the chasm, the secret abyss which had eluded us for so long. Barren, rocky Mars, and sweltering, toxic Venus had been the long-time favourites of science-fiction writers, but none of them had considered that little Europa, Jupiter's daughter, in the cold outer reaches, might be a perfect little Easter egg, its clean ice shell hiding all the essential ingredients for life in its pleasantly warm ocean.
"Life puffs up to fill space," I said to myself in awe, on seeing the bountiful produce of Europa for the first time. Sceptical scientists had bewailed the lack of photosynthesis, but here, with core degassing, there was at least enough oxygen for eukaryotes, and cryptogamous plants (fungi) had filled the niches, in shapes large and small, plain and bizarre. With their mulch, they had laid down foundations for an impressive array of animal life.
Most of them were amazingly familiar: jellyfish, crustaceans, molluscs and even fish, but all with a distinctly Europan cast, adapted for the much darker dark and minimal gravity, and having the luxury of no interactions with either surface or land life. I was especially astounded by the evolution of bioluminescence to lighten Europa's depths, to a much greater degree than on Earth. It was the only light.
But laid on the top of this was the race of intelligent cephalopods which had captured our imagination, the large, octopusoid creatures with big brains, prehensile tentacles, language, and material culture. The Europans.
The first we saw of them, trailing down to a crustal shelf, was their farms, serried rows on rows of regimented fungus stalks that were surely the product of intelligence. We had spotted our first Europans nearby. Jane studied them intently as the rest of the crew wondered. Finally, she surmised in fluent ASL, "they are pointing at us, talking about us. What they are saying, though, I have no idea."
"'What the bloody hell is that??!!', perhaps," I said drily. It got a laugh. But Jane took the idea seriously and looked at them closely again with the bins, her brow furrowed in the quest for a Europan 'wh-' word.
As we saw the rural Europan landscape become more urban, we held back. It was not yet time for encounter. We were content to drift along collecting information, preferring to lurk rather than declare ourselves. But we still managed to see a lot --docile de-clawed giant crabs and lobsters in great herds, obviously waiting to be eaten, and cephalopod dens built with neatly worked stone.
We got close up to a circular one that was derelict and abandoned, and marvelled at the crisply-cut, equally-sized interlocking blocks. This troubled Peter, the geologist on board. "They need metal to do this," he said, "or something very much like it." And we all wondered how they had achieved this in the depths of the ocean, where they could not very well build a fire.
Then we were able to hide behind a great rock and watch what looked like a village. We actually camped here for several days and Jane did a lot of useful work. The others could not keep their eyes away either, and we saw Peter's predicted metal stone-cutting tools. We laughed when we saw their smaller hunting fish, an oscar-like species, and bigger pack fish, seen hauling stone over rollers on the smoothed ocean bed. Dogs, horses - they had them all! Then it became apparent that as we could not understand Earth just by watching a village in the Ozarks, so this settlement was but a shadow of their metropolis, and we moved on.
Then our mission commander, Stacey, had the bright idea of approaching the city at a very high altitude.