The Moons of Jupiter: Europa's Ice and Ocean

You travel out past Mars to a banded planet eleven times the width of the Earth, and find four small worlds standing beside it in a line. The second one is white, smooth as a billiard ball, and cracked all over like a glazed bowl. You learn why it has almost no craters, how a tiny wobble in its orbit keeps an ocean liquid where nothing should be, and how that ocean was found from the outside without anyone touching it. Then you sink through the ice into water that has never once seen light.

The ending, given away now, per house rules: you do not need to keep the depths, or the numbers, or the names of the four moons. There is nothing else to wait for, which is the point.

The first minute

Wherever you are, whatever kind of day it has been, you can let it end now. It is done with. It has no more claim on you. Let your shoulders drop. Let the bed hold your whole weight. There is nothing left tonight that needs carrying. Let your hands open. Let your jaw loosen. Let your breathing find its own slower pace. Nothing here needs watching. Nothing needs deciding. Nothing will be asked of you in the morning. Tonight we are going out to a small white moon, very far from here. It is covered in ice, and cracked all…

Why this one works at night

There is no light down there and there never has been. The water simply turns over in the dark, as it has for a very long time, and none of it needs watching tonight. The pace is quiet and downward, and the whole of it is cold, white, deep, quiet. Nothing in it asks to be followed closely, which is what makes it easy to let go of.

“…In that picture the ocean is close to the surface, and the cracks may open all the way down—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during