Jupiter Stone
by Kelly A Jacobson
To understand my story, you must first understand me--not in the philosophical sense, but the physical entity that is "me," the way that my identical atoms are contained in their random motion. Imagine a balloon filled with helium, only there is no balloon. Imagine a cloud, only without the liquid droplets. This must be difficult for you. You humans like solidity and a visible evidence of strength. But you must accept that our strength is a direct result of our instability--or it was, before "our" became a concept, a memory, a thing that I light at the heart of the balloon of me whenever I need to burn.
Good.
I believe my translator has recalibrated.
Let's start again.
My name is Woo Sa. These words should be whispers in the wind, but I suspect that even your translator prefers hardness. I come from the planet you call Jupiter, which we call home--in our language, of course.
How can I explain it?
In your language, our planet is named as the "sky father." God of thunder. King. The largest planet in our solar system, and yet inaccessible to you journeyers--until now, of course. How you wrote off this mass of hydrogen, this undefined surface, inhospitable, you thought, to any life.
Then what am I?
You have the story of the Owl Goddess, Minerva, in Greek called Athena and birthed from Zeus. We have the Great Red Spot. From it, we were birthed, spun out like helicopter seeds from your maple trees. Our cataclysmic event was not a bomb, or an asteroid, but a slow shifting of the ratio of hydrogen to helium comprising our planet. Such a change created monsters--versions of us that consumed the others, so that they grew and grew and became the very atmosphere around us. Those of us who survived did so by finding the one place the monsters would not go: the spot where they were born, which might, if they got too close, consume them.
Home.
In your language, home means the noun of a place one lives, but also the verb of returning to a territory after leaving it. A constant making and remaking. In our language, home means a stable place where we are remade.
This reshaping is not a painless process.
There were casualties.
