Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The crescent thinned rapidly as it grew, as if the light were bleeding from its tapering horns. Soon it was so huge that Benacerraf had to crane her neck to see its full extent.

  And then, with a flare of gold and red, the sun passed beyond the horizon.

  Discovery,flying over oceans, plunged into Earth’s huge shadow. Now, the spacecraft inhabited a new landscape, which revealed itself to Benacerraf as her eyes dark-adapted.

  Over the night hemisphere of Earth, a huge aurora glowed. It was a curtain of green light that appeared to extend from the fleeing spacecraft all the way to Earth’s horizon, at the pole. Beneath, the aurora blended in with the airglow, the luminous gas layer high in the atmosphere excited by the sun’s radiation. And Benacerraf could see noctilucent clouds, very high decks illuminated by the airglow, like the surface of a thin, milky sea. Above the aurora, very faint, she could see streamers, very thin striations which seemed to extend down from much higher altitudes, spokes aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field.

  The aurora’s curtains and folds seemed to be on the same level as Discovery — the orbiter was near its closest approach now, just a couple of hundred miles above the planet — and Benacerraf had a rare sense of motion, of speed, of sailing through some invisible sea, populated by these bergs of cool light.

  It was the most beautiful thing Benacerraf had ever seen. And a hell of a relief from the bleak emptiness of interplanetary space, where it never felt like she was going anywhere. Damn, damn. How could I abandon all this?

  Discovery was revisiting Earth for its final gravity assist before Jupiter; Earth was, in fact, the most massive object between the sun and Jupiter.

  By passing so close to Earth — coming within a couple of hundred miles of its surface — Discovery had become briefly coupled to Earth, like, Benacerraf thought, a child grabbing hold of a merry-go-round propelled by the strong arms of its father. When Discovery flew on, it would have picked up energy from the encounter — the equivalent of thousands of pounds of additional fuel — and Earth’s store of energy would be reduced; forever after the planet would circle the sun a little slower.

  Benacerraf remembered a Public Affairs Officer trying to explain this at a JSC briefing, a couple of months before the launch. A reporter asked if the resulting slowdown in the Earth’s orbit around the sun would do harm to the environment. On the podium, there were the usual shaking of heads and rolling of eyes. Then Bill Angel had said, mockingly, that NASA would just have to launch another spacecraft and make it fly by Earth on the opposite side…

  General laughter.

  It had left a sour taste in Benacerraf’s mouth. That reporter had been entitled to a better answer than that. There was too much bullshitting of the ignorant, when it came to science and engineering, she thought. You only had to look at the history of the civil nuclear power program to see that engineers didn’t deserve any kind of implicit trust, that they had a duty to answer as fully as possible every question and concern from the public, however dumb it might seem.

  And anyhow, Angel’s answer had been wrong tactically; because after that the questioning had gotten very hostile, for instance on what contingency plans NASA had to shoot Discovery down if something went wrong — if the ship came barrelling in towards a collision with Earth, with the payload bay full of uranium…

  And maybe all that arrogance had contributed, in the end, to the decision to dump Benacerraf and her crew: to cut off the retrieval program, even to close down the resupply missions.

  Benacerraf and the others had half-expected such a sentence from the beginning, she suspected, even as they’d formulated the unlikely mission profile, over Chinese food in her house at Clear Lake. And, oddly, it hadn’t seemed so hard to take when the news first came in, as they sailed around the sun at the boiling heart of the Solar System.

  But now, so close to Earth, it was much more difficult. To sail over that blue-glowing landscape, so close, to be within a couple of thousand miles of Jackie and the kids — and not be able to reach them — was pretty much unbearable.

  For this closeness was an illusion. She was separated from Earth now by intangible barriers of energy and velocity, as impenetrable as the huge distances of the Solar System. There was no way Discovery could shed all its hard-won kinetic energy, and allow them to sail safely home.

  Benacerraf was not going home, ever again. Her only destination now was Titan, a cold dark hole, out on the chilly rim of the System.

  Suddenly, the sunrise was approaching, far ahead, at the rim of the roof which the Pacific hemisphere had become.

  A blue streak, deep and beautiful, spread around Earth’s huge curve. Then a golden brown began to seep into the light. Abruptly the gold flooded out the blue, becoming as bright as rocket light, and spreading around the horizon; a fingernail arc of the sun appeared at the horizon, and the shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards Benacerraf.

  Blight white light flooded the cabin, as the sun hauled itself over the limb of Earth.

  It was, Benacerraf realized, almost certainly the last Earth sunrise she would ever witness.

  …There was a sharp tap, directly in front of her, making her jump.

  Holy shit, she thought. It had sounded for all the world like a fingernail on the window.

  She released her restraints and pushed herself out of her chair, head first towards the window before her.

  She could see a tiny crater there, maybe a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. It picked up the flat sunlight coming over the ocean, and gleamed like a raindrop on the outside of the glass.

  She knew she was in no danger. The exterior window was a half-inch thick, and two further panes lay behind that; there was a total of two inches of glass between her and the vacuum.

  Maybe this little dink had been caused by something natural, a micrometeorite. Maybe. On the other hand, Discovery was flying right through the altitude where the maximum density of man-made debris had accumulated: bits of broken-up satellites, droplets of frozen fuel, nuts and bolts. She was willing to bet that if she dug down into that little pit, she’d find a flake of some cheap Chinese paint, or a droplet of frozen urine from the Mir.

  A minute after closest approach, Earth had receded by seventy miles, and Benacerraf could see the planet falling away; a couple of minutes after that and Discovery had risen more than a thousand miles above the surface. As Earth closed over its own spherical belly of silvery ocean, Benacerraf felt a stab of loneliness, of loss.

  Earth receded, now, as dramatically as if she was rising in some kind of high speed lift. The huge, delicately-edge crescent of blue and white opened out rapidly, the sky-bright sunlit side expanding into the darkness. She could see how rapidly she was moving; the clouds piled up over the equator seemed to flow steadily into her view as Discovery flew on. After perhaps fifteen minutes the orbiter had receded to about a full Earth diameter, and suddenly she could see the half-shadowed disc of Earth, contained in her window, hanging over the payload bay like some unlikely Moon…

  And, over the night side of Earth, Benacerraf saw a bright streak of light: a flare, hair-thin, its length of perhaps a few hundred miles dwarfed by the carcase of the planet.

  The light died, as rapidly as it had formed.

  She felt her mouth draw into a smile.

  That was what she had been waiting up here to see. Now, Discovery would sail on alone; now, perhaps, Niki Mott would be able to get some sleep.

  After sailing with Discovery around the sun, Siobhan Libet had made it home.

  * * *

  When he got off the plane at Sea Tac, Marcus White found a long queue at passport control. He stood in line like everyone else, ignoring the pain in his back and his rebuilt hips and his osteoporosis-stricken legs and the pressure from his bladder, which seemed to hold no more than a shot glass these days.

  The thing of it was, he felt just the same as he ever did, inside; he was just stuck inside this decaying, betraying husk of a body, getting slower all the time, in
a world that was moving past him ever more quickly.

  There was a huge screen up ahead, Frank Sinatra and Katherine Hepburn starring together in a new gender-reversed version of Casablanca, and everyone else in the line seemed to be goggling up like mesmerized sheep at sim-Sinatra’s digitized face.

  The line shuffled forward. His attention drifted.

  …Sometimes he thought he could see that light-drenched landscape again: the glowing regolith under the black sky, his own reflection in Tom’s mirrored visor, breaking through the washed-out reality of the present…

  Some guy poked him in the back. He’d been holding up the line.

  He remembered something that Chinese kid, Jiang Ling, had told him during her visit a few years back. In China, for all its faults, things were different; in China, they were aiming for economic growth, but without dumping the family en route. Jiang talked about how it was her duty to protect her parents, her surviving grandparent.

  He could see it in the faces of people around him, even here, in this goddamn line: they looked on him as just an obstruction, an irritation.

  Meanwhile that prick in the White House, Maclachlan, was talking about “radical solutions to our demographic problems…”

  Happy booths, they were calling them. Sometimes, when White thought about it, he got scared. But Geena was long dead, and his son, Bob, had a family of his own, who White hardly ever got to see. Most of the time, he couldn’t give a fuck.

  At last he got to the front of the line. The clerk was just a kid; her face was so covered in image-tattoos she almost looked like one of those fucking Nullists who were making life miserable for everyone. White took the opportunity to vent off a little steam at her. Maybe Washington was a different country now, but as far as he was concerned it was a joke to have to produce a passport — even the new type, a shiny patch tattooed to the back of your hand — just to get from Houston to Seattle.

  The clerk just tolerated him; she had, of course, no reply to offer.

  Outside the terminal he caught a cab, and gave the driver Jackie Benacerraf’s address, just off 23rd Avenue, in the Capitol Park district.

  Seattle was bright, clean, growing; the air seemed clean and fresh, and he felt he might have been able to smell the scent of the woods. He didn’t even need the umbrella he’d brought, against the habitual drizzle.

  It was a city he’d always liked; a long, skinny town sprawling along an isthmus, a tongue of land, with its parks and waterways and its neat views of mountains and lakes. He’d come out here years ago, during Apollo, to visit Boeing for training and familiarization and glad-handing; they’d been responsible, back then, for the development of the Saturn first stage. He recognized a lot of the landmarks he’d gotten to know then. But there was a lot of construction going on, and it seemed to White that everywhere he looked he saw plump Asian faces: Chinese, Japs, Malaysians. And the walls, even of the older buildings, were covered with those huge new softscreen billboards, pumping out ads and infomercials and online soaps day and night, so that it was somehow hard to make out the shape of things, the sweep and structure of the city, and he could have been anywhere.

  New Columbia,they called it now: an amalgam of Alaska, Washington, Oregon — all seceded from Maclachlan’s imploding U.S. — with the old Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. On its formation the new nation had instantly become an economic giant, with a massive trade surplus and a lot of assets: Alaskan oil, Albertan natural gas and wheat, Washington’s nuclear, aerospace and software industries, Oregon’s timber and high-tech industries, a string of massive ports serving the Asia-Pacific trade, not to mention a highly educated workforce.

  He was a long way from what was left of the old US of A now, he thought, all that smoggy old development on the East Coast. This was a modern Pacific nation-state, prosperous, aggressive.

  He shook his head. He hated to find himself thinking like an old fart. His real trouble was not that Seattle wasn’t part of the USA any more, but that it wasn’t the 1960s. The young people were remaking the world, and Earth was becoming an alien planet to him: more alien, in fact, than the Moon, if by some magic he could have been transported back there.

  Still, he thought, if you had to go to somewhere that had seceded, he still preferred Washington State to Idaho.

  At Jackie Benacerraf’s house, it only took a minute to be allowed in through the security barrier, although he had to present his passport tattoo to the cameras. A kid, a little boy around ten, let him into the house itself, and directed him to the living room where he’d find Jackie.

  White dropped his bag in the hall. The house was big, sprawling, bright, but messy. Softscreens were playing in every room, mostly kid’s stuff, pop videos and animations. It was a clamor of noise and imagery to White, but it didn’t seem to faze the kids — two of them, Fred and Ben, Paula Benacerraf’s grandchildren, boys who ran around and wrestled and seemed to be doing pretty much what White had gotten up to when he was nine or ten. But the kids looked odd, to White, with their image-tattoos and pierced cheeks and ears and shaved-off, sculpted hair. The younger one, in fact, was pretty much coated with image-tattoos, like a Nullist, but he was too young to hold still for long enough to let the processors turn his flesh invisible.

  It ought to be possible to exert some kind of control, he thought. These kids ought to be playing softball in the yard, not dressing up like high-tech Barbies, playing with the designs on each other’s faces.

  We got decadent, he thought. Like ancient Rome. No wonder the Chinese are beating the pants off of us economically.

  In the living room, Jackie Benacerraf was sitting on the floor. She was surrounded by softscreens and books, which she was pawing through and tapping desultorily. On the wall, apparently unnoticed by Jackie, a softscreen bore the image of Paula Benacerraf’s face — pale, a little haggard, her grey hair floating around — against a dimly-seen background of clunky, beat-up hab module interior. Paula was talking quietly, describing how the surviving crew all were, what they were doing, their daily routine, their science observations.

  Jackie looked up at White. She smiled, but it looked forced. “Hi. You didn’t need to come out, you know.”

  He shrugged, standing there awkwardly. “It’s not a problem. I thought somebody ought to.”

  “Yeah.” She stood up, a little stiffly. She looked to have aged, too, to White. How old was she now? — no more than thirty, surely… Her face had lost a lot of its prettiness, he thought sadly; her skin already looked slack and lifeless, her eyes deep-shadowed, and he thought she was putting on weight, though the black, softscreen-sequined kimono she was wearing masked a lot of that. Her hair was a close-cropped black fuzz, and there were pale patches on her cheeks where she had had old image-tattoos removed.

  “So,” she said without enthusiasm, “you’re here. You want a meal? Are you hungry?”

  “No. I ate on the plane. A coffee would be good, though.”

  She smiled. “Let me guess. Black, sugar, caffeine.”

  “Almost. I take it white. You have any cream?”

  She pulled a face. “Are you kidding? Take a seat.”

  He sat on the end of a sofa. He had to clear a space, move aside some softscreens and books. The cushions were too soft, and he knew he would have trouble getting up later; but it was, he admitted to himself, a relief to sit down again.

  He heard her banging around, the hum of a microwave. “We’re all out of caffeine,” she called.

  “Forget it. I’ll take it as it comes.”

  Paula Benacerraf kept on talking.

  …You have to try not to worry. We aren’t in despair; no way. The whole point of this trip was to figure out how we could become self-sufficient up there. Now, that list has a little extra sharpness. And we have Rosenberg, who’s a bright guy, and you can be sure when we get to Titan we’ll be doing our best to figure out how we can use the local resources to…

  The quality of the image was poor; big blocky pixel faults craw
led over Paula’s face like organized, repetitive insects. Benacerraf’s personal message would have been recorded, digitally compressed, and then fired off in a brief pulse from Discovery to Goldstone, probably as filler along with another data stream.

  He understood how hard it was for Paula to express herself in such a situation. Space was a mixture of the bland — the endless dull routine, the business of survival — and the deadly. And in the midst of all the routine stuff, how could you talk of your fears, without sounding lurid and indulgent? But if you didn’t, how could you communicate with the folks at home?

  Damn, damn. Paula Benacerraf was an impossibly brave woman, and she had been betrayed, by NASA itself. The anger, the near-grief he’d been nursing since that asshole Hartle had started issuing his draconian edicts came bubbling to the surface once more.

  He turned away, looking for distraction.

  Under the layers of softscreens the walls were just plaster, he saw, white-painted. Nobody decorated their home any more, he thought, save for throwing up these damn screens. Jackie’s home was a kind of shell of shifting light shapes, like an underwater cave, nothing permanent, nothing worthwhile, nothing owned.

  No wonder the kids these days are going crazy, he thought.

  He flicked through Jackie’s softscreens, until he found some news, an online edition of the Seattle Times.

  Lousy economic figures once again: the depression seemed to be deepening, with more trade barriers going up around the world, capital fleeing from one country to another. Australia was the latest to have run into the buffers. There were pictures of queues for some kind of new-millennium soup kitchens in Sidney and Melbourne, starving kids in the outback, swollen pot-bellies that made White think of pictures of Africa rather than anywhere with an Anglo-Saxon background.

  He had been born during one great depression, he thought; maybe he was going to die during another.