Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  There was more trouble from the Nullists, this time some kind of pipe bomb in New York. And the negotiations between Washington DC and Boise over the future of the nuclear silos were getting stalled again, and there had been some kind of border-crossing incident near Richmond, Utah…

  Here was a piece on the new Pope — some Italian cardinal called Carlo Maria Martini, who’d taken the name John XXIV — coming to visit Idaho, the first major figure from the outside world to do so. Maybe some of the conspiracy nuts were right: the guys who thought that Idaho, Christian-Fundamentalist as it was — even more extremely so than Xavier Maclachlan’s America — was being funded in its secession by the Catholic Church, which, in the wake of the uprise of fundamentalism all over the planet, seemed to be trying to reemerge as a global force.

  It wasn’t impossible, as far as Marcus White was concerned. He was even prepared to believe that the Catholics had been working, covertly, with Islam for years, in defence of common precepts on sexuality and reproduction. Some said it went all the way back to John Paul II, the last Pope but one…

  The news drizzled on, depressing, a series of high-tech images of timeless human foolishness and misery.

  It seemed to Marcus White beyond dispute that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. But then, maybe every old geezer who ever lived thought the same way.

  Jackie came back in, carrying a coffee and a can of diet soda for herself. She sat with him, at the far end of the sofa, her gaze drifting around the junk in the room.

  White killed the softscreen. He sipped the coffee gratefully; it was bland, lacking the charge he felt he needed from the caffeine, but at least, he thought, he should get a boost from the sugar.

  She said, “I don’t really understand why you’re here.”

  “You don’t…? Barbara Fahy asked me to fly over. It’s a kind of tradition, at times like this.”

  “Times like what?”

  He frowned. “Your mother’s situation.”

  “Her situation.” She smiled. “The truth is, NASA has abandoned my mother, left her to die up there. Why not just say it?”

  He said doggedly, “It’s a tradition to send an astronaut, or an astronaut’s wife, to break news like this. The theory is we understand how this feels, better than anyone else.”

  “You aren’t breaking the news,” she said mildly. “I heard already.” She pointed to Paula’s image, ignored, still working through its message on the wall. “I got a notification from Al Hartle’s office. In fact I heard it first from the net news, the public stuff…”

  He grunted. “It wasn’t headline. How did you — ?”

  “News gophers, of course,” she said. She smiled, a little more kindly. “You really are behind the times, Marcus.”

  “Whatever.” He felt irritated, to his shame a little petulant. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t have come. It’s a tradition, is all.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean to be so sharp. It’s just that I have my head full of other stuff. Here. Look at this junk.”

  She picked up one of the softscreens; it was scrolling through some kind of text, with diagrams, on religion.

  He scanned it quickly. It was — he read, bemused — a modern rework of the Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas, issued by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

  “It’s what they’re teaching the kids at school now; by law, every parent has to learn this stuff too.”

  He said, “The Foundation was the group behind Maclachlan.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled, tiredly. “In New Columbia, we might have bust away from Maclachlan’s politics and economics, but I’m afraid we took his theology with us…”

  The Summa — the original written in 1266 — was a kind of theological Theory of Everything, White read. It united Christian practice with Aristotelian physics. White read about transubstantiation, for instance: the moment in the Catholic Mass in which the bread and wine held by the priest became the body and blood of Christ. The stuff might still look like bread and wine, but — according to Aristotle — the form and the substance of every object were different. And at the moment of transubstantiation, while the form was unchanged, the substance of the bread became that of Christ’s body… And so on.

  “It makes a kind of logical sense,” Jackie said. “It just isn’t science. Which is why they’ve started teaching Aristotelian physics in the schools.”

  That gave him a double-take. “Woah,” he said. “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” she said. “The kids these days are getting the whole shebang. Even the cosmology: the spheres of Moon and sun, the fixed stars beyond… Technology is allowed to continue as long as it’s limited to practical, Earth-bound applications. Even low Earth orbit satellites are okay, because they are beneath the sphere of the Moon. But we’re not supposed to look up at the sky, for fear of getting scared. In greater Seattle, they’ve even banned telescopes… Xavier Maclachlan is putting us back at the center of the Universe, Marcus; he says he wants to heal the spiritual dislocation that science has caused.” She shrugged. “There are compensations. Aristotle taught the interconnectedness of everything; that’s not a bad thing for kids to learn. Look at the environment. Besides, who am I to say Maclachlan’s wrong, if it does make people happier?”

  “It’s not right, damn it,” he growled, shocked.

  “But you have to face the facts, Marcus,” she said. “To most people the Earth might as well be flat anyhow. The sun might as well be a disc of fire floating round the sky…”

  “But I walked on the Moon.”

  Her face hardened. “Not too many people care about those old Moonwalks nowadays, Marcus. Anyhow, you can see why I can’t make too much of a fuss about Paula. She’s gone to a place which — according to what my kids are being taught — doesn’t even exist.”

  After a time, they ran out of things to say.

  White stared into his coffee cup. The milk substitute, whatever it was, had created some kind of scum that swirled around on top of the coffee’s meniscus; when he drank, he tried to filter the shit through his teeth.

  The two boys just ignored White, carrying on with their business as if he wasn’t there. There had been a time when it was different. There had been a time when any ten-year-old kid would have been as thrilled as all hell to have a Moonwalker come visit.

  Paula’s message ran out. At the end, Benacerraf seemed to be trying to say something a little more personal — I love you, I miss the kids — but her face just hovered on the wall, mute and distressed and inarticulate.

  At last, to White’s relief, the image faded to black; the softscreen filled up with some kind of cartoon.

  Jackie, awkwardly, offered to put him up for the night. It was a genuine offer but not exactly heartfelt; he found it easy to turn down. He would take a cab back into the city and find a hotel, fly home tomorrow.

  When the cab came she walked him to the door; he emerged info the fresh sunlight.

  He said, “I got a feeling I wasted my time here.”

  “No,” she said, distracted. Then she seemed to be trying to make more of an effort. She put her hand on his arm; her fingers were light, as fragile as dried twigs. “No. I’m sorry you feel that. I’m grateful you came. I know you were trying to help.”

  “In my old fart way.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Sure you did.”

  A shadow drifted across them, like a cloud. Together, they looked up, White shielding his rheumy eyes against the low afternoon sunlight.

  It was an aerostat: a filmy bubble a mile wide, a geodesic sphere overlain by a translucent film that caught the sunlight, like a huge soap bubble. The shell, buoyed up by the heated air inside, was tinged with the green and yellow of crops, growing in the rich high-altitude light. And the base trailed what looked like spiny tentacles; they were electrostatic chargers, generating and scattering ozone. White could just make out the huge Boeing logo, and the ocean-blue flag of New Columbia, pai
nted on the side.

  To White, it was just another fix of disorientation. The whole floating factory-farm looked like some huge jellyfish: an alien invader, maybe, drifting through the tall blue sky of Earth.

  Jackie looked up at him, her eyes empty, the tattoo scars on her cheeks a washed-out pink in the sunlight. “I lost my mother years ago. Or maybe she lost me. The fact that she’s still alive up there, floating around half-way to Jupiter in some metal coffin, is just—” She hunted for the word. “Theoretical.”

  He tried to think of something to say, some way to get out of this situation.

  You’re too old, Marcus, just too damn old.

  * * *

  Day 1181

  Alone in the humming calm of the flight deck and with her feet padding at the Teflon sheet — with all the lights subdued save for the small instrument glows, surrounded by the soft sounds of her mother’s voice, her own breathing and the high-pitched whir of the pumps — Nicola Mott stared upwards at the moons of Jupiter.

  The crop yields continued to fall, and the transmission of mutations to successive generations was rising. Some plants, like the strawberries, refused to flower altogether. Rosenberg had talked about the reasons for this — inappropriate cell structures, poor fluid transmission — but Mott just tuned him out. The science really didn’t matter right now; in a sense, it never had.

  They just had to find solutions with their available resources. Ways to survive.

  So they were improvising. Rosenberg had designed a new plant growth unit to work in the centrifuge arm, where the plants could be subjected to a high percentage of a G for most of each day. That meant transferring some of the farm’s equipment — lamps, the air blower system, racks and nutrient baths and reservoirs — into the cramped arm cabin.

  It was a long and difficult job, to which they were all having to contribute, under Rosenberg’s reluctant supervision. It wasn’t going to be a complete answer; the growing area inside the arm would be nothing like sufficient to fulfil their needs. And the arm wasn’t shielded from radiation so well as the farm itself. But Rosenberg’s hope was that stronger growths in the arm, coupled with at least some provision from the original farm, would close the gap in their requirements, before they started to go hungry.

  The biggest drawback was the loss of the centrifuge for the crew.

  They had reinstalled the exercise cycle, up on the flight deck, where there was still a little room. But not the treadmill.

  That pissed Nicola Mott. It had been proven, all the way back to Skylab, that a treadmill was a much better way of exercising a range of muscle groups than a cycle. In her opinion it was just another example of the crew’s collective laziness and incompetence, which would lead them all, ultimately, into disaster.

  Anyway, she had got on with devising her own solution.

  She improvised a treadmill. It was just a slippery sheet of Teflon that she bolted to the floor of the flight deck, behind the pilot’s seat. She could balance herself with a hand on the seat in front of her, and just walk along, her feet slithering on the slippery pad. She wore socks, so her feet could slide more easily. It wasn’t as effective as the real thing; too often she stubbed a toe on the bolts that held the Teflon in place, and because she couldn’t vary the resistance, generally it was muscle fatigue that stopped her working. But she found if she worked at it long enough her calves, tendons and toes got a real workout.

  And so, here she was. She had slapped a softscreen on the wall, and as she worked she listened to a message from her parents, relayed from their home in Cambridge, England. She didn’t trouble to watch too carefully; the quality was low because of reduced capacity anyhow, and her father was prone to providing her with badly-shot home movies overlaid by her mother’s slow, monotonic speech. Right now, for instance, there was a shaky pan of the new rice paddy fields around Ely in Cambridgeshire.

  …You remember your cousin Sarah,her mother said. Came down with CJD, didn’t she. She was only twenty-two. Such a pretty girl. She chose the euth clinic, you know, even though Mary — your aunt Mary, you know, her mother — said it was un-Christian, What a mess the whole thing is. Of course we don’t have blood donors now, all our transfusion blood is flown in from abroad, and the Tories say the government’s blood tax is too high. Quarantine, they call it. The French were the first — typical bloody French, your father says — when they poured all that concrete down the Channel Tunnel. Oh, John Major died. There was a program on the telly. I didn’t realize he was the last Tory Prime Minister, who’d have thought it…

  Her mother’s face, on screen now, was a ruin, the left side imploded, cratered. She had come down with a prion disease related to Creutzfeld-Jakob, non-fatal but disfiguring, the prions steadily sculpting the soft cells of her flesh.

  It had taken Mott herself a hell of a lot of tests to be proven fit to come to the States, to get into NASA.

  She had come a long way from Cambridgeshire.

  …Everything was different here.

  Discovery was now five hundred million miles from the sun — five times the distance of Earth from the parent star. As the mission had unfolded the inverse square law had worked inexorably at the sun’s radiation and size; from here the sun was still brilliant — at magnitude minus seventeen, much brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth — but its disc was tiny, like a flaw in the retina, like a distant supernova, like nothing she had seen from the surface of Earth. The light it cast had a strange quality, too: almost the light of a point source, the shadows stretching over the orbiter long and sharp.

  Even the sun was different here, transmuted into something alien by distance.

  As Discovery’s separation from Earth had grown, and the lag of radio signals from Houston had risen to an hour and a half round trip, it was as if their tenuous link to home had stretched, broken.

  Now Earth was just a spark of blue light close to the shrinking sun, the place the high-gain antenna pointed. And those remote voices, from Mission Control and in the back rooms of Building 30 at JSC, with their detailed reams of advice and instruction — trying to control the crew, as once they had choreographed Moonwalkers, step by step — seemed to have little to do with their situation, here, suspended in extraordinary isolation in this outer darkness.

  It was taking a while to sink in, after four decades of the culture of the ground control of spaceflight, but out here, as they sailed past the moons of Jupiter, the crew of Discovery was truly alone. There was nothing to fall back on but what they had brought along with them, for better or worse, and whatever ingenuity they could apply.

  Your father’s talking about a holiday. He wants to go to Mega-Power — you know, the turbine tower, that Dutch monstrosity in the North Sea. Apparently they have restaurants and a hotel and shop, four miles high. All covered over, of course. Fancy that. But I wouldn’t trust it, not after the leak of that huge cloud of ammonia last year…

  Directly above her head Mott could see the half-disc of Jupiter. It glowed salmon-pink in the flat sunlight. Discovery was coming no closer than two million miles to the planet — twenty-five Jupiter diameters — but even so the giant world showed a sizable disc, like a big pink coin held at arm’s length, four times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky. On the sunlit hemisphere she could make out the stripes of the ammonia ice cloud bands, brown and white and orange stripes, streaked and curdled with turbulence along the lines where they met. She couldn’t see the Great Red Spot, and that was a disappointment. But Jupiter’s day was only ten hours or so; perhaps the planet’s disc would stay visible long enough for the Spot to be brought into view.

  And Mott could see some of Jupiter’s moons, strung out in a line parallel to the equator of their parent.

  Io — a little larger than Earth’s Moon — lay between its parent and the sun, about two Jupiter diameters from the cloud tops, its illuminated hemisphere a sulphur-yellow spot of light. Ganymede, twice as far from Jupiter as Io, sat behind its parent, its ice surface glittering wh
ite. Europa and Callisto, the other large moons, were harder to spot; eventually she found Callisto as a bright white spark against the darkness of Jupiter’s shadowed hemisphere.

  It only took Io, the innermost of the large satellites, a day or so to travel around its orbit around Jupiter. If she stayed up here long enough, Mott would get to see the moons turn around their parent in their endless, complex dance…

  The compact Jovian system was oddly charming. Like an old-fashioned orrery, a clockwork model of the Solar System. But Jupiter was eleven times the diameter of Earth. And its moons, if freed from Jupiter’s grip, were large enough to have qualified as planets in their own right. Ganymede — out here, a spark dwarfed by Jupiter — was the largest moon in the Solar System: larger than Titan, larger, in fact, than the planet Mercury.

  In a window frame of this beat-up Shuttle orbiter, she could see five worlds, clustered together in one gigantic gravity well.

  But, she thought, there was no life here, not even — as far as anyone could tell — on that slush ball Europa. There was no life for a half-billion miles in any direction, save within the battered walls of this spacecraft, the bubble of air which sheltered her.

  Damn it all. She wished Siobhan could see this. That remote death, back in the heart of the Solar System, was losing its power to hurt her now. But still, what a waste, what a meaningless, cruel waste.

  No, I want to go to the hedgerow museum in Hampshire, Apparently they still have some ptarmigans there, the last ones. Oh, I have to tell you, you wouldn’t believe the price of potatoes in the shops. All the sweetcorn you could ask for, but it’s not the same… We know you are still missing Siobhan, love. We know you two were pals. You take care of yourself, and try not to fret about it all too much…

  Pals. Her parents had never known — or had preferred not to know — about Libet’s true relationship with their daughter. Her parents had been young in the 1970s, hardly the Victorian era. Mott wondered if there was something in the human genome which dictated that no generation could accept the sexuality of its offspring.