Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  At last, Rosenberg said the air and temperatures were okay.

  Benacerraf cracked the seal of her helmet.

  Chill air gushed into her helmet, at her neck and over her face. Her breath immediately misted before her face, and gathered as frost on the glass of her faceplate. She coughed, and took a deep breath. The air was so cold she could feel it burning at her lungs, and digging into the flesh of her face. The warmth of her suit seemed to gush out at her neck, and the cold seeped deeper into her.

  “My God, Rosenberg.”

  “Can you breathe? What can you smell?”

  She sniffed, but her nose seemed blocked. “It’s so damn cold.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It isn’t going to get a lot better.”

  She tried again, dragging the air through her nostrils. The cold of it seemed to scour at her nasal passages, the back of her throat.

  The air stank.

  “Bad eggs,” she said. “Farts.”

  Rosenberg cracked his own helmet now; she could see steam billow out around his face, as if his suit was a mobile sauna. He grimaced. “Methane,” he said. “Other shit too. Welcome to Titan, Paula.”

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  Benacerraf took off her boots and gloves; her fingers immediately felt numb and the tips turned pasty-white, but despite the cold, it was a relief to get the boots off her sore feet.

  She began digging around inside her suit, opening zips, trying to get at her urine bag. When she had it, she tipped it up into a larger plastic storage bag. She tried to keep the whole operation sealed up, but her cold hands were clumsy, and a few drops of the thick piss escaped and splashed on the gumbo-streaked fabric of her sleeves. She sealed up the bag and passed it to Rosenberg; he pushed it into a corner of the tent, far from the heater, where it would freeze quickly.

  Mercifully, neither of them had taken a dump into their suit collectors during the walk. That was something to face another day.

  She plugged her PLSS into the power feed, to charge up its batteries. She checked the status of her lith canisters and other consumables.

  Rosenberg had brought a couple of bags of Mount Othrys water into the tent. These had refrozen, of course, during the haul; now he held them close to the heater and mashed them up with his boot.

  There was enough water for seven or eight days, enough to be able to make it back to Discovery from the edge of the ice sheet without resupply. After that, they would be on the ice of Cronos, and ought to be able to collect local water.

  When the ice was melted, they used the water to drink, and to resupply the spigots in their helmets, and to rehydrate a couple of packets of food.

  Washing, they had decided, was a luxury for this trip.

  The menu was soup, rice, biscuits and chocolate, with a handful of baby carrots. Benacerraf gulped down her food as rapidly as she could. The soup made a tiny warm place at the center of her body. The carrots still tasted bitter, but Rosenberg devoured his, and she passed him her portion.

  Rosenberg measured the amount she drank. They had to watch out for dehydration. Cold air couldn’t hold much moisture, and with every breath she took, her nose and mouth were trying to humidify the air. She could lose a gallon of water a day that way, through her nose and breathing passages. It was a vicious circle; the more she dried out the less thirsty she would feel.

  She gulped down the last of her ration. “I’m done,” she said, shivering. “I think I’ll seal up again.”

  He checked the Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Not yet, Paula. Remember what we said. We have to leave the suits open a full hour before sealing up; we have to get the moisture out.”

  Benacerraf thought of arguing against that, but he’d already relented on the schedule today.

  Anyhow he was right. If the dampness from her body seeped into the suit’s layers, it would shortcut their insulating effect. She could even freeze in there.

  “Let me look at your foot,” Rosenberg said now.

  “It’s just a friction injury.”

  “Then let’s stop it getting any worse,” Rosenberg said mildly. “Come on, Paula. Doctor’s orders.”

  With great reluctance, Benacerraf removed the sock she was wearing on her right foot.

  The side of her foot was rubbed raw, all the way back to the heel. Rosenberg rubbed cream into it, and stuck a plaster over the worst of her blisters. “If this keeps up we’ll have to think about cutting a chunk out of that boot, I guess it wasn’t designed for hiking.”

  “No. Thanks, Rosenberg.”

  When Benacerraf had sealed up her suit again, she lay down on her side, facing the soft plastic wall, away from Rosenberg. When she reached out to the wall and touched it with her gloved hand, she could feel how stiff it was, and a rime of frost — gathered from their breath and the moisture emitted by the hot Earth-born bodies inside their suits — scraped off on her fingertip.

  She would be waking up to darkness again, she realized, to another day of tough hauling across the bleak, featureless gumbo.

  It was impossible to settle her head inside her helmet. The damn thing wasn’t designed to be a pillow, after all. Tomorrow night, she’d put some kind of cushion inside here, something from the sled. Anything soft, even a scrap of parachute canvas.

  She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the stiffness of her shoulders, the way her hip dug into the ground, the soreness of her feet, the sucking cold of the icy slush below her.

  The suit heater labored to warm her; gradually the cold of the tent was dispelled, and the fresh oxygen-nitrogen blowing across her face dispelled the stink of methane.

  The news from home,they’d taken to calling it.

  It was impossible to grasp the scale of it, and so she didn’t even try. Maybe their isolation and abandonment had, in an offbeat way, actually helped. After so many years away from Earth she found it hard to remember that there were members of the human race beyond the handful who had left Earth orbit with her, in. After so long in confinement, the hab modules and landing craft and pressure suits making up a series of high-tech prisons, stretching back years, it was difficult to imagine walking, unimpeded, in the open air. Even if by some miracle she could be transported home now, she suspected she would be some kind of agoraphobic, a recluse, shunning company and light.

  Even her family, Jackie and the boys, seemed to be receding from her. After all, the boys had lived half their brief lives without Benacerraf. If she had been taken home, she wouldn’t have recognized them, nor they her.

  They’d been cut off up here, on this ice ball in the sky. They couldn’t have gotten home anyhow. The fact that home may not even exist any more really didn’t seem to make much difference. She still faced the same grinding numbness, the same lengthy list of chores to stay alive, every time she woke up, whether humanity lived or not.

  It made no difference.

  They didn’t talk about it, much. Rosenberg never referred to people he had lost, places he would never see again.

  But that was Rosenberg. He was probably happier up here on Titan anyhow; human society had never done many favors for smart, goofy kids like Rosenberg, no matter how much it needed their inventions.

  As for herself, maybe she was working through some kind of post-shock syndrome. Christ knows, she thought, I’m entitled to. Here she was stranded with an unfit wacko on a moon of Saturn, and it looked as if the world had come to an end, and she appeared to be developing crotch rot. How was she supposed to react? Now here’s my plan…

  On the whole, she concluded, however, she was handling this pretty well. In a way, even the walking helped. Even the pain. Something to do, to occupy her mind during the long, slow-time Titan days.

  Sleep times, however, were harder to handle.

  On the fifth day, they reached the lip of the ice plateau Cronos.

  Benacerraf stopped, and leaned against her harness.

  The break in the landscape was surprisingly sharp. Maybe a half-mile ahead of her, the gumbo visibly thinne
d. Then a ridge of eroded grey-white water ice pushed its way up out of the tholin, like a beach rising from some sludgy polluted ocean. The slope was shallow at first, but Benacerraf could see how it continued on upwards, until it was lost in the thick band of horizon haze. The ice was worn with gullies and grooves, like old sandstone, and Benacerraf could make out stripes and stains of tholin down the grey buttresses.

  As far as she could see the ridge continued, a band of dull grey like a wall across the world, merging at last with the horizon.

  Rosenberg came up to her, breathing hard, leaning against his traces. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Rosenberg’s voice was odd: light, fragile. And his stance seemed awkward; he seemed to be leaning too far into the traces. She tried to look into Rosenberg’s helmet. But his visor was obscured by an orange reflection from the hazy sky, frost, a smear of tholin. Rosenberg was the doctor; Benacerraf had been focusing on her own minor ailments, and trusting Rosenberg to look after himself.

  Maybe he wasn’t.

  She looked up dubiously at the slope they would have to climb. “Magnificent. Absolutely. Let’s go on.”

  She led the way once more.

  It got easier, despite the slope. It was like climbing Othrys. The gumbo got gradually thinner and less clinging — though less supportive of the sled — until at last her snowshoes were clattering on bone-hard ice, and the sled’s base was scraping with an ominous grind across the slope.

  She stopped again, and waited for Rosenberg to catch up. Even in such a short distance he seemed to have fallen a long way behind, and it took him some minutes to make up the ground.

  “Time for the great changeover, Rosenberg,” she said.

  His breath was a noisy rasp, and he didn’t attempt to speak; he just let himself out of his harness and began to unpick the knots on his sled cover.

  They had to fix their aluminum runners to the bases of the sleds. Benacerraf found it difficult to handle the big wing nuts with her gloved hands. The first time she twisted too hard, and the thread of the bolt sheared right off, coming away in a spiral twist.

  Rosenberg dug out a spare for her. “Take it easy,” he said. “Steel is brittle at these temperatures, remember.”

  Next she fitted her skis to her feet. These were just slats of hull metal, with opened-out overshoes fixed to them for boots.

  After stowing the snowshoes and lashing up the sleds, they resumed again.

  It took her a few hundred yards to get used to the skis, and the half-sliding action they required. There was a lot of work for her knees and ankles, against the stiffness of her suit. Soon her joints were aching, and muscles on the back of her calves were announcing their existence with pulses of stiffness and pain.

  But when she settled into a new rhythm, she seemed to make faster and easier progress than before. To haul the sled she was able to lean steadily into her traces, rather than having to yank at the sled as she’d had to over the gumbo, and that smoothed out the pains in the pressure points on her shoulders, hips and waist.

  This haul was never going to be easy, but it was, she conceded, a relief to be free of the clinging of the gumbo.

  For a while she felt almost exhilarated.

  She reached the mouth of a wide, shallow gully.

  In the white light of her helmet lamp, the gully walls were blue-grey, and there was a scattering of loose ice on the floor.

  The slope further up was undulating — it was gathering itself into a series of huge, frozen waves — and the gully, although it got steeper and more narrow towards the end, seemed to offer the easiest route forward.

  She looked back. A way below, Rosenberg’s gumbo-streaked suit and the yellow-grey canvas on his sled were easily visible against the orange-grey ice.

  She pushed up into the gully.

  She could feel loose granules crunch beneath her weight. But it didn’t get any easier to pull the sled; the friction actually increased, and she felt the granules grind beneath her skis.

  She bent down, stiffly, and scooped up a handful of the ice granules. They were hard and round, nothing like the snow of Earth. On the surface they were loose, but a little deeper they stuck together — presumably thanks to a surface layer of organics — to form pebble-sized chunks that she could crush in her hand. What the geologists called duricrust, she thought.

  She took a look at the runners on her sled. There were fine grooves scratched into the runners’ base by the ice crystals. She knew that at normal human temperatures, sleds and skates worked by melting a fine layer of water at the top of the ice, and then sliding across, lubricated by the water, with almost no friction. Here, these small, hard crystals wouldn’t melt under the pressure of her runners; they were like grains of sand, and what she was doing was more like dragging a sled across a desert.

  She felt an unreasonable, crushing disappointment. They just got no breaks with the conditions here.

  As her climb up the gully wore on, the gradient increased in severity. Soon she was free of the clinging granules, but now, to her irritation, the ice grew too slick. She just couldn’t win. Sometimes her skis slipped backwards at every step, and the only way she could proceed was to tack back and forth at forty-five degrees to the slope, which added a lot of extra distance to the whole.

  Even so, soon she had risen so far that when she looked back the ground was hidden in the haze. And still the slope continued above her, eroded and ancient, up into the orange mists above. She got her head down and climbed on. She forced any thoughts of the future — even the pleasure of getting her boots off, or the distance they still had to cross — out of her head.

  At last, she reached the top of the steepening gully. The landscape opened out before her. She seemed to have reached a plateau.

  The ice at her feet was jumbled and cracked. And when she looked ahead, she saw a sprawling mass of ice, locked in suspended animation. Waves of ice, which must have been a hundred feet tall, reared up, caught in the instant of crashing against each other. Huge open chasms showed dark against the grey-white mass. There was noise here, too: deep groans resounded from the belly of the ice, pulsing back and forth across the broken landscape. Each ice wave was carved, sometimes into elaborate shapes, with fluted channels and sharp crests. The giant shapes marched to the close horizon, so big they were visible as they receded over the curve of the world, like ships sailing over a frozen sea.

  A layer of methane cloud, dark and threatening, lay like a lid over the shattered icescape, obscuring the haze and merging with the ice at the close horizon into a complex band of grey, black and orange.

  After some minutes, Rosenberg came staggering up the gully after her. He leaned against his sled, breath rattling, and stared out at the ice sea, which was reflected in his visor.

  “Pressure ice,” he said. “Paula, I think this whole continent is a giant magma extrusion, distorting one whole side of the moon. It’s like the Tharsis Bulge on Mars. Maybe such features are common on small worlds like this… And all this ice is flowing slowly outwards and downwards from the magma extrusion, a huge, continent-sized viscous relaxation.”

  Benacerraf looked around with new understanding. The pressure ridges were ice waves, magnified by Titan’s low gravity, frozen in time. She shivered, feeling dwarfed in space and time. If she could accelerate her perception — if she could live for a million years — she would see the ice flowing thickly away from Rosenberg’s magma mound, like warm icing off a wedding cake.

  After a couple more minutes they pushed on, Benacerraf leading again.

  She tried to select a route which would take them threading between the worst of the pressure ridges.

  The waves took a variety of forms. Some of them were sharply defined ridges, some of them rounded hummocks; some took still more exotic shapes — rounded boulders, even torpedo shapes, forms out of nightmares, mounted on eroded, fragile-looking pillars that looked unable to hold up all that mass, low gravity or not.

  Ways through the ridges were winding and uneven. She tr
ied at first to use her skis, but the paths were too narrow and twisting, and the skis just got in the way. She took them off and stowed them in her sled. The paths were covered besides by an uneven layer of loose granules, difficult to judge; sometimes the granules crunched beneath her boots, taking her weight before bottoming out, but sometimes she would find her heel thudding against ice as hard as rock, concealed by a quarter-inch of gritty granules. Her sores and blisters chafed. Her sled bumped and rattled over the surface, every step a jarring uncertainty, and her harness dragged over her shoulders and waist, burning her. She found herself growing nostalgic for the miles of compliant, sticky gumbo.

  She was forced to scale some of the ridges.

  They were exactly like frozen waves, a hundred feet tall or more. She tacked at a shallow angle to reach the top of each ridge. At the top she turned so that the sled went ahead of her as she slid down the slope of the far side. Then it was time to clamber painfully up to the top of the next ridge. She was like an insect, she thought, struggling over the meniscus of some giant pond.

  She had no crampons or ski-sticks; she had to paw at the surface with her gloves and the sides of her skis to gain leverage. Soon her knees and elbows were bruised, and her fingers and toes ached. Sometimes her sled slid sideways and pulled her back down into a trough.

  She paused at a crest. The ice was bare and blue-grey. Gritty granules lay in the hollows. The ice here was polished, and when she ran a gloved hand over it, it felt as smooth as glass, hard as concrete. The wave had been scoured out by gritty granules, and then polished to a sheen by fine aerosol dust.

  When she looked back, she could see Rosenberg toiling through the valleys between the waves. The great ridges thrust upwards all around him, dwarfing him, and his helmet lamp splashed little puddles of yellow light against the shimmering walls around him. Sometimes he would pass a clearer patch of blue ice, and his light would penetrate the bulk of the waves; Benacerraf would see the beam glimmering within the bulk of a wave, scattering and sparkling from complex fissure patterns within the ice, an arc of Earth light illuminating these giant, dead, silent fairy castles.