He looked around. There just wasn’t anywhere to piss into, inside this sheer-walled, seamless bubble.
He tried not to think about it. But of course that didn’t help.
In the end, he just stood up in the center of the bubble, grabbed his dick, and let go. What else could he do? Warm urine splashed up over his feet. A puddle gathered at the lowest point of the bubble floor, green and frothy, and he stepped back quickly, trying to keep his bare feet out of it.
When he was done he retreated to the wall of the bubble, watching the urine lake. It spread slowly over the bubble floor, quivering as the jellyfish surged smoothly.
A shadow, wide and long, swept over the bubble.
Rosenberg flinched, raising his hands over his head, cowering naked against the floor of the bubble.
It was as if a roof had spread over the jellyfish, a ceiling of translucent, leathery skin, green-tinged; where the sun shone through, Rosenberg could see a coarse graininess, a sketchy skeletal structure.
The skin ceiling moved away, and sunlight, suddenly bright again, shone down into the bubble.
Rosenberg kneeled up and stared after the departing platform. It was like a kite, roughly diamond-shaped, the size of a 747. It glided, one pointed corner first, through the thick air. That papery flesh stretched over a frame-like skeleton. The anatomy seemed sketchy. There looked to be a spine along the axis, bulging in places; maybe there were organs — a digestive tract — in there.
It was like the pterodactyls of antique Earth. Or a Wright brothers fever dream, he thought.
This was Titan, Rosenberg reminded himself; the living things here could only be built from the raw materials to hand. And so, the bones of the kite-thing were probably made of water ice.
All along the leading edges of the diamond wings there were gaping cavities, like jet inlets. Maybe they were mouths; perhaps the creature fed on smaller airborne life forms, cruising like a shark. Like the jellyfish he was riding, the kite seemed passive, inert, as if saving its energy; he could see no sign of motion, anywhere across the kite’s huge frame. And that immense mass of skin showed another similarity with the jellyfish: a lot of exposed surface area for the kite’s mass.
He couldn’t see any legs, any means of landing.
Perhaps it never landed at all; perhaps it spent its life in the air, feeding on the airborne particles, even breeding there.
The pterodactyl receded, slowly, its sharp rectangular profile diminishing.
Rosenberg kneeled against the wall. The urine, cooling, lapped against his feet.
And now a dark form cruised over the surface of the ocean, far below him.
It was shaped something like a terrestrial ray, but it was immense. Those hundred-foot Titan waves broke like ripples in a bathtub over its oily, corrugated back; it had to be a mile across at least. Rosenberg could see vent-like mouths all along the ray-thing’s leading edges, and its back. It was turned to face the waves, but it didn’t appear to be moving; he could see no sign of a wake, no frothing or disturbance from any kind of impellers. He was reminded of a big basking shark, cruising through beds of krill and plankton, its huge jaw gaping. But this basker did not trouble to seek out its feed; it just sat in the prevailing current, waiting for plankton-analogue or whatever other organic goodies were suspended in the ammonia ocean to drift into its multiple mouths.
So, Titan life. There were common characteristics, he thought dully. Huge size. Large surface area. Passivity.
The jellyfish continued to rise. Now he was far above the surface of the ocean, and he had risen above the lip of the Cronos cliffs. The land on the plateau was a plain of grey-green ice, pocked with craters. Most of the craters were just sketches, palimpsests, their walls diminished by relaxation. The old craters were empty of their ethane lakes now, although he thought he could make out a purplish, filmy crust in the crater basins.
The world was split in two: an ocean hemisphere to his right, the flat grey-green ice of Cronos to his left. The horizon was blurred by mist and vapor, but curved sharply; the world was small and compact, a ball suspended in space, visibly smaller than the Earth.
He thought he caught glimpses of more baskers. Their delta shapes were arrayed across the surface of the ocean, like huge factory ships slowly processing the plankton-analogue.
Tiring, his lungs aching, he sat with his back resting against the pliant wall, his legs outstretched.
His thinking was feverish, getting fragmented, as if he was lacking sleep.
In fact he started to feel bored.
Now, that was just ridiculous. Here he was, somehow restored from death by Vitamin A poisoning, preserved across — oh, God — preserved across billions of years, maybe, and revived in an ammono-life ecosphere…
But he had nothing to do but sit here and sightsee. He wanted to get out there and do something. He wanted to take samples, run them through his lab in the hab module.
And he craved mundane things: to take a shower, read a book.
He wanted someone to talk to.
The sky, stained bottle-green by methane, was getting perceptibly darker. He must be rising out of the troposphere, the thick bottom layer of the air.
He looked up at the sun. Its bloated disc seemed a little clearer, though it was still surrounded by a faint halo.
He wondered if it was possible to see Earth from here. If Earth still existed, it must be lifeless: no more than a cinder, skimming the surface of the sun’s swollen photosphere.
No help for me there, he thought.
His chest was dragging at the air.
He tried to suppress panic, to keep his breathing even and steady.
Something was wrong.
He was going to suffocate in here, in this bubble suspended over the bizarre surface of a transformed Titan, here at the end of time. He would drown in his own exhalations, awash in urine—
A pillar thrust out of the surface of the jellyfish, ten feet from the wall of the bubble.
Rosenberg screamed. He scuttled backwards, over the yielding surface, getting as far as he could from the pillar.
To his shame, more urine dribbled out of his shrivelled penis and leaked over his legs.
The pillar was six or seven feet tall, maybe two wide. It was made of glistening crimson flesh. Its surface was like the jellyfish carapace: the same purple-black coloration, that complex ridging pattern. But the ridging was on a smaller scale, the gouges and bars separated by a couple of inches. It was topped by a cluster of large, complex-looking cell groups. Perhaps they were some form of sensor; perhaps he was being inspected.
Maybe it was here to give him more air, to feed and water him.
The pillar was utterly still.
The way it had moved was eerie. It had been reptilian: a burst of motion, followed by stone-like stillness. Perhaps it was that quality which made him feel so nervous and suspicious.
What did it want?
Take me to your leader.His ragged thoughts ran on in uncoordinated hypotheses, as his fear bubbled in his hind brain.
He coughed, and the pain in his lungs sharpened; black spots swam in his vision, clustering at the edge of his field of view.
He crawled forward, through the puddle of urine, to the wall facing the pillar. He slapped the bubble’s surface with the flat of his hand. “Can’t you see I’m dying in here? Why don’t you do something about it? Hey…!”
The pain in his lungs started to spread outward, up through his throat and out across his chest.
He slumped, resting his face and chest against the yielding wall. He slid down, onto his back. He could feel the cooling piss lap against his feet and lower legs.
“You weren’t expecting me to be conscious. You don’t know how to handle this, do you?”
Black flecks gathered at the periphery of his vision. Through the filmy upper surface of the bubble, the sky deepened to a rich emerald green. He was lying here in his own urine, gasping for air like a beached fish. What an end for mankind, he thought; w
hat an epilogue.
There seemed to be something descending from the sky towards him: a broad, purple-black disc, a glimmering bubble, softly distorted…
He could see through it. It was a reflection, of his rising jellyfish, in some kind of translucent sheet above him.
They’ve roofed over the world, he thought.
He thought he saw more of those pillars, thrusting out of the carapace around him like fingers.
He tried to grip the plastic surface under him, struggling to stay conscious, to make this interval last as long as he could, before another unimaginable period of non-existence overwhelmed him.
But the cold green darkness was washing over him. He cried out as it pushed into his eyes, his brain; but he could no longer hear his own voice.
* * *
Paula Benacerraf had no memory of waking.
Suddenly, she was aware of herself again. It was as simple, and as brutal, as that.
She was standing. Everything seemed to be red. Her feet were cold.
She tried to look down, to see what she was standing on. When she moved her head, her eyes didn’t track properly, as if they were badly controlled automatic cameras, and her head seemed to slosh, a bag full of fluid.
The redness turned abruptly to grey, and there was a clamoring of bells in her ears.
The world tipped up around her. She saw a huge sky wheeling past, a sun like a dish of red light.
But it was taking so long, as if in a dream.
She collapsed gently against the ground, on her back. The landing was soft, but she could feel the spiky hardness of the ground, and where it pressed against her flesh, in a hundred places along the length of her body, it was ice cold.
Her heart’s hammering slowed, and some of the color leached back into the world.
That sun, straight above her, was immense. Much bigger in the sky than Earth’s sun, it was huge and red and dim. The disc was mottled with spots, complex black pits surrounded by crimson-grey penumbrae. She held up her arms, and moved out her hands, to accommodate the sun’s disc. Her hands finished up a yard apart.
She remembered her last walk to Cronos. The water. The seed packet. Her choice to die.
Oh, shit,she thought. I’m alive.
She felt — disappointed. Life would go on. She was going to have to eat, and drink, and sleep, and maybe figure out what was happening to her.
She’d have to make choices. She’d thought that was all over, for her. She felt cheated.
She closed her eyes. But the world wouldn’t go away, the gritty reality of it in her lungs, under her back.
So where was she? A hospital?
In the open air?
She opened her eyes, and lifted her arms. She was clothed.
Her hands were bare, but her arms were encased in long sleeves of some translucent material, like golden-brown polythene. She pulled at the material; it gave a little, but would not stretch, and when she pinched at her cuff it was impossible to tear.
She reached up to her face. There was no covering: no helmet, no visor, no face mask.
…She was in the open air, unprotected.
The shock reached her. She felt a moment of panic; she felt her lungs constrict, as if she was drowning.
She forced herself to relax. She took away her hands, opened her mouth, and deliberately sucked air into her lungs.
She wasn’t in an EMU. But wherever the hell she was, there was evidently an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.
She put her arms flat against the chill ground and tried to push herself up. As soon as she got her head upright, the ringing and greyness returned.
“Take it easy.”
The voice startled her.
“Lie back for a while.” A head moved into her field of view above her, silhouetted against the broad face of the sun. It seemed hairless, and the neck and shoulders supporting it were swathed in some transparent substance that caught the light. “I don’t think they got your fluid balance quite right. Orthostatic intolerance. It took me a couple of minutes to adjust, but it passes.”
“Rosenberg. I should have expected you.”
“Yeah.” He knelt down beside her. “Yeah, it’s me — I think.” He was wearing some translucent all-in-one coverall, which left only his hands and head free. And he looked younger.
“Good grief, Rosenberg. What happened to your hair?”
He laughed. “The same as happened to my eyebrows, and nasal hair, and chest hair, and pubic hair… I guess they forgot to put it back.”
“They? Who are they?”
“One step at a time, Paula.”
“You don’t have your glasses.”
He touched his face, looking surprised. “So I don’t. I don’t seem to need them. They grew back my foreskin, too.”
“They?”
“How are you feeling? Do you think you can sit up?”
“I’d rather stand up. This ground is freezing my ass off.”
Rosenberg laughed. It was a brittle, icy sound. He got an arm under her armpit and lifted; with his help she scrambled to her feet. She still felt dizzy, and her heart pumped a lot harder than she’d been used to, but she wasn’t going to faint again.
She and Rosenberg were out in the open. No hospital. No buildings at all, in fact. They were standing on some kind of plain. It was coated with sparse, low vegetation — stunted dark green bushes, a little grass — but there were no people, no cars or houses. The air was clear and her vision was sharp; the horizon seemed close by.
Off to her right was a long, straight, grey-white cliff which slid towards each horizon.
That big balloon of a sun still hung directly overhead. The sky and land were drenched in a dull dried-blood red. There were high icy-looking cirrus clouds, draped over the roof of the sky; some of them cut across the face of the sun and glowed crimson, as if on fire.
The only sound was the soft hiss of a breeze over the spiky grass.
This ain’t Seattle, she thought, with gathering dismay.
And Rosenberg—
Under his golden-brown translucent coverall, Rosenberg was naked.
He clamped his hands over his private parts. “Will you stop staring at my dick?”
She touched her scalp. It was bald and smooth, the skin cold to her touch. She glanced down. Under a translucent suit, past the low swell of her breasts, she could see her pubic mound, as bare as Rosenberg’s.
“Shit,” she said. She covered her breasts and groin with her arm and hands, while Rosenberg kept his hands clamped over his balls.
They stared at each other. “This is ridiculous,” she said at last.
“I agree. I won’t stare if you don’t.”
“It’s a deal.”
Deliberately, she lowered her arms; she looked him resolutely in the eye.
He laughed again. “A hell of a thing. We cross billions of years, and we bring all our dumb primate taboos with us.” His voice was brittle. Almost hysterical. And—
And he’d said, billions of years. “How long? Where the hell are we, Rosenberg? How did we get here, from there?”
“One step at a time, Paula. Come on.”
He turned away, and began walking slowly across the plain. His footsteps lifted him up in the air, so that he bounded forward in a series of short half-hops, Moonwalk style.
Oh,she thought.
This wasn’t even Earth, then.
She started to feel scared.
“Where are we going?”
“Damned if I know.”
She felt an absurd reluctance to move away from here, the place she’d come awake. As if she ought to wait here, on this anonymous patch of a uniform plain, until somebody came by to tell her what to do.
She sat down, ignoring the cold.
She didn’t want any of this. Choices, a structured world to figure out, even a relationship to manage. The hell with it. I did all this once.
She lay down and curled up, burying her head in her arms.
I want to go home,
she thought. To Seattle. And if I can’t go home, I don’t want to be here.
But the world wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t even go to sleep, the ground was too hard and cold.
She opened her eyes.
The plain, the big red sun, Rosenberg waiting patiently, squatting on his haunches, a few yards away.
She got angry. She kicked at the ground, dug out great handfuls and threw the dirt around, rubbed it over her bare scalp. “Why couldn’t you leave me alone, damn it…?”
She got tired quickly. She stood there, panting, hot inside the suit, dripping bits of dirt.
Rosenberg just waited. He didn’t even watch her.
Reluctantly, she walked up to him. He got up, and walked on, and she followed.
Sensory impressions crowded in on her, unwelcome, forcing her to think, to analyse.
She found she was wearing some kind of booties, welded onto the suit, as clear as the rest of the coverall. When she lifted up her foot she could see there was no grip on the sole, no ridging, but she seemed to be able to keep her footing nevertheless.
The ground was a sandy, crusty, rust-brown soil; it crunched when her weight settled on it. There were stunted trees — they looked like willow, or birch — scattered over the plain; none of them came much higher than her shoulder. Between the trees, grass grew. Near her feet there was a splash of flowers, almost white despite the ruddy light, the petals as big as her palm. She knelt down and pulled up a handful of grass. She rubbed the blades between her thumb and forefinger; there was a sharp herbal aroma.
Rosenberg lifted up what looked like a mushroom, a huge puff-ball a foot across. “Mosses, lichens. It’s hard to see in this red light, but I’ll bet these things are livid green.”
“Chlorophyll?”
“Of course these aren’t true plants. They’re just organisms descended from some root stock, which have radiated to fill the various ecological niches…”
She dug up a little of her anger. “Radiated from what? What are you talking about? You’re so full of shit, Rosenberg.”
He said irritably, “Radiated from whatever terrestrial-biosphere samples the ammonos managed to retrieve from our bodies, or the ruins of our base, or the seeds you planted.”
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