Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Once the core memory’s saturation point was reached, the master program would:

  1. Store data in available space in the biology, geophysics, and maintenance programs;

  2. Minimize the downlink communications program and use the available space to store additional sensor data;

  3. Minimize the uplink communications program and use the available space to store additional sensor data.

  Satisfied with this decision, Alpha moved ahead. Until it climbed a ridge of ice and its forward sensors detected a field of thick, dark, carbon-based material covering the ground as far as the sensors could observe. Not the muddy methane that slushed over the ice and was washed away by the rains. This carbon-based mat was hard and thick, as if protected by a sturdy dark shell that stretched beyond the horizon.

  Alpha stopped dead in its tracks while both its biology and geophysics programs went into the machine equivalent of hyperventilation.

  20 MARCH 2096: SIMULATIONS LABORATORY

  Pancho had to squint as she approached the B ring. This was their first full-mission simulation and all the details were in place to test her.

  “Lotta glare here,” she said into the helmet microphone. “Either the sim’s too bright or we oughtta add another layer of tint to the visor.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Gaeta’s voice replied.

  It was like dropping into a blizzard. The simulator couldn’t reproduce the gut-hollowing sensation of falling, but as Pancho watched the swirling ice particles of the B ring approaching her, she felt pretty damned close to it.

  “Suit’s getting pinged,” she reported. The simulation was reproducing the impacts that Gaeta had experienced when he’d dived through the ring. Minor hits, but Pancho knew there were chunks of ice-covered rock in the B ring that were as big as cannonballs and were moving just as fast.

  She glanced at her thruster controls. With her hands inside the suit’s gloves, she could control the thrusters with the motions of her fingers. But control was a relative term. Try avoiding a bowling ball that’s comin’ at you at supersonic speed, she told herself. Good luck, girl.

  “Okay,” Wunderly’s voice sounded inside her helmet, “open the sampling boxes.”

  A trio of sampling boxes had been attached to the chest of the excursion suit. Pancho had laughed when she’d first seen them. “Suit looks real female now,” she’d said, pointing.

  “First time I’ve seen square ones,” Wanamaker had cracked.

  “Or three of’em,” Tavalera had added, in a rare burst of humor.

  Pancho was strictly business now, though. “Opening sampling boxes.”

  “Confirm,” Gaeta said, “samplers open.”

  By the time they had finished the simulation Pancho felt tired yet high with adrenaline. As she climbed out of the suit and down to the floor of the sim lab, Wanamaker said, “Good morning’s work, Panch. You’ve earned a fine lunch.”

  “Okay, but lemme shower first. Gets sweaty in there.”

  Wunderly asked, “How soon do you think you’ll be ready to make the real flight?”

  Pancho shrugged, but before she could answer Wanamaker said, “We need at least several more weeks of simulator runs, Nadia. There’s no sense rushing this. Pancho’s got to be able to do this mission blindfolded, purely by reflex.”

  Wunderly nodded glumly and walked away. Pancho knew what she was thinking: The election’s only ten weeks away. Will we be able to run the mission before then?

  Leaving Tavalera to shut down the control consoles, Gaeta walked over to the trio standing by the massive suit. “Your turn this afternoon, Jake.”

  Wanamaker nodded. He was due to practice flying the transfer craft that would carry Pancho to the B ring and then pick her up on the other side.

  Looking almost guilty, Pancho said, “I can’t make it this afternoon, guys. Gotta be at Holly’s rally.”

  Gaeta frowned, but Wanamaker said, “We can run the transfer sim without her, can’t we, Manny?”

  “It’d be better with Pancho in the suit,” Gaeta said.

  “No can do, fellas,” said Pancho. “Promised my sister I’d be at the rally.”

  “What rally?” Wunderly asked.

  “Come with me, Nadia,” Pancho replied. “You oughtta be there, too.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Pancho insisted. “The guys can run the transfer sim without us. Can’t you, Manny?”

  Clearly unhappy about it, Gaeta nodded minimally. “I can run the suit.”

  Pancho turned to Wanamaker. “Well?”

  “Hearkening and obedience,” Wanamaker said with a mock bow.

  Tavalera asked, “What’s this rally all about?”

  “Women’s stuff, Raoul,” Pancho replied. “But men are welcome to attend, too.”

  “I need you here, Raoul,” Gaeta said firmly.

  “Yeah, I know. I was just curious.” But he was thinking, I haven’t seen Holly alone for weeks. Guess I wouldn’t at her rally, either, whatever it’s about.

  Holly stood alone on the stage of Athens’s indoor theater and watched the rows fill up almost entirely with women. Pancho sat in the front row, grinning up at her. And she even had Nadia Wunderly sitting beside her. She saw Professor Wilmot and a couple of other men, including that Ramanujan guy that worked for Eberly. A flaming spy for Malcolm, she told herself. It almost amused her to see Wilmot and Ramanujan sitting together, as if for protection, amid a growing sea of women. Berkowitz was in back, a remote controller in one hand to direct the cameras he had stationed in the far corners of the theater.

  Otherwise the theater was occupied by women. Dozens of conversations hummed through the place, but so far they didn’t sound impatient. Quite the opposite, Holly thought. The women seemed positive, even buoyant.

  More were still coming into the theater at two o’clock, the time set for the rally to start. Holly fidgeted nervously on the stage, torn between a compulsion to start promptly and a desire to get as large an audience as possible. The theater sat four hundred, and the seats were more than half filled. Malcolm’s first rally back in his first election campaign hadn’t drawn this many.

  She killed a minute or so adjusting the microphone pinned to the lapel of her tunic.

  At last, three minutes past the hour, Holly cleared her throat and said, “I want to thank you for coming here this afternoon.”

  All the buzzing conversations stopped. All eyes turned to Holly. She noted a few women were still trickling into the theater and hurrying to seats toward the rear.

  “I know a lot of you have had to take time off from your jobs or other occupations to come here. I want to apologize for having this rally at such a weird hour. Thing is, the administration claimed that all the theaters and other public spaces are completely booked for every evening between now and election day. And you know who runs the administration!”

  “Malcolm Eberly!” someone shouted.

  A chorus of hisses rose from the audience. It startled Holly; it sounded like an angry warning from a den of snakes.

  “Reason Eberly stuck us with this midafternoon time is that he figured nobody’d show up.”

  “But he was wrong!” a woman yelled. Laughter and cheers rose from the audience.

  Holding up her hands for silence, Holly went on, “The reason I accepted this dimdumb time was that we’ve got an important job to do, and we can’t waste any time getting it done.

  “What is it?” Pancho asked, at the top of her voice.

  Suppressing a grin at her sister’s stooging, Holly said, “We want the Zero Population Growth repealed, or at least reexamined.”

  “Repealed!” several women shouted.

  “Well, okay, but Eberly’s going to say that the ZPG protocol can’t be repealed or even altered unless there’s a formal petition signed by sixty-seven percent of the habitat’s population.”

  “No!”

  “Boo!”

  “That’s a crock!”

  Again gesturing for silence, H
olly said, “I’m afraid it’s true. I’ve looked it up. Our constitution states that any clause or protocol that’s in force now can only be changed or repealed outright if two-thirds of the habitat’s citizens sign a petition to that effect.”

  A babble of angry voices rose from the audience.

  “Now wait,” Holly urged. “Wait up! Women make up forty-seven percent of the habitat’s population. If we get all the women to sign the petition, we only need two thousand men to sign up.”

  That silenced them. Holly could practically hear them thinking; Two thousand men. How are we going to get two thousand men to agree with us?

  Fishing her handheld from her tunic pocket, Holly flashed the petition she had drafted on the rear wall of the stage.

  “I’ve written up the petition, all nice and legal,” she said. “Now what we’ve got to do is get sixty-seven hundred signatures in less than six weeks. Petitions have to be officially registered and counted by May first, one month before the election. That gives us only forty-one days to get the job done. We’ve got to get busy!”

  They jumped to their feet and cheered. All but Wilmot and Ramanujan, who sat there in stony silence. Holly felt thrilled at their response until she realized that there were hardly more than two hundred here. We need sixty-seven hundred signatures, she thought. Even if we get every woman in that habitat to sign the petition, which we won’t, we’ll still need two thousand men.

  20 MARCH 2096: EVENING

  Where were you this afternoon?” Yañez asked his wife over their dinner table. ”I called from the hospital and you weren’t home.”

  Estela replied, “I went to a political rally.”

  His brows rose. “A political rally? You?”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t know that Eberly held a rally this afternoon.”

  “It wasn’t for Eberly,” Estela replied.

  Yañez put his soupspoon down on his place mat. “Whose rally was it, then?”

  “Holly Lane’s,” she replied calmly. “It was about this ZPG business.”

  Frowning, he picked up his spoon and ladled some soup to his lips.

  “She’s written a petition against the ZPG protocol. I signed it.”

  “Estela, no!”

  “So did plenty of other women.”

  “Sheer nonsense,” he muttered into his soup.

  If she heard him, she gave no sign. They finished their light dinner cheerily enough, then Yañez went to the living room to watch the news while Estela cleared the table and put the dirty dishes in the washer. She heard Holly Lane’s voice and looked up: Oswaldo was watching the evening news. But he quickly turned it to an entertainment channel.

  Once the kitchen was tidied, Estela went to her desk, next to the pantry, and took a copy of the ZPG petition from the top drawer. She walked into the living room and deposited the petition in her husband’s lap.

  He looked up at her. “What’s this?”

  “The petition.”

  He scanned it, then handed it back to her. “Very competently drafted.”

  “Sign it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Sign it. We need six thousand and seven hundred signatures. Sign it, please.”

  “Estela!”

  She dropped the petition back on his lap.

  “No!” he said.

  Estela did not argue. She said nothing; she simply left the flimsy sheet on her husband’s lap and sat beside him to spend the rest of the evening watching entertainment vids beamed from Earth and Selene.

  They retired to bed. Once the lights were out, Yañez laid a hand on his wife’s bare thigh and began stroking her skin.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Sign the petition.”

  “Estela! I’m shocked! This is … it’s not right!”

  “Sign the petition.”

  “I have my rights as your husband!”

  “Once you sign the petition we can discuss your rights as my husband. Not until then.”

  He glared at her in the darkness. She turned her back to him. Furious, he turned his back to her. They both fell asleep that way.

  Urbain spent the evening shuttling between his office and the mission control center. While his engineers and technicians were trying to trace out the ghostly trail of the tracks Alpha had left on Titan’s frozen ground, Urbain had presided at a meeting of the biologists on his staff. They had crowded into his office, bubbling with excitement at their observations of Alpha’s ghost tracks.

  “I’ve set up a timeline,” said Negroponte. She clearly had assumed leadership of the group. “The tracks are smoothed down in a matter of hours.”

  “How many hours?”

  “Hard to say, exactly,” she replied, pushing back that stubborn lock of hair that swept across her face. “It’s between four and ten hours, that’s the best we can come up with, so far.”

  “It’s got to be biological,” one of the other biologists said. “It can’t be anything else.”

  “May I point out,” Urbain said, trying to regain control of the meeting, “that we do not know enough about erosion mechanisms on Titan to make such a definite statement.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” the biologist replied, “but what else could it be?” He was young, earnest, agog with the idea that they were actually watching a biological process at work on the surface of Titan.

  “I agree,” said Negroponte. “I can’t imagine any weathering process acting so fast.”

  “We do not know enough to say that,” Urbain repeated firmly. “We should call in the geologists to look at this.”

  They all stared at him, sitting behind his desk like the lord of a castle while they huddled on the other side like a knot of beseeching peasants.

  “However,” Urbain added, “I see no reason why we cannot proceed on the hypothesis that we are witnessing a biological process. Until further data is produced.”

  There, he thought. That ought to keep them satisfied. He got up from his chair and headed for the mission control center, to see if they had made any progress. The biologists continued discussing their data, throwing off ideas and theories like a St. Jean Baptiste fireworks display, while Negroponte sat back and encouraged them.

  Holly was dead tired, emotionally drained from her afternoon speech, but still she spent the evening in a long and repetitious panel discussion with six other residents—including Professor Wilmot—in front of Berkowitz’s cameras in the communications center’s studio. The panel wrangled over the ZPG issue and Holly’s announcement that she had started a petition drive to repeal the zero-growth protocol.

  It seemed to Holly that they covered the subject pretty thoroughly in the first half hour, but the panel members droned on, rehashing the issue endlessly. They’re talking just to hear the sound of their own voices, Holly thought. All of them except Wilmot; he was the panel moderator, and he kept his opinions to himself, except for an occasional wry smile or a subtle lifting of his gray brows.

  Citizens phoned in their questions and comments, as well:

  “You don’t expect men to sign this petition, do you?” a woman asked. “They don’t want children. All they want is sex without the responsibilities.”

  A man remarked, “You take away the ZPG law and this place’ll look like Calcutta before the biowar inside of a few years!”

  “We came out here to get away from those religious nuts and their holier-than-thou regulations. Why do we need this ZPG protocol? Aren’t we responsible enough to regulate our own affairs?”

  “Birth control is a personal matter. The government shouldn’t be poking its nose into our bedrooms.”

  “We live in a limited environment, for god’s sake! How’re we going to feed double, triple, five times our current population?”

  Wilmot allowed each of the panelists to speak to each caller. Holly found herself making shorter and shorter responses.

  “We have the intelligence and the understanding to allow responsible populati
on growth,” she repeated several times. “Not unlimited growth. But not zero growth, either.”

  Wilmot finally spoke up. “Yes, but who will make the decisions about growth? Will you appoint a board that will decide who will be allowed to have a child and who will not?”

  Holly stared at him, her mind churning. At last she heard herself reply, “I honestly don’t have an answer for that. Not yet. I’m hoping we can bring together a group of people who can offer suggestions about that. Then the general population can vote on how they want to proceed.”

  That brought an avalanche of phone calls, and the panel all chimed in with their opinions, as well. After what seemed like hours, Wilmot waved them all down and said, “I’m afraid that our time is up. I want to thank all the panelists for their participation, and all you callers for your thought-provoking questions.”

  Before any of the panelists could rise from their seats, the professor added, “This subject should be debated thoroughly by the two contestants for the office of chief administrator. I intend to arrange such a debate in the very near future.”

  The red eyes of the cameras died, and Holly let out a weary sigh.

  “Very good show,” Wilmot said jovially, as he got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. “Capital!”

  Holly slumped back in her chair. “I’m glad it’s over.”

  The other panelists seemed to feel the same way as they shuffled tiredly toward the studio’s main doors.

  Berkowitz was all smiles. “Terrific audience response,” he said to Holly. “All those calls mean that more than half the population was watching. Terrific!”

  Holly was too tired to care. She pulled herself to her feet as Berkowitz and Wilmot walked away, deep in amiable conversation. A shower and a good night’s sleep, Holly told herself. That’s what I need.

  She was surprised to see Raoul Tavalera standing in the open doorway of the studio. He looked uncertain, hesitant.

  “Raoul!” Holly blurted. “What’re you doing here? How long—”