Titan

by John Varley

  Cirocco spent most of her time daydreaming, watching the clouds drift by. She considered ways and means of reaching the hub, trying to anticipate problems, but it was a futile occupation. The possibilities were too varied to allow reasonable planning. She much preferred woolgathering.

  She eventually did sing to them, and surprised them both. She had taken voice and piano lessons for ten years as a child, had considered a career as a singer before the lure of space grew too strong. No one knew about it until the trip in the Titanic; she had thought it not in keeping with her image to entertain the crew with songs. Now she didn't care, and the singing brought them closer together. She had a rich, clear alto that worked best with old folk music, ballads, and Judy Garland songs.

  Bill made a lute from a nutshell, parachute shrouds, and a smiler skin. He learned to play it, and Gaby joined in on a nut- shell drum. Cirocco taught them songs and assigned harmonies: Gaby had a passable soprano, Bill a tone-deaf tenor.

  They sang drinking songs from the taprooms of O'Neil One, songs from the hit parade, from cartoons and old movies. One quickly became their favorite, considering their circumstances. it spoke of a yellow brick road and the wonderful wizard of Oz. They bellowed it every morning when they set out, shouting all the louder when the forest shrieked back at them.

  Several weeks went by before they reached the Ophion. Only twice did anything interrupt their peaceful routine.

  The first incident was three days into the trip, when an eye- ball at the end of a long stalk emerged from the water not five meters from Titanic. There was no doubt that it was an eye, any more than there had been with Whistlestop. It was a ball twenty centimeters in diameter, set in a flexible green socket that at first glance appeared to be a green hand with fingers wrapped around the eye from behind. The eyeball itself was a lighter green with a gaping pupil.

  They began poling for shore at the first sight of the creature. The eye had been pointing at them, betraying neither interest nor emotion but only a fixed stare. it did not seem to mind when they moved away. It watched for two or three minutes, then vanished as quietly as it had appeared.

  The consensus, once ashore, was that there was little they could do about it. The creature had not tried to harm them- which said nothing about its future conduct. But they could not end their trip just because there were big fish in the river.

  They soon saw more of the eyes, and eventually became accustomed to them. They looked so much like periscopes that Bill named them U-boats.

  The second incident was something they were more prepared for because it had happened before. it was the vast moaning wind Calvin had dubbed Gaeas Lament.

  There was time before the worst of the winds to beach Titanic and seek shelter on the downwind side of the boat. Cirocco did not want to go under the trees, recalling the near-miss by a falling branch in the highlands.

  The observing conditions were not good with the wind whipping her face and the clouds rolling overhead, but she managed

  to catch glimpses of the storm coming out of Oceanus. It came from above. Clouds billowed down from the vast spoke above the frozen sea like the icy breath of God. The wind hit the sheet of ice and broke on it, whipped into tornadoes that looked tiny from that distance, but which must have been huge.

  Through the clouds that rapidly advanced toward Hyperion, Cirocco could see the angled support cables that joined the ground to the sky over Oceanus. If they were moving in the wind it was far too slowly to be seen, but there must have been some swaying or stretching motion. The cables were shedding a fine gray mist. She watched it drift down into the narrow angles the cables made with the ground and had to remind herself that the particles she could see from so far away must be as large as trees. Then the clouds obscured all vision, and snow began to fall. Soon after that the river grew agitated, rising almost to the beached Titanic. Cirocco thought she could feel the ground moving.

  She knew she was seeing some part of Gaea's air circulation system in operation, and wondered how the air was drawn into the spoke and what mechanism forced it back out again. She also wondered why the process had to be so violent. Calvin's watch said it had been seventeen days since the last Lament. she hoped it would be at least as long until the next.

  As before, the cold did not last more than six or seven hours, and the snow did not stick to the ground. They weathered it better this time, finding that the blimpsilk clothes were more protective than they looked, working as windbreakers.

  The thirtieth day since their emergence was marked by two things: something that happened, and something that didn't happen.

  The first was their arrival at the confluence of the Clio and the mighty river Ophion. They were deep in south Hyperion by then, equidistant between the central vertical cable and the southern one, both of which now towered over them.

  Ophion was blue-green, wider and swifter than the Clio. It swept Titanic into its center, and after a time of alertness and soundings with their poles, the travelers decided it would be safe to stay there. In size and speed, Ophion reminded Bill and Cirocco of the Mississippi, but with more vegetation and tall trees along the banks. The land was still jungle, but Ophion was wide and deep.

  Cirocco was far more concerned with the non-event--- the one she had waited for as the days ticked by on Calvin's watch. She had been regular as the tides for twenty-two years, and it was disturbing to miss a period.

  "Did you know it's been thirty days now?" Cirocco asked Gaby that evening."

  "Has it? I hadn't thought about it." She frowned.

  "Yeah. And I'm more than late. I've always been twenty-nine days; sometimes early by a day, never late."

  "You know, I'm late, too." "I thought you were."

  "Christ, that just doesn't make sense at all."

  "I was wondering what sort of protection you used on Ring- master. Could you have forgotten about it back then?"

  "Not bloody likely. Calvin gave me monthlies."

  Cirocco sighed. "I was afraid it'd be something as infallible as that. Me, I can't take pills; they make me swell up. I used one of those wear-ever diaphragms. I had it in when we went under. I didn't really think to look for it until ... well, after we joined up with Bill and August and it might already have been too late." She was hesitant to discuss that part with Gaby. It was no secret that she and Bill had made love, and also no secret that there had been no time or place or privacy for it on Titanic with Gaby always around.

  "Anyhow, it's gone. I presume it was eaten by the same thing that ate our hair. Which makes my skin crawl, by the way,"

  Gaby shivered.

  "But I thought it could be Bill. Now I don't really think so." She got up and went over to Bill, who was sleeping on the ground. She woke him, and waited until he looked alert.

  "Bill, we're both pregnant."

  Bill was not as awake as she had thought. He blinked in surprise, then his brow furrowed.

  "Well don't look at me. Not even for yours. The last time with Gaby was not long after we left Earth. Besides, I've got a valve."

  "I wasn't saying anything like that," she soothed. With Gaby,

  hub? she thought. She hadn't known about that, and she thought she had been aware of everything that occurred on Ring- master. "That just makes it more certain that something very strange is going on. Somebody or something is playing a big joke on us, but I'm not laughing."

  Calvin was as good as his word. Two days after Cirocco hailed a passing blimp, Whistlestop hovered overhead and a blue flower blossomed with their wandering surgeon dangling beneath it. August was close behind him. They hit the water just off shore.

  Cirocco had to admit that Calvin looked good. He was smiling, and there was a bounce in his step. He greeted everyone and didn't seem to mind having been summoned. He wanted to talk about his travels, but Cirocco was too anxious to hear what he thought of the new situation. He turned very serious long before they had finished telling him about it.

  "Have you had a period since we got here?"
he asked August. "No, I haven't."

  "It's been thirty days," Cirocco said. ',is that unusual for you?" From the way August's eyes widened, Cirocco assumed it was. "When was the last time you had intercourse with a man?"

  "I've never."

  "I was afraid you'd say that."

  Calvin was quiet for a while, considering it. Then he frowned more deeply.

  "What can I say? You all know it's possible for a woman to skip a period for other reasons. Athletes sometimes skip a whole lot of them, and we're not sure why. Stress can do it, emotional or physical. But I think the chances of it happening to all three of you at the same time are slim."

  "I would tend to agree," Cirocco said.

  "It could be dietary. There's no way to know. I can tell you that the three of you, and ... uh, April, were undergoing some convergence."

  "What's that?" Gaby asked.

  "It sometimes happens to women who live together, like on a spaceship where they're in close quarters. Some hormonal signal tends to synchronize their menstruation. April and August have been in rhythm with each other for a long time, and Cirocco was only a few days off their cycle. Two early periods and she was in step. Gaby, you were getting erratic, if you recall.,,

  "I never paid much attention to it," she said.

  "Well, you were. But I can't see what that would have to do with what we have here. I only brought it up to point out that strange things happen. It's possible that you all just skipped one."

  "It's also possible that we're all knocked up, and I shudder to think who the father is," sirocco said, sourly. .

  "That's just flat impossible," Calvin said. "If you're saying that the thing that ate us did it to you all ... I can't buy that. There isn't another animal even on Earth that can impregnate a human. You tell me how this alien creature did it."

  "I don't know," Cirocco said. "That's why it's alien. But I'm convinced it got inside us and did something that might seem perfectly reasonable and natural to it, but is alien to what we know. And I don't like it, and we want to know what you can do if we are pregnant."

  Calvin rubbed the tight curls on his chin, then smiled slightly. "They didn't prepare me for virgin births at med school."

  "I'm not in the mood for jokes."

  "Sorry. You and Gaby aren't virgins, anyhow." He shook his head in wonder.

  "We were thinking of something more immediate and less sacred, " Gaby said. "We don't want these babies, or whatever the hell they are."

  "Look, why don't you wait another thirty days before you start getting excited? If you miss another period, call me again."

  "We'd like to get it over with now," Cirocco said.

  Calvin looked upset for the first time. "And I'm saying I won't do it yet. It's too risky. I might make the tools for a D. and C., but they'll have to he sterilized. I don't have a speculum, and the thought of what I might have to improvise to dilate the cervix is enough to give you nightmares."

  "The thought of what I've got growing in my belly is giving

  me nightmares," Cirocco said, darkly. "Calvin, I don't even want a human baby now, much less whatever this might be. I want you to do the operation."

  Gaby and August nodded their agreement, though Gaby looked slightly ill.

  "And I say wait another month. It won't make any difference. The operation would he the same, just scraping out the inner walls of the uterus. But maybe a month from now you'll have found a way to make a fire, to boil some water, to sterilize whatever instruments I manage to make. Doesn't that make sense? I assure you, I can do the operation with a minimum of risk, but only with clean tools."

  "I just want to get it over with," Cirocco said. "I want to get this thing out of me."

  "Captain, take it easy. Settle down and think it out. if you get infected, I'm helpless. There's different country to the cast. You ~t find a way to make a fire. I'll look, too. I was clear over in Mnemosyne when your call came. It could be there's somebody who uses tools and could make a decent speculum and dilator."

  "Then you're leaving again?" she asked. "Yes, I am, after I give you all a check-up." "I'm asking you again to stay with us."

  "I'm sorry. I can't." Nothing Cirocco could say would change his mind, and though she flirted again with the idea of holding him, the same reasons still made that a bad idea. And one more thing had occurred to her since his departure; it might not he wise to harm someone with a friend as big as Whistlestop.

  He pronounced all four of them fit and healthy, despite the missed periods of the women, then stayed a few hours, seeming to begrudge even that. He told them what they had seen in their travels.

  Oceanus was a terrible place, frozen and forbidding They had crossed it as quickly as possible. There was a humanoid race down there, but Whistlestop would not go down for a close look They had thrown rocks from a wooden catapult even when the

  blimp was a kilometer above them. Calvin described them as human in shape, covered with long white hair. They shot first and asked questions later. He called them Yeti.

  "Mnemosyne is a desert," he said. "It looks odd, because the dunes stack up a lot higher than on Earth, from the low gravity, I guess. There's plant life down there. I saw some small animals when we went down low, and what looked like a ruined city and a few small towns. Places that might have been castles a thousand years ago perched up on vertical rock spires, crumbling apart. It would have taken a thousand years of coolie labor to build them, or some pretty good helicopters.

  "I think something has gone badly wrong in here. It's all going to dust. Mnemosyne might have looked like this place once, right down to the empty river bed and the corpses of huge trees being eaten away by sandstorms. Something changed the climate, or got away from the builders.

  'lit was probably this worm we saw. There's only one of them, Whistlestop says. Mnemosyne is only big enough for one. If there were two, they fought it out long ago and only this grand- daddy worm is left. It's big enough to eat Whistlestop like an olive."

  Both Cirocco and Bill looked up at Calvin's mention of giant worms.

  "I never did see the whole thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's twenty kilometers long. It's just a big, long tube, with a hole at both ends as wide as the whole damn worm. It's segmented, and the body looks hard, like an armadillo shell. it's got a mouth like a buzz saw, teeth an the inside and the outside both. it spends its time under the sand, but sometimes it isn't deep enough and it has to come to the surface. We watched it one of those times."

  'There was a worm like that in a book," Bill said. "A movie, too," Cirocco said. "It was called Dune." Calvin seemed annoyed at the interruption, and glanced up to see if the blimp was still close.

  "Anyway," he said, " I wondered if that worm might be what's giving Mnemosyne such a had time. Can you imagine what it'd do to tree roots? It could wreck the whole area in a couple years. The trees die, pretty soon the soil is going bad, can't hold water anymore, and right after that the rivers go underground. They must, you know; Ophion goes through Mnemosyne. You can see where it disappeared and where it comes up again. The flow isn't broken, but it doesn't do Mnemosyne any good. "

  "So then I thought that nobody who was planning this place would have put a worm like that in it. It must not like the dark, or else it would go right through Oceanus and wreck the whole place. I think it's just luck that didn't happen, and if this place is .getting by on luck, it can't have too long to go. That worm's got to be a bad mutation, and that means there's nobody around with enough power to kill it and get things back on the track. I'm afraid I think the builders either died out or reverted to savagery, like those stories you were telling us, Bill."

  "It's a possibility," Bill agreed. Cirocco snorted. "Sure it is. It's also possible you're reading too much into that worm. Maybe the people here like worms and couldn't bear to leave this one behind. Then he grew until he needed a bigger house, and they gave him Mnemosyne. Anyhow, we've still got to try to get to the hub."

  "You do that," Calvin agreed.
"I'm going to sail around the rim and see who's still alive down here. The builders could have taken a tumble, and still have enough technology to make a radio. If they do, "I'll come tell you, and you folks are home free."

  "'You folks'?" Cirocco said. "Come on, Calvin. We're all in this together. just because you won't stick with us doesn't mean we'd abandon you here."

  Calvin frowned, and would say no more.

  Before Whistlestop got under weigh, Calvin tossed out a few smilers attached to parachutes. He was using them as weights to draw chutes out of the dispenser, because the bluish silk and the shrouds were the most useful items they had yet found.

  Gaby folded the chutes and stowed them carefully, vowing that she would dress Cirocco like a queen. Cirocco resigned her- self to it. It was a small price to pay to keep Gaby happy.

  And once again Titanic was launched, this time with a new sense of urgency. They had to contact a race advanced enough to help with antiseptic surgery or find a way to build a fire, and it had to he soon. The thing in her belly would not wait.

  She thought about it a lot in the following days. Her revulsion was like a tight fist inside her. Most of it stemmed from the unknown nature of the beast that had planted its seed in her.

  And yet abortion would have been her course even if she had been sure she was nurturing a human foetus. It had nothing to do with the idea of motherhood itself; she planned to become a mother when she retired from NASA, probably at age, forty or forty-five. She had a dozen cells in cryogenic suspension at O'Neil One, ready to be fertilized and implanted when she felt ready to give birth. It was a common precaution among astronauts, and even the Lunar and LS colonists: a hedge against radiation damage to reproductive tissue. She planned to raise a boy and a girl while old enough to be their grandmother.

  But she would choose the time. Whether the father was a human and a lover, or a shapeless monstrosity in the bowels of Gaea, she would control her own reproductive organs. She was not ready, not by many years. Notwithstanding that Gaea was no place to be burdened with an infant, she had many things yet to do, endeavours where a child would be as great a problem as it would be here. And she fully intended to get out and do those things.