Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  “Item three,” he said, and he brought up another map. “Taiwan. The CIA thinks this is the main flashpoint area in the whole region. The Red Chinese have always claimed that any effort by Taiwan to achieve formal independence would justify them going to war. Currently the Taiwanese are pressing no such claim. But now we think the Chinese are preparing for a more significant push.

  “We’ve seen exercises by the People’s Liberation Army on the mainland. Violations of Taiwanese airspace by Chinese military jets. Missile launches, impacting the ocean within Taiwanese waters. Blockades, particularly around the big ports, Keelung and Kaohsiung… It’s a classic pattern. They did all this in the ’50s, and again in the ’90s. This time, we think they mean it. And there appears to be a faction within the senior and military Chinese leadership which believes that the U.S. would not intervene in the Taiwan Strait, no matter what happens there.”

  “But why would the Chinese do this?” Fahy asked. “Why now?”

  Hartle turned to her. “To see that, Miss Fahy, you have to understand the psychology of the very old men who run Red China. Have run that country for decades, in fact.”

  She looked into his leathery face, the rheumy blue eyes embedded there. Nobody better placed to figure that psychology than you, General, she thought.

  “The Party still has a grip on China. For now. But those wizened old dwarfs in Beijing can feel their grip slipping away. They fear koan—a return to chaos, which they see as fundamental to China’s former weakness—more than any other condition. And we have every indication that koan is indeed descending on the country.”

  Deeke said, “Some of the new economic growth areas are pushing for more independence from Beijing. Nobody really knows what’s happening in the heads of the young people over there, in the new cities. And the influence of Communism in the rural areas has been waning for decades. In its place, you have all sorts of crazy cults and beliefs. There’s the cult of Wu Yangming, who was shot as a rapist fifteen years ago. He called himself a Holy Emperor, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Death didn’t stop him; Wu alone has a million followers. Some of these cult types are organizing using the methods Mao Zedong used during his insurrection—and his revolt worked, remember.”

  Hartle said, “Think of it. A billion fucking peasants, still poor, their rice paddies drying out, all going crazy about their gods, consulting the I Ching … and organizing. What a tinderbox.”

  Deeke said, “The leadership need some way to reassert their grip. A symbolic act, a show of strength. The space shots didn’t quite hack it, it seems. Maybe a war with Taiwan will do it.”

  Hartle said with an almost comical darkness, “We must not allow the emergence of a great power on the Asian continent. We don’t want to spend the rest of the millennium paving tribute to the fucking Red Chinese. If the Red Chinese resent that, fuck them. But if they try to break out—go for Taiwan, for instance—we have to be ready…”

  Fahy scowled. “I thought we were here to discuss the space program.”

  Hartle studied her, analytically. “Here’s a quotation for you, Miss Fahy. I wonder if you recognize it: You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. You know who said that?”

  “No…”

  “Trotsky. War has come looking for us, young lady.” He eyed her. “You run the Office—”

  “Of Manned Spaceflight.”

  “Well, there ain’t going to be any more manned spaceflight, Miss Fahy, so I guess you’re out of a job. But we hate to lose good people. Maybe you’re just the person we need for our new program.”

  “What program?”

  Hartle nodded to Deeke, who tapped his softscreen once more. A new schematic came up: blown-up images of bacteria, DNA strands. Deeke launched into his new spiel. His slickness unnerved Fahy; he was like a machine, utterly subservient to Hartle, without anything to say for himself.

  He said now, “The Chinese are not short of people, and have always accepted the human wave—attrition, mass slaughter—as an acceptable form of warfare. The First World War should have been a Chinese war.”

  “So,” Hartle said, “we need a new deterrent.”

  Hadamard frowned. “What?”

  “A bio-weapon.” Hartle smiled. “Jake, Miss Fahy, we seem to have reached a plateau in mechanical engineering, but those biological lab boys have made remarkable progress in the last couple of decades. Now that the human genome map is complete, new possibilities have opened up for us. It’s possible to distinguish the DNA variation between different racial and ethnic groups. What I’m saying is, the lab boys can develop an agent which will kill only a specific group.”

  “My God,” said Fahy “Such as?”

  “Such as the Han Chinese. Miss Fahy, with such a weapon—delivered by some small-scale missile launcher, which is where we need NASA technicians—we could lop off the head of the Red Chinese flower. Or threaten to, which is equivalent.”

  “You’re crazy,” Fahy breathed.

  Hadamard said, “Now, Barbara—” He steepled his hands. “Al, I think we’ve gone far enough. NASA is still a civilian agency. Dedicated to the exploration of space and the dissemination of information to the public, and the world. And so forth. You cannot expect us to contribute to any such program as this…”

  Hadamard, even to Fahy, sounded weak, unconvinced by his own words.

  “He’s right. You can’t tell us what to do,” she said to Hartle. “No matter what Maclachlan says. Your authority has limits.”

  Hartle seemed unfazed. “Jake, excuse me. Have you told her?”

  Fahy frowned. “Told me what?”

  Hartle said, “As of seventeen days hence, I will be Administrator of NASA. Changing times, Miss Fahy.”

  Hadamard looked across at Fahy and shrugged. “It took fifty years, but in the end the Air Force won. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

  Hartle grinned at Fahy, and she could see antique fillings in his teeth. “Let me tell you what my first orders are going to be, just so you can start to prepare, Miss Fahy. NASA has been a sink of national resources for decades; now we’re approaching a time of unparalleled crisis, and that is going to stop.”

  Hadamard said, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, no more of this science crap. Item. The Deep Space Network can go. Item. All those science satellites, the observatories—”

  “Some of them have been up there for decades,” Fahy said. “The Hubble space telescope is the most successful—”

  “If there are decades’ worth of data in the can,” Hartle said, “there shouldn’t he too much objection when I turn off the tap, should there?”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Al,” Hadamard said mildly.

  “What doesn’t? Science? Fuck the science, Jake. I guess you hadn’t noticed, here in this ivory tower of yours, but science isn’t exactly the top priority of this Administration. Six months from now, the only U.S. satellites I want operating up there are those with military or commercial potential—comsats, Earth resources, reconnaissance. Item. The Delta IV boosters currently assigned to these asshole deep space resupply missions will be switched to military missions, which was the primary function of the Delta IV program in the first goddamn place. Miss Fahy. You got a problem with any of that?”

  “Yes,” she said, flaring. “Yes, I have a problem. Damn it, General—”

  “Nobody forced that fucking crew of yours, that bunch of dykes and ecologists and has-been pilots up into space,” Hartle said. “Did they? They knew the risks when they accepted the assignment.”

  “They didn’t accept the risk of being shot down.”

  Hadamard said wearily, “Barbara…”

  Hartle studied her, as if pitying her. “You know, I truly believe you haven’t taken in a word that’s been said this morning, Miss Fahy. Let me spell it out again. The time for your Buck Rogers space cadet stunts is over. The loss of your crew—if that happens—is regrettable. But it was their choice. We’ve been pouring billions every year into this fuc
king circus stunt. Well, Miss Fahy, I now have a clear mandate from the President to put a stop to that. And it’s the first thing I intend to do.”

  “Let us keep a dish,” Hadamard said suddenly.

  Hartle looked at him. “Huh?”

  “A deep space dish. Let us keep Goldstone open, at least. That way, at least maybe we’ll be able to listen to Discovery. Better PR, Al.”

  Hartle’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell,” he said. “Keep the fucking dish; what can that cost?”

  Hadamard nodded, avoiding Fahy’s eyes.

  He’d won a small victory, Fahy saw, extracting such a relatively inexpensive concession in this, Hartle’s moment of triumph. Maybe this was his main objective for the meeting, in fact. Maybe he brought me in here as a kind of diversion, to soak up Hartle’s fire.

  I should be so political, she thought.

  But I’m not.

  She asked, “Who is going to tell the astronauts? You, General? The President? Who will tell their families?”

  Hartle grinned easily and stood up. “I’ll leave that to old Jake here; he’s still the man holding the ball until next month. And you, Miss Fahy, will start working on delivery systems for those biobomb options we outlined.”

  “I quit,” she said impulsively “You’ll have my resignation on your desk the day you walk in here.”

  He walked over to her; he stood before her threateningly, a squat pillar of silver hair and grizzled skin and tough, aged muscle. “And you’ll have it back up your ass, corners first, a day after that. This is a time of national crisis, Miss Fahy; quitting is not an option. For any of us.”

  He turned and left. Deeke rolled up his softscreen, nodded to Hadamard, and followed.

  Hadamard, staring at the floor, seemed to have nothing to say. Framed in the window behind him, a slab of orange Washington sky was brightening to a washed-out glare.

  Day 680

  On Discovery’s flight deck, Benacerraf sat strapped into the left-hand commander’s seat. She was wearing her usual grubby Beta-cloth T-shirt and shorts. The flight deck was homey, like a little den, glowing with the fluorescent glareshield lights, and the multicolored light of the instruments panels. Benacerraf always felt comfortable in here: at home, in the environment in which she’d spent so many hours training and flying. Anyhow, the flight deck, with its big windows, made a pleasing change from the shut-in squalor that the hab module had become, and the stinking cabin of the centrifuge.

  Especially today, she thought. Because today, for the first time in nearly two years, Earthlight was streaming into Discovery.

  Thirty minutes from closest approach, Earth was a fat ball that looked the size of a dinner-plate held at arm’s length.

  From Benacerraf’s point of view, behind the big picture windows on Discovery’s flight deck, the planet was a gibbous disc, close to full, suspended over the roof of the cabin. The orbiter would fly past Earth with her belly away from the planet, and her payload bay turned to Earth, to give the instruments there a good vantage.

  Discovery was barreling in at around twelve miles per second—fast enough to cross the continental United States in five minutes, fast enough to traverse the diameter of Earth itself in eleven minutes.

  The hemisphere turned to the sun was coated with land: it was noon somewhere over central Asia, and much of the Pacific must be in darkness. She could see the mountain-fringed plateaux broadening out from Turkey, through Iran and Afghanistan, to the great Tibetan plateau. The plateau was cut off from the rest of India by the still higher Himalayas. To the south and east of this plateau were the great river valleys of Asia, crammed with humanity. Masses of stratus clouds were piled up behind the mountains; she could see how the mountains, protruding through the vapor layer, were causing disturbances in the clouds, like waves, along a front a thousand miles long.

  Benacerraf—parochial to the last—felt a stab of regret she wasn’t going to get to see more of the continental U.S.

  There were few signs of human life, even from here.

  She knew that the old Apollo astronauts had been struck by the beauty and fragility of Earth from space. It hadn’t hit Benacerraf like that at all. At first glance Earth was a world of ocean, desert and a little ice, half-covered by cloud. The areas colonized by humans seemed tiny, dwarfed, little rectangles of cultivated ground clinging to the coasts, or the banks of rivers, or timidly at the feet of mountains. Almost all of the Earth was empty, too hostile for man; humans clung in little clusters to the fringes of continents, like some feeble lichen.

  To Benacerraf, the view from space showed her not so much the delicacy of Earth, but the tenuous grasp of humanity, even on this single planet, even after four billion years of life’s adaptation, down there at the bottom of that murky gravity well.

  Humans were restricted to a shell around the surface of Earth, no thicker than an hour’s car ride. In the depths of interplanetary space, where Earth and Moon were reduced to faint specks, man had left no mark but a handful of aging spacecraft, a thin hiss of radio static … and Discovery.

  The Universe was huge, empty, dead. It knew nothing of mankind and all its works. Benacerraf had traveled beyond Venus; she had seen that for herself. Here she was scooting over the surface of Earth itself, and she still thought so.

  At such times, the thought of life aspiring to anything but to cling to the surface of that big ball of rock down there seemed absurd.

  She was alone up here, on the flight deck. She didn’t even know where the others were right now.

  It made you think, if the four of them couldn’t stand each other enough to be together even for the few hours of this flyby of the home world.

  But she was going to stay up here. It was, after all, one hell of a view. And she had a duty to perform.

  Discovery was passing behind the planet, crossing over its night side, so from Benacerraf’s point of view the fat gibbous disc began to narrow, soon approaching a crescent.

  The crescent thinned rapidly as it grew, as if the light were bleeding from its tapering horns. Soon it was so huge that Benacerraf had to crane her neck to see its full extent.

  And then, with a flare of gold and red, the sun passed beyond the horizon.

  Discovery, flying over oceans, plunged into Earth’s huge shadow. Now, the spacecraft inhabited a new landscape, which revealed itself to Benacerraf as her eyes dark-adapted.

  Over the night hemisphere of Earth, a huge aurora glowed. It was a curtain of green light that appeared to extend from the fleeing spacecraft all the way to Earth’s horizon, at the pole. Beneath, the aurora blended in with the airglow, the luminous gas layer high in the atmosphere excited by the sun’s radiation. And Benacerraf could see noctilucent clouds, very high decks illuminated by the airglow, like the surface of a thin, milky sea. Above the aurora, very faint, she could see streamers, very thin striations which seemed to extend down from much higher altitudes, spokes aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field.

  The aurora’s curtains and folds seemed to be on the same level as Discovery—the orbiter was near its closest approach now, just a couple of hundred miles above the planet—and Benacerraf had a rare sense of motion, of speed, of sailing through some invisible sea, populated by these bergs of cool light.

  It was the most beautiful thing Benacerraf had ever seen. And a hell of a relief from the bleak emptiness of interplanetary space, where it never felt like she was going anywhere. Damn, damn. How could I abandon all this?

  Discovery was revisiting Earth for its final gravity assist before Jupiter; Earth was, in fact, the most massive object between the sun and Jupiter.

  By passing so close to Earth—coming within a couple of hundred miles of its surface—Discovery had become briefly coupled to Earth, like, Benacerraf thought, a child grabbing hold of a merry-go-round propelled by the strong arms of its father. When Discovery flew on, it would have picked up energy from the encounter—the equivalent of thousands of pounds of additional fuel—and Earth’s store of energy wou
ld be reduced; forever after the planet would circle the sun a little slower.

  Benacerraf remembered a Public Affairs Officer trying to explain this at a JSC briefing, a couple of months before the launch. A reporter asked if the resulting slowdown in the Earth’s orbit around the sun would do harm to the environment On the podium, there were the usual shaking of heads and rolling of eyes. Then Bill Angel had said, mockingly, that NASA would just have to launch another spacecraft and make it fly by Earth on the opposite side…

  General laughter.

  It had left a sour taste in Benacerraf’s mouth. That reporter had been entitled to a better answer than that. There was too much bullshitting of the ignorant, when it came to science and engineering, she thought. You only had to look at the history of the civil nuclear power program to see that engineers didn’t deserve any kind of implicit trust, that they had a duty to answer as fully as possible every question and concern from the public, however dumb it might seem.

  And anyhow, Angel’s answer had been wrong tactically; because after that the questioning had gotten very hostile, for instance on what contingency plans NASA had to shoot Discovery down if something went wrong—if the ship came barreling in towards a collision with Earth, with the payload bay full of uranium…

  And maybe all that arrogance had contributed, in the end, to the decision to dump Benacerraf and her crew: to cut off the retrieval program, even to close down the resupply missions.

  Benacerraf and the others had half-expected such a sentence from the beginning, she suspected, even as they’d formulated the unlikely mission profile, over Chinese food in her house at Clear Lake. And, oddly, it hadn’t seemed so hard to take when the news first came in, as they sailed around the sun at the boiling heart of the Solar System.

  But now, so close to Earth, it was much more difficult. To sail over that blue-glowing landscape, so close, to be within a couple of thousand miles of Jackie and the kids—and not be able to reach them—was pretty much unbearable.