Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  That gave him a double-take. “Woah,” he said. “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” she said. “The kids these days are getting the whole shebang. Even the cosmology: the spheres of Moon and sun, the fixed stars beyond… Technology is allowed to continue as long as it’s limited to practical, Earth-bound applications. Even low Earth orbit satellites are okay, because they are beneath the sphere of the Moon. But we’re not supposed to look up at the sky, for fear of getting scared. In greater Seattle, they’ve even banned telescopes… Xavier Maclachlan is putting us back at the center of the Universe, Marcus; he says he wants to heal the spiritual dislocation that science has caused.” She shrugged. “There are compensations. Aristotle taught the interconnectedness of everything; that’s not a bad thing for kids to learn. Look at the environment. Besides, who am I to say Maclachlan’s wrong, if it does make people happier?”

  “It’s not right, damn it,” he growled, shocked.

  “But you have to face the facts, Marcus,” she said. “To most people the Earth might as well be flat anyhow. The sun might as well be a disc of fire floating round the sky…”

  “But I walked on the Moon.”

  Her face hardened. “Not too many people care about those old Moonwalks nowadays, Marcus. Anyhow, you can see why I can’t make too much of a fuss about Paula. She’s gone to a place which—according to what my kids are being taught—doesn’t even exist.”

  After a time, they ran out of things to say.

  White stared into his coffee cup. The milk substitute, whatever it was, had created some kind of scum that swirled around on top of the coffee’s meniscus; when he drank, he tried to filter the shit through his teeth.

  The two boys just ignored White, carrying on with their business as if he wasn’t there. There had been a time when it was different. There had been a time when any ten-year-old kid would have been as thrilled as all hell to have a Moonwalker come visit.

  Paula’s message ran out. At the end, Benacerraf seemed to be trying to say something a little more personal—I love you, I miss the kids—but her face just hovered on the wall, mute and distressed and inarticulate.

  At last, to White’s relief, the image faded to black; the softscreen filled up with some kind of cartoon.

  Jackie, awkwardly, offered to put him up for the night. It was a genuine offer but not exactly heartfelt; he found it easy to turn down. He would take a cab back into the city and find a hotel, fly home tomorrow.

  When the cab came she walked him to the door; he emerged into the fresh sunlight.

  He said, “I got a feeling I wasted my time here.”

  “No,” she said, distracted. Then she seemed to be trying to make more of an effort. She put her hand on his arm; her fingers were light, as fragile as dried twigs. “No. I’m sorry you feel that. I’m grateful you came. I know you were trying to help.”

  “In my old fart way.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Sure you did.”

  A shadow drifted across them, like a cloud. Together, they looked up. White shielding his rheumy eyes against the low afternoon sunlight.

  It was an aerostat: a filmy bubble a mile wide, a geodesic sphere overlain by a translucent film that caught the sunlight, like a huge soap bubble. The shell, buoyed up by the heated air inside, was tinged with the green and yellow of crops, growing in the rich high-altitude light. And the base trailed what looked like spiny tentacles; they were electrostatic chargers, generating and scattering ozone. White could just make out the huge Boeing logo, and the ocean-blue flag of New Columbia, painted on the side.

  To White, it was just another fix of disorientation. The whole floating factory-farm looked like some huge jellyfish: an alien invader, maybe, drifting through the tall blue sky of Earth.

  Jackie looked up at him, her eyes empty, the tattoo scars on her cheeks a washed-out pink in the sunlight. “I lost my mother years ago. Or maybe she lost me. The fact that she’s still alive up there, floating around halfway to Jupiter in some metal coffin, is just—” She hunted for the word. “Theoretical.”

  He tried to think of something to say, some way to get out of this situation.

  You’re too old, Marcus, just too damn old.

  Day 1181

  Alone in the humming calm of the flight deck and with her feet padding at the Teflon sheet—with all the lights subdued save for the small instrument glows, surrounded by the soft sounds of her mother’s voice, her own breathing and the high-pitched whir of the pumps—Nicola Mott stared upward at the moons of Jupiter.

  The crop yields continued to fall, and the transmission of mutations to successive generations was rising. Some plants, like the strawberries, refused to flower altogether. Rosenberg had talked about the reasons for this—inappropriate cell structures, poor fluid transmission—but Mott just tuned him out. The science really didn’t matter right now; in a sense, it never had.

  They just had to find solutions with their available resources. Ways to survive.

  So they were improvising. Rosenberg had designed a new plant growth unit to work in the centrifuge arm, where the plants could be subjected to a high percentage of a G for most of each day. That meant transferring some of the farm’s equipment lamps, the air blower system, racks and nutrient baths and reservoirs into the cramped arm cabin.

  It was a long and difficult job, to which they were all having to contribute, under Rosenberg’s reluctant supervision. It wasn’t going to be a complete answer; the growing area inside the arm would be nothing like sufficient to fulfill their needs. And the arm wasn’t shielded from radiation so well as the farm itself. But Rosenberg’s hope was that stronger growths in the arm, coupled with at least some provision from the original farm, would close the gap in their requirements, before they started to go hungry.

  The biggest drawback was the loss of the centrifuge for the crew.

  They had reinstalled the exercise cycle, up on the flight deck, where there was still a little room. But not the treadmill.

  That pissed Nicola Mott. It had been proven, all the way back to Skylab, that a treadmill was a much better way of exercising a range of muscle groups than a cycle. In her opinion it was just another example of the crew’s collective laziness and incompetence, which would lead them all, ultimately, into disaster.

  Anyway, she had got on with devising her own solution.

  She improvised a treadmill. It was just a slippery sheet of Teflon that she bolted to the floor of the flight deck, behind the pilot’s seat. She could balance herself with a hand on the seat in front of her, and just walk along, her feet slithering on the slippery pad. She wore socks, so her feet could slide more easily. It wasn’t as effective as the real thing; too often she stubbed a toe on the bolts that held the Teflon in place, and because she couldn’t vary the resistance, generally it was muscle fatigue that stopped her working. But she found if she worked at it long enough her calves, tendons and toes got a real workout.

  And so, here she was. She had slapped a softscreen on the wall, and as she worked she listened to a message from her parents, relayed from their home in Cambridge, England. She didn’t trouble to watch too carefully; the quality was low because of reduced capacity anyhow, and her father was prone to providing her with badly-shot home movies overlaid by her mother’s slow, monotonic speech. Right now, for instance, there was a shaky pan of the new rice paddy fields around Ely in Cambridgeshire.

  … You remember your cousin Sarah, her mother said. Came down with CJD, didn’t she. She was only twenty-two. Such a pretty girl. She chose the euth clinic, you know, even though Mary—your aunt Mary, you know, her mother—said it was un-Christian. What a mess the whole thing is. Of course we don’t have blood donors now, all our transfusion blood is flown in from abroad, and the Tories say the government’s blood tax is too high. Quarantine, they call it. The French were the first—typical bloody French, your father says—when they poured all that concrete down the Channel Tunnel. Oh, John Major died. There was a pro
gram on the telly. I didn’t realize he was the last Tory Prime Minister, who’d have thought it…

  Her mother’s face, on screen now, was a ruin, the left side imploded, cratered. She had come down with a prion disease related to Creutzfeld-Jakob, non-fatal but disfiguring, the prions steadily sculpting the soft cells of her flesh.

  It had taken Mott herself a hell of a lot of tests to be proven fit to come to the States, to get into NASA.

  She had come a long way from Cambridgeshire.

  … Everything was different here.

  Discovery was now five hundred million miles from the sun—five times the distance of Earth from the parent star. As the mission had unfolded the inverse square law had worked inexorably at the sun’s radiation and size; from here the sun was still brilliant—at magnitude minus seventeen, much brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth—but its disc was tiny, like a flaw in the retina, like a distant supernova, like nothing she had seen from the surface of Earth. The light it cast had a strange quality, too: almost the light of a point source, the shadows stretching over the orbiter long and sharp.

  Even the sun was different here, transmuted into something alien by distance.

  As Discovery’s separation from Earth had grown, and the lag of radio signals from Houston had risen to an hour and a half round trip, it was as if their tenuous link to home had stretched, broken.

  Now Earth was just a spark of blue light close to the shrinking sun, the place the high-gain antenna pointed. And those remote voices, from Mission Control and in the back rooms of Building 30 at JSC, with their detailed reams of advice and instruction—trying to control the crew, as once they had choreographed Moonwalkers, step by step—seemed to have little to do with their situation, here, suspended in extraordinary isolation in this outer darkness.

  It was taking a while to sink in, after four decades of the culture of the ground control of spaceflight, but out here, as they sailed past the moons of Jupiter, the crew of Discovery was truly alone. There was nothing to fall back on but what they had brought along with them, for better or worse, and whatever ingenuity they could apply.

  Your father’s talking about a holiday. He wants to go to Mega Power—you know, the turbine tower, that Dutch monstrosity in the North Sea. Apparently they have restaurants and a hotel and shop, Jour miles high. All covered over, of course. Fancy that. But I wouldn’t trust it, not after the leak of that huge cloud of ammonia last year…

  Directly above her head Mott could see the half-disc of Jupiter. It glowed salmon-pink in the flat sunlight. Discovery was coming no closer than two million miles to the planet—twenty-five Jupiter diameters—but even so the giant world showed a sizable disc, like a big pink coin held at arm’s length, four times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky. On the sunlit hemisphere she could make out the stripes of the ammonia ice cloud bands, brown and white and orange stripes, streaked and curdled with turbulence along the lines where they met. She couldn’t see the Great Red Spot, and that was a disappointment. But Jupiter’s day was only ten hours or so; perhaps the planet’s disc would stay visible long enough for the Spot to be brought into view.

  And Mott could see some of Jupiter’s moons, strung out in a line parallel to the equator of their parent.

  Io—a little larger than Earth’s Moon—lay between its parent and the sun, about two Jupiter diameters from the cloud tops, its illuminated hemisphere a sulphur-yellow spot of light. Ganymede, twice as far from Jupiter as Io, sat behind its parent, its ice surface glittering white. Europa and Callisto, the other large moons, were harder to spot; eventually she found Callisto as a bright white spark against the darkness of Jupiter’s shadowed hemisphere.

  It only took Io, the innermost of the large satellites, a day or so to travel around its orbit around Jupiter. If she stayed up here long enough, Mott would get to see the moons turn around their parent in their endless, complex dance…

  The compact Jovian system was oddly charming. Like an old-fashioned orrery, a clockwork model of the Solar System. But Jupiter was eleven times the diameter of Earth. And its moons, if freed from Jupiter’s grip, were large enough to have qualified as planets in their own right. Ganymede—out here, a spark dwarfed by Jupiter—was the largest moon in the Solar System: larger than Titan, larger, in fact, than the planet Mercury.

  In a window frame of this beat-up Shuttle orbiter, she could see five worlds, clustered together in one gigantic gravity well.

  But, she thought, there was no life here, not even—as far as anyone could tell—on that slush ball Europa. There was no life for a half-billion miles in any direction, save within the battered walls of this spacecraft, the bubble of air which sheltered her.

  Damn it all. She wished Siobhan could see this. That remote death, back in the heart of the Solar System, was losing its power to hurt her now. But still, what a waste, what a meaningless, cruel waste.

  No, I want to go to the hedgerow museum in Hampshire. Apparently they still have some ptarmigans there, the last ones. Oh, I have to tell you, you wouldn’t believe the price of potatoes in the shops. All the sweetcorn you could ask for, but it’s not the same… We know you are still missing Siobhan, love. We know you two were pals. You take care of yourself, and try not to fret about it all too much…

  Pals. Her parents had never known—or had preferred not to know—about Libet’s true relationship with their daughter. Her parents had been young in the 1970s, hardly the Victorian era. Mott wondered if there was something in the human genome which dictated that no generation could accept the sexuality of its offspring.

  But, out here, it hardly seemed to matter, like so much else.

  Discovery’s path—whirling around the inner planets, and then out past Jupiter to Saturn—was actually similar to that of Cassini, which had come this way more than a decade before. But since then Jupiter and Saturn had wheeled through their grand orbits, of twelve and twenty-nine years, and they weren’t in such a favorable position for Discovery’s slingshot as they had been for Cassini. Discovery needed to come in a lot closer than Cassini, to extract still more energy from Jupiter, the most massive planet in the Solar System.

  But that meant the orbiter had to penetrate deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

  Mott knew she, and the rest of the crew, were paying a price. Jupiter’s magnetic field was ten times as powerful as Earth’s, and its magnetosphere—the doughnut-shaped belt of magnetically trapped solar wind particles—stretched fifty Jupiter diameters, far beyond Discovery’s current position. Right now heavy solar wind particles, electrons and hydrogen and helium nuclei, which circled, trapped, in Jupiter’s magnetosphere—ten thousand times as energetic as those in the Van Allen belts of Earth—coursed through the fabric of the ship, and her body.

  Arguably this place, the magnetosphere of the most massive planet, was the most hostile section of deep space in the Solar System. And here she was, staring out the window at it.

  Mott stayed on the flight deck as long as she could, exercising in Jupiter light.

  She slowed her pace on the treadmill. She hung onto the pilot’s seat for a moment and let her aching legs drift, deliciously, in the balm of microgravity, bearing no weight at all. Then she swiveled and pulled herself to the instrument panel at the back of the flight deck, and looked out over the orbiter’s instrument bay.

  Discovery was passing Jupiter with its payload bay turned up to the giant planet and its system, instruments straining, the big high-gain antenna pointing at remote Earth, lost now in the glare of the sun. The point-source sun and pink Jupiter, at right angles to each other, cast complex multiple shadows over the blocky, blanketed equipment in the payload bay, and over Discovery’s curving wings.

  It was impossible to reconcile the awesome spectacle up here with the squalor and crap of their lives inside the space-craft—the shitty, failing systems, the endless slog of their daily lives.

  But there had been no other way to get here, to see this.

  She toweled off her sw
eat, wrapped up her softscreen, and went back to the hab module.

  Rosenberg clambered into Apollo Command Module CM-115, through the tight little docking tunnel in its nose, past the compartments containing the drogue and recovery parachutes and their mortars and the forward reaction control system.

  He came down into the big pressurized crew compartment in the mid-section, descending on it from above. There were three couches in there, side by side on their backs. They were just metal frames slung with gray Armalon fiberglass cloth, so close together he was sure it wouldn’t be possible for three adult humans to pack in there without rubbing shoulders, elbows and knees against each other.

  Rosenberg wriggled into the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. He spread out his manuals on his knee.

  He was here as part of his in-flight training program. He was never going to be a pilot, but he had to learn how to fly an Apollo—in case of contingency—all the way to the surface of Titan.

  The Command Module was like a small aircraft, upended, its interior coated with switches, dials and cathode ray displays. The lights were subdued, the glow in the cabin greenish from the CRTs. Directly in front of him there was a big, gun-metal gray, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel, glistening with five hundred switches. There were control handles on the commander’s couch armrests: the attitude controller assembly on the right, which was used to control the reaction thruster assemblies, and the big thrust-translator controller on the left, which could be used to accelerate the craft forward or back. For this unique mission, the attitude control would also be used to direct a paraglider, a shaped parachute which would guide Apollo down to a safe landing on Titan’s slushy surface.

  There was a smell of plastic and metal; all around him the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred.

  The windows seemed small and far away; he was pretty much surrounded by metal walls, here, and even though the side hatch was still open, he felt closed in.