Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  She reached down, and dipped her blue gloves into the slush. The sticky gumbo dripped down through her fingers, like ocean bottom ooze.

  She said: “This is the stuff of life.”

  She took some experimental steps forward, walking away from the Command Module.

  There was none of the exhilarating balloon-like floating which the Apollo astronauts had been able to achieve, bouncing off the hard surface of the Moon. The gumbo sucked at her feet, and her backpack, while not heavy, was an obvious mass at her back, throwing off her center of balance.

  She found it hard to tell where the vertical was. On Earth, tipping a couple of inches either way was enough to trigger the balance mechanisms in her ears. But in this soft gravity she felt she could tilt a long way before her body could sense it; and in the murky gloom, on the dips and folds of the smoothed-out landscape, her visual cues weren’t strong. It all added to the feeling of strangeness.

  She stopped, maybe twenty feet from the Command Module, and turned around.

  The Command Module was a teepee before her, stuck in a broad splash crater. It had very evidently been dropped, from a great height, into the gumbo. The slush had washed up, viscous and sticky, against the lower hull, swamping the lower reaction thruster nozzles; and the powder-white upper surface of Apollo was streaked with purplish tholin deposits. In the open hatchway, Rosenberg was framed against a rectangle of glowing white light; it looked blue-green, in fact, Earth-like, in contrast with the burned orange of the rest of the landscape.

  The camera sat on its stand, panning and focusing automatically.

  She turned away.

  Bifrost had come down in a shallow depression. Towards the horizon, beyond this slushy plain, there were rolling hills. They were the foothills surrounding Mount Othrys, she knew. The horizon itself was lost in gloom and haze.

  The peaks were stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks, and streaks of gray, exposed water ice at the higher elevations. The landscape looked as if it had been water-colored by an unimaginative, heavy-handed child. There were scars in the hills’ profiles, perhaps left by recent icefalls. The profiles looked oddly softened: these were mountains of ice, not rock, after all. Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills. The clouds were fat methane cumuli, fifteen or twenty miles high, dark and oppressive.

  This is ancient, unmarked terrain, she thought. Despite Rosenberg’s hypothesizing, she had the intuition that there had been no life here, no births, no bodies buried under this complex ground.

  Bifrost had come down close to the center of the hemisphere that was turned away from Saturn. It was actually a little before local noon. They would have four or five days before Titan’s orbit around the primary would rotate the moon so that the invisible sun set, beyond the banks of cloud and haze. Then they would have to endure eight or ten days of darkness, while this face of the moon was turned away from the sun, before the next, protracted “dawn.”

  So this was midday on Titan: as bright as it would get. It was like a dim twilight on Earth. Standing in the gumbo in this muddy light, in fact, was like being at the bottom of a pond.

  In the half-distance she could see a splash of yellow-brown, like spilled paint. That must be Bifrost’s discarded parachute. They would have to reclaim that later, she knew; in the years to come—if they were to survive—they would need the cloth, everything they could salvage. Beyond the chutes she could clearly see the white, gumbo-streaked form of Discovery, perhaps a half-mile from Bifrost. It looked as if the orbiter had dug a shallow furrow in the surface of Titan, when it had come in from orbit for its automated glide landing.

  And, a little further away, she saw a bone-white teepee shape. That had to be Jitterbug, Nicola’s Apollo. She couldn’t tell if Jitterbug was upright or not.

  “Paula. Check your infrared.”

  Benacerraf pressed the switch on her chest panel which turned her visor into a crude night-vision monitor. This was an adapted bit of military technology.

  The world turned brighter, but gray and blotchy, ill-defined in the long wavelengths of infrared. The icy landscape was cold, dark, like a cloudy, Moonless night on Earth.

  Bifrost, with its open hatch, was suddenly dazzling bright, a thing of straight lines and rectangles, still intensely hot compared to the thin cold of the rest of Titan’s landscape; that bulk of metal, she guessed, would take some hours to dissipate its heat entirely, before it turned as dark, in her new vision, as the ice which was consuming it. When she turned, she could easily see Discovery and Jitterbug, glowing like diamonds on the ice.

  She looked down towards her feet, at her own body. Even through the insulating layers of Beta-cloth she was glowing with heat, her hands and arms clearly visible, shining; in infrared, she looked like an angel descended to this icy world, alight with fire from the inner Solar System.

  She lifted her head, tipping back on her heels inside the stiff suit.

  The haze in the sky was transparent, in the near-IR wavelengths to which the visor was tuned. And through muddy purple-orange smears on her faceplate, she could see the sun, a coin of white light, rising above complex cloud layers, almost directly above her head. It was surrounded by an aureole, a disc of milky light that looked as if it was constructed of complex layers, like a huge glass onion in the sky, filled with light. There was probably, she thought apathetically, a lot of atmospheric physics contained in this single image.

  Saturn, of course, was hidden by the bulk of Titan, forever below the horizon.

  When she turned off the IR visor, returning to human vision, the sun disappeared. She was never going to see the sun with her naked eyes again, not even the attenuated star to which Sol had been reduced by their huge distance.

  Her visor had gotten streaked with tholin slush, as if she had been caught in some filthy industrial rain. She lifted her right hand and wiped at the visor with her glove, but that just smeared the slush, making it worse.

  I’m going to spend most of my life here just keeping my damn suit clean, she thought. And this tholin drizzle is going to be a constant problem. They should have fitted screen wipers to the visors.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m going to Jitterbug now.”

  “Copy that, Paula.”

  She turned towards that distant shard of bone-white, and began walking.

  She found herself shuffling through the gumbo, a hunched old woman. Her helmet lamps cast pools of light on the glistening, purple-streaked surface.

  “The slush supports my weight, but it is sticky, cloying,” she reported. “It’s very tiring to lift my legs out and take a fresh step. Like walking on soft sand. I think we’re going to have to do something about this, Rosenberg.”

  “Snowshoes, maybe,” he said.

  “Yeah. We’ll have to think about it.”

  She could feel the heavy tubes of warm water wrapped around her limbs; the water seemed to slosh as she walked. Actually she liked the feeling; it was as if she was encased in a little shell of Earth-fluid which cradled her, here in the freezing slush of Titan.

  But even so she felt cold. She could feel the heating system of her suit trying to work, the hot little chicken-wire diamonds close to her flesh. It didn’t seem to be sufficient. Her fingers, especially, seemed chilled, scarcely protected by the gloves; they were going to have to be careful of frost bite.

  In fact, the cold seemed to deepen the further she got from Bifrost.

  She reached Jitterbug.

  The Apollo lay nose-down in the slush, its scorched base turned up to the tholin drizzle. She could see immediately what had happened. The paraglider had failed to separate, and had pulled Jitterbug over. The paraglider’s leads were still attached to the apex of the Command Module, and they trailed across the gumbo to the chute itself.

  Even so, it was possible Mott was alive in there. Even conscious. Just stuck upside down in her couch, unable to get to the comms.

  When she reached the Command Module, she brushed her hand agai
nst its hull. The white tiles were scorched from the entry and laced with tholin drizzle; she couldn’t feel their texture through the thickness of her glove. She could see some of Jitterbug’s windows, exposed above the slush. They were dark. There was evidently no power in there; there hadn’t been for some time.

  She turned, and leaned against the Module’s wall, resting the mass of her backpack there. After her half-mile slog through the slush she was already exhausted, her heart thumping, the space-wasted muscles of her legs like jelly.

  She sipped orange juice, trying to calm her breathing, her rattling heart, trying to face the next step.

  Pushing through the sticky slush, she made her way around the capsule.

  Jitterbug’s side hatch was suspended about four or five feet off the ground. The hatch window was dark, revealing nothing.

  She was going to have to open up the Apollo, get inside quickly, try to find some way to save Nicola from the cold.

  In a pocket of her Beta-cloth coverall she had a wrench. It was the kind used in the Pacific by Apollo recovery crews. With this, she could undog the hatch from the outside.

  It was a little odd working in gravity again, after six years. She didn’t have to brace herself, or the item she was working on; gravity did all that, providing a magical vertical-horizontal reference frame, like an invisible jib.

  The hatch swung open. Too easily. So easily that the hull must be breached, or a window smashed. The air of Titan had gotten into Apollo.

  She pushed her head into the hatchway; the top of her PLSS caught on the top of the frame.

  Immediately, Mott’s head, in its white helmet, was right before her. But Mott didn’t move.

  The three couches were almost upside down at an angle, parallel to Jitterbug’s tilted base. Mott was in the middle couch, unmoving, hanging in her straps. There was Titan slush all over the cabin; it must have forced its way in through a smashed window, a breach in the hull. It had lapped right up, almost to the rim of the hatch. Mott’s face and chest and legs were buried in the slush.

  Benacerraf pushed her arms into the slush beneath Mott, almost up to the shoulders. She fumbled for Mott’s restraint clasps; she could feel barely anything through her thick, insulated gloves, and she had to trace the straps down from their anchors, over Mott’s chest, towards her waist.

  Her arms and hands were soon very cold. The icy slush of Titan seemed to be sucking the warmth out of her. Well, she thought, this damn moon’s heat capacity can beat out mine any day of the week.

  At last she got the clasps loose.

  Mott fell forward, into the slurping slush, and Benacerraf’s arms.

  Benacerraf managed to get her hands hooked underneath Mott’s shoulders. She began to haul at Mott’s limp body, trying to get it through the hatch. But the orange pressure suit kept catching on the narrow frame, and the gumbo sucked back at her, almost willfully.

  At last Mott came free, her knees and feet clattering against the door frame.

  Benacerraf stumbled backwards, falling over into the slush. Mott’s left foot caught in the hatch, and she sprawled grotesquely against the side of the Command Module, her head dipping into the slush.

  A cold, deeper than anything Benacerraf had yet experienced, started to work into her back.

  She had to get up, or the slush would kill her.

  It took a real effort, a haul by her feeble stomach muscles, to pull herself up to a sitting position. She tried to brace herself against the slush, but there was nothing firm to hold onto. She found she had to worm her way around to a crawling position, her arms embedded in the slush up to her elbows, and then drag herself painfully upright. All the time, the mass of the pack on her back threatened to pull her over again.

  When she was on her feet again, she was exhausted anew. She looked down at herself. Her arms, legs and much of her chest were smeared with purple-brown gumbo.

  She walked back to Mott. She bent and dug her hands under Mott’s shoulders again, and pulled her all the way out onto the ice. Her hands left tholin streaks on Mott’s pressure suit.

  She turned Mott over. Mott’s visor was smashed, her helmet full of slush. Benacerraf reached inside and scooped the slush away from Mott’s face. Mott’s eyes were open. Benacerraf tried to push closed the lids, but they were frozen, even the eyeballs hard.

  Rosenberg said, “Do you have her?”

  “Yes, Rosenberg. I have her.”

  Rosenberg fell silent.

  There was Titan slush in Mott’s mouth. Benacerraf dug it away with a finger. Her gloved finger seemed too fat for Mott’s mouth; it was like clearing vomit from the mouth of a sick child.

  “So,” Rosenberg said. “Then there were three.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Paula.”

  “Me too. Rosenberg, prepare a message for the ground. Her parents…”

  “Sure.”

  Benacerraf straightened up and returned to Jitterbug. By touch, in a storage compartment behind the head of Mott’s couch, she found a spade, and a little packet of cellophane that contained the Stars-and-Stripes. The spade was broad-bladed, like a snow-shovel. It had a handle that telescoped out. She walked a few yards away from the apex of Jitterbug and began to dig.

  The blade penetrated the gumbo easily, and she could lift big shovelfuls away into the thick air. But the stuff clung to the spade and was difficult to shake off. And the walls of the little trench she dug kept collapsing inwards. It was like digging into wet sand.

  She kept going, until she was four feet down.

  She scraped gumbo off Mott’s chest, exposing the Union Jack sewn there. Then she opened the cellophane packet. She shook out the flag, and laid it over Mott’s body. She wrapped it underneath, making a neat parcel. Now the weak gravity helped her; Mott was feather-light, easy to handle, like a small child.

  Two flags, two bodies, she thought.

  Benacerraf laid Mott in the trench she had dug.

  It was easy to fill. She just pushed the mounds of slush back over the body. The bright orange of Mott’s pressure suit, the brave red and blue and white of the flag, were soon obscured, claimed by the ubiquitous brown of Titan. The clinging stuff oozed quickly back to smoothness.

  Benacerraf rested her shovel against the hull of Jitterbug, and stood at the head of Mott’s grave.

  “No words this time, Paula?”

  “She should have been the first,” Benacerraf said. “Not me. She should have been first… That’s all, I guess.”

  Her exhaustion was immense, crushing, beyond anything she had known before.

  “Paula,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s go open up Discovery.”

  “Yes,” she said. Suddenly, standing here in the slush and dark, the idea of the glowing lights of the orbiter’s flight deck and the cramped, clean confines of the hab module, the warm growing smells of the CELSS farm seemed welcoming to Benacerraf.

  She could see, in the murk, Rosenberg plodding away from Bifrost towards Discovery, the dangling form of Angel limp over his shoulders.

  Jackie Benacerraf sat alone on the floor of her lounge, waiting for the pictures of her mother’s first footsteps on Titan.

  So far the big softscreen on the wall was blank, save for schematics and timelines and a couple of animated sponsors’ logos. But sound was coming through: traditional astronauts’ voices, distorted and overlaid with pops and crackles, and with a judder imposed by the lousy bandwidth of the compressed signals.

  For the record, we have a go for vent… Affirmative, we’re all sealed up. Go for vent… All right.

  Jackie couldn’t even tell which voice was her mother’s. There they were, the astronauts, solemnly reporting each step as if working on an unexploded bomb. All for the benefit of those who might follow one day.

  But, of course, nobody would. Not ever.

  Anyhow, it was hard to concentrate. She was worried about the kids.

  She was always worried about the kids.

  At least Fred had grown out of
his Nullist phase, and he was having some of the image-tattoos removed. That was leaving marks on his skin, but the doctors were saying they shouldn’t be permanent—unlike hers—because he was still young enough. That skin cancer he’d developed when one of the laid-bare patches had been exposed to the sun was more worrying, but again the specialists said it would clear up…

  What bothered her more right now was his determination to quit school and go join the Hunter-Gatherers in Central America.

  She’d listened to the arguments and lectures until she thought her head would bust open.

  The agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago was now pretty much accepted by the academics as a global disaster. So her son told her, anyhow. The archaeology showed the incidence of tooth cavities rose seven-fold; mothers were badly undernourished; anemia became much more common, and so did tuberculosis… We were better off, ran the argument, so argued Fred, before agriculture. It was true that farming a piece of land could support ten times as many people as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but that didn’t buy you much; today there were seven billion people in the world, almost all of whom were worse nourished than their Stone Age ancestors … and so on.

  Once, Jackie would have been passionate about such arguments, either for or against. Now, all she cared about was Fred.

  The governments cooperating in the Central American park scheme—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize—had pledged to protect and shelter the young Americans and New Columbians flooding down there to—in theory—rediscover an ancient lifestyle. There was supposed to be no regulation, beyond a simple limit on numbers—but, of course, no communication was possible once you went inside.

  Jackie pulled at a tuft of hair. All she could do was keep talking, trying to persuade Fred to think again, to wait, to stick with college…

  It was just like the arguments her mother had had with her. Maybe she was doomed to turn into her mother, just as her own kids seemed to be turning into her.