Jiang would not admit to liking Xu Shiyou. Still less did she regard him as worthy of her trust. But she had come to understand, with a cynical analysis that surprised herself, that as long as she did nothing to tarnish her image as a new demi-god, his interests were identical to hers. Therefore, she decided, he was an ally…
So she said, “Give me your advice, Xu Shiyou.”
“Whatever the Helmsman says to you, you must endeavor to see the world through his eyes. You must suffer with him, sense his fears.”
“His fears?”
“Remember this: the Helmsman was born in 1904. Eleven decades ago: think of all he has seen, and suffered, in those years, his long and hard life matching the tortured history of our country. When the Helmsman came of age, China was a mere dish of loose sand, as Sun Yat-sen said: hopelessly divided by warlordism and chronic social disorder. There is, embedded deep in the bones of these, our senior leaders, a tear of falling back into such a state of humiliation and disunity.
“And now, in the twilight of his long life, the Helmsman faces chaos once more,” Xu said solemnly. “It is no secret that our losses in the attempt to liberate Taiwan were monstrous. And it is, of course, the peasants in the hinterland who suffered most. It is said that every family in China lost a son or daughter on the beaches of Taiwan. True or not, that has become a symbol, provoking unrest in the provinces.
“The answer to all this, of course,” said Xu, “is economic growth. Expansion. But we are contained, by the Americans and their allies. Our technology cannot match theirs. The puppet allies ring us, their satellites watch over us. And hence any conflict in the future like the Taiwan war must, inevitably, end in defeat for us.
“We must face stark facts. Every effort has been made to maintain ample food and decent housing. But the peasants have little spare income, little choice. The farmers see their cousins in the city acquiring private phone lines, houses, cars, softscreens, image-tattoos… And meanwhile, all the forecasts predict a worsening of the lot of the peasants, as new diseases spread, as even the water supplies shrivel…
“We are becoming desperate.”
“And it is the fault of the West.”
“Yes,” he said. “The West remains corrupt, increasingly decadent, and must ultimately rot from within…”
“Yes,” she said. In fact she did agree; based on her own observation, she believed this to be true.
“But when we face the West, Jiang, we face a lunatic; a lunatic more powerful than we are, who cripples us with his threat. What we must do is strike at him—hard, a single blow, which will remove his dominance—perhaps for all time.”
That confused her. “What do you mean?”
“We must seek a single hammer blow, which might change the shape of human destiny for ten thousand years… And that is what the Helmsman will say to you.”
An attendant came to call them forward. The Great Helmsman was ready to receive them.
“Be ready, Jiang Ling,” Xu said softly. “Be open.”
She approached, fear and fascination mixed in equal part.
He was a wisp of a man, she thought, a dried-out husk of a man, overwhelmed by the bulky technology of his wheelchair. She saw medical equipment, discreet, unlabeled black boxes, tucked into the frame of the chair, pipes and tubes snaking up into the Helmsman’s clothing. And she thought she could detect the liquid bulk of a colostomy bag under his jacket. A middle-aged woman, dumpy and plain—perhaps one of his daughters—stood at his side, her plump hand protectively on his thin shoulder. Occasionally, as the leaders paid their obeisance, he would react—nod, shake his head, stare—and the companion would lean, bringing her face closer to his, evidently attempting to decipher his meaning.
Jiang was called to approach. She did so, feeling still more nervous than the day she had been called to enter the first space capsule.
He lifted his head. The eyes in that battered face seemed to fix on her. His mouth worked, wordless.
The daughter began to intone, as if resuming a speech suspended halfway through. Without addressing Jiang directly, she spoke of the crimes of the United States, of atrocities committed during the recent conflict against hapless Chinese servicemen on the beaches of Taiwan. The people of the United States were foreign devils, of the type who had raped China repeatedly in the past. And they did not act alone, but in cooperation with their allies—even with their old foe Russia, even with the new young states which had budded off the corpse of the U.S., and which competed with it in other arenas. The world, it seemed, was polarized: China stood alone, ringed by her enemies, and it was ever thus…
Now the Helmsman tipped forward, as if rocking. He spoke, and his voice was faint, as if coming from far away.
“Jiang Ling. I dream I am at home, in my villa here in Beijing, with my family and associates. News arrives. On the fringe of the city, there is an odd outbreak of a respiratory disease. Hundreds of citizens present themselves to the hospitals gasping for breath. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a choking cough and labored breathing. Antibiotics appear to contain the disease. Without antibiotics, death from hemorrhage, respiratory failure or toxic shock follows in a few days. It kills more than ninety percent of its victims. The doctors struggle to diagnose this bizarre, unusual illness.
“People start to die, in large numbers.
“At last the doctors understand. The disease is spread by spores—spores polluting the air of the city, thousands of them entering the lungs with every breath—and the spores cross the lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph nodes, where they germinate, multiply and spread to other tissues, releasing toxins as they go.
“Public health officials try to understand where the spores come from and which direction they are spreading. But this takes time; and we have no more time. Rumors begin to spread that supplies of antibiotics have run out.
“Other rumors state that only some racial groups are affected by the disease: specifically, Han.
“I appear on softscreens, in Beijing and across the nation, and I caution against panic. But then news is brought to me that even my family has been exposed, even mysel…”
He seemed to be looking at her, but his eyes were so vague and discolored she could not be certain. “Jiang Ling, I am describing an attack by the anthrax bacillus—or rather, a strain of it genetically engineered to strike at specific population groups. My advisers inform me that it would take a mere two hundred pounds of spores to destroy three million people in a city like this. And, my advisers say, such gruesome weapons are even now under preparation for use against us in secret laboratories in the United States…”
Jiang, horrified, thought of the America she had glimpsed: large, complex, confused, fragmenting, frightened. And she thought of some of the Western leaders she had met, for instance the chilling General Hartle: a grisly mirror image of the Helmsman, another old man clinging to the levers of power, continually reenacting the paranoia of his youth.
Was such scheming possible there?
Yes, she decided.
“But,” she asked, “what is my assignment, sir?”
The Great Helmsman lifted his hand, his bony wrist protruding from the soft fabric of his Mao suit, his fingers thin as dried twigs, and he beckoned to her.
She stepped forward and, encouraged by the Helmsman’s daughter, she leaned down and placed her face close to his. Close up, his skin did not have the alien texture she had perceived from a greater distance; it was clearly human, but brown with age, as brown as the earth, and riven with wrinkles and cracks, distended pores like the craters of the Moon. She had an impulse to reach out and touch it, to feel the faint warmth which must still pump beneath that battered surface.
His eyes, embedded in their black sockets, were like pearls, gray, moist, formless. His breath smelled, oddly, of milk.
“Yingzhen zhike,” he said. “Poisonous wine. We must drink poisonous wine to slake our thirst. That is your assignment, Jiang Ling. You must sip the wine, now, for
all of us…”
His voice was as dry, she thought, as the scratch of a leaf along the bed of an ancient Martian canal.
Benacerraf was standing on a shallow, undulating beach. Overhead, gray-brown methane cumulus clouds crowded the sky.
The black meniscus of Clear Lake, flat and still, swept all the way to a horizon that was nearby and sharply curving, dimly obscured by the continuous, burnt-orange drizzle of organic sediment. To left and right, Benacerraf could make out the mountainous walls of the enclosing crater, like lines of steep, irregular hillocks, their erosion channels stained by gumbo streaks, their profiles softened by the slow relaxation of the bedrock ice. Under the uniform orange glow which suffused everything, the lake’s liquid ethane sat like a basinful of crude oil, thirty miles across.
The lighting—orange above, black below—and the sharp curvature of this small world were disconcerting. It was as if she was looking through a fish-eye lens, like the Apollo periscope, which made the ground bulge upward towards her, distorted by a rendering in false colors.
She wondered how long it would take for the lack of blue and green in this landscape to drive her crazy.
Rosenberg had been hoping that they might find the tholin washed away, exposing a rim of bedrock water ice, reasonably accessible. It hadn’t worked out that way. These ancient, frozen coastlines were eroded by the slow action of waves—in fact Benacerraf could see some evidence of wave action; at the very edge of the liquid there were parallel streaks of crusty, foamy deposit, like the debris of some industrial pollutant, washed up over the raw tholin—but the drizzle of tholins from the air evidently fell more thickly than the waves could wash them away.
This was really just a down-sloping extension of the sludgy gumbo-coated icescape she’d become used to, the purple-brown sheen of tholin continuing all the way to the edge of the ethane lake and beyond.
And yet this was, nevertheless, a beach: one in its morphology with that other beach at Canaveral, a billion miles away, From which she had launched. And there was the same air of disjointedness she had noticed at beaches on Earth—at the interface between two different media, the sea and the land, where erosion and decay worked to reduce mountains and cliffs to a uniform, muddy mediocrity.
And besides, she thought, maybe this wasn’t so unearthly after all. A few billion years back—give or take a couple of hundred degrees—it mightn’t have been so different to stand on the beaches of primeval Earth, to look out on a similar ocean of sludgy, prebiotic organic soup. It was on a beach like this, she thought, that some proto-amphibian ancestor of mine first crawled out.
She had come full circle.
Rosenberg touched her shoulder; she could barely feel the weight of his hand through the layers of her suit. “Weather forecast for all you nautical types,” he said. “Haze.”
“Funny, Rosenberg.”
“So. You ready to go?”
Ready, she thought, to go sailing: on a horseshoe-shaped lake of paraffin, for all the world like a character in an Edward Lear poem.
I want to be back in Seattle.
She padded back up the shallow slope of the beach to the boat. She was wearing snowshoes, as they called them: big curving plates of Command Module hull metal, strapped to her blue boots. The snowshoes kept her pretty much on top of the sticky gumbo. She had worked out a way of walking that involved sliding the snowshoes forward first, as if scraping mud off the soles, to free them of the clinging gumbo.
The “boat” was simply the base of Mott’s Command Module, Jitterbug. Benacerraf and Rosenberg had cut away the external shell of the double-skinned Module a couple of feet above the rounded lip of the heatshield. What they ended up with was a round, shallow bowl with a turned-up rim, something like a big dog-food dish, thirteen feet across. The orifices which had once contained the nozzles of reaction control engines were round, gaping wounds in the shallow walls. Rosenberg had plugged all but one of these; to the last he had fixed a steel cable. Atmospheric entry scorch marks still spread from the heatshield lip up and over the low walls of the boat. The wall had been etched with a scale, gradations inches apart, so they could measure the draught of the boat in Clear Lake. Its interior was cluttered up with the equipment Benacerraf was going to need, out on the ethane.
Building the boat—designing it in the relative warmth of the hab module, cutting and shaping the base of Jitterbug—had actually been fun, in a home-workshop kind of way. Working those hours with Rosenberg, most of them in a companionable silence, had been among the happiest Benacerraf had known since leaving Earth. For once in this mission they’d had a finite, well-defined goal, and the means to achieve it.
But now that they’d hauled the thing down here to the lake, it looked absurd, flimsy, a lashed-up improvisation. Which, of course, it was.
Benacerraf lined up with Rosenberg behind the boat. In her multilayer suit it was difficult to bend, and she struggled to close her thick gloves around the half-inch-thick rim of the boat’s wall. But when they overcame the friction of the gumbo and got up a little momentum, the boat coasted easily down the beach.
The boat slid into the ethane without a splash, and came to rest a couple of feet from the edge of the beach. It bobbed, eerily slowly, and concentric oily swells rippled away from its circumference, fat and massive.
Now Rosenberg wrapped the end of the boat’s steel mooring cable around his waist, and stepped back a few yards from the ethane’s edge. He kicked off his snowshoes and let himself sink into the gumbo, anchoring himself there. “Okay, Paula. I’ll pull you back at the first sign of trouble. The shallows should be okay, but that boat won’t be able to withstand any problems in deeper water. I mean, ethane. And, Paula. Whatever you do, don’t fall in. Don’t even sit down. That ethane lake has a much bigger heat capacity than your ass, it will give you one cosmic case of hemorrhoids…”
“I’ll bear it in mind, Rosenberg.”
She took off her snowshoes, and lifted them carefully back up the beach. Then she hauled on the cable to pull the boat a little closer to the shoreline, to minimize the ethane wading she would have to do.
She stumbled through the shallow ethane to the boat. As fast as she walked, the stabbing cold of the liquid pierced the multiple layers of her heated boots.
She stepped over the boat’s foot-high wall, and moved to the center of the boat. The little vessel rocked back and forth with slow grandeur, and she could hear a slow, somber sloshing from the liquid around its hull.
She looked down at her feet. Droplets of ethane fizzed as they boiled away from her boots.
The rocking steadied, slowly.
Rosenberg was climbing further back up the beach, stepping backwards, making sure his footing in the slush was secure. He sent waves rippling up and down the steel cable. The cable moved with languorous, snakelike grace in the low gravity; but it sliced through the low-density ethane liquid as if it wasn’t there. And where the cable penetrated the liquid Benacerraf could see a puncture in the heavy meniscus, surface tension hauling ethane up the steel.
Rosenberg pressed a stud on his chest panel to take photographs with the digital Hasselblad mounted there. “The boat is riding well. You’ve dipped into the liquid by no more than a few inches, under the combined weight of the boat itself, you, and the equipment…”
“Just as you calculated.”
“Just as I calculated. The density of the ethane—”
“Archimedes’ principle applies, even on Titan. I do understand, Rosenberg.”
“Sorry. Good luck, Paula.”
“Yeah.”
Benacerraf stepped to the rear of the boat and picked up the paddle. This was just another piece of Jitterbug hull, a curved shovel shape, fixed to a bar which had once been a couch strut, Feeling self-conscious, she leaned over to dip the paddle blade in the liquid.
She waved the paddle to and fro, in the ethane. There was little resistance to her motion, and the blade cut smoothly through the fluid without turbulence, but she could feel
how the ethane was being cupped by the paddle.
With painful slowness, the boat inched away from the shore.
She was soon panting with the effort of waving the paddle. As she couldn’t sit down she had to lean over the side of the boat to reach the liquid, and that was making her back and arms ache. Her suit was too stiff for rowing, a task for which it had never been designed. And besides, she knew her muscles still hadn’t recovered from their extensive space soak. She made a mental note that they would need a longer handle the next time they tried this stunt.
Despite all this, the boat was gliding forward across the oily surface, fat ripples spreading away from its circular bow, the only sound a glutinous gurgle of ethane against the sides.
“That’s it,” Rosenberg said. “A back and forth motion; that’s fine. Remember the viscosity of the ethane is very low. Once you build up some momentum you should just sail on. Just like the air-bearing facility back in Budding 9 at JSC, right? Don’t forget you have a back-up paddle in case you drop that one. Don’t try to reach in after it. And—”
“Let me row the damn boat, Rosenberg.”
He fell silent.
The shoreline receded, the ethane surface between her and solid land growing into a thick black band.
Behind her, the lake’s far shore began to protrude over the horizon. It was a shallow, dome-shaped hill, blackened by gumbo streaks.
When she judged she had gotten to a hundred yards out, she lifted her paddle out of the liquid and dropped it at her feet; her back and shoulders were aching, and she moved her arms around, trying to ease the muscles.
The boat continued to sail on over the surface of the oleaginous fluid. It was as smooth a ride, she thought, as if she was a beetle riding a hockey puck over damp ice.
At last she came to rest. The air seemed a little clearer here, in the middle of the lake, perhaps because of the constant dissolving and exsolving of gases from the ethane. It was as if she was embedded in some clear orange resin, with the dark gray methane clouds scattered over her head in their well-defined layer, like shadows on a ceiling.
Titan Page 47
