Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  The suit heater labored to warm her; gradually the cold of the tent was dispelled, and the fresh oxygen-nitrogen blowing across her face dispelled the stink of methane.

  The news from home, they’d taken to calling it.

  It was impossible to grasp the scale of it, and so she didn’t even try. Maybe their isolation and abandonment had, in an offbeat way actually helped. After so many years away from Earth she found it hard to remember that there were members of the human race beyond the handful who had left Earth orbit with her, in 2008. After so long in confinement, the hab modules and landing craft and pressure suits making up a series of high-tech prisons, stretching back years, it was difficult to imagine walking, unimpeded, in the open air. Even if by some miracle she could be transported home now, she suspected she would be some kind of agoraphobic, a recluse, shunning company and light.

  Even her family, Jackie and the boys, seemed to be receding from her. After all, the boys had lived half their brief lives without Benacerraf. If she had been taken home, she wouldn’t have recognized them, nor they her.

  They’d been cut off up here, on this ice ball in the sky. They couldn’t have gotten home anyhow. The fact that home may not even exist any more really didn’t seem to make much difference. She still faced the same grinding numbness, the same lengthy list of chores to stay alive, every time she woke up, whether humanity lived or not.

  It made no difference.

  They didn’t talk about it, much. Rosenberg never referred to people he had lost, places he would never see again.

  But that was Rosenberg. He was probably happier up here on Titan anyhow; human society had never done many favors for smart, goofy kids like Rosenberg, no matter how much it needed their inventions.

  As for herself, maybe she was working through some kind of post-shock syndrome. Christ knows, she thought, I’m entitled to. Here she was stranded with an unfit wacko on a moon of Saturn, and it looked as if the world had come to an end, and she appeared to be developing crotch rot. How was she supposed to react? Now here’s my plan…

  On the whole, she concluded, however, she was handling this pretty well. In a way, even the walking helped. Even the pain. Something to do, to occupy her mind during the long, slow-time Titan days.

  Sleep times, however, were harder to handle.

  On the fifth day, they reached the lip of the ice plateau Cronos.

  Benacerraf stopped, and leaned against her harness.

  The break in the landscape was surprisingly sharp. Maybe a half-mile ahead of her, the gumbo visibly thinned. Then a ridge of eroded gray-white water ice pushed its way up out of the tholin, like a beach rising from some sludgy polluted ocean. The slope was shallow at first, but Benacerraf could see how it continued on upwards, until it was lost in the thick band of horizon haze. The ice was worn with gullies and grooves, like old sandstone, and Benacerraf could make out stripes and stains of tholin down the gray buttresses.

  As far as she could see the ridge continued, a band of dull gray like a wall across the world, merging at last with the horizon.

  Rosenberg came up to her, breathing hard, leaning against his traces. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Rosenberg’s voice was odd: light, fragile. And his stance seemed awkward; he seemed to be leaning too far into the traces. She tried to look into Rosenberg’s helmet. But his visor was obscured by an orange reflection from the hazy sky, frost, a smear of tholin. Rosenberg was the doctor; Benacerraf had been focusing on her own minor ailments, and trusting Rosenberg to look after himself.

  Maybe he wasn’t.

  She looked up dubiously at the slope they would have to climb. “Magnificent. Absolutely. Let’s go on.”

  She led the way once more.

  It got easier, despite the slope. It was like climbing Othrys. The gumbo got gradually thinner and less clinging though less supportive of the sled until at last her snowshoes were clattering on bone-hard ice, and the sled’s base was scraping with an ominous grind across the slope.

  She stopped again, and waited for Rosenberg to catch up. Even in such a short distance he seemed to have fallen a long way behind, and it took him some minutes to make up the ground.

  “Time for the great changeover, Rosenberg,” she said.

  His breath was a noisy rasp, and he didn’t attempt to speak; he just let himself out of his harness and began to unpick the knots on his sled cover.

  They had to fix their aluminum runners to the bases of the sleds. Benacerraf found it difficult to handle the big wing nuts with her gloved hands. The first time she twisted too hard, and the thread of the bolt sheared right off, coming away in a spiral twist.

  Rosenberg dug out a spare for her. “Take it easy,” he said. “Steel is brittle at these temperatures, remember.”

  Next she fitted her skis to her feet. These were just slats of hull metal, with opened-out overshoes fixed to them for boots.

  After stowing the snowshoes and lashing up the sleds, they resumed again.

  It took her a few hundred yards to get used to the skis, and the half-sliding action they required. There was a lot of work for her knees and ankles, against the stiffness of her suit. Soon her joints were aching, and muscles on the back of her calves were announcing their existence with pulses of stiffness and pain.

  But when she settled into a new rhythm, she seemed to make faster and easier progress than before. To haul the sled she was able to lean steadily into her traces, rather than having to yank at the sled as she’d had to over the gumbo, and that smoothed out the pains in the pressure points on her shoulders, hips and waist.

  This haul was never going to be easy, but it was, she conceded, a relief to be free of the clinging of the gumbo.

  For a while she felt almost exhilarated.

  She reached the mouth of a wide, shallow gully.

  In the white light of her helmet lamp, the gully walls were blue-gray, and there was a scattering of loose ice on the floor.

  The slope further up was undulating—it was gathering itself into a series of huge, frozen waves—and the gully, although it got steeper and more narrow towards the end, seemed to offer the easiest route forward.

  She looked back. A way below, Rosenberg’s gumbo-streaked suit and the yellow-gray canvas on his sled were easily visible against the orange-gray ice.

  She pushed up into the gully.

  She could feel loose granules crunch beneath her weight. But it didn’t get any easier to pull the sled; the friction actually increased, and she felt the granules grind beneath her skis.

  She bent down, stiffly, and scooped up a handful of the ice granules. They were hard and round, nothing like the snow of Earth. On the surface they were loose, but a little deeper they stuck together—presumably thanks to a surface layer of organics—to form pebble-sized chunks that she could crush in her hand. What the geologists called duricrust, she thought.

  She took a look at the runners on her sled. There were fine grooves scratched into the runners’ base by the ice crystals. She knew that at normal human temperatures, sleds and skates worked by melting a fine layer of water at the top of the ice, and then sliding across, lubricated by the water, with almost no friction. Here, these small, hard crystals wouldn’t melt under the pressure of her runners; they were like grains of sand, and what she was doing was more like dragging a sled across a desert.

  She felt an unreasonable, crushing disappointment. They just got no breaks with the conditions here.

  As her climb up the gully wore on, the gradient increased in severity. Soon she was free of the clinging granules, but now, to her irritation, the ice grew too slick. She just couldn’t win. Sometimes her skis slipped backward at every step, and the only way she could proceed was to tack back and forth at forty-five degrees to the slope, which added a lot of extra distance to the whole.

  Even so, soon she had risen so far that when she looked back the ground was hidden in the haze. And still the slope continued above her, eroded and ancient, up into the orange mists above. She got her he
ad down and climbed on. She forced any thoughts of the future—even the pleasure of getting her boots off, or the distance they still had to cross—out of her head.

  At last, she reached the top of the steepening gully. The landscape opened out before her. She seemed to have reached a plateau.

  The ice at her feet was jumbled and cracked. And when she looked ahead, she saw a sprawling mass of ice, locked in suspended animation. Waves of ice, which must have been a hundred feet tall, reared up, caught in the instant of crashing against each other. Huge open chasms showed dark against the gray-white mass. There was noise here, too: deep groans resounded from the belly of the ice, pulsing back and forth across the broken landscape. Each ice wave was carved, sometimes into elaborate shapes, with fluted channels and sharp crests. The giant shapes marched to the close horizon, so big they were visible as they receded over the curve of the world, like ships sailing over a frozen sea.

  A layer of methane cloud, dark and threatening, lay like a lid over the shattered icescape, obscuring the haze and merging with the ice at the close horizon into a complex band of gray, black and orange.

  After some minutes, Rosenberg came staggering up the gully after her. He leaned against his sled, breath rattling, and stared out at the ice sea, which was reflected in his visor.

  “Pressure ice,” he said. “Paula, I think this whole continent is a giant magma extrusion, distorting one whole side of the moon. It’s like the Tharsis Bulge on Mars. Maybe such features are common on small worlds like this… And all this ice is flowing slowly outward and downward from the magma extrusion, a huge, continent-sized viscous relaxation.”

  Benacerraf looked around with new understanding. The pressure ridges were ice waves, magnified by Titan’s low gravity, frozen in time. She shivered, feeling dwarfed in space and time. If she could accelerate her perception—if she could live for a million years—she would see the ice flowing thickly away from Rosenberg’s magma mound, like warm icing off a wedding cake.

  After a couple more minutes they pushed on, Benacerraf leading again.

  She tried to select a route which would take them threading between the worst of the pressure ridges.

  The waves took a variety of forms. Some of them were sharply defined ridges, some of them rounded hummocks; some took still more exotic shapes—rounded boulders, even torpedo shapes, forms out of nightmares, mounted on eroded, fragile-looking pillars that looked unable to hold up all that mass, low gravity or not.

  Ways through the ridges were winding and uneven. She tried at first to use her skis, but the paths were too narrow and twisting, and the skis just got in the way. She took them off and stowed them in her sled. The paths were covered besides by an uneven layer of loose granules, difficult to judge; sometimes the granules crunched beneath her boots, taking her weight before bottoming out, but sometimes she would find her heel thudding against ice as hard as rock, concealed by a quarter-inch of gritty granules. Her sores and blisters chafed. Her sled bumped and rattled over the surface, every step a jarring uncertainty, and her harness dragged over her shoulders and waist, burning her. She found herself growing nostalgic for the miles of compliant, sticky gumbo.

  She was forced to scale some of the ridges.

  They were exactly like frozen waves, a hundred feet tall or more. She tacked at a shallow angle to reach the top of each ridge. At the top she turned so that the sled went ahead of her as she slid down the slope on the far side. Then it was time to clamber painfully up to the top of the next ridge. She was like an insect, she thought, struggling over the meniscus of some giant pond.

  She had no crampons or ski-sticks; she had to paw at the surface with her gloves and the sides of her skis to gain leverage. Soon her knees and elbows were bruised, and her fingers and toes ached. Sometimes her sled slid sideways and pulled her back down into a trough.

  She paused at a crest. The ice was bare and blue-gray. Gritty granules lay in the hollows. The ice here was polished, and when she ran a gloved hand over it, it felt as smooth as glass, hard as concrete. The wave had been scoured out by gritty granules, and then polished to a sheen by fine aerosol dust.

  When she looked back, she could see Rosenberg toiling through the valleys between the waves. The great ridges thrust upward all around him, dwarfing him, and his helmet lamp splashed little puddles of yellow light against the shimmering walls around him. Sometimes he would pass a clearer patch of blue ice, and his light would penetrate the bulk of the waves; Benacerraf would see the beam glimmering within the bulk of a wave, scattering and sparkling from complex fissure patterns within the ice, an arc of Earth light illuminating these giant, dead, silent fairy castles.

  Rosenberg stopped, several times, and took samples, scrapings of the eroded surfaces. He photographed the wave shapes. He even measured the angles of the frozen crests. His voice was weak, but Benacerraf could hear his enthusiasm as he found the opportunity to do a little science. “So beautiful… Benacerraf, each of these waves might be a million years old. And as the wind wears away at them, it’s exposing ice billions of years older than that—ice older than life on Earth … so beautiful…”

  She found a new hazard.

  She had to skirt huge crevasses; they looked to be hundreds of feet deep, with walls of a clean Earth-like blue where her helmet lamp shone on them. As the ice flowed out of the heart of Cronos, it was splitting along gigantic faults.

  The crevasses parallel to the flow weren’t difficult to handle, as they pointed the path she wanted to take, towards the heart of the continent. But in some places, where the ice was compressed as it flowed, the crevasses ran transverse to the flow. She had to take wide detours to reach a narrowing of each crevasse, so that she could straddle them with her skis.

  In the most difficult country there was a mix of transverse and parallel crevasses, presumably because of some distortion of the flow. The crevasses intersected, cracking the ice into gigantic, parallel pillars, some of which had tumbled and shattered, so it was as if she was picking her way across the smashed sidewalk of some giant, ruined city.

  She kept a weather eye on Rosenberg; his progress was slow, but he was plodding along in her wake, his head down.

  After some hours of this, she found a place to camp. It was at the hollow between two giant pressure waves, a patch of regolith granules not much larger than the area of their two sleds. They had to anchor the tent to the sleds, because their metal pegs would not drive into the ice layer.

  All around, as far as Benacerraf could see in the orange-brown light, there were pressure mounds and cracks. Their little encampment was like a small boat, she thought, lost in a giant sea.

  Before they could crawl into the tent, a wind came up, blasting through the valley as if through a wind tunnel.

  This was the seventh night, some fifty miles from Tartarus, and they were getting into a routine when they established camp.

  Benacerraf hadn’t managed to take a dump that day as she walked—which was the preferred way, because then at the end of the day they just had to dig the crap out of their diapers, and some semblance of privacy was maintained. But now she could feel pressure building inside her. She suspected she was coming down with some kind of diarrhea. It was probably the antibiotics she was taking.

  “Sorry, Rosenberg,” she said in advance.

  He was piping water into today’s ration bags. He looked at her, his eyes glassy, and shrugged.

  She opened her suit as wide as she could. She stood up and bent over in the tent’s cramped confines, with the open front of her suit close to the heater. She fumbled to get an old ration bag inside the suit. She found her butt. The skin of her buttocks felt flaccid, the flesh depleted of fat. It was, she thought, an old woman’s ass. She clamped the bag as best she could over her butt, and let go.

  The crap emerged as a hard, hot spray, accompanied by an explosive fart. She tried to catch it all in the bag, but it wasn’t easy, and she could feel excrement splashing her hands, sleeves and legs.

  T
he smell, erupting from the interior of her suit, was moist and pungent. My own contribution to Titan’s methane layer, she thought.

  She closed up the bag and pulled it out, and her first priority was to close up her suit, trying to trap whatever warmth was left. Then she swathed the bag of sludgy excrement in a couple of other bags, wiped her hands on the back of her legs—the stuff would freeze off there tomorrow anyhow—and lodged the bag in the corner of the tent, with her piss bag.

  She huddled closer to Rosenberg and the fire, shivering, her arms wrapped around herself.

  Rosenberg was working at the cooking, but slowly. His left hand had got frostbitten a few days before, when damp had gotten inside his glove, and the cold of the ice ridges to which he had to cling had found a route to his fingers. Now, three of his main finger blisters had burst, the dead skin falling away to reveal raw stumps, like uncooked meat.

  “Rosenberg, that looks like agony. You want me to take over?”

  “No,” he said. His face was thin, the flesh disturbingly slack; his cheeks seemed to descend in folds over the corners of his mouth. “It’s not so bad now the blisters have burst. Before, sometimes the fluid in them would freeze.”

  “Ouch.”

  “We both got problems. Here. Eat.”

  She took her food packets; the warmth, cupped in her hands, was welcome.

  The meal passed in uncompanionable silence.

  During the last couple of stops, the sour thoughts she’d previously been able to leave outside the tent’s airlock had started to seep inside.

  She’d come to loathe Rosenberg’s personal habits. The yellow stink of his urine bags. The icicle-like dribbles of snot and saliva and tears that formed on his spindly beard. The way the wounds of his hands wept over her food.

  And she started to become obsessed with the fairness, or otherwise, of the way Rosenberg handled the food.

  The business with the carrots was one thing. Benacerraf had tried again to eat the things, but failed. So he got to eat all the damn carrots. And now Rosenberg had developed other little habits. Like he would take her discarded soup bags, turn them inside out, and lick the inner surface clean of any residue, before stowing them for use later. It drove her crazy. She started to insist on a turn making the soup, so she could get to lick the bags.