Titan

by Stephen Baxter

His eyes were closed. He was warm, comfortable. He was aware of his body—his face, arms, legs were a tangible, solid, massy physical presence—but there was no EVA suit around him, no sleeping bag.

  He seemed to be rising. As if he was in some huge elevator.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was in darkness. He could see only the fuzzy patterns, starbursts and whorls, generated by the hard-wiring of his own nervous system.

  He could hear nothing.

  Maybe he was in some kind of sensory deprivation tank.

  He tried to remember how he’d got here. He remembered Titan—the Cronos EVA, those damn carrots, Benacerraf nursing him back in Discovery…

  I ought to be dead, he thought.

  Was this some kind of hallucination? Was he still propped up in that lumpy Apollo couch in the hab module, wrapped in Beta-cloth, his senses failing as his body slowly fell apart?

  He felt a stab of panic.

  He reached up to his face. He felt his cheeks, the pressure of his hands, the bones of his nose.

  His cheeks were smooth. Free of stubble. And when he ran his palms up over his face, there wasn’t a hair on his head: no eyebrows, no eyelashes.

  He reached down to his groin. He was naked. His hands cupped his genitals, warm lumps of flesh. No pubic hair.

  He jammed a finger up his left nostril. No hairs there, either.

  Puzzling.

  And, he thought, you’re moving pretty well for a guy in the last stages of Vitamin A poisoning, Rosenberg.

  Anyhow, this was no hallucination. I can feel my balls, therefore I am.

  He dropped his hands to his sides. His hands hit something. It was a soft, pliable floor of what felt like plastic. It seemed to have no temperature, neither hot nor cold.

  He felt to left and right. The floor stretched under him. He could push his fingers an inch or so into the material before he reached the limits of pliability, where it became tough and hard.

  Maybe he was in some kind of bubble.

  He didn’t have enough data to work on. He ought to wait. Maybe he could sleep.

  Sleep, right.

  He tried to control his fear.

  Be logical, Rosenberg. Whoever has brought you here, wherever here is, can’t mean you any harm.

  He ought to separate the world into pieces he could understand. Dismiss the problems he could do nothing about.

  Like, the air. Where was it coming from? How was it replenished? Was it poisoned?

  Here’s my plan: don’t breathe, until we know more…

  He had to accept the air. He had to accept the temperature, the living conditions.

  Later, he would be hungry, thirsty. He would have to deal with those problems when he could.

  Great logic.

  He found he’d cupped his hands over his genitals again. A primate reflex, he thought. I’m just a scared monkey, alone in the dark.

  On impulse, he spoke. “Hey.”

  He could hear his voice.

  “Testing, one, two. How about that.” He clapped his hands. He heard no echo, just the dead sound of the clap itself. So, a little more data. This bubble, or rubber room, whatever, was anechoic…

  Something changed.

  There was a light above him, deep crimson, barely visible. The intensity varied as he moved his head from left to right.

  Work it out, Rosenberg. That means the light is external to you. There’s something above, which is differentiated from what is below.

  The light seemed to spread, as if across a flat surface. He thought he could see ripples, scattering oily highlights. Maybe he was rising up through some fluid, towards a meniscus.

  He looked down at himself. He could see his body, emerging in the gathering light, chest and legs stretching away before him, his nipples dark against a hairless chest, a faint landscape of flesh.

  He was bald, but healthy. No sign of the Vitamin A crap that had killed him.

  … The light brightened. Suddenly he was approaching the surface. It was indeed a meniscus, the surface of some body of fluid, and he could see slow, fat ripples, streaks of some scummy deposit—

  The surface broke, in a pulsing circle, directly above him. The fluid spilled down over the hull of his protective bubble.

  He saw a sky. It was high and tall, and scattered with thin, ice-white cirrus clouds. There was a fat red sun—too big—near the zenith, bright enough to dazzle him, surrounded by a fine halo. Contrails criss-crossed the sky.

  That sun really was too damn big, and the sky was a rich blue-green.

  The fluid fell away The chamber was dimly visible around him, like a soap bubble, in glimmerings of refracted light.

  Rosenberg sat up.

  All around him, beyond his bubble, a solid mass was breaking the liquid.

  The surface was corrugated, and it glistened, deep green. And as it rose, he could see how the platform bulged upwards, a dome perhaps fifty yards across. His filmy bubble perched, squat, on the top of the corrugated dome, as if on the back of some immense turtle.

  Rosenberg got to his knees. He pressed his face and hands flat against the warm surface of his bubble, and stared out.

  The dome, still rising from the liquid, was an island in an oily sea that stretched to the horizon. The fluid wasn’t clear; it was overlaid by a purplish scum, frothing in places. There were a couple of pink-white ice floes, clustering amid the scum islands.

  The air was clear, if green-tinged, and he could see thick, fat ripples proceeding in concentric circles away from the rising mass he rode. Further out there were waves—they looked gigantic, mounds of liquid maybe a hundred feet tall—and they drifted across the sea, driven by the prevailing winds.

  He could see land.

  Perhaps a mile from him, there was a shallow beach; and beyond that, a cliff, steep, gray-green and heavily eroded.

  It could be Cronos, he thought.

  He wanted to try something.

  The bubble was too small to allow him to stand up, but by squatting on all fours he was able to thrust himself up into the air, by a foot or so.

  It took him maybe a half-second to sink back to the floor.

  He tried it a couple more times, before he was satisfied. The gravity here was low, surely no more than a seventh or eighth of a G.

  Right. He was still on Titan. But a Titan that was changed, out of all recognition.

  … And the sun was too big.

  It was the central fact he didn’t want to face.

  It was so big it outsized the fat yellow sun of Earth, let alone the shrunken disc he’d observed at Saturn. And it was a deep, angry red. He thought he could see spots, gigantic black flaws, sprawled across its disc.

  He could only think of one way the sun could have gotten so big, so red.

  By getting old.

  Oh, shit, he thought. I am a long way from home.

  It was all too big, too much. He was a scared, naked primate, stranded in an alien future… He could do a Bill Angel, retreat into some dark primitive recess he’d brought with him, all the way from the past…

  The hell with that. Think, Rosenberg. Categorize.

  He thought about the gravity. The waves.

  All that proved the laws of physics were still working. And he could still figure things out. Even run experiments, test hypotheses. Hang onto that, Rosenberg. Whatever the hell is going on here, science still works. I can figure it out.

  Anyhow, isn’t this what I wanted? To cheat death—to see how it all came out in the end?

  … But, deep down, he had expected some kind of team from Earth to retrieve them, human faces peering over some kind of hospital bed.

  Not this.

  He wanted to curl into a ball, retreat into sleep and incomprehension. But if he did, he might never come back out.

  His shadow, blurred by its passage through the bubble wall, fell over the corrugations, shortened by the high angle of sunlight.

  He tried to feel the corrugations through the bubble material, but the
stuff wasn’t flexible enough to give him any real sense of touch. He thought he could see something of a cellular structure, though: there was a crude graininess to the corrugations, lumps maybe the size of rice grains. Cells, maybe. The surface looked almost porous, where he could see it closely. There were beads of some liquid gathered there, and a crusty, solid deposit…

  I bet that solid’s cyanogen. His mind raced. This is some kind of animal.

  Ammonia life?

  Come on, Rosenberg, you know the theory. His huge steed must drink ammonia, respire by burning methane in nitrogen. But cyanogen, the carbon dioxide analogue, was a solid at these temperatures. And so the hide of this creature was dripping with ammonia, and crusted with cyanogen waste.

  In that case, he thought with growing excitement, he had to be rising out of an ammonia ocean, polluted with complex, melted hydrocarbons. There must be some form of photosynthesis going on here: ammono plants, using solar energy to turn respiration products—ammonia and cyanogen—back to methane and nitrogen, closing the matter loops. But cyanogen could only circulate in solution, not as readily as gaseous carbon dioxide in the air of Earth. That must mean the photosynthesis-analogue was going on in the oceans—some kind of plankton equivalent there. Perhaps there were no land-colonizing plants here…

  Perhaps the creature whose back he rode was the flowering of the ammono-based life forms whose prebiotic chemicals he had glimpsed near Tartarus Base.

  It was as he’d predicted to Benacerraf. It was Titan summer.

  How about that. A hell of a lot to deduce from a few grains of cyanogen, Rosenberg. But it was comforting, hugely so, to be able to figure stuff out. And—

  And the surface under him lurched. His bubble rolled. He tried to grab at the yielding wall but could get no grip. He slid down the wall, his chest rubbing against the soft, warm material, and finished on his front at the base of the bubble.

  The bubble stabilized again. He climbed back up to his knees.

  Beyond the rim of the corrugated surface, the ocean was receding from him rapidly, its oily ripples diminishing, and he could see the reflection of the swollen sun as a disc on the sluggish surface. His bubble sat on the back of a mass of flesh, maybe a hundred yards wide, a big flattened sphere. Those complex bruised-purple corrugations spread all the way to the rim. Maybe the creature needed a lot of surface area, for its bulk.

  He could see a shadow sailing over the ocean surface. It was the shadow of his huge steed. There were ropy objects trailing beneath, maybe tentacles, waving passively in reaction to the breeze of the flight…

  The shadow was under him. The damn thing was flying, now, like some immense chewed-up balloon. He was riding a jellyfish the size of a football field, as it flew through the green air of a new Titan…

  Wonder battled with fear, threatening to overwhelm him. He longed to be enclosed: he longed for the cozy warmth of his EMU, the tight metal walls of the hab module.

  … So how was it flying? He couldn’t see any wings, jets, propellers.

  Anti-gravity?

  Think, Rosenberg. Look for the simple explanation.

  The thing was probably buoyant. Simple gas-bags, somewhere within this fat structure, would be sufficient to lift the jellyfish from the ocean, and up into Titan’s thick air.

  There was something else riding the back of the jellyfish, about twenty yards from him.

  It was another bubble, resting like a drop of water on the back of the ammono creature.

  He threw himself at the wall of his translucent cage and stared across. It was like trying to see inside a droplet of scummy pond water.

  He thought he saw something in there, an inert white form.

  He shouted, banging on the wall of his bubble. He even tried to roll forward, within the bubble, to make the whole thing roll across the jellyfish, like a hamster in a plastic ball. But the bubble resisted his efforts.

  His mind seemed to dissolve. To hell with the red giant sun, the new biosphere. All he wanted was to reach that other human being.

  He was soon panting, his hairless flesh coated with a sheen of sweat.

  He gave up.

  Even if he’d gotten over to the other bubble there wasn’t anything he could have done to reach its occupant. If he could somehow breach this bubble—even if the temperatures outside were tolerable—the air of this new Titan was surely toxic, laced with hydrogen cyanide and ammonia.

  But it was sure as hell worth a try.

  He was finding it harder to breathe.

  He felt an uncomfortable pressure in his bladder. He needed to take a piss.

  He looked around. There just wasn’t anywhere to piss into, inside this sheer-walled, seamless bubble.

  He tried not to think about it. But of course that didn’t help.

  In the end, he just stood up in the center of the bubble, grabbed his dick, and let go. What else could he do? Warm urine splashed up over his feet. A puddle gathered at the lowest point of the bubble floor, green and frothy, and he stepped back quickly, trying to keep his bare feet out of it.

  When he was done he retreated to the wall of the bubble, watching the urine lake. It spread slowly over the bubble floor, quivering as the jellyfish surged smoothly.

  A shadow, wide and long, swept over the bubble.

  Rosenberg flinched, raising his hands over his head, cowering naked against the floor of the bubble.

  It was as if a roof had spread over the jellyfish, a ceiling of translucent, leathery skin, green-tinged; where the sun shone through, Rosenberg could see a coarse graininess, a sketchy skeletal structure.

  The skin ceiling moved away, and sunlight, suddenly bright again, shone down into the bubble.

  Rosenberg kneeled up and stared after the departing platform. It was like a kite, roughly diamond-shaped, the size of a 747. It glided, one pointed corner first, through the thick air. That papery flesh stretched over a frame-like skeleton. The anatomy seemed sketchy. There looked to be a spine along the axis, bulging in places; maybe there were organs—a digestive tract—in there.

  It was like the pterodactyls of antique Earth. Or a Wright brothers fever dream, he thought.

  This was Titan, Rosenberg reminded himself; the living things here could only be built from the raw materials to hand. And so, the bones of the kite-thing were probably made of water ice.

  All along the leading edges of the diamond wings there were gaping cavities, like jet inlets. Maybe they were mouths; perhaps the creature fed on smaller airborne life forms, cruising like a shark. Like the jellyfish he was riding, the kite seemed passive, inert, as if saving its energy; he could see no sign of motion, anywhere across the kite’s huge frame. And that immense mass of skin showed another similarity with the jellyfish: a lot of exposed surface area for the kite’s mass.

  He couldn’t see any legs, any means of landing.

  Perhaps it never landed at all; perhaps it spent its life in the air, feeding on the airborne particles, even breeding there.

  The pterodactyl receded, slowly, its sharp rectangular profile diminishing.

  Rosenberg kneeled against the wall. The urine, cooling, lapped against his feet.

  And now a dark form cruised over the surface of the ocean, far below him.

  It was shaped something like a terrestrial ray, but it was immense. Those hundred-foot Titan waves broke like ripples in a bathtub over its oily, corrugated back; it had to be a mile across at least. Rosenberg could see vent-like mouths all along the ray-thing’s leading edges, and its back. It was turned to face the waves, but it didn’t appear to be moving; he could see no sign of a wake, no frothing or disturbance from any kind of impellers. He was reminded of a big basking shark, cruising through beds of krill and plankton, its huge jaw gaping. But this basker did not trouble to seek out its feed; it just sat in the prevailing current, waiting for plankton-analogue or whatever other organic goodies were suspended in the ammonia ocean to drift into its multiple mouths.

  So, Titan life. There were common charact
eristics, he thought dully. Huge size. Large surface area. Passivity.

  The jellyfish continued to rise. Now he was far above the surface of the ocean, and he had risen above the lip of the Cronos cliffs. The land on the plateau was a plain of gray-green ice, pocked with craters. Most of the craters were just sketches, palimpsests, their walls diminished by relaxation. The old craters were empty of their ethane lakes now, although he thought he could make out a purplish, filmy crust in the crater basins.

  The world was split in two: an ocean hemisphere to his right, the flat gray-green ice of Cronos to his left. The horizon was blurred by mist and vapor, but curved sharply; the world was small and compact, a ball suspended in space, visibly smaller than the Earth.

  He thought he caught glimpses of more baskers. Their delta shapes were arrayed across the surface of the ocean, like huge factory ships slowly processing the plankton-analogue.

  Tiring, his lungs aching, he sat with his back resting against the pliant wall, his legs outstretched.

  His thinking was feverish, getting fragmented, as if he was lacking sleep.

  In fact he started to feel bored.

  Now, that was just ridiculous. Here he was, somehow restored from death by Vitamin A poisoning, preserved across—oh, God—preserved across billions of years, maybe, and revived in an ammono-life ecosphere…

  But he had nothing to do but sit here and sightsee. He wanted to get out there and do something. He wanted to take samples, run them through his lab in the hab module.

  And he craved mundane things: to take a shower, read a book.

  He wanted someone to talk to.

  The sky, stained bottle-green by methane, was getting perceptibly darker. He must be rising out of the troposphere, the thick bottom layer of the air.

  He looked up at the sun. Its bloated disc seemed a little clearer, though it was still surrounded by a faint halo.

  He wondered if it was possible to see Earth from here. If Earth still existed, it must be lifeless: no more than a cinder, skimming the surface of the sun’s swollen photosphere.

  No help for me there, he thought.

  His chest was dragging at the air.

  He tried to suppress panic, to keep his breathing even and steady.

  Something was wrong.