Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  He was going to suffocate in here, in this bubble suspended over the bizarre surface of a transformed Titan, here at the end of time. He would drown in his own exhalations, awash in urine—

  A pillar thrust out of the surface of the jellyfish, ten feet from the wall of the bubble.

  Rosenberg screamed. He scuttled backwards, over the yielding surface, getting as far as he could from the pillar.

  To his shame, more urine dribbled out of his shriveled penis and leaked over his legs.

  The pillar was six or seven feet tall, maybe two wide. It was made of glistening crimson flesh. Its surface was like the jellyfish carapace: the same purple-black coloration, that complex ridging pattern. But the ridging was on a smaller scale, the gouges and bars separated by a couple of inches. It was topped by a cluster of large, complex-looking cell groups. Perhaps they were some form of sensor; perhaps he was being inspected.

  Maybe it was here to give him more air, to feed and water him.

  The pillar was utterly still.

  The way it had moved was eerie. It had been reptilian: a burst of motion, followed by stonelike stillness. Perhaps it was that quality which made him feel so nervous and suspicious.

  What did it want?

  Take me to your leader. His ragged thoughts ran on in uncoordinated hypotheses, as his fear bubbled in his hind brain.

  He coughed, and the pain in his lungs sharpened; black spots swam in his vision, clustering at the edge of his field of view.

  He crawled forward, through the puddle of urine, to the wall facing the pillar. He slapped the bubble’s surface with the flat of his hand. “Can’t you see I’m dying in here? Why don’t you do something about it? Hey!…”

  The pain in his lungs started to spread outward, up through his throat and out across his chest.

  He slumped, resting his face and chest against the yielding wall. He slid down, onto his back. He could feel the cooling piss lap against his feet and lower legs.

  “You weren’t expecting me to be conscious. You don’t know how to handle this, do you?”

  Black flecks gathered at the periphery of his vision. Through the filmy upper surface of the bubble, the sky deepened to a rich emerald green. He was lying here in his own urine, gasping for air like a beached fish. What an end for mankind, he thought; what an epilogue.

  There seemed to be something descending from the sky towards him: a broad, purple-black disc, a glimmering bubble, softly distorted…

  He could see through it. It was a reflection, of his rising jellyfish, in some kind of translucent sheet above him.

  They’ve roofed over the world, he thought.

  He thought he saw more of those pillars, thrusting out of the carapace around him like fingers.

  He tried to grip the plastic surface under him, struggling to stay conscious, to make this interval last as long as he could, before another unimaginable period of nonexistence overwhelmed him.

  But the cold green darkness was washing over him. He cried out as it pushed into his eyes, his brain; but he could no longer hear his own voice.

  Paula Benacerraf had no memory of waking.

  Suddenly, she was aware of herself again. It was as simple, and as brutal, as that.

  She was standing. Everything seemed to be red. Her feet were cold.

  She tried to look down, to see what she was standing on. When she moved her head, her eyes didn’t track properly, as if they were badly controlled automatic cameras, and her head seemed to slosh, a bag full of fluid.

  The redness turned abruptly to gray, and there was a clamoring of bells in her ears.

  The world tipped up around her. She saw a huge sky wheeling past, a sun like a dish of red light.

  But it was taking so long, as if in a dream.

  She collapsed gently against the ground, on her back. The landing was soft, but she could feel the spiky hardness of the ground, and where it pressed against her flesh, in a hundred places along the length of her body, it was ice cold.

  Her heart’s hammering slowed, and some of the color leached back into the world.

  That sun, straight above her, was immense. Much bigger in the sky than Earth’s sun, it was huge and red and dim. The disc was mottled with spots, complex black pits surrounded by crimson-gray penumbrae. She held up her arms, and moved out her hands, to accommodate the sun’s disc. Her hands finished up a yard apart.

  She remembered her last walk to Cronos. The water. The seed packet. Her choice to die.

  Oh, shit, she thought. I’m alive.

  She felt—disappointed. Life would go on. She was going to have to eat, and drink, and sleep, and maybe figure out what was happening to her.

  She’d have to make choices. She’d thought that was all over, for her. She felt cheated.

  She closed her eyes. But the world wouldn’t go away, the gritty reality of it in her lungs, under her back.

  So where was she? A hospital?

  In the open air?

  She opened her eyes, and lifted her arms. She was clothed.

  Her hands were bare, but her arms were encased in long sleeves of some translucent material, like golden-brown polythene. She pulled at the material; it gave a little, but would not stretch, and when she pinched at her cuff it was impossible to tear.

  She reached up to her face. There was no covering: no helmet, no visor, no face mask.

  … She was in the open air, unprotected.

  The shock reached her. She felt a moment of panic; she felt her lungs constrict, as if she was drowning.

  She forced herself to relax. She took away her hands, opened her mouth, and deliberately sucked air into her lungs.

  She wasn’t in an EMU. But wherever the hell she was, there was evidently an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.

  She put her arms flat against the chill ground and tried to push herself up. As soon as she got her head upright, the ringing and grayness returned.

  “Take it easy.”

  The voice startled her.

  “Lie back for a while.” A head moved into her field of view above her, silhouetted against the broad face of the sun. It seemed hairless, and the neck and shoulders supporting it were swathed in some transparent substance that caught the light. “I don’t think they got your fluid balance quite right. Orthostatic intolerance. It took me a couple of minutes to adjust, but it passes.”

  “Rosenberg. I should have expected you.”

  “Yeah.” He knelt down beside her. “Yeah, it’s me—I think.” He was wearing some translucent all-in-one coverall, which left only his hands and head free. And he looked younger.

  “Good grief, Rosenberg. What happened to your hair?”

  He laughed. “The same as happened to my eyebrows, and nasal hair, and chest hair, and pubic hair… I guess they forgot to put it back.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “One step at a time, Paula.”

  “You don’t have your glasses.”

  He touched his face, looking surprised. “So I don’t. I don’t seem to need them. They grew back my foreskin, too.”

  “They?”

  “How are you feeling? Do you think you can sit up?”

  “I’d rather stand up. This ground is freezing my ass off.”

  Rosenberg laughed. It was a brittle, icy sound. He got an arm under her armpit and lifted; with his help she scrambled to her feet. She still felt dizzy, and her heart pumped a lot harder than she’d been used to, but she wasn’t going to faint again.

  She and Rosenberg were out in the open. No hospital. No buildings at all, in fact. They were standing on some kind of plain. It was coated with sparse, low vegetation—stunted dark green bushes, a little grass—but there were no people, no cars or houses. The air was clear and her vision was sharp; the horizon seemed close by.

  Off to her right was a long, straight, gray-white cliff which slid towards each horizon.

  That big balloon of a sun still hung directly overhead. The sky and land were drenched in a dull dried-blood red. The
re were high icy-looking cirrus clouds, draped over the roof of the sky; some of them cut across the face of the sun and glowed crimson, as if on fire.

  The only sound was the soft hiss of a breeze over the spiky grass.

  This ain’t Seattle, she thought, with gathering dismay.

  And Rosenberg—

  Under his golden-brown translucent coverall, Rosenberg was naked.

  He clamped his hands over his private parts. “Will you stop staring at my dick?”

  She touched her scalp. It was bald and smooth, the skin cold to her touch. She glanced down. Under a translucent suit, past the low swell of her breasts, she could see her pubic mound, as bare as Rosenberg’s.

  “Shit,” she said. She covered her breasts and groin with her arm and hands, while Rosenberg kept his hands clamped over his balls.

  They stared at each other. “This is ridiculous,” she said at last.

  “I agree. I won’t stare if you don’t.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Deliberately, she lowered her arms; she looked him resolutely in the eye.

  He laughed again. “A hell of a thing. We cross billions of years, and we bring all our dumb primate taboos with us.” His voice was brittle. Almost hysterical. And—

  And he’d said, billions of years. “How long? Where the hell are we, Rosenberg? How did we get here, from there?”

  “One step at a time, Paula. Come on.”

  He turned away, and began walking slowly across the plain. His footsteps lifted him up in the air, so that he bounded forward in a series of short half-hops, Moonwalk style.

  Oh, she thought.

  This wasn’t even Earth, then.

  She started to feel scared.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Damned it I know.”

  She felt an absurd reluctance to move away from here, the place she’d come awake. As if she ought to wait here, on this anonymous patch of a uniform plain, until somebody came by to tell her what to do.

  She sat down, ignoring the cold.

  She didn’t want any of this. Choices, a structured world to figure out, even a relationship to manage. I he hell with it. I did all this once.

  She lay down and curled up, burying her head in her arms.

  I want to go home, she thought. To Seattle. And if I can’t go home, I don’t want to be here.

  But the world wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t even go to sleep, the ground was too hard and cold.

  She opened her eyes.

  The plain, the big red sun, Rosenberg waiting patiently, squatting on his haunches, a few yards away.

  She got angry. She kicked at the ground, dug out great handfuls and threw the dirt around, rubbed it over her bare scalp. “Why couldn’t you leave me alone, damn it…?”

  She got tired quickly. She stood there, panting, hot inside the suit, dripping bits of dirt.

  Rosenberg just waited. He didn’t even watch her.

  Reluctantly, she walked up to him. He got up, and walked on, and she followed.

  Sensory impressions crowded in on her, unwelcome, forcing her to think, to analyze.

  She found she was wearing some kind of booties, welded onto the suit, as clear as the rest of the coverall. When she lifted up her foot she could see there was no grip on the sole, no ridging, but she seemed to be able to keep her footing nevertheless.

  The ground was a sandy, crusty, rust-brown soil; it crunched when her weight settled on it. There were stunted trees—they looked like willow, or birch—scattered over the plain; none of them came much higher than her shoulder. Between the trees, grass grew. Near her feet there was a splash of flowers, almost white despite the ruddy light, the petals as big as her palm. She knelt down and pulled up a handful of grass. She rubbed the blades between her thumb and forefinger; there was a sharp herbal aroma.

  Rosenberg lifted up what looked like a mushroom, a huge puff-ball a foot across. “Mosses, lichens. It’s hard to see in this red light, but I’ll bet these things are livid green.”

  “Chlorophyll?”

  “Of course these aren’t true plants. They’re just organisms descended from some root stock, which have radiated to fill the various ecological niches…”

  She dug up a little of her anger. “Radiated from what? What are you talking about? You’re so full of shit, Rosenberg.”

  He said irritably, “Radiated from whatever terrestrial-biosphere samples the ammonos managed to retrieve from our bodies, or the ruins of our base, or the seeds you planted.”

  “Ammonos?”

  “I told you we had to take this one step at a time.”

  She looked at Rosenberg. “You know,” she said, “I’m hungry. And thirsty. Shit. They had no right.”

  “What?”

  “To bring me back.”

  “Yeah. Well, they did it. And I’m hungry, too.” He shrugged. “Try anything. We’ve no way of knowing what’s toxic, even lethal… We have to trust the design.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Just try something, Paula.”

  Near her legs grew a couple of the mushroom-like puffballs, some sparse grass, and a scratchy growth like bruised-purple heather. At random, she dug her hand into a puffball. It imploded, like a meringue, and a cloud of some kind of spores blew up around her arm, clinging to her flesh and the suit. She came away with a handful of the mushroom’s meat. It was white, soft, cold, slightly moist. She suppressed a shudder; the feel of it was repellent.

  She lifted it to her mouth, bit off a chunk, and chewed deliberately.

  It crumbled, collapsing to a hard residue, like bad sponge cake. It was still cold, and there was the faintest of flavors, an aftertaste of decay.

  She swallowed the residue.

  Rosenberg watched her intently. “Well, you haven’t choked, thrown up or keeled over.”

  “But I’m even more thirsty.”

  “Come on,” he said. “I think the ground dips down a little over that way; maybe we’ll find some fresh water.”

  They began to walk, parallel to the looming gray-white cliffs.

  They came to a stream.

  It ran sluggishly through a shallow gully, eroded into the ground. The water was running away from the direction of the gray cliffs, Benacerraf noticed. It looked a little muddy, and dirty gray ice clung to its banks.

  Rosenberg squatted and dipped a hand into the steam. He pulled it back quickly, but he brought up a little water cupped in his hands. “Ouch. Cold as all hell. I guess it’s glacier melt, running off those cliffs.” He stared dubiously into the little puddle he cradled.

  “Drink it, Rosenberg.”

  He sighed. He lifted up his hand to his mouth, and sucked in the water noisily. He grimaced. “A little salty. It’s okay. So cold, though.”

  She knelt down beside him, and began scooping up water. It splashed over her face, the cold stinging; and she could feel its icy passage down her neck and into her stomach.

  Rosenberg said, “These suits seem to keep us warm enough. But drinking this stuff will bring our core temperatures down. We need to find a way to build a fire.”

  “Those trees look as if they will burn.”

  “We don’t have any way of lighting the fire.”

  “Didn’t you ever go camping, Rosenberg?… No, I guess you wouldn’t. You take a couple of sharpened sticks, and—”

  He held up his hands. “I believe you. Show me later. Just don’t lecture me about it.” He plucked at the chest-cover of his transparent suit. “I got a more urgent problem. I need to pee.” He clawed at the plasticlike sheet over his genitals, comically.

  She realized that the cold water had run straight through her, too; soon she would face the same urgency as Rosenberg.

  What were they supposed to do? Just let go, and walk around sloshing? Suddenly her suit seemed constricting, even claustrophobic.

  She stood with Rosenberg, and experimented with his suit, pulling the clear material this way and that. At last, she found that if sh
e pinched both sides of the suit’s neck, a seam opened up. Once the split began, it ran quickly along the lines of Rosenberg’s body, over his arms, down his hips and the sides of his legs.

  Gently, Benacerraf pulled at the neck, and the front of the suit just peeled away from Rosenberg, like a parting chrysalis.

  When the suit lay in a clear puddle at Rosenberg’s feet, he clutched his arms over his chest. “Christ, that’s cold.”

  “Don’t be a baby; Rosenberg.”

  He walked away, hopping gingerly over the icy ground on the balls of his feet. He moved behind one of the trees, and in a couple of seconds Benacerraf heard the heavy splash of urine drops against the soil, and saw wisps of steam rising around Rosenberg’s legs.

  To get Rosenberg back into the suit, they found the easiest way was to lie him down, inside the back section. Benacerraf lifted the front over him and ran her pinched thumb and forefinger up over the opened seal; the material melded together seamlessly.

  After that, she took her turn. Oddly, she felt naked out of the suit, even though it had been all but transparent. The ground was hard and icy under her bare feet as she squatted.

  So here she was, eating and drinking and pissing and talking, life going on, just as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn’t ended, as if she hadn’t died and been dug out of the ice and … hell, all of it.

  It had never struck her before how much of her time, her conscious attention, was taken up just with the business of being human.

  She rejoined Rosenberg, who stood by the stream. They looked at each other.

  “Where are we, Rosenberg? Is this Mars?”

  He looked confused. “No. Not Mars. Of course not. Mars is gone. This is Titan. Don’t you get it? You’re still on Titan, Paula.” He glanced up at the wide, flawed face of the sun, which filled the dome of heaven above.

  Something connected in her mind. Cosmology lectures. Carl Sagan. “If this is Titan—” Oh, shit. “A red giant,” she said. “The sun’s become a red giant.”

  He laughed brutally. “You figured it out. Just like I had to. Sorry there aren’t any comforting answers. We might be ten billion years from home, Paula.”

  The ruined sun seemed to hang over her head, huge and heavy, as if it might crush her; she wanted to escape from it, run under a tree, hide her head with her hands. “Tell me what’s happened to us, Rosenberg.”