Titan (GAIA)

by John Varley

  The fish had no eyes, no scales, and no fins. She held it up and looked at it curiously. It was the first fish any of them had caught.

  “What the hell am I doing?” she asked aloud. She tossed it back into the water, coiled her fishing line, and started around the bend in the river toward camp.

  Halfway there, she began to run.

  “I’m sorry, Bill, I know you put a lot of work into this place. But when they come to get us, I want to be working as hard as I can toward getting ourselves out,” Cirocco said.

  “I agree with you, basically. What’s your idea?”

  She explained her thinking about the hub, the fact that if there was a central technological control for this vast construct, it would be up there.

  “I don’t know what we’d find. Maybe nothing but cobwebs and dust, and everything down here is still going by sheer inertia. Or maybe the Captain and a crew waiting to blow us to pieces for invading their ship. But we have to look.”

  “How do you propose to get up there?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I’m assuming the blimps can’t do it or they would know more about this goddess they talk about. There may not even be any air in the spokes.”

  “That would make it a bit tough,” Gaby pointed out.

  “We won’t know until we look. The way to get up the spokes is the support cables. They should go all the way up the insides, right to the top.”

  “My God,” Gaby muttered. “Even the slanted ones are a hundred kilometers high. And that just brings you to the roof. From there it’s another 500 kilometers to the hub.”

  “My aching back,” Bill groaned.

  “What the matter with you?” Cirocco demanded. “I didn’t say we’d climb them. We’ll decide that when we get a good look. What I’m trying to tell you is that we’re ignorant of this place. For all I know, there’s an express elevator sitting in the swamp that would take us all the way to the top. Or a little man selling helicopter tickets, or magic carpets. We’ll never know unless we start looking around.”

  “Don’t get excited,” Bill said. “I’m with you.”

  “What about you, Gaby?”

  “I go where you go,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You know that.”

  “All right. Here’s my thinking. There’s a slanted cable to the west, toward Oceanus. But the river flows the other way, and we could use that for transportation. We might even get to the next row of cables faster that way than beating through the jungle. I think we should head east, toward Rhea.”

  “Calvin said we should stay out of Rhea,” Bill reminded.

  “I didn’t say we’d go into it. If there’s anything that would be harder to take than this perpetual afternoon, it would have to be perpetual night, so I’m not anxious to go there anyway. But there’s a lot of country between here and there. We could take a look at it.”

  “Admit it, Rocky. You’re a tourist at heart.”

  She had to smile. “Guilty. I thought a while ago, here we are in this incredible place. We know there are a dozen intelligent races in here. What do we do? Sit around and fish. Well, not me. I feel like nosing around. It’s what they were paying us for, and hell, it’s what I like. Maybe I want some adventure.”

  “My god,” Gaby said again, with a hint of chuckle. “What more could you ask? Hasn’t enough happened?”

  “Adventures have a way of turning around and biting you,” Bill said.

  “Don’t I know it. But we’re heading down that river, anyway. I’d like to get going after the next sleep period. I feel like I’ve been drugged.”

  Bill considered that for a moment. “Do you think that’s possible? Something in one of the fruits?”

  “Huh? You’ve been reading too much sci-fi, Bill.”

  “Listen, you don’t knock my reading habits and I won’t knock your old black and white flat films.”

  “But that’s art. Never mind. I guess it’s possible we’ve eaten something that tranquilizes but I really think it’s just old-fashioned laziness.”

  Bill stood and reached for his non-existent pipe. He looked annoyed to have forgotten yet again, then dusted off his hands.

  “It’ll take a while to knock a raft together,” he said.

  “Why a raft? What about those big seed pods we’ve seen floating down the river? They’re big enough to hold us.”

  Bill frowned. “Yes, I guess they are, but do you think they’ll handle well in rough water? I’d like to get a look at the bottoms before—”

  “Handle? You think a raft would be better?”

  He looked startled, then chagrined.

  “You know, maybe I am getting slow. Lead on, Commander.”

  Chapter Ten

  The seeds grew from the tops of the tallest trees in the forest. Each tree produced only one seed at a time, and when it reached maturity it exploded like a cannon shot. They had heard them going off at long intervals. What was left after the explosion was something like a walnut shell, evenly and smoothly divided.

  When they saw a large one float by, they swam out and pulled it to shore. It rode high in the water when empty. Loaded, it still had plenty of freeboard.

  They took two days outfitting it and trying to rig a rudder. They fashioned a long pole with a broad blade on the end, and hoped that would be enough. There was a primitive oar for each of them in case they ran into rough water.

  Gaby cast off the line. Cirocco put her back into poling them out to the middle of the river, then took her post at the stern, one hand lightly on the tiller. A breeze came up, and she wished once again for her hair. What a fine thing, to have hair whipping in the wind. It’s the simple things we miss, she thought.

  Gaby and Bill were excited, forgetting their animosity for the time being as they sat on opposite sides of the boat, watching the river ahead and calling out hazards to Cirocco.

  “Sing us a sea chantey, Captain!” Gaby yelled back.

  “You’ve got it mixed up, stupid,” Cirocco laughed. “It’s you low-life types in the fo’c’sle who pump the bilge and sing the songs. Haven’t you ever seen The Sea Witch?”

  “I don’t know. Has it been on the treedie?”

  “It’s a flat movie starring good ol’ John Wayne. The Sea Witch was his ship.”

  “I thought it might be the Captain. You’ve just picked yourself a nickname.”

  “You watch yourself, or I’ll see if I can rig up a plank for you to walk.”

  “What about a name for this boat, Rocky?” Bill asked.

  “Hey, it should have a name, shouldn’t it? I was so busy trying to scrounge up champagne for the launching I forgot all about it.”

  “Don’t mention champagne to me,” Gaby moaned.

  “Any suggestions? Here’s your chance for a promotion.”

  “I know what Calvin would have named it,” Bill said, suddenly.

  “Don’t talk to me about Calvin.”

  “Nevertheless, we’ve committed ourselves to Greek mythology. This ship should be named the Argo.”

  Cirocco looked doubtful. “Wasn’t that tied up with the search for the golden fleece? Oh, yeah, I remember the movie now.”

  “We’re not searching for anything,” Gaby pointed out. “We know where we want to go.”

  “Then how about …” Bill paused, then looked thoughtful. “I’m thinking of Odysseus. Did his ship have a name?”

  “I don’t know. We lost our mythologist to that overgrown tire advertisement. But even if it did, I wouldn’t want to use it. Odysseus had nothing but trouble.”

  Bill grinned. “Superstitious, Captain? I never would have believed it.”

  “It’s the sea, lad. It does strange things to a body.”

  “Don’t give me your late-show dialogue. I vote to call the boat Titanic. There was a ship for you.”

  “A bucket of rust. Don’t tempt the fates, matey.”

  “I like Titanic, too,” Gaby laughed. “Who’d believe it, on a boat made out of a glorified peanut?”

  Cir
occo looked up, thoughtfully. “Let it be on your heads, then. Titanic it is. Long may she sail. You may whoop, and otherwise make merry.”

  The crew cheered three times, and Cirocco grinned and took a bow.

  “Long live the Captain,” Gaby shouted.

  “Say,” Cirocco said. “Shouldn’t we be painting the name on the fender, or whatever the hell it is?”

  “On the what?” Gaby looked horrified.

  Cirocco grinned. “This is a fine time to be telling you, but I don’t know shit about boats. Who’s done some sailing?”

  “I’ve done a little,” Gaby said.

  “Then you’re ship’s pilot. Change places with me,” She released the tiller and walked forward carefully. She reclined on her back, stretched, and folded her arms under her head. “I’ll be making important command decisions,” she said, with a big yawn. “Don’t disturb me for anything less than a hurricane.” She closed her eyes to a chorus of hoots.

  The Clio was long, winding, and slow. In the middle, their four-meter poles would not touch bottom. If they put them in the water they could feel things bump into them. They never knew what was doing it. They kept Titanic midway between the middle of the river and the port side shore.

  Cirocco had planned for them to stay on the boat, going ashore only to gather food—a project which never took more than ten minutes. But standing watch did not work well. Too often, Titanic would run aground, making it necessary to wake the sleepers. It took all three of them to move the boat when the bottom was on mud. They quickly learned that Titanic was not very maneuverable, and it took two people with poles to push the boat away from approaching shallows.

  They decided to camp every fifteen or twenty hours. Cirocco made a schedule which assured that two people were always awake while they sailed, and one when they camped.

  Clio meandered through the almost-level terrain like a snake doped with Nembutal. One night’s camp might be only half a kilometer in a straight line from the one of the night before. They would have lost their orientation but for the support cable which attached to the ground in the center of Hyperion. Cirocco knew from her air survey that the cable would be east of them until long after they joined the river Ophion.

  The cable was always there, towering like some unimaginable skyscraper, rising, seeming to lean toward them until it vanished through the roof and into space. They would pass near it on their way to the angled support cables which led into the spoke over Rhea. Cirocco hoped to get a close look at it.

  Life settled into a routine. Soon they were working flawlessly as a team, seldom needing to talk. Most of the time there was little to do but stay alert for sand bars. Gaby and Bill spent a lot of time making improvements in everyone’s clothing. They both got to be handy with thorn needles. Bill continually tinkered with the rudder and worked to make the interior of the boat more comfortable.

  Cirocco spent most of her time daydreaming, watching the clouds drift by. She considered ways and means of reaching the hub, trying to anticipate problems, but it was a futile occupation. The possibilities were too varied to allow reasonable planning. She much preferred wool-gathering.

  She eventually did sing to them, and surprised them both. She had taken voice and piano lessons for ten years as a child, had considered a career as a singer before the lure of space grew too strong. No one knew about it until the trip in the Titanic; she had thought it not in keeping with her image to entertain the crew with songs. Now she didn’t care, and the singing brought them closer together. She had a rich, clear alto that worked best with old folk music, ballads, and Judy Garland songs.

  Bill made a lute from a nutshell, parachute shrouds, and a smiler skin. He learned to play it, and Gaby joined in on a nutshell drum. Cirocco taught them songs and assigned harmonies: Gaby had a passable soprano, Bill a tone-deaf tenor.

  They sang drinking songs from the taprooms of O’Neil One, songs from the hit parade, from cartoons and old movies. One quickly became their favorite, considering their circumstances. It spoke of a yellow brick road and the wonderful wizard of Oz. They bellowed it every morning when they set out, shouting all the louder when the forest shrieked back at them.

  Several weeks went by before they reached the Ophion. Only twice did anything interrupt their peaceful routine.

  The first incident was three days into the trip, when an eyeball at the end of a long stalk emerged from the water not five meters from Titanic. There was no doubt that it was an eye, any more than there had been with Whistlestop. It was a ball twenty centimeters in diameter, set in a flexible green socket that at first glance appeared to be a green hand with fingers wrapped around the eye from behind. The eyeball itself was lighter green with a gaping pupil.

  They began poling for shore at the first sight of the creature. The eye had been pointing at them, betraying neither interest nor emotion but only a fixed stare. It did not seem to mind when they moved away. It watched for two or three minutes, then vanished as quietly as it had appeared.

  The consensus, once ashore, was that there was little they could do about it. The creature had not tried to harm them—which said nothing about its future conduct. But they could not end their trip just because there were big fish in the river.

  They soon saw more of the eyes, and eventually became accustomed to them. They looked so much like periscopes that Bill named them U-boats.

  The second incident was something they were more prepared for because it had happened before. It was the vast moaning wind Calvin had dubbed Gaea’s Lament.

  There was time before the worst of the winds to beach Titanic and seek shelter on the downwind side of the boat. Cirocco did not want to go under the trees, recalling the near-miss by a falling branch in the highlands.

  The observing conditions were not good with the wind whipping her face and the clouds rolling overhead, but she managed to catch glimpses of the storm coming out of Oceanus. It came from above. Clouds billowed down from the vast spoke above the frozen sea like the icy breath of God. The wind hit the sheet of ice and broke on it, whipped into tornadoes that looked tiny from that distance, but which must have been huge.

  Through the clouds that rapidly advanced toward Hyperion, Cirocco could see the angled support cables that joined the ground to the sky over Oceanus. If they were moving in the wind it was far too slowly to be seen, but there must have been some swaying or stretching motion. The cables were shedding a fine gray mist. She watched it drift down into the narrow angles the cables made with the ground and had to remind herself that the particles she could see from so far away must be as large as trees. Then the clouds obscured all vision, and snow began to fall. Soon after that the river grew agitated, rising almost to the beached Titanic. Cirocco thought she could feel the ground moving.

  She knew she was seeing some part of Gaea’s air circulation system in operation, and wondered how the air was drawn into the spoke and what mechanism forced it back out again. She also wondered why the process had to be so violent. Calvin’s watch said it had been seventeen days since the last Lament; she hoped it would be at least as long until the next.

  As before, the cold did not last more than six or seven hours, and the snow did not stick to the ground. They weathered it better this time, finding that the blimpsilk clothes were more protective than they looked, working as windbreakers.

  The thirtieth day since their emergence was marked by two things: something that happened, and something that didn’t happen.

  The first was their arrival at the confluence of the Clio and the mighty river Ophion. They were deep in south Hyperion by then, equidistant between the central vertical cable and the southern one, both of which now towered over them.

  Ophion was blue-green, wider and swifter than the Clio. It swept Titanic into its center, and after a time of alertness and soundings with their poles, the travelers decided it would be safe to stay there. In size and speed, Ophion reminded Bill and Cirocco of the Mississippi, but with more vegetation and tall trees along the banks.
The land was still jungle, but Ophion was wide and deep.

  Cirocco was far more concerned with the non-event—the one she had waited for as the days ticked by on Calvin’s watch. She had been regular as the tides for twenty-two years, and it was disturbing to miss a period.

  “Did you know it’s been thirty days now?” Cirocco asked Gaby that evening.

  “Has it? I hadn’t thought about,” She frowned.

  “Yeah. And I’m more than late. I’ve always been twenty-nine days; sometimes early by a day, never late.”

  “You know, I’m late, too.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “Christ, that just doesn’t make sense at all.”

  “I was wondering what sort of protection you used on Ringmaster. Could you have forgotten about it back then?”

  “Not bloody likely. Calvin gave me monthlies.”

  Cirocco sighed. “I was afraid it’d be something as infallible as that. Me, I can’t take pills; they make me swell up. I used one of those wear-ever diaphragms. I had it in when we went under. I didn’t really think to look for it until … well, after we joined up with Bill and August and it might already have been too late.” She was hesitant to discuss that part with Gaby. It was no secret that she and Bill had made love, and also no secret that there had been no time or place or privacy for it on Titanic with Gaby always around.

  “Anyhow, it’s gone. I presume it was eaten by the same thing that ate our hair. Which makes my skin crawl, by the way.”

  Gaby shivered.

  “But I thought it could be Bill. Now I don’t really think so.” She got up and went over to Bill, who was sleeping on the ground. She woke him, and waited until he looked alert.

  “Bill, we’re both pregnant.”

  Bill was not as awake as she had thought. He blinked in surprise, then his brow furrowed.

  “Well don’t look at me. Not even for yours. The last time with Gaby was not long after we left Earth. Besides, I’ve got a valve.”

  “I wasn’t saying anything like that,” she soothed. With Gaby, huh? she thought. She hadn’t known about that, and she thought she had been aware of everything that occurred on Ringmaster. “That just makes it more certain that something very strange is going on. Somebody or something is playing a big joke on us, but I’m not laughing.”