Titan Cruel Moon

by Kate Rauner

  "Late afternoon, I suppose you'd say. We're receiving some sunlight directly plus reflected light from a half Saturn overhead. In four days it will be midnight - the colony will sit directly on the opposite side of Titan from the Sun, but looking at a full Saturn, so the sky will be bright. That's one of the reasons we settled here, near the equator and the sub-Saturn point. We'll always have light outside."

  "And it'll be warmer? Than the poles?"

  "Not enough to notice. But we're far away from the large polar lakes. Those seem to grow and shrink a lot over Saturn's year, and we didn't want to be left high and dry or get flooded. This quiet little pond is perfect for us."

  Maliah came galloping along the line of domes. "Are you guys gonna stand there talking about the weather all day? Let's drag out the fliers."

  Yash passed one out the door. "Before you take off, remember to stay away from the nuclear power plant. Its shielding wall doesn't stop radiation from streaming out the top."

  "No problem. I'm going along the peninsula. Trina and Shun are going with me."

  Fynn glanced at the helmet's comm display. Maliah, Shun, and Trina glowed yellow. They'd switched to a different channel. He raised his left arm to examine the suit's control panel. Nubbins on his gloved fingers meshed with a slight hollow in each button, so he easily clicked through pages to reach communications controls, and found he could tap the screen with the nubbins too. The common channel button was large and prominent, but there were several suit-to-suit options. He picked a channel and held the sleeve up for Yash and Drew to see. They tapped their own sleeves and their names glowed blue on his heads-up display. "Shouldn't we be worried about Maliah taking off like that?" Fynn asked.

  Yash watched her disappearing with the adjuncts into the murky sky. "This is our world. We need to claim it, to explore and feel safe here. Besides, there's a beacon in each flier, and at the village dome's docking port." He held out his arm to show Fynn the access screen. "And the Herschel's parked overhead, in the Lagrange Point, so Liam could contact them. They can't get lost."

  Fynn looked up, but Maliah and the others had disappeared.

  ***

  Maliah shouted to Trina, a joyful yell. Comms made shouting unnecessary, but she couldn't suppress the urge. She had to fly fast, think fast, and shout as she gripped the flier with her knees and barrel-rolled.

  "Watch out." Trina waved downward and Maliah suddenly saw the mottled ground rushing toward her in a blur.

  She pulled up hard, exhilarated. "Wow. Guess I better leave the altimeter running on my heads-up."

  Shun called to her. "Guess we better fly higher."

  Bright highlands of rugged ice passed below them, with dark branching channels. Methane must rain down in buckets sometimes. The land was brownish and barren.

  Maliah checked her altimeter. "Whoa. Those highlands aren't very high." Her readings showed a hundred meters, though she knew that somewhere there was a kilometer tall mountain. But she'd never climb even a little hill when she could fly instead.

  They leveled off side by side. "I thought we'd see more white," Trina said. "The land is supposed to be water ice."

  "Under an orange sky and covered in a slick of hydrocarbons," Maliah said. "Coated in star tar."

  Trina dipped downwards. "If you want to do something useful, we could look for meteorites. Anything made of rock and minerals should look darker."

  Maliah pulled up to hover for a moment. "Visible light may not be efficient. I'm going to try a full spectrum display. Oh, wow. Try it. The false color makes everything easier to see."

  Maliah led them along the lakeshore, scanning for meteorites from time to time, but mostly enjoying the flight. She unclipped her suit tethers from the flier and tried holding it away from her body with one hand and spreading her arms wide. She felt like a bird.

  Shun circled in front of her. "Look, there's another lake." The image intensifier spread a rainbow of color over the land but the methane lakes remained black. "Let's land. I want to see what these colors mean."

  Maliah set her flier down vertically to land on its blower base and hopped off. Ice sand crunched under her feet, smoother than outside the dome, and sloping steeply to liquid methane a few meters below them.

  Maliah opened a map on her faceplate and tapped at her right eye. "It's about two hundred kilometers to reach a named feature, Garotman, the paradise for faithful souls."

  Shun hopped away from his flier and looked in at her through the transparent map. "We'll make Titan a paradise for ourselves and an inheritance for posterity. The greatest challenge in history and it belongs to us."

  Maliah closed the map to see him better. In false color, he glowed white with a blue sphere for a helmet. She contracted the display spectrum to make out Shun's dark eyes.

  Trina steadied herself against his shoulder. "It's not very pretty out here. Rather inhospitable." She kicked at an ice pebble and the overhead glow from Saturn cast her face into deep shadow.

  Maliah looked into the murk toward the Paradise for Faithful Souls. "Imagine this entire ridge lined with domes, powered by Titan's hydrocarbons, with the Herschel pulling down asteroids from orbit to become our mines and quarries. Exactly what Doctor Tanaka promised us. A world to win and a paradise to build."

  ***

  Fynn hopped from the dock to the ground, an easy drop of twice his height. The dark outer layer of the dome curved against the sky like a false horizon.

  Fynn leaned forward and pushed a foot out. "It's like walking underwater."

  Yash landed next to him with a flier in each hand. "It'll be easier to fly than walk. Are you coming, Drew?"

  Drew stood at the edge of the dock ramp with his flier, but didn't jump. "No, thanks. I'd rather fly along the shore."

  Fynn flipped down his flier's step, attached his suit's tethers, and lifted off while standing upright. He rose slowly above the string of domes. At the other end, turbulence rose through the atmosphere.

  "Try thermal imaging," Yash said. "You'll see what's happening better."

  Fynn held tight to the left handgrip and tapped his sleeve pad until colors in his faceplate overlaid the world. The methane lake remained black, but the dome was reddish, the ground below dark purple.

  Yash hovered nearby, a yellow figure standing behind a bluish column. "The helmet's imager distributes a standard visible spectrum across the full range of wavelengths you chose."

  Fynn twisted at the hips and his flier pivoted. At the far end of the domes, a brilliant white column edged in yellow and pink boiled into the sky. Heat rising from the nuclear reactor. He drifted toward it low to the ground.

  Fynn touched the ice wall. "Shouldn't the wall be a uniform color?"

  "Heat or light, and maybe some radiation, is refracting through the blocks. Ice will be the only building material readily available on Titan, so you need to study it."

  "Study ice?"

  "We're not on Earth. There are multiple crystalline forms of water ice at low temperatures. Based on Titan's surface conditions today, this should all be ice-one-C, but different phases and different densities can be stable. There's so much to learn."

  Fynn knelt, limiting his view to the base of the shielding wall, and let the helmet spread a rainbow of color across the small area. "I see a line, a cable or something, through the ice."

  "That's one of the tie-downs. The nuclear reactor's been running on the surface for three years, so the tie-downs have probably absorbed some heat. Here, come look at an anchor for the village dome, where you can see it clearly."

  A cable ran down the dome wall, sinking into the plastic to form a channel most of the way. It was clamped to a rod as thick as Fynn's wrist that sank into the ground not far from the dome's floor.

  Yash pulled on the rod but it stayed rock solid. "Four tie-downs on each dome, guyed into the ice. We live in hot air balloons and don't want them to take off. Now you understand the scope of our job, son. Visionaries will build our perfect society, but you and I, we must
not allow visions to overwhelm reality. First survival and then paradise."

  Yash swept an arm out. "Remember what Titan is. Indifferent, unknowing, a frozen rock without heart or soul. No matter how dramatic Tanaka makes it sound, our destiny is to die in this place, where eternity cannot bury a body but only coat it in oils. There's no guarantee the colony will make it, especially in the first few years."

  Fynn felt cold to his core. His inner fears, spoken out loud, especially by his father, felt real. "But the plans. The schedules. They're yours."

  Yash settled a hand on each of Fynn's shoulders and sought his eyes through the helmet's shadows. "Deploying equipment has gone well so far, but we're about to tie our systems to Titan's lake and atmosphere, and that adds more dangers. It was selfish of me to bring you here. You, your mother, and your sister. I am selfish and afraid of being alone, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity." A deep breath pulled him up on his toes, square-shouldered and tall. "To build a colony halfway across the solar system. Tanaka is right on one point. This is the greatest challenge in history. I hope you'll come to embrace the challenge in your own way."

  Fynn's mouth went dry. His hands locked on his father's arms, and warmth replaced the chill in his chest. The family had been separated over the years, and now they were together. Yash's eyes glistened and a smile spread across his broad, dark face. Fynn smiled too, as if he was looking in a mirror.

  Fynn tipped his head up to admire the sky of his new home. Yash followed his gaze and an orange glow fell across their cheeks.

  ***

  Drew watched Fynn and Yash fly off. They'd want some time alone and that was fine. Drew needed time alone too. He puffed the blower to lift up a few meters and then let the flier sink back toward the ground as it drifted forward. The shore sloped gently down to the black methane lake. Pebbly surfaces occasionally disappeared under smooth sand, and when he found a dry rivulet carving its way to the lake, he stopped.

  Drew laid the flier on its side and sat on the column. He hoped that would challenge his suit less and keep his butt warmer than sitting directly on Titan's surface. He played with his helmet's image intensifier, shrinking the display spectrum around blue-green wavelengths, until his faceplate displayed a passably blue sky, shades of green in the ground, and a purplish lake. He fiddled with the rebreather controls and cooled the air flowing across his face. More like the mountain air of home.

  His mind felt dull, his arms heavy, and he leaned his elbows on his knees to support the helmet in his hands. He would never see real blues and greens again. False colors on a display, tinted plastics in the domes, but never a blue sky again. Not truly.

  Maybe it wouldn't matter as long as no one knew how the realization twisted in his guts. Emily praised his management of the wastewater systems, and he was safe with Fynn, so no one knew how vulnerable he really was. He sat up and looked across the lake. The sky wasn't quite the right shade, but he could get used to this. If he couldn't return to Earth, Titan's surface could be a refuge. It would have to do.

  Chapter 11

  F ynn and Ben prepared to drop a pump into the methane lake. They checked the buoy one last time. The tear-shaped float was shiny white but looked yellowish under Titan's sky. As simple as possible, the buoy had no antenna and no transponder.

  The pump was simple too. A knee-high plastic cylinder, also white and also seemingly yellow once they had it outside, hung below the buoy, with a screened cage over its inlet. It wasn't clear what a pump might suck up suspended a meter below the methane surface. Ice balls, Fynn supposed, if the lake's level dropped. Ice in this lake would sink.

  "Ready to go?" Fynn asked.

  Ben braced himself as if he expected a fight. "Ready."

  Fynn's schedule linked to a pre-programmed button, which seemed to be his only way to communicate with the decabots that roamed Titan's surface outside the domes. The Robotics Cohort had secretly uploaded a handful of programs with rudimentary triggers. Until he awakened with his passcodes, the bots were limited to those few operations.

  Fynn had watched the video instructions a dozen times and knew what was supposed to happen, but it was unnerving to have no real control. The bot was remarkably stupid and Fynn could stop it by yanking some item it expected to find far enough away to force a pause, but otherwise it was a sorcerer's apprentice nightmare.

  He and Ben watched the bot lumber into position on six legs that splayed out crab-style, leaving divots in the gritty ice surface. Four arms unfolded from grooves in its central column. It opened a tool compartment in its own side, pulled out two scoop-shaped tips, and twisted them into the ends of two arms. Then it picked up the pump and buoy.

  The decabot crawled down the slope to the black surface of the lake. It moved one leg into the methane, confirmed its footing, moved another, and reached as far as its range of motion allowed to release the pump and buoy. Then Fynn and Ben pushed the assembly away from shore with their poles, and the bot backed away.

  Perfect.

  Fynn dropped the pole's tip, slipped a stake through the ring at the end, and pounded it into the sand. "Well, I can't say I wouldn't touch this buoy with a ten foot pole."

  Ben echoed the joke. "More like a ten meter pole."

  Ben shuffled on his way to the dock's airlock. After a few tumbles, they'd discovered that kicking off against the slope made feet slip backward. Rica and Casper waited inside the airlock, ready to connect the power cable.

  While his crew was busy, Fynn planned to explore the shoreline from a flier, ostensibly to look for signs of erosion that might endanger their domes, but mostly to conquer Titan. At least, as a start.

  He drifted slowly, occasionally traveling up a dry rill where liquid from old hydrocarbon rainstorms once flowed. Without wave action, the lake never erased fiddly-bits of runoff channels, and they gave the shore a frilly edge in places.

  He found a narrow bay where a finger of the lake poked into the shore. The ground was darker and the slope was shallower at an alluvial deposit only a few paces wide. The sand glittered for some reason, so he landed for a closer look.

  Fyn knelt and dug at a glinting fleck with one finger. A pale lump as big as his thumb popped out. Like a cord of threads twisted into a conical spiral, it was striated with fine, dark bands. He shuffled to the edge of the lake not realizing he'd stepped in until thick ripples wavered in the liquid. The methane was clear enough to be invisible.

  He hopped out quickly, but his boots weren't harmed. He swished the spiral in the methane and the dark bands washed away, leaving a bundle of smooth white fibers.

  He'd seen fibrous minerals. This thing in his glove looked better organized. Like it had been made. Like something had made it.

  Fynn leaped up and spun in mid-atmosphere. Once his feet touched down, he did it again. He almost called Ben, but he was a long way from the colony. He could see a column of heated atmosphere if he switched to infrared, but not the domes. Before he called anyone, he needed to calm down. He didn't want to embarrass himself with impulsive declarations, because maybe the spirals weren't a sign of life.

  ***

  Hoses and cables from Titan's surface ran through a long insulated box in the airlock where valves, heaters, and expansion chambers channeled methane and nitrogen from the surface. The crew used the box as a bench, and Fynn sat with Rica, Casper, and Ben. Drew arrived just as Fynn decided his pile of spirals had warmed enough to touch barehanded.

  Drew rolled one around in his hand and poked a fingertip into an empty pocket at the wide end. "You say there are more of these?"

  "Loads," Fynn said. "And all the same size." He held out his cupped hands, full of spirals.

  Rica looked skeptical. "Are these things alive?"

  "Not anymore," Drew said. "Not if they live at a hundred eighty degrees below zero in liquid methane."

  Fynn suddenly wished he hadn't dug up so many, if maybe he'd killed them. "I thought I was collecting seashells on the beach. They didn't move."

  Ben he
ld one close to his face. "It can't be alive. There's no liquid water out there. Doesn't life require liquid water?"

  "That's why I called Drew," Fynn said. "He's a biologist."

  Drew corrected him. "I'm a geneticist, which is hardly the same thing as an exobiologist. But chemistry is chemistry. There's enough sunlight reaching Titan's surface to support photosynthesis, and even that may not be necessary. There're bacteria on Earth that draw electrons directly from rocks. Maybe life could cluster around a meteor on the lake bottom."

  "There's a lot of nitrogen dissolved in the methane," Fynn said. "We have an off-gassing chamber before the furnaces to deal with that. So these shelly things have nitrogen available."

  Drew scratched at the spiral but the threads didn't loosen. "Could be an acrylonitrile. Only carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen in those, and nitriles can polymerize into fibers if I remember right. They can absorb metal ions, too."

  Drew clutched the spiral in his fist. "Oh man, I wish the Herschel's labs were available. If there are metallic elements present, maybe we could grind these up for fertilizer. Don't get a swelled head, Fynn, but your discovery could be huge."

  ***

  Fynn crossed to Yash and Emily in bounding steps. His father was swiping along the schedule on his large, flat pad, and Greta and adjuncts Maj and Shun were settling into chairs.

  "Me first," Fynn said. With a flourish, he tossed a spiral onto the table and Yash caught it before it bounced away.

  Fynn grinned. "While we were hooking up the methane line, I found this a little way along the shore. Dozens of them." He pulled out a handful and passed them around.

  Yash turned his spiral over, his brows tightening as he concentrated. "Some kind of mineral?"

  Fynn ran a finger along the twisting threads. He wanted to shout that this was a seashell, but even Drew had been cautious. "We won't know until the Herschel can analyze them."

  Maj took a spiral from the table and shoved it in her pocket. "Doctor Tanaka says we will find Old Ones - remnants of ancient souls. I'll take this to him."