by Eric Klein
Stepping outside, I could see Hydropole on the other side of what was now Lake Enki Catena. Originally this was a set of thirteen interconnected craters that were just as described, the result of a hit from a comet which broke apart. Now full of water, it looks more like a Scottish loch than a crater chain. Overall, the lake is 217 kilometers long. With so much lake-front, Hydropole has spread along the coast rather than up the hills. There are plenty of spots for water sports and personal moorings for boats. I understand from the tourist literature that wind-surfing was wonderful; with a bit more than one-sixth the gravity of Earth (or a tad more than on the Moon), it was possible to do all sorts of acrobatics using a square rig. Also, the locals had been working on populating the lakes with a complete eco-system, starting with plants and small fish. Recently they have started to allow fishing for rainbow trout, pike, perch, northern walleye, and bass. The hills outside of Hydropole are covered with clover and alpine grasses that allow sheep to graze. Along the edges of these meadows, there are populations of Siberian ibex living and spreading the plant life further afield. They seem to have adjusted well to their new home and were taking giant leaps from one cliff face to the other.
Wandering through town, we can see that the population is mostly Chinese, with smaller groups of Mongolians, Tibetans, and some other nationalities. The town is made up of single or two-story buildings, and smooth stone roads. No slide-ways, just stationary sidewalks in front of the various shops or homes. There are not many motorized vehicles; mostly we see small carts pulled or pushed by people, a few with bicycles attached or drawn by small yaks.
There are small groups of armed soldiers standing around every few hundred meters or walking around in the streets. When citizens approach them they step off of the sidewalk into the roadway and bow their heads, either allowing the soldiers to pass or walking around them. Unlike all the other colonies, there is no music or visible art.
We enter a Japanese teahouse. The host first looks down, but seeing our feet are not in military boots, she looks up and smiles at us. “いらっしゃいませ. Welcome. Please remove your shoes and follow me.” We can see next to the door a small rack for street shoes, each unused spot occupied by indoor slippers. “Do you have a reservation? Is it just the two of you?”
“Yes, it is just the two of us. We are sorry that we do not have a reservation – we have just landed.”
“No problem.” She points to the rack of indoor slippers. Once we have changed into them she smiles and says, “Please to follow.” Following our hostess to a low table in a small room with bamboo paper walls, we sit on the mats provided. Our hostess leaves us for a few minutes and returns with a tray with a pot of hot water, two tea bowls and the accessories necessary to prepare the tea. She places the tray on the mat next to Fay. Fay looks down at the tray and then at the hostess. Seeing the confusion on Fay’s face, the hostess asks, “Shall I prepare the tea?”
“Yes, please.”
Our hostess takes up a white cloth and wipes out one of the tea bowls. She lifts up a small box of fine green powder, and taking a piece of shaped bamboo she turns it twice and scoops a small pile of powder into the first bowl. Returning the box, she lifts the water kettle and pours water over the powder. She lifts and inspects the whisk, and once satisfied she takes slow, measured movements as she whisks the powder until it dissolves. She then takes the tea bowl and places it in front of me.
Lifting it, I admire the fine workmanship in the bowl’s creation; I rotate it and take a sip, pausing to savor the flavor. “This is the best tea I have ever had,” I say. I then wipe the lip and pass the bowl to Fay, who is watching me with some confusion. Taking the bowl, she looks at it, trying to understand what I saw. Then as she is about to sip I make a twisting motion, so she rotates the bowl and takes a sip.
Her eyes open wide. “Wow, this is the best tea I have ever tasted.”
Our hostess nods to acknowledge the compliment and starts to wipe the utensils. She looks at me sidelong and says, “You have been to Japan.” It is a statement, not a question.
I nod in reply. “I have had the pleasure of visiting Kyoto and was invited to participate in a tea ceremony. Would it be permissible to see the utensils?”
Nodding, she places them in the center of the table, takes the tray and backs out the door. Fay lifts the whisk and admires its delicate shape.
Less than a minute later our hostess returns with another tray. This one has two tea bowls, a slightly larger pot of water, and some pastries. Placing them next to me, I nod and accept the honor. She bows and backs from the room.
“What was that?”
“She was offering me the honor of preparing the tea myself. When she offered you, it was clear that you did not understand, so she presumed that neither of us knew how, and made the first cup for us. When she realized that I had seen this before, she was offering me the option to make it for us. Otherwise, she would have stayed and made us both bowls.”
Taking the white cloth, I wipe the two bowls and proceed to make the first cup of tea. I offer it to Fay, “Tradition says you should refuse, I will insist, and then you will accept. But we can skip that part.” I then prepare my own cup of tea and wipe the utensils.
As we are sipping the tea and nibbling on the sweet cakes, we can hear through the thin walls someone enter the main room. A female voice says, “I’m meeting some friends. The reservation is under the name Adam Selene.” Then we can hear them going past the door. As we continue to sip our tea, this happens several more times. After they go past we don’t hear anything more from them.
“I would really like to skip all of the science,” Fay says. “Terraforming here is too different and not related to what I study. Let’s just have some fun.”
We discuss options for water sports and hikes, and our hostess comes and replaces the hot water. She smiles when she sees we are savoring the time, and not rushing like the other guests who have come in and finished while we were there.
As I make our third cup, we hear footsteps coming up the steps, followed by a loud crash as the main door is slammed open. We can hear the slippers falling to the floor from the force. A loud voice asks something in a language I don’t understand, but would guess is Cantonese. We don’t hear an answer, but the hostess is pushed through the bamboo paper wall as a line of uniformed men pushes past. After seven or eight have entered, a slightly shorter one stops at the door to our room, looks in at us, shouts something at the hostess, and leaves her lying on the floor, half in and half outside the room as his troops follow.
I stand to help her up and offer her the cup of tea I had just finished preparing. She almost gulps it down, pausing only to nod in acknowledgement that I had made it correctly. “I don’t know what the security forces want. The only other people here are a group of students celebrating a reunion downstairs.”
The shorter one returns, entering via the hole in the wall and starts speaking in that other language again. Seeing that we don’t understand, he switches to English. “Your ident chips, now!”
Reading the information on his wristpad, “You are just down in the L.S.S. Venture. What brings you to this teahouse?”
“We were out for a walk after dinner and decided to relax with some tea before going to bed. In the ship’s time, it is almost twenty-two hundred. This looked like a nice quiet place, so we stopped.”
“It is not a quiet place. Now you return to your ship. We have work to do here.”
Looking at the hostess, I ask, “What do we owe you for the wonderful tea?”
“I am shamed that you were disturbed. You owe nothing.”
Bowing, “Domo arigato. We are honored to have been able to share the time and tea with you.”
We retrieve our outside shoes and return to the ship. The security team at the gates is looking less than happy, but upon checking our ident chips and hearing where we have been, they let us back into the shi
p. As we start towards the escalator, Dodge rushes to catch up with us.
I catch her as she misses the first step and almost falls. The last two charms on her bracelet hit me in the face. Regaining her balance, she asks, “What’s with security? They were much friendlier when I came out of the ship.”
Chapter 16
“Sometimes the advantage of being young and bright is not knowing what’s impossible.”
Cherie Priest, Ganymede
The security check leaving the ship the following day is similar to last night. With fewer people anticipated, there are only two scanners manned. The soldiers are still friendly, though they seem to be a bit on edge. In preparation for our hike, Fay and I have had the ship print us out some hiking boots and appropriate gear. We have filled our canteens with water, which the security personnel take extra time to check.
One of the guards notices our gear and directs us towards a particular peak to the north of the city, he says that “the view was unlike that anywhere else in the solar system.” We follow the advice and head to the hills. Taking an hour to get to the peak, we see that the guide was not exaggerating. It is breathtakingly different. There, hanging before us in the sky, is Jupiter, nicely framed by the valley walls and reflecting off of the surface of the lake. It is almost like the Big Red Spot is winking at us across the lake. I manage to catch a holo image of it just after Io pops out of the shadow of Jupiter.
The rest of our hike is uneventful, but Fay finds the science irresistible. She keeps stopping to look at different flowering plants and lichen that are growing in the hills away from the city. She points out to me signs of some animal life and dictates a note to her wristpad to ask about it when we get back, as no one has mentioned the introduction of small mammals or carnivores. I notice that there are many bees, flies, and butterflies but few other insects and no birds.
Back in town we have a lovely evening meal of Szechuan lamb with peppers and spinach served with brown rice. The desert is CHON green tea ice cream. It is surprisingly tasty for a molecular construct.
The whole town seems to close up at 19:45 to see the pageant performances, our host encouraging us to finish so he won’t miss the show.
The city has a wonderful lake-side theater modeled on the Roman ruins at Caesarea. The pageant contestants have been assigned to groups of four and are performing pieces of various shows and operas. Last was the portrayal of a scene from Puccini’s Turandot, where the loyal servant, Liù, is tortured for the name of the Prince so that Princess Turandot will not have to marry him. One of the contestants’ brothers plays the silent prince during the scene. When Liù steals a dagger and kills herself rather than betray her prince, the crowd jumps to its feet and gives a roaring ovation that echoes from across the lake.
After the performances, there is a small reception with wines and saké along with dim-sum and sushi rolls. The performers join the reception still in costume, to the delight of the crowd. Madame Sul-Te-Wan comes out, still in her costume as Liù – complete with the dagger still sticking from her chest. When the mayor asks her about it, she calls out for everyone to watch and the floor is cleared around her. She pulls the dagger out and we see the blade extend. Then she puts the side of the dagger against her chest, where it stays after she lets go. “The dagger has a retracting rubber blade, while the hilt is made of steel. I have a strong magnet sewn into the costume. This way when I press the blade against the magnet it retracts and then sticks as if I was stabbed. It will even move a little as I shift around. There is an option for stage blood to be included, so when the blade starts to retract it forces out the blood onto the costume. Knowing we would have the reception, I chose to skip that, as I did not want the cold and sticky stage blood on me while conversing with everyone here.”
Returning to the ship, we are carefully checked by security. Again, there are four fully manned security lines; the staff seems a bit upset by having to leave the reception early to set up for our departure. They actually take the time to compare an inventory of what everyone took from the ship to be sure that everything is returned. They are using very detailed lists of what we had – lists that we had not noticed being taken when we left in the morning. Security are most curious about Madame Sul-Te-Wan’s stage dagger, asking for it to be demonstrated several times. Once they are convinced that the only thing different from what we took off was our water and snacks, we are allowed back aboard the ship.
Chapter 17
“They tore themselves from warm hearths and good homes, promising to return; they fled from cold hearts and bad debts, vowing never to return.”
H.W. Brands in The Age of Gold
Having only part of a day before we take off, we have an early breakfast and then quickly rush back ashore. This time, security is very strict. There is no hiding that they are inventorying what we are carrying as we go through the scanners. The agent’s attitude seems cold and almost hostile.
Discussion with some of the agricultural team reveals that they were unaware that some of the wild flowers and lichen had moved to where we had seen them. They thought that region was still only hand-sown grassland. They are thrilled to see how things are spreading and start planning to send both drones and a human team out to check the extent of the progress. By this point, it is as if they have forgotten that we are still there. They slide into a mix of Cantonese and Japanese while pulling up maps and the most recent drone images.
Leaving them to their work, we head back to the ship, where security is similar to the night before, and we get the feeling that they would have liked to do a cavity search but cannot figure out how to justify doing it on return.
It is with a great sigh of relief that Fay and I enter the main lobby of the ship.
Chapter 18
“What do you mean someone is knocking on the airlock hatch?”
Captain Christian Huygens, (distant relative to Christiaan Huygens who discovered Titan) first official manned mission to Titan.
We are warned that security and customs are quite different on Titan. The warnings are such that I have Brain note them in a log file for future reference.
To ease these customs, the government had allowed participants in the pageant to travel together between the ship and the event hall. The audience would be only male. Females accompanying the contestants would be permitted to watch from a special room dedicated to them. The symposium participants were a bit more restricted, and the women who did not have fathers or male family members were required to stay on the ship to watch and listen, but not speak, via a remote-presence robot that would accompany the group. Needless to say, this was both a surprise and an insult to the women in both groups. One of them commented, “How could a country and culture manage to colonize a distant moon, and not leave its backwards, sexist past back on Earth?”
Knowing his daughter only too well, the Captain agrees to sign a marriage certificate for us, enabling me to squire her around without risking prison. He would have liked to join us, but his replacement foot is ready for him. So there is no better time than while we are not underway to have it attached. Taking me aside, he says, “Please take her ashore; it will help keep her mind off of my surgery.” Carol and Dodge have Frank D. Williams acting as husband and father, so they can go ashore.
A man with a long, white beard and wearing a white robe with a red and white keffiyeh as a head covering comes aboard to give us the mandatory introductory lecture before we are permitted to enter into the customs area.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum. Unlike the other colonies, Titan was not a large government’s sanctioned project. A group of young men, backed by Abdullah Bin Saud, one of King Sultan Bin Saud’s brothers, arranged for a large, deep space probe to be launched by China to study Titan. The payload was delivered and loaded the day before launch was scheduled. What the Chinese did not realize was that it was a manned module. Inside were six men. The module was designed as both a transport and lander
. To hide the real purpose of the mission, it continued to send back images and other data as if it was any other robotic mission; like Voyager or Juno, looking for more information. As far as the world was concerned, it was a failure when it lost contact with Earth just before entering orbit. In reality, it was equipped with an early version of the entangled communications system and never lost contact. The ‘loss’ was subterfuge to distract the world from the fact that a manned mission had landed on Titan. The crew was able to establish themselves by digging under the lander and using it as an airlock for a complex set of caverns in which they lived. While there, they used the surface hydrocarbons to build insulated interior walls and as an input to their primitive CHON food machine. Daily prayer direction was calculated to ensure that they prayed towards the Earth, and thus Mecca. Visitors are not required to participate in the daily prayers five times a day, but you are asked to be respectful and quiet while our people pray.
“Based on the news being relayed from Earth, they were well aware of NASA’s plan to launch a crew, expecting to be the first to land on Titan, and when it was on the way. NASA was kind enough to provide a running commentary about when and where it would land, so they were prepared for Captain Christian Huygens and his crew. Shortly after the NASA crew landed, one of the colonists knocked on the airlock door. Once the crew understood the situation, they accepted the traditional three days of hospitality. They were shown the colony and what it had accomplished. After three days, the crew returned to Earth with the scientific data they had been sent to collect, samples of the hydrocarbons, and an invitation to return as colonists should they care to. The original colonists were happy to have had new people to talk with, and knew that this meant the secrecy was over and more people could be sent to join the colony. It was not long after the departure of the NASA crew that the organization for the transportation of the wives and families of the original colonists began.
