Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Rosenberg stopped, several times, and took samples, scrapings of the eroded surfaces. He photographed the wave shapes. He even measured the angles of the frozen crests. His voice was weak, but Benacerraf could hear his enthusiasm as he found the opportunity to do a little science. “So beautiful… Benacerraf, each of these waves might be a million years old. And as the wind wears away at them, it’s exposing ice billions of years older than that — ice older than life on Earth… so beautiful…”

  She found a new hazard.

  She had to skirt huge crevasses; they looked to be hundreds of feet deep, with walls of a clean Earth-like blue where her helmet lamp shone on them. As the ice flowed out of the heart of Cronos, it was splitting along gigantic faults.

  The crevasses parallel to the flow weren’t difficult to handle, as they pointed the path she wanted to take, towards the heart of the continent. But in some places, where the ice was compressed as it flowed, the crevasses ran transverse to the flow. She had to take wide detours to reach a narrowing of each crevasse, so that she could straddle them with heir skis.

  In the most difficult country there was a mix of transverse and parallel crevasses, presumably because of some distortion of the flow. The crevasses intersected, cracking the ice into gigantic, parallel pillars, some of which had tumbled and shattered, so it was as if she was picking her way across the smashed sidewalk of some giant, ruined city.

  She kept a weather eye on Rosenberg; his progress was slow, but he was plodding along in her wake, his head down.

  After some hours of this, she found a place to camp. It was at the hollow between two giant pressure waves, a patch of regolith granules not much larger than the area of their two sleds. They had to anchor the tent to the sleds, because their metal pegs would not drive into the ice layer.

  All around, as far as Benacerraf could see in the orange-brown light, there were pressure mounds and cracks. Their little encampment was like a small boat, she thought, lost in a giant sea.

  Before they could crawl into the tent, a wind came up, blasting through the valley as if through a wind tunnel.

  This was the seventh night, some fifty miles from Tartarus, and they were getting into a routine when they established camp.

  Benacerraf hadn’t managed to take a dump that day as she walked — which was the preferred way, because then at the end of the day they just had to dig the crap out of their diapers, and some semblance of privacy was maintained. But now she could feel pressure building inside her. She suspected she was coming down with some kind of diarrhea. It was probably the antibiotics she was taking.

  “Sorry, Rosenberg,” she said in advance.

  He was piping water into today’s ration bags. He looked at her, his eyes glassy, and shrugged.

  She opened her suit as wide as she could. She stood up and bent over in the tent’s cramped confines, with the open front of her suit close to the heater. She fumbled to get an old ration bag inside the suit. She found her butt. The skin of her buttocks felt flaccid, the flesh depleted of fat. It was, she thought, an old woman’s ass. She clamped the bag as best she could over her butt, and let go.

  The crap emerged as a hard, hot spray, accompanied by an explosive fart. She tried to catch it all in the bag, but it wasn’t easy, and she could feel excrement splashing her hands, sleeves and legs.

  The smell, erupting from the interior of her suit, was moist and pungent. My own contribution to Titan’s methane layer, she thought.

  She closed up the bag and pulled it out, and her first priority was to close up her suit, trying to trap whatever warmth was left. Then she swathed the bag of sludgy excrement in a couple of other bags, wiped her hands on the back of her legs — the stuff would freeze off there tomorrow anyhow — and lodged the bag in the corner of the tent, with her piss bag.

  She huddled closer to Rosenberg and the fire, shivering, her arms wrapped around herself.

  Rosenberg was working at the cooking, but slowly. His left hand had got frostbitten a few days before, when damp had gotten inside his glove, and the cold of the ice ridges to which he had to cling had found a route to his fingers. Now, three of his main finger blisters had burst, the dead skin falling away to reveal raw stumps, like uncooked meat.

  “Rosenberg, that looks like agony. You want me to take over?”

  “No,” he said. His face was thin, the flesh disturbingly slack; his cheeks seemed to descend in folds over the corners of his mouth. “It’s not so bad now the blisters have burst. Before, sometimes the fluid in them would freeze.”

  “Ouch.”

  “We both got problems. Here. Eat.”

  She took her food packets; the warmth, cupped in her hands, was welcome.

  The meal passed in uncompanionable silence.

  During the last couple of stops, the sour thoughts she’d previously been able to leave outside the tent’s airlock had started to seep inside.

  She’d come to loathe Rosenberg’s personal habits. The yellow stink of his urine bags. The icicle-like dribbles of snot and saliva and tears that formed on his spindly beard. The way the wounds of his hands wept over her food.

  And she started to become obsessed with the fairness, or otherwise, of the way Rosenberg handled the food.

  The business with the carrots was one thing. Benacerraf had tried again to eat the things, but failed. So he got to eat all the damn carrots. And now Rosenberg had developed other little habits. Like he would take her discarded soup bags, turn them inside out, and lick the inner surface clean of any residue, before stowing them for use later. It drove her crazy. She started to insist on a turn making the soup, so she could get to lick the bags.

  The NASA rations, in their bags and tins, were easy to split fairly. But the stuff from the CELSS farm — the carrots, their crude bread, wheat, rice — had to be divided. And if they had to choose between two portions, Benacerraf became obsessed by the need to stop Rosenberg getting the bigger portions, every damn day.

  They came up with ways to deal with it. They took turns working the food. If something had to be split, one would make the break as fairly as possible, and the other got the chance to choose. They would alternate that, day by day.

  Benacerraf got to look forward to the times when she could make the choice after Rosenberg’s split. That way she was guaranteed to finish up with a few fractions of an ounce more than he did. She woke up remembering it was her turn, with a lighter mood.

  She understood what was happening here. They were both in such foul and increasing discomfort that they needed someone to blame. The real candidates were too impersonal and remote to be hated, satisfyingly: Titan’s ghastly conditions, the lousy equipment, the treachery of NASA and its political masters in abandoning them here, the Chinese and their hammer rock.

  There was nobody else to blame. Only each other.

  Understanding it, though, didn’t make it any easier to contain.

  After the meal, they went to work on each other’s wounds.

  Benacerraf had developed hemorrhoids, a consequence of the sweat and moisture trapped inside her suit. Rosenberg had brought a cream she could apply. Her back, shoulders and stomach were sore continually now, from their battering by the sled harness. It felt as if her pelvis was starting to protrude through the raw patches over her hips, as her body fat fell away. Her lips were still a problem; the scabs and crevices stubbornly refused to heal, and she still swallowed salty blood with every mouthful of food.

  And she had indeed developed crotch rot; her inner thighs and the area around her pubic hair were rubbed raw by the inner layers of her suit, even though she treated the area with Canesten powder.

  Rosenberg had a dose of crotch rot too. With the innocence of a child, he showed her his genitals. His scrotum was a shrunken bag, red raw from the rot. And somehow his penis had gotten nipped by the frost. It had swollen up to a shapeless mass, and the end was blistered. He shrugged. “What you pay for being circumcised. One less layer of insulation. Add that to the list, Paula. No Jews
on Titan, without boxer shorts.”

  He took a look at Benacerraf’s right foot. For days she had been favoring the foot as she marched, but that had just generated more problems. Now she had an abscess, swollen up on her Achilles tendon, where her heel was pressured by the rim of her boot. Rosenberg had been giving her antibiotics from their precious, dwindling supply, but they seemed to be doing little but give her the squirts.

  Today, Rosenberg said he would have to operate.

  He gave her two deep injections of Xylocaine. For a couple of minutes he covered up her foot, protecting it from the cold while the anaesthetic took hold. Then he took a scalpel blade — one he’d sterilized back in Discovery — and plunged it deep into the swelling. He made diagonally crossed incisions with brisk, confident strokes.

  Yellow pus poured out of the wounds, and he collected it in an empty ration bag.

  When he was done he cleaned the wound, coated it with antiseptic, and bound it up with bandage.

  Benacerraf turned and began to pull on her sock.

  When she sealed herself up again that night, Benacerraf found herself immersed in a deep animal stink. She knew that inside her high-tech suit she was becoming progressively more foul and filthy. She was an animal, stranded far from home and encased in this technological bubble, gradually fouling her own mobile nest.

  The hell with it. For now, the dirt was another layer between her and the cold.

  She turned her face to the tent wall. She pictured the way Rosenberg picked icicles of snot out of his nose-hairs. Warmed by irritation, she sought sleep.

  At last the giant ice ridges began to diminish.

  She came to a place where the waves, somehow sheltered from the wind, were smaller — no more than six or seven feet high, reduced almost to a human scale. Benacerraf decided to change her tactics, to attempt a frontal assault.

  She waited to make sure Rosenberg was in view; then she donned her skis again and set out directly east, cutting across the first wave, a characteristic frozen wave-shape.

  Hauling her sled behind her, she made it to the narrow ridge at the top of the wave. Her sled was suspended halfway up the slope, and the harness hauled back at her, rubbing the chafed parts of her skin. The ridge of the next wave was only about four feet away, and she reached out towards it, hoping to bridge across the gap with her feet. But the sled fouled on a ridge of the ice, and jammed; she was hauled backwards, and almost lost her balance.

  Irritated, she leaned forward and lunged, trying to clear the sled. It bounced into the air and came free suddenly; unbalanced again she tumbled forward, scrambling with her skis to avoid falling down on the steep far side of the second wave.

  So she proceeded.

  The waves gradually declined in size, until she found herself skiing almost unimpeded over a plain of ridged ice, scattered with gumbo and pockets of gritty granules.

  Gradually, they penetrated the heart of Cronos.

  On the ninth day she started to find the going harder. After a while she realized the ground was sloping up beneath her. She pushed on through the uniform haze, ignoring the pain in her knees and feet.

  The slope became dramatically steeper.

  The ground was pushed up into a wall as far as she could see, from north to south, like one giant wave, its termini disappearing into the misty horizon. The ice was uneven, scoured by ankle-snappers: narrow, gumbo-streaked gulleys which plunged down the steepening contours.

  She walked a zig-zag path, at an angle to the line of steepest slope, and that got easier on her feet, because the skis, sideways on, laid over all but the widest of the gulleys. But the gulleys snagged repeatedly at the runners of her sled, jerking her backwards.

  Beyond the miniature horizon created by the crest of the wall, a mountain was rising, its grey-white flanks streaked by gumbo, like a model of Othrys.

  The crest of the ridge came up suddenly. The ground levelled out and she found herself on a narrow, eroded shelf, maybe fifty yards across, puddled with gumbo. With a final effort she hauled her sled up and over the edge. She unbuckled her harness, and dropped it gratefully to the ice.

  She looked back the way she had come. Her runners and skis had left no visible trail on the bone-hard ice. She could see how this great wall swept up out of the plain in a smooth concave sweep. Much further down the slope she could see Rosenberg; he was a dark, toiling speck, dwarfed by the bulk of the sled he hauled.

  She turned and walked forward to the far edge of the wall. The ice here was smooth and relatively free of gulleys and crevasses, and she slid easily on her skis.

  She reached the edge of the wall. She stepped carefully, avoiding the edge and any brittleness there.

  The wall stretched to left and right, foreshortening and dimming out in the horizon mist. Its inward curve was just visible. That mountain peak, a neat cone, lay dead ahead of her, its base lost in the murky haze of distance.

  She was clearly standing on the rim of a crater, a great walled plain which curved around that central peak. It looked too symmetrical to be natural, like a huge artifact.

  She looked down into the crater plain. The wall here was steeper than on the other side; the crater was clearly a wound dug deep into the countryside. In a belt at the foot of the wall the ice surface was shattered into giant chunks which would make travelling difficult. But beyond that chaotic country, the land smoothed out, and was coated by a thickening layer of purple gumbo.

  The sky was a dome of unbroken, twilight orange, empty of cloud save for a high, light scattering of nitrogen-ice cirrus.

  Rosenberg came up to her. Like Benacerraf he’d discarded his harness; as he stood alongside her he leaned forward, letting the mass of his pack settle over his center of gravity, and his arms dangled, limp. His breathing was as noisy as ever.

  “El Dorado,” he said. “I guess we made it. It looks just like in the radar images.”

  She stared at the crater floor gumbo. She could see that it wasn’t the uniform purple-black bruise, color she’d become used to, back around Clear Lake. Purple predominated, but there were streaks of lighter reds — even a trace of scarlet — mixed in. The whole mess looked like a puddle of oil paints, the multiple colors mixed up and streaked together.

  “Well, it’s different,” she said. “Do you think there’s kerogen?”

  “I can’t tell,” he said testily.

  “Try your IR.”

  He reached up to switch on his night-vision visor. “I don’t know if this tells me anything or not.” Then he lifted his head, and in his visor she could see the reflection of the mountain, the orange sky.

  “…Oh, wow,” he said. “Look up there, Paula. Use your infra-red. Oh, wow.”

  She turned on her own visor, and looked up.

  Through the milky-gold haze, beyond the feathering of cirrus cloud, was rising the huge, multicolored crescent of Saturn.

  It was almost local noon here, so the sun was directly over her head. Saturn looked as if it was tipped on its side, a half-shadowed hemisphere with its bright round belly thrusting upwards. And jutting ahead of the globe of the planet, pointing vertically up towards the sun, she could see the brilliant rings, thin, striped ellipses.

  It was the first time she had seen Saturn since they had dropped out of orbit;

  Suddenly she realized where she was. It was a surge of perspective, as if the walls of the Universe opened out around her.

  She had let this sunless bubble-world of ice and gumbo and haze and crotch rot eat into her imagination, until it was as if the gumbo extended on, beyond the visible, to infinity.

  In fact, she was crawling over a ball of ice, a billion miles from the warmth of the sun.

  I’m on Titan, she thought. Here I am — Paula Benacerraf, human, American, grandmother — gazing up at the rings of Saturn.

  I made it.

  They camped in the lee of the crater wall, on the edge of the chaotic terrain.

  Rosenberg, a shapeless mass in the layers of his grimy suit, crawle
d over the tent floor and inspected Benacerraf’s feet. That early injury to her right foot still hadn’t healed up, and now she had frostbite in a couple of the toes of her left.

  Rosenberg himself had developed some kind of tremor, rendering his own fingers too clumsy to apply the scalpel precisely. Benacerraf did most of the doctoring for both of them now.

  Under Rosenberg’s direction, she lanced the swollen lump on her right foot, and the worst frostbitten toe on the left. Multi-hued liquid matter pulsed out of the new wounds.

  The throbbing pain ebbed slightly.

  “I don’t think that right foot of yours is good news, Paula,” Rosenberg said. “I think you have a deep-seated infection in the bone itself.”

  “Terrific,” she said.

  “I’ll increase your antibiotics. We still have some Metronidazole and Flucloxicillin. They’re not the most effective, but—”

  “It’s all we have. I know.”

  She used the scalpel to slice off squares of paraglider fabric, and plastered them all around the wounds. She pulled her socks back over her feet, wincing when the fabric tore at her new incisions.

  She helped Rosenberg pull open the layers of his own suit. She had to pull carefully at the fabric, she found, or she would tear away great transparent strips of flesh, like sheets of onion-skin. The flesh seemed loosely attached, but nevertheless caused a lot of pain to Rosenberg when they came loose.

  It was scary. She had problems herself, but loose skin wasn’t one of them.

  Inside the suit she could feel Rosenberg’s ribs, the bony ledges of his pelvis, the slack thinness of his legs. The bulk of the suit masked this degeneration; out on the surface all she could see was his clumsiness, his slumps and lousy posture. It was astonishing he could walk at all, let alone haul a heavy load across the surface of Titan.

  She rubbed cream into his armpits and stomach, the raw regions of his crotch. She even worked the cream into his frost-nipped penis, which was still swollen and sore.

  Hemorrhoid cream was all they had left. But it seemed to soothe.