Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  She hated to do this, to be so close to another human. She’d make a lousy nurse, she thought. To get through, she made herself think of how she’d handled Jackie as a kid.

  He lectured her about their Belsen-like boniness.

  “It shouldn’t be a surprise, Paula. We’ve been expending calories at a hell of a rate. More than we’ve been replacing them with food. We’re slowly starving, in fact. We’ve already metabolized a lot of our body fat, shifting it as a fuel supply into the bloodstream. All this is part of our bodies’ strategy to cope with what we’re putting them through: heavy exercise, without enough fuel. Our bodies are eating themselves up, trying to keep going as we demand…”

  “Eat your soup, Rosenberg.”

  With his hands swathed in lengths of parachute canvas, Rosenberg tried to raise his soup spoon to his lips. His hands shook too much, and the spoon clattered pitifully against his teeth, like a bird tapping on a window.

  She put her arm round him to steady him, and guided his hand to his mouth. He sucked the soup gratefully.

  Later they lay, back to back, in the confines of the tent. There was nothing before Benacerraf’s eyes, through the window of her helmet, save a patch of plastic wall reflecting the dim low-energy bulb, and a couple of piss bags, slowly freezing.

  “You know, Paula—”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I want to give up. Just stop. Lie down on the ice, or in the granules or the gumbo or whatever damn stuff, and just stop. Go to sleep. You know?”

  “We can’t call in a rescue chopper.”

  “I know, Paula. It makes no damn difference.”

  She lay silently for a moment. “Then why do you go on?”

  “Why do you?”

  She thought that over.

  “Because of Jackie.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Yes. And her kids. In case they’re watching me, the stills and video we transmit.”

  “Paula, we haven’t heard from Houston since—”

  “I know. I didn’t say it was logical.”

  “So it’s the clan. Right? You got the clan in your heart, even here, a billion miles away, on Titan. So far away you can never do anything to affect them again, for good or ill, or they you. Even though the world has ended.”

  “Yes,” she said. “If you want to be anthropological about it. I’m doing it for them. Can’t you understand that, Rosenberg?”

  “Sure. It’s just primate logic.”

  “So what about you? What stops you giving up?”

  He slouched; it was a shrug, masked by the layers of his suit.

  She turned over, to face his huddled back. She reached over his waist and put a gloved hand over his; his glove felt as if it. was empty. “Listen, after eleven years I know you. You back off into generalities and theory whenever anyone gets too close. Tell me why you keep going, Rosenberg.”

  At length, reluctantly, he said: “Curiosity. I always wanted to know how it all worked, Paula. It drove me crazy to think that one day I would die, and I’d never see all the science and exploration and discovery that would follow me, all the things people would figure out. And now, here I am on Titan, for God’s sake. A world nobody’s visited before. Every hill we climb offers the prospect of something new, something nobody’s seen. Right now I’m excited.” He smiled at her weakly. “I mean it. I’m looking forward to getting this kerogen, or whatever it is, back to the hab module. Maybe it will keep us alive a little longer. And even if not, it’s something nobody’s seen before.”

  “At least you made it this far.”

  “Yeah. But—”

  “But what?”

  “If the Universe is just a puzzle box, it doesn’t mean a damn thing, does it? It’s not enough. Not any more; maybe it never was.”

  Rosenberg had reached a kind of ultimate logic, she thought. He must be spending his walking time addressing the final question science couldn’t answer, in this godless age:

  Why bother to live at all?

  But that wasn’t really his problem, of course. She’d never met anybody who knew themselves worse than Rosenberg. Except maybe Bill Angel.

  Rosenberg’s problem was that he was alone. He’d come all the way to Titan, because of that, and now he was here, and he was still alone.

  “Rosenberg,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If it’s any consolation, I need you. I’ve never depended on anyone so much in my life. No human has been more dependent on another, than you and I.”

  “More primate logic, Paula?”

  “We are primates, asshole.”

  “This is just perlerorneq, Paula.”

  “Huh?”

  “The winter blues. An Inuit word. Goodnight, Paula.”

  “Goodnight.”

  They walked into the crater basin, and loaded the sleds with as much crater-bottom tholin as they could carry.

  They turned, for home.

  The journey didn’t get any easier. Her sled was even heavier than when they had set off from Tartarus, laden with bags of frozen urine and feces, and with canvas-wrapped bundles of kerogen-soaked gumbo — so they hoped — from El Dorado. And as Rosenberg had weakened, she had been forced, surreptitiously, to transfer some of his load to hers.

  Once again Titan’s slow rotation had taken this hemisphere into night. They would stay in darkness, in fact, until they reached Discovery. So she walked on, with only a splash of light from her helmet lamp ahead of her, and the faintest of diffuse orange glows from the haze above and around her.

  The pain in her feet dominated her mind. It was as if she was trapped in some tunnel, walled in by pain, receding ahead and behind her to infinity.

  She tried to objectify the pain itself.

  She imagined the pain as outside her, even as a living thing, a malevolent creature. It was a red-hot poker embedded in her bone, a crucifixion nail driven into her foot, a gigantic invisible snake-head with its jaws clamped over her foot…

  If only there was some way she could make it stop. If she was on some dumb stunt of a polar expedition, she’d call in the relief planes right now. If she was subject to some ghastly torture, she’d confess, give in, betray anybody or anything. Just to make this stop.

  But through all this the pain was still there, lurking beneath the distracting superstructures she erected inside her head. And every time she slipped or caught her boot on a ridge in the ice the pain would come bubbling up, overwhelming her conscious thought, raw and primeval.

  She kept getting ahead of Rosenberg. Each time she stopped, it seemed an increasing wait before his circle of helmet lamp light came weaving across the ice towards her.

  The journey just went on, without meaning save survival, day after day.

  After fifteen days out, they got back to Tartarus Base.

  In the light of her helmet lamp, the orbiter and Command Module, side by side, were just mounds in the gumbo, their surfaces streaked by bruised-purple tholin deposits. They were unrecognizable as man-made artifacts save for their symmetry of construction.

  Somehow, Benacerraf was disappointed. She’d been building this place up in her mind as her home, like a cliche of a family-Christmas fireside, somewhere warm and safe that would shelter her. But it was no such thing, of course; all there was here was a couple of downed spacecraft, a tiny, shivering farm, a cooling nuclear pile.

  She unbuckled her traces. She retraced her tracks, back towards Rosenberg. Her footsteps, in the dim yellow light of her helmet lamp, were shallow, infilling craters in the gumbo.

  She got them both into the airlock. She cracked their suit seals and took off their helmets, boots and gloves. Rosenberg’s helmet came away with strips of skin and tufts of hair and beard clinging to the lining.

  She led him through into the interior of the hab module. The air here was hot, thick and moist, hard to breathe, and so sterile it almost smelled antiseptic. Bizarrely, she found herself missing the warm, almost cozy suit-stink she’d been immersed i
n for two weeks.

  She helped Rosenberg to one of the Command Module couches. He sat there like a melting, gumbo-streaked snowman, his bony hands dumped in his lap, his head slumped forward.

  Benacerraf made her way to the far end of the hab module, her ruined socks leaving trails of sticky blood on the clean metal surfaces.

  She stripped off her own suit. She was stiff all over, particularly in her lower back, shoulders and hips; it was painful to put herself through the contortions required to shuck off the suit’s layers. The inner layers clung to her damaged flesh; she had to tease the cloth and plastic away from her skin, trying not actually to break her epidermis or pull away scabs. The suit was worn and badly damaged in places. They’d been lucky the suits had worked to carry them so far — the EVA had been well beyond the suits’ design limits.

  At last the suit lay as a heap of soiled Beta-cloth at her feet.

  She stood naked, shivering despite the cloying warmth of the hab module.

  She was skeletal, her ribs protruding under flat sacks she didn’t recognize as her breasts, her buttocks lumpy and flaccid, her knees and elbows hard knobs of bone. Her feet were a mass of lumpy, pus-filled growths and open frostbite wounds and scars. Crotch rot spread from the dark triangle of pubic hair, out over her thighs and belly, angry red. There were pressure sores where the harness had dug into her, and where her suit had chafed, over her hips, under her armpits and around her chest and waist. Her personal hygiene during the EVA hadn’t been too effective. Her upper legs and buttocks were flecked with yellow urine stains and smears of what looked like dried excrement, and there were patches of glaring red skin infections around her waist and legs, the parts of her body where she hadn’t been able, or willing, to reach.

  She allowed herself two minutes to shower. The hot, clean water felt like acid on her skin; it was actually painful to have the layers of filth lifted from her ghost-pale flesh.

  She padded to her quarters. She pulled on underwear, and an old Beta-cloth T-shirt and shorts. She tried to don her Beta-cloth slippers, but they wouldn’t fit over her swollen sores; so she wrapped old T-shirts loosely over her feet and bound them up with duct tape.

  She gave herself a moment to run her hands over her belongings, her books and photos, anchoring herself once more in these relics of her life, her personality.

  As an afterthought, she put on a facemask and a pair of surgical gloves. Then she made her way to Rosenberg.

  He was still in his suit. She stood him upright. He felt disturbingly light. His head was a mess, the hair matted with filth and patchily bald; there were cracks around his mouth, nose and eyes that had opened into fissures as deep as razor slices, dribbling thin blood.

  Slowly, she got him stripped. His undergarments were even more matted with waste and filth and blood than hers had been. It looked as if he had suffered some kind of dysentery attack and fouled his pants; when she pulled off the suit, hot stinking liquid flowed out over the clean floor of the hab module.

  Benacerraf got his longjohns away from his arms and lowered them around his legs. A shower of skin fragments and pubic hair fell onto the metal at Rosenberg’s feet. His legs and groin seemed to have been stripped clean of skin, left raw and compressed into folds. His kneecaps were just ripples of flesh, his genitals rubbed raw. She could see deep wounds dug by the edges of the harness straps, and within the patterns of straps she found eruptions like small, festering boils.

  The soles of Rosenberg’s feet had split, each of them, down the middle: almost neatly, like the soles of cheap shoes. The casts of dead skin came away like plastic moulds in her hands, leaving roughened, raw tissue, from which a watery fluid leaked.

  “Dear God, Rosenberg.”

  He whispered, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  His head lolled, and he sighed, his voice a rattle.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  His head rolled around until he was facing her. “Yes, I know what it is. I think, anyhow. You need to take a few blood samples to—”

  “Tell me.”

  “Vitamin A poisoning. Those damn baby carrots.” He opened his mouth to laugh, and spittle looped between his lips. “Remember, Paula? They were too bitter for you. Well, you were right. More vitamin A than dog liver. Another failure of this toy ecosystem we’re trying to maintain here. No buffering… the whole thing’s too small… levels of toxin all over the place. We just couldn’t control it well enough. We gave it a good try, but it was going to get us in the end…”

  There was a flap of skin, loose, beneath his ear. Like a ring-tab, she thought. With a sense of dread, she touched it. It was dry. She pulled at it.

  The epidermal covering of Rosenberg’s ear came away intact, a complete cast. It drooped between her finger and thumb. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” She shivered violently and flung the thing away.

  He fell against her, clutching at her arm. “You have to get the samples in, Paula. Look for the kerogen. Do it while I can help you. Everything depends on that — everything—”

  His head lolled again, and he went limp.

  Gently, she tucked her arms under his body, and lifted him like a child.

  There had been no signal from the ground, of any kind. Benacerraf checked every day, and bounced test signals off Cassini, to ensure there was no fault with the satellite. And she sent transmissions home, regular updates, with their results, and some personal messages.

  In case anyone was listening.

  The choice was not to send at all, and that would have felt like giving up. Or as if, by her own loss of faith, by not acting as if there was someone left down there, she might actually somehow bring down the catastrophe they both feared.

  She could picture Seattle, almost as vividly as if she was there. She could picture the house where she’d grown up, the places she’d lived with Jackie as a child, her grandchildren… It was more real, to her, than this murky shit-hole.

  How could it be gone, ruined? How could there be nobody, walking the dog, watching the news, mowing the lawn?

  In the privacy of her room, though, she grieved, little by little, for her family. It was as if she was allowing herself to face the huge loss, piece by piece.

  What she feared most was the thought that she and Rosenberg might be all that was left. She hated the idea that her actions, the rest of her trivial life, had suddenly become so significant.

  She wished she had some way to climb up above the clouds, to lash up some kind of telescope and peer at the Earth, and see.

  * * *

  Rosenberg sat on a Command Module couch. He was wrapped up, pupa-like, in layers of clothing and thick blankets of Beta-cloth, but he still complained about feeling cold. He wore heavy sunglasses — they’d belonged to Bill Angel — to protect his eyes from the glare of the hab module floods. He’d lost most of his hair, and much of the skin from his scalp and face; swathes of raw tissue showed where his flesh was exposed, riddled by crimson crevasses.

  Benacerraf made herself a meal: rice, boiled in Titan melt, with lettuce and some beef jerky from the stores. She sat opposite Rosenberg as she ate. She’d already fed him tonight, spooning the contents of one of their last soup sachets into his mouth, trying not to react to the blood and hunks of loose skin that followed the spoon back out of his lips.

  Rosenberg had become the defining feature in her mental landscape now, as so much of her time was given over to caring for him: medical attention, tending to his basic needs — wiping my ass,as Rosenberg put it — and covering his work for him.

  He told her what he’d found in the samples from El Dorado. His voice was a thin, robotic rasp.

  “I found a lot of interesting products. Beyond the usual organic sediments that come from the stratospheric chemistry, there are traces of urea, organic acids, diacids, some amino acids. Products of tholin hydrolysis. Other amino acids resulting from cyanogen addition to nitriles. Results of cyanogen and nitrile polymerization, inclu
ding imidazole, purines, pyrimidines. I got aldehydes, ketones, acetaldehyde — the results of alkyne hydrolysis. Some Strecker synthesis — aldehyde-nitrile condensation. Aldehyde polymers, including sugars, glycerol, some other species of—”

  “Christ, Rosenberg. Did we find kerogen or not?”

  “…No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Paula. I guess I was wrong; El Dorado can’t hare been a carbonaceous chondrite crater after all. My best guess now is that it was formed by a fragment, a calving of a much bigger bolide, which was probably water ice… There is a large water ice crater system a little further to the west.” His head rolled back and forth. “And that’s recent. Maybe the impact was in historic times. Maybe it could have been visible from Earth through a telescope, if anyone had been looking that way, a giant ice comet smashing into Titan… A hell of a thing.”

  “So we’re fucked. The EVA was a wild goose chase.”

  “All the products I found were the result of reacting Titan materials with water from the bolide. I’m sorry, Paula.”

  She grunted, “It was a good shot. Anyhow, I didn’t have any smarter ideas.”

  He seemed to be trying to lean forward; he struggled, feebly, within his Beta-cloth layers. “Look, Paula. We have to face facts. We’re beyond rescue from Earth. We’re on our own here. We ought to look at the worst case.”

  “The worst case?” She laughed, around a mouthful of rice. “Look at us, Rosenberg. What could be worse than this?”

  “We are the last humans.”

  He fell silent, his breathing a noisy rasp.

  She felt the motion of her jaw slow, without conscious volition. Saliva pooled in her mouth, flooding the rice grains and lettuce there, swamping her sense of taste.

  Rosenberg said, “The great unspoken truth, huh.”

  Deliberately she started to chew again; she swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

  “But what difference does it make?” she said. “We’re fucked anyhow.”

  “True. Without the kerogen supplement, our ecosystem isn’t going to last long. A couple more system crashes and we won’t be able to recover. We just aren’t viable here. We tried hard to make it so, but in the long term we were always going to lose. And the whole thing will die with the two of us anyhow.”