“Ammonos?”
“I told you we had to take this one step at a time.”
She looked at Rosenberg. “You know,” she said, “I’m hungry. And thirsty. Shit. They had no right.”
“What?”
“To bring me back.”
“Yeah. Well, they did it. And I’m hungry too.” He shrugged. “Try anything. We’ve no way of knowing what’s toxic, even lethal… We have to trust the design.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Just try something, Paula.”
Near her legs grew a couple of the mushroom-like puffballs, some sparse grass, and a scratchy growth like bruised-purple heather. At random, she dug her hand into a puffball. It imploded, like a meringue, and a cloud of some kind of spores blew up around her arm, clinging to her flesh and the suit. She came away with a handful of the mushroom’s meat. It was white, soft, cold, slightly moist. She suppressed a shudder; the feel of it was repellent.
She lifted it to her mouth, bit off a chunk, and chewed deliberately.
It crumbled, collapsing to a hard residue, like bad sponge cake. It was still cold, and there was the faintest of flavours, an aftertaste of decay.
She swallowed the residue.
Rosenberg watched her intently. “Well, you haven’t choked, thrown up or keeled over.”
“But I’m even more thirsty.”
“Come on,” he said. “I think the ground dips down a little over that way; maybe we’ll find some fresh water.”
They began to walk, parallel to the looming grey-white cliffs.
They came to a stream.
It ran sluggishly through a shallow gully, eroded into the ground. The water was running away from the direction of the grey cliffs, Benacerraf noticed. It looked a little muddy, and dirty grey ice clung to its banks.
Rosenberg squatted and dipped a hand into the stream. He pulled it back quickly, but he brought up a little water cupped in his hands. “Ouch. Cold as all hell. I guess it’s glacier melt, running off those cliffs.” He stared dubiously into the little puddle he cradled. “Drink it, Rosenberg.”
He sighed. He lifted up his hand to his mouth, and sucked in the water noisily. He grimaced. “A little salty. It’s okay. So cold, though.”
She knelt down beside him, and began scooping up water. It splashed over her face, the cold stinging; and she could feel its icy passage down her neck and into her stomach.
Rosenberg said, “These suits seem to keep us warm enough. But drinking this stuff will bring our core temperatures down. We need to find a way to build a fire.”
“Those trees look as if they will burn.”
“We don’t have any way of lighting the fire.”
“Didn’t you ever go camping, Rosenberg…? No, I guess you wouldn’t. You take a couple of sharpened sticks, and—”
He held up his hands. “I believe you. Show me later. Just don’t lecture me about it.” He plucked at the chest-cover of his transparent suit. “I got a more urgent problem. I need to pee.” He clawed at the plastic-like sheet over his genitals, comically.
She realized that the cold water had run straight through her, too; soon she would face the same urgency as Rosenberg.
What were they supposed to do? Just let go, and walk around sloshing? Suddenly her suit seemed constricting, even claustrophobic.
She stood with Rosenberg, and experimented with his suit, pulling the clear material this way and that. At last, she found that if she pinched both sides of the suit’s neck, a seam opened up. Once the split began, it ran quickly along the lines of Rosenberg’s body, over his arms, down his hips and the sides of his legs.
Gently, Benacerraf pulled at the neck, and the front of the suit just peeled away from Rosenberg, like a parting chrysalis.
When the suit lay in a clear puddle at Rosenberg’s feet, he clutched his arms over his chest. “Christ, that’s cold.”
“Don’t be a baby, Rosenberg.”
He walked away, hopping gingerly over the icy ground on the balls of his feet. He moved behind one of the trees, and in a couple of seconds Benacerraf heard the heavy splash of urine drops against the soil, and saw wisps of steam rising around Rosenberg’s legs.
To get Rosenberg back into the suit, they found the easiest way was to lie him down, inside the back section. Benacerraf lifted the front over him and ran her pinched thumb and forefinger up over the opened seal; the material melded together seamlessly.
After that, she took her turn. Oddly, she felt naked out of the suit, even though it had been all but transparent. The ground was hard and icy under her bare feet as she squatted.
So here she was, eating and drinking and pissing and talking, life going on, just as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn’t ended, as if she hadn’t died and been dug out of the ice and… hell, all of it.
It had never struck her before how much of her time, her conscious attention, was taken up just with the business of being human.
She rejoined Rosenberg, who stood by the stream. They looked at each other.
“Where are we, Rosenberg? Is this Mars?”
He looked confused. “No. Not Mars. Of course not. Mars is gone. This is Titan. Don’t you get it? You’re still on Titan, Paula.” He glanced up at the wide, flawed face of the sun, which filled the dome of heaven above.
Something connected in her mind. Cosmology lectures. Carl Sagan. “If this is Titan—” Oh, shit. “A red giant,” she said. “The sun’s become a red giant.”
He laughed brutally. “You figured it out. Just like I had to. Sorry there aren’t any comforting answers. We might be ten billion years from home, Paula.”
The ruined sun seemed to hang over her head, huge and heavy, as if it might crush her; she wanted to escape from it, run under a tree, hide her head with her hands. “Tell me what’s happened to us, Rosenberg.”
His face hardened further. “You want the short version? You died. So did I. We all died. We were frozen into the gumbo. Later — a lot later — aboriginal life forms dug us out and restored us. Quite a feat.” His voice was thin, trembling.
“We’re stranded here. Is that what you’re saying, Rosenberg?”
Again he looked confused. “Stranded? Of course we’re stranded. Who do you think I am, H.G. Wells?”
She felt a snap of irritation. “Lighten up, Rosenberg. I’m just finding all this a little hard to handle.”
“What the hell do you expect me to say? I woke up ahead of you, that’s all. This is as hard for me as for you. And I’m stuck here too.”
“No way home, huh.”
He frowned. “Paula, Titan is our home now. For the rest of our lives.”
She lifted up her face to the distorted sun.
She thought of home: of Houston’s sticky heat, the corroding sea air of the Cape, the fresh green of Seattle. It was impossible to believe that all of that wasn’t still up there somewhere: that huge, sunlit Earth, infinite and eternal, full of problems and dreams, the disregarded backdrop to her own life.
How could it all be gone?
“Come on,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s follow this brook downstream,” he said.
She shrugged. She didn’t have any better plans.
As they walked, he told her about the first time he’d woken, the glimpse he’d got of ammonia life.
They walked for a couple of miles, away from the cliffs. The ground started to slope downwards, as if they were walking down a long beach, and the stream became broader, its eroded banks more ragged.
At last, the covering of topsoil wore thin, and bare ice bedrock pushed through the surface like bone, pale red-grey in the light of the sun. Only a handful of plants grew here, clumps of the grass-analogue struggling to survive in the scrapings of topsoil. The exposed ice was sharply cold under Benacerraf’s feet.
They topped a shallow crest.
Before them an ocean stretched to the horizon, blood-red and murky, huge waves moving sluggishly across it. The liquid lapped at the edge of the sh
ore, and flecks of ice crusted its surface.
Rosenberg grunted. “We’re on Titan for sure. Look at the size of those damn waves. And no tides to speak of.”
“What do you think the fluid is? Ammonia?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Of course not. The temperature’s wrong. It’s water. What else?”
She wrapped her arm around his. “You’re going to have to give me a little time, Rosenberg. I’m not so smart as you.”
“Then you’re lucky.”
“Come on. Let’s go find somewhere we can sleep.”
Maybe a mile inland from the water’s edge, they found a thicket of trees, with a thick blanket of topsoil and fat white flowers beneath. When they crawled under the layers of low branches, Benacerraf had a feeling of shelter; the shade shut out the unchanging, ruddy sky.
They ate and drank a little more. They tried to build a fire, Benacerraf rubbing sticks back and forth earnestly, but without any success. Maybe the wood needed to dry out.
They huddled together to sleep. They lay on the ground, back to back, then face to face. They couldn’t get comfortable, and Benacerraf was cold, even with her face tucked down into her suit.
She had an idea.
They stripped off their suits, and pressed their four halves together, pinching the magical seams. It took a little experimentation, but eventually they had made a kind of shapeless sleeping bag large enough to take the two of them.
They crawled into it, face to face. Rosenberg’s flesh, where it touched her at knees and hips, was hot. Soon the bag started to grow warmer.
Benacerraf felt something pressing against her stomach.
“Rosenberg…”
“I’m sorry,” he said miserably. “A primate reflex, here at the end of time. I can’t help it.”
“You’re so pompous, Rosenberg.”
She touched his face. It was wet.
She said, “What’s wrong?”
“Do you want a list? I want to go home. I don’t want to be stuck out here, like this, in the open air, trying to sleep in the daylight.”
“Have you lost your curiosity, Rosenberg?”
“No. But I hate not knowing what tomorrow will be like.”
“Rosenberg—”
“What?”
She reached out and ran her hand over his chest. Rosenberg’s body, shorn of hair, was soft, almost girlish.
She climbed on top of him, keeping the suit bag huddled over her. She bent down and kissed him gently on the mouth. “Let’s get warm, Rosenberg.”
“Yeah.”
He took hold of her hips, and pulled her down towards him.
There was a scratching sound, from a few yards away. Maybe it was a cat, she thought sleepily.
She had one arm stuck under Rosenberg. He had his thin back to her, and was snoring softly. Carefully she pulled the arm out from under him; it tingled as the blood supply was restored to it.
She rolled on her back. That huge, swollen sun still hung above her; maybe it had dipped down from the zenith a little way.
Morning on Titan:no birds were singing, no traffic noise, no radios or TVs blaring, no softscreen billboards shining.
Shit, she thought. It’s real. I’m still here. I’m stranded billions of years into the future. Earth is gone, and I’m on Titan, transformed by person or persons unknown.
Yesterday had been — unreal. Overwhelming. But waking up today, with a pain in her back and a gritty taste in her mouth, the reality of her situation seemed mundane. Even irritating.
And there wasn’t a cup of coffee on the whole fucking moon.
Away from Rosenberg’s warmth she could feel the hard coldness of the ground under her, and the chill air seeped into the improvised sleeping bag at her neck.
She had the feeling that Rosenberg was awake, but was lying there with his eyes closed, hoping the day would go away, or maybe that she would take some kind of responsibility for it all. She could understand that. Hell, how were they supposed to cope with this? Surely they both had some kind of post-traumatic stress to work through. And—
…What cat?
She rolled over and pushed up to her knees, resisted by the cramped, linked suits.
The creature was six feet away from them. It was the size and shape of a dinner table, and it picked its way across the ground on eight spindly, insectile legs, each maybe four feet long. The legs terminated in points, and didn’t leave footmarks. The main body, the table-top, was a corrugated, purple-black carapace; there were clusters of what looked like blackberries all around the table rim. The whole table-shape was swathed in a translucent golden-brown blanket, evidently the same material as Benacerraf’s suit.
Arms — six or seven of them — reached down from the underside of the table-top, and poked at the ground. The arms were skeletal bars of a glassy, semi-transparent crimson-grey substance, and Benacerraf couldn’t see how they moved; there was no evidence of anything like muscles or cables. The arms terminated in spiky claws with opposable thumb-like extensions. The claws dug gently at the surface, delicately picking up fragments and lifting them up to some kind of stowage under the table-top.
Rosenberg woke up with a start, his eyes puffy with sleep.
“What the—”
“Shut up,” Benacerraf hissed. “Look.”
He rolled onto his belly, his bony hip bumping against hers.
“Holy shit,” he said.
The creature, or artifact, was all but still. Only its arm-extensions worked, methodically picking over the soil. Occasionally a leg would rise, folding up delicately, and set down again. The motions were slow, deliberate, almost reptilian.
She had no sense of threat. The thing was so slow it was impossible to imagine that it could outrun humans, if it came to a chase. And besides, those limbs looked pretty fragile. Maybe they were made of water ice.
There were some heavy chunks of wood-analogue left over from the abortive fire from yesterday, within Benacerraf’s reach. If she had to she could reach out and find a club. It wouldn’t be hard to shatter those icicle legs.
The creature was standing over the patch of ground she had used as an improvised john yesterday, and it was taking salami slices off half-frozen lumps of feces.
“U.S. Cummings, I presume,” said Rosenberg.
“What?”
“Science fiction. Philip Dick. Never mind.”
“Rosenberg, I think it’s picking up one of my turds.”
“I don’t think you need to whisper,” Rosenberg said — but he was whispering too. The two of them were propped up on their elbows, inside their sleeping bag, like two kids watching TV in bed. “It must be aware we’re here. But I’m sure it’s not going to bother us.”
“You think it’s some kind of machine?”
“No. I think it’s alive. It’s an ammono creature. The coloration, the ridging on its back: all of that’s characteristic of the aboriginal life forms here.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw them, remember. Anyhow, you can see for yourself. Look at that blanket over the main body.”
“What is that, some kind of insulation?”
“No. Look at the frost; the temperatures in there must be low enough to allow ammonia to be liquid. Don’t you get it, Paula? It’s a spacesuit. The warming sun has brought the end of the world to Titan as much as to Earth. Now, this ammono animal is forced to take an EVA on the surface of its own planet.”
“So what’s it doing with my turds?”
“Sampling. Come on.” He struggled up to a kneeling position, and the last of their night’s warmth and musk dissipated. “Let’s get out of here.”
They shucked off the bag. Rosenberg pulled the suite apart, and Benacerraf hopped over the chill ground to a clump of trees, where she took a leak.
When she got back to Rosenberg, shivering, she found herself covering up her breasts and crotch until he’d helped her into her reassembled suit. It was odd, but she felt more embarrassed about her nudity in fron
t of the thing Rosenberg had called an ammono than she had before Rosenberg.
The suit sealed up neatly around her, and warmed rapidly.
The two of them walked out of the little copse, and onto the plain. The ammono stayed behind, still sawing industriously at Benacerraf’s crap.
On the open plain, little had changed since the day before. The plain was just a gently sloping tundra, studded by the clusters of low bushes and scratchy grass, bordered at one side by the white cliffs of ice, and on the other by the black, oily, placid sea.
But now, there was movement — delicate, precise — everywhere.
The ammonos were scattered over the plain, from cliff to ocean’s edge. There had to be hundreds of them. And they all looked identical to the table-shaped creature which had disturbed them: the swathe of translucent blanket over the rectangular, ridged carapace, the spindly legs, the arms industriously scratching at the soil.
“They can’t all be taking samples of our dung.”
“Of course not,” he said, faintly irritated. “It isn’t us alone they’re interested in. It’s the whole of this biosphere.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
He pointed east towards the cliffs. “Come on. That way.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, that’s where the ammonos are coming from.”
She looked more carefully. Rosenberg was right. There was a greater density of the ammonos in the direction of the base of the cliffs.
“And for another—” He pointed upwards.
There was a contrail in the sky, white and sharp and unmistakable, scratched across the orange sky. It was rising up out of the east, from the land beyond the ice cliffs.
They walked.
She looked down on the ammonos as she passed them. It was like walking through a field of huge beetles. She could hear the soft clattering of the ammonos’ claws as they worked, a gentle sound like the click of cutlery on plates at some quiet restaurant. The ammonos dug blades of grass, complete little plants, out of the ground. They took black buds from the trees, pulling them gently away from their branches, and plucked seed packets from flowers. They seemed to be trying to avoid damaging the life forms.
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