Titan

by Bova, Ben

  “Most of the people in this habitat aren’t terribly religious,” Holly said. “We got rid of the zealots.”

  “Perhaps so, but when it comes to family planning, most people have usually been imprinted since childhood with firm ideas on the subject.”

  “I guess,” Holly said, as the robot trundled back to their table with a tray bearing a tea service.

  While she put the tray on their table and began to pour herself a cup of tea, Wilmot went on. “Different cultures have approached the matter in different ways. The Chinese, with their hierarchical heritage, imposed population limits by government fiat. It worked, after a fashion. India, of course, was a different matter entirely. Before the biowar depopulated the subcontinent, that is.”

  “Our ZPG protocol has been sort of voluntary, really.”

  Wilmot nodded. “Yes. A law with no enforcement behind it. Seems to be working, so far.”

  “So far.”

  “You’re concerned that it won’t work much longer.”

  “Professor, it can’t work much longer. Most of our population is young; the women are of child-bearing age.”

  Wilmot’s lips twitched in what might have been either a smile or a grimace. “Child-bearing age seems to have stretched a great deal. Once it was definitely ended by the time a woman reached forty. Now it’s decades longer.”

  “And getting even longer,” Holly added.

  “I suppose they’ll all want to have children. Most of them, at least.”

  “At least.”

  He took a sip of his tea. “Western cultures—Europe, North America, Australia—they’ve pretended that they handle family planning through the concept of individual liberty.”

  “You mean they don’t?”

  “Hardly. There has always been a religious backbone to the illusion of individual liberty. Western governments never had to make laws about population control because their churches did it for them. Especially once the fundamentalists gained power and civil law became intermixed with religious dogma.”

  “But the New Morality and the other fundamentalist groups are against family planning,” Holly pointed out.

  “Officially, yes. They realize that overpopulation leads to poverty, and poor people are easier to control than wealthy ones. Still …” Wilmot tilted his head slightly. “There are ways to get the churches to look the other way. Particularly if you are a generous donor to said churches.”

  “So the rich stay rich and the poor have babies.”

  “And remain poor.”

  Holly could feel her brows knitting. “So how do we handle population growth here in Goddard?” she asked. “We can’t keep this ZPG protocol much longer.”

  Wilmot drained his cup, then set it down with a delicate clink on its saucer. “My dear young lady, I’m afraid that problem is one that you are going to have to deal with. I have no wisdom from on high to impart to you.”

  She almost smiled at his words. “I was hoping you did.”

  With a shake of his head, Wilmot said, “You are dealing with the most fundamental of human drives, my dear. There are no pat solutions to the problem. You—and the rest of our population—will have to work out your own salvation for yourselves.”

  Glumly, Holly said, “I guess.”

  “Indeed,” said Wilmot, thinking, This will be the most fascinating anthropological study since Margaret Mead’s early work in Samoa. Will these people be able to produce a workable solution, or will they tear themselves and this habitat to pieces?

  18 FEBRUARY 2096: EVENING

  Despite Berkowitz’s assurances, Holly felt wired tighter than a bomb as she stepped before the video cameras. There was no one else in the studio. She had chosen to give her first political speech from the communications center, alone, without a claque of an audience to applaud her words. I don’t have a following, she realized. Not like Malcolm. Not yet.

  Pancho, Wanamaker, Wunderly and several other friends had offered to come with her, but Holly had told them all that their presence would only make her more nervous. In truth, the only person she wanted to have there was Raoul, but he hadn’t said more than six words to her that morning in the simulations lab, when the power failure had struck.

  So now she stood nervously in front of a trio of cameras with their unblinking lenses focused on her. Berkowitz was smiling benignly at her from behind the central camera. There had been a couple of other technicians in the studio when Holly had come in, but they seemed to have disappeared now.

  “Your introduction is prerecorded. I’ll set it going and then give you a five-second countdown,” Berkowitz said. “When I point to you like this”—he aimed a stubby forefinger at her—“it’ll be time for you to start.”

  “’Kay,” Holly said. “I click.”

  There was a monitor screen beside the camera on her right. Holly thought she looked terrible: strung tight and eyes staring like a skinny, frightened waif. Slightly to her left, another monitor displayed the words of her speech in oversize capital letters.

  The seconds dragged by, until at last Berkowitz began, “Five … four … three … two …” He pointed dramatically.

  Holly tried to make a smile as she began, “Good evening. I’m Holly Lane, and I’m running for the office of chief administrator. Until yesterday I was your director of human resources, but I was fired from that job, prob’ly because the guy who’s currently chief administrator got sore that I decided to run against him.”

  She took a breath, saw her next paragraph scrolling up on the monitor, then focused her eyes on Berkowitz, rocking up on his toes and down again as he smiled and nodded encouragement to her from behind the center camera.

  “I’d like to tell you why I decided to run against my former boss. It’s because of a certain married couple who came to me to ask permission to have a baby. They made me realize that there must be a lot of women in this habitat of ours who want to have children.

  “Now, I know we live in an enclosed environment with limited resources. And I know we all signed onto to the Zero Population Growth protocol when we first joined this habitat. But I feel that it’s time to examine that protocol and see if there isn’t some way we can allow our population to expand—within the limits of our resources, naturally. More than half of our habitat is empty, unpopulated, unused. I believe that with care, we can allow our population to grow. I believe that we have the intelligence and the courage to allow controlled population growth. I don’t think that this habitat of ours should continue to be barren and childless.”

  Berkowitz continued to nod and smile at her. The monitor had scrolled to her final, wrap-up paragraph.

  But Holly ignored it and blurted, “And I also believe that there’s absolutely no acceptable reason for power outages like we had this morning. That’s inexcusable. We need to pay much more attention to the equipment that keeps us alive. That’s all I’ve got to say. For now. I’ll have more later on. Thank you.”

  Holly thought she could hear Eberly’s howl of anguish from halfway across the village.

  19 FEBRUARY 2096: MIDNIGHT

  And where have you been?” Urbain snapped.

  Coolly stepping to the chair before his desk and sitting in it, Yolanda Negroponte brushed a tress of ash-blonde hair from her face and said, “A group of us had a little political discussion over supper.”

  Habib, already seated in front of Urbain’s desk, looked puzzled. “What group?”

  “The women of the scientific staff,” Negroponte replied, smiling faintly. “Didn’t you watch Holly Lane’s speech earlier this evening?”

  Shaking his head, Habib answered, “I was here, going over these ghost tracks—”

  “Where you should have been,” Urbain said sternly to Negroponte. “A break for supper should not take three hours.”

  “As I said,” Negroponte replied, unflinching, “we had a political discussion over our meal.”

  Before the two of them fell into an actual argument, Habib pointed to the display on the
wall screen and said, “We’ve been trying to piece together these ghost tracks from Alpha.”

  The display of Titan’s surface was the only light in Urbain’s office. As Negroponte turned in her chair to look at the screen, Urbain noticed that Habib was watching her, not the smart wall. She is a well-proportioned woman, Urbain noticed. Slightly fleshy, big as an Amazon. Habib seemed fascinated by her.

  “If those faint traces in the ground actually are the remains of Alpha’s tracks,” Habib said, “maybe we can use them to find the beast.”

  Urbain bristled at his “if,” and even more at his referring to Alpha as a beast.

  Negroponte was shaking her head, which made that troublesome lock of hair fall across her face again. “There’s something else involved here,” she said. “Something more important.”

  Urbain felt his brows rise. “More important than finding Alpha?”

  “If those smooth areas are the remains of Alpha’s tracks, then the question is, what smoothed the tracks?”

  Habib said, “You mentioned this before, the idea that something is actively smoothing over the beast’s tracks. Something in the ground.”

  “Actively smoothing the tracks,” Urbain repeated.

  “Within a matter of days,” said Negroponte. “Perhaps only hours.”

  Despite himself, Urbain felt intrigued. “It could be erosion from rainfall.”

  “Or something tectonic, geological,” Habib mused.

  “What geological force could do that?”

  Negroponte shook her head. “I don’t think it could be geological. And not weathering. Not on this time scale.”

  “You believe it’s biological?” Urbain murmured.

  “What else could it be?”

  Habib said, “We’d better get the bio team in on this.”

  He scrambled to his feet. Negroponte got up beside him. Urbain absently noted that she was slightly taller than he. They headed for the door.

  “It’s past midnight,” she said to Habib.

  “So what?” he replied, almost laughing. “They’ll want to get started on this right away. They can sleep some other time.”

  The two of them left the office, leaving Urbain sitting there, his mouth hanging open, his mind spinning: But we must find Alpha! That is our primary task. And we have only another day or so, perhaps only hours, before she goes into hibernation.

  But he was now alone, talking to no one but himself.

  Eberly had settled down in his favorite easy chair to watch Holly’s speech with smug assurance that she would trip over her own feet. But her crack about the power outage infuriated him. As if it’s my fault! he raged, pacing up and down in his apartment.

  At last he decided that he had no choice. He had to fire Aaronson. Someone’s head had to roll—he had to show the voters that he was doing something. I’ll reorganize the maintenance department, Eberly said to himself. I’ll put Timoshenko in charge of the entire department, with Aaronson’s number-two under him. And the first job for Timoshenko will be to find out what caused that power outage and make certain it doesn’t happen again. Not until the election’s over, at least.

  Tamiko and Hideki Mishima were so excited by Holly’s speech that they couldn’t sleep.

  “She really wants to help us,” Tamiko said to her husband, as they lay together, wide awake, in the darkened bedroom.

  “Yes, but she will run into a lot of opposition,” Hideki warned. “Many people will be afraid of a population explosion that could ruin us. They’ll want to cling to the ZPG protocol.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  Tamiko propped herself on one elbow and peered down at her husband’s face. “Then we must take positive action. Bring people together to support Ms. Lane. Organize into a political force.”

  “We?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Women who want to start having babies,” she replied. Then, laughing, she tousled his hair. “Don’t worry, darling, you won’t have to do a thing. This is my responsibility.”

  Oswaldo Yañez had watched Holly’s speech while sitting beside his wife on the sofa in their living room. He had paid careful attention to every word, then dismissed her speech from his mind. He got up from the sofa, went to the office he had created out of an alcove in their bedroom and spent the remainder of the evening studying the latest medical bulletins from Earth and Selene.

  The research reports from Earth concentrated on public health efforts to contain epidemics of diseases long thought eradicated. But ebola, tuberculosis and even plague were on the rise in new strains that resisted antibiotics. Even in the major cities, with their sanitized buildings and public water and sewage systems, such diseases were stalking the streets. In the poorer parts of the world the epidemics were almost out of control.

  Yañez wondered about his native Buenos Aires. How were the people there being affected? He felt an unaccustomed sense of mean pleasure at the thought of the people who had exiled him from Earth being cut down by the very diseases he had worked to curtail. Vengeance is the Lord’s, Yañez reminded himself. Yet he took a cold satisfaction from the thought.

  Of course there were no reports on research dealing with AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases. The self-righteous prigs who had exiled him refused to allow such research; they considered the agony and death from such diseases to be a punishment for sin.

  The bulletins from Selene were very different. Research in the lunar laboratories concentrated on life extension work, rejuvenation therapies, nanotechnology—areas of study that were forbidden on Earth.

  Blinking tiredly, Yañez looked up from his screen and saw that it was past midnight. Strange that Estela had not come to bed. Rubbing his eyes, he walked back into the living room.

  Estela was watching Holly Lane’s speech again.

  “Are they rerunning it?” he asked, heading for the kitchen and the leftover empanadas that Estela had stored in the bread box.

  “No, I recorded her speech,” Estela replied calmly. She was a slim, spare woman without a gram of fat on her. He often thought of her as a dear little sparrow. But Yañez knew his little sparrow had the inner strength of an eagle.

  He stopped before reaching the bread box. “You recorded it?”

  “I think what she is saying is important.”

  Yañez chuckled uncertainly. “You’re too old to have another baby.”

  She smiled thinly at him. “Women my age have given birth. You know that.”

  “After being implanted with ova from a donor.”

  “So?”

  “Estela, I’m too old to put up with a baby!”

  She laughed out loud. “Don’t worry, querido. I’m not going to go through all that again.”

  “Good,” he said, not recognizing the bitterness in her laughter. He went to the bread box, thinking that Estela had voted for Eberly last election and would probably do the same again this time.

  He hoped.

  TITAN ALPHA

  Machines do not feel monotony or boredom. Titan Alpha trundled across the rolling, spongy ground collecting data and storing them in its main memory core. The core was nearing its saturation point, though, and Alpha’s master program recognized that a decision would soon have to be made.

  Reviewing the data accumulated so far, the master program decided that Titan’s indigenous life forms were 83 percent unicellular, the remainder being protocellular forms that reproduced at random rather than follow a preset reproduction code patterned into their genetic materials. Indeed, the protocellular organisms had no genetic materials, not in the sense that terrestrial cells did. No genetic code, either. They consisted entirely of protein analogs and reproduced by random fission. Offspring bore statistically insignificant resemblance to their parent organisms.

  The biology program flashed a continuous urgent request to uplink this information. It was completely different from any observations that were stored in its files, and therefore the bio program’s imperatives re
quired that these data be uplinked without delay. But the master program’s primary restriction prohibited any uplinks. The biology program searched its limited repertoire of responses and found no way to override the primary restriction.

  So Alpha labored onward, climbing crumbly prominences of crackling ice, delving into slush-coated craters that were shallow enough to be negotiated. It skirted the shore of the methane sea that was named Dragon’s Head in its terrain atlas, although it fired its laser into the thinly crusted waves that surged sluggishly across the sea to verify that its chemical constituents matched those of the Lazy H Sea, where it had originally landed.

  Ethane rain fell, and streams of the ethane-laced water flowed down into the nearby sea. Black snows of tholins blanketed the region briefly, then marched away on the turbid wind that slowly pushed the smoggy clouds high above.

  Still Alpha lumbered onward, propelled by its master program’s twin priorities: survival and data collection.

  The fact that the core memory was nearing its saturation point impinged on the master program like a glaring light flashing painfully into a man’s eyes. The master program reviewed its options. Hibernation mode would suspend data collection and was to be used only as a last resort. Dumping existing data was a possibility, but that option conflicted with the higher priority of data collection. The master program ran through its logic tree three times, then searched all its systems for additional memory space. There was some in the biology and geophysics programs, also in the maintenance program. Reviewing all the other possible options, Alpha concluded that since neither its downlink nor uplink communications programs were being used, it could collapse both programs and use the freed space to store additional data.

  The master program went through its permissible options once again, and after fifteen nanoseconds of comparing priorities and restrictions, it constructed a decision hierarchy.