Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Jiang caught Fahy’s arm. “The others are planning to play golf later—”

  “Where?”

  “At Augusta. Or rather, in a VR sensorium in the basement of the hotel… Would you prefer that we slip away, see something of the rest of the city?”

  Fahy frowned. “You mean a VR tour?”

  Jiang smiled. “Actually I meant—ah—RL. On foot.”

  The prospect terrified Fahy. But she didn’t feel she could refuse.

  And so they walked out.

  Shenzhen hit all her senses at once.

  There were five-star hotels, and revolving restaurants, and a stock market. There were huge billboards, maybe half of them animated, all of them acoustic, bellowing out ads. There was construction everywhere, buildings rising like fragile plants from cages of bamboo scaffolding; huge robot piledrivers hammered, and dust and rock fragments billowed out in peals of concussive noise. Cars and bicycles jostled in the crammed streets.

  Jiang, hidden behind softscreen one-way glasses and a smog-excluding facemask, kept hold of Fahy’s arm, and guided her away from the worst hassles. But still she saw prostitutes everywhere, painted girls in miniskirts or tight pants lining the curbs. There were child beggars in rags, running after cars, babies flapping like dolls in their arms. There were groups of young men wearing flashy softscreen-rich Western clothing, modish moustaches and elaborate coiffures; some of them wore rumpled, denim Mao jackets.

  Over a main artery there was a huge softscreen picture of the Helmsman of the Nation, China’s antique revolutionaryera leader. The image of his masklike, cracked face repeated a phrase over and over, which Jiang translated: Stick to the Communist Party’s line, one hundred years unwavering…

  There were few foreigners, little evidence of ethnic diversity. Everywhere, short, skinny people stared at Fahy, curious and hostile.

  Jiang leaned close to Fahy and murmured in her ear. “What do you think?”

  Fahy lifted her smog mask. “I feel like I’ve arrived in hell.”

  Jiang Ling laughed. “Perhaps you have. There are no cathedrals here. Shenzhen is a new city. There is nothing to do here but eat, buy sex, and do business.”

  “There are so many people…”

  “Of course. The city is a magnet for those from the country. It has always been thus. And besides, the countryside is failing.”

  “Failing?”

  “The country is suffering a severe water shortage. You must realize this is a global phenomenon. The Earth offers us only a finite amount of fresh water each year. Global warming is depleting the supply. And as the population and water usage grows, we may soon pass a fundamental limit… In China, much agriculture is water-intensive. The rice paddies, tended for a hundred generations, are drying out. So what is there to do? Life in a Shenzhen dorm—ten to a room, stinking metal bunks, locked in to mitigate against theft may be horrible, and prostitution may be morally foul. But it is better than starvation in a parched field. And then there are the plagues. Tuberculosis is the worst—”

  Fahy couldn’t help but flinch at that.

  Jiang’s hold on her arm tightened. “Don’t worry. There are monitors at the border fence, and medical patrols within. The TB is excluded from the city; cases are rare.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about my own safety,” Fahy said, but she was lying. “There must be solutions to the water problem,” she said. “Dams, river diversions—”

  “For many years such schemes have been proposed,” Jiang said. “There is a scheme to dam the Yangtze below the Three Gorges, for example, and another to divert half the Yangtze’s waters to the arid north. But the West has been reluctant to invest in such projects. Environmental concerns are raised, for example.”

  “That must be valid.”

  “But perhaps also there are ulterior motives: a continuing desire to contain China, to restrict its growth, using environmental factors as a pretext.” Jiang’s face, masked by her colorful softscreen glasses, was unreadable, betraying no resentment; her voice was even.

  They walked near the river, the Lohu, and the stink of hydrocarbons from the polluted water made Fahy think of the surface of Titan.

  Jiang led her to a park called Splendid China. This was a kitschy theme park with models of Chinese wonders, like the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square and the Potala Palace in Tibet. This was what passed for Shenzhen culture, said Jiang.

  They walked past a little model of a Long March, and a toy Lei Feng Number One suspended on a wire.

  Jiang laughed at this. “I can buy myself here, as a doorstep god,” she said. “How strange life is!”

  They called into a tea shop; they sat in comparative comfort and sipped hot jasmine tea—decaffeinated, Jiang assured her.

  An old man went by taking his canary in its cage for its constitutional. He encountered another owner on a small grass space outside a broken-down apartment building; they held up their birds, and stayed silent, while the birds sang to each other. Somewhere, the voice of a sim-Elvis—probably pirated—was crooning a song called, said Jiang, Ah, Chairman Mao, How the People from the Grasslands Long to Behold You.

  Fahy studied Jiang, discreetly. The slim girl she had met back in Houston in ‘05 was still there, she thought, but now Jiang looked much older: strained, disoriented.

  “You look tired, Jiang Ling,” she said.

  Jiang smiled. “Three years of touring the world. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to return to my first love.”

  “Flying.”

  “Yes.” Her face worked. “But I understand I am too valuable in my symbolic role. How I envy you.”

  “Me?”

  “You worked on the voyage to Titan. You showed vision and perseverance. And now, the fact that you are prepared to continue with your work even after the latest setback—”

  “You mean the RLV deferment.” Hadamard had been forced to accept another scaling-down of the Shuttle replacement project, another deferment of hardware delivery and testing. The current funding problems were the result of preliminary maneuvering in Congress as the members tried to position themselves for the new climate to come when, as expected, Maclachlan took the White House later in the year.

  The current scenario showed a Titan colony being resupplied by payloads delivered by a series of unmanned boosters—Delta IVs or Protons, probably—while some new manned capability, based on a Shuttle II, was developed, so they could be retrieved. But that possible retrieval date was receding further and further into the future. And it Maclachlan was elected—and did everything he said he would—it was quite possible even the resupply strategy would be allowed to wither altogether.

  Fahy refused to believe the dire worst-case predictions mouthed in the NASA centers. Was it really possible that some future Administration would actually choose to abandon Americans, on a remote world, without hope of retrieval or resupply? …

  Despite brutal controls, China’s population had grown to one and a half billion—a quarter of all the humans alive. Of those, a billion lived as peasants in the interior. And, it was estimated, as many as a hundred million lived in squalor and poverty in the shanty-town fringes of the glittering cities.

  More than a billion people, she thought, living in a cage, imposed by the continuing technological dominance of the West, and the rigid grip of the aging Party hierarchy.

  As long as the cage held, maybe things could persist. But it was all so damn unstable.

  China was not what she expected. China was different. China wasn’t just another geopolitical foe, like the Soviets used to be. It seemed to Fahy, sitting here in this tea shop, that China was the huge soul of humanity, its grandeur; and now that soul was waking, and America, with its tin-foil technology and rocketships, seemed remote and fragile, a land of fools.

  The future was bewildering. Not for the first time she wished she was traveling with Paula Benacerraf, leaving this huge, messy planet for the clean simplicities of spaceflight.

  A group of young people moved into the r
estaurant. Their faces and hands were invisible, as it made of glass. They sat in silence at their table. They wore plain Mao suits and caps. Their exposed flesh must be uniformly coated with image-tattoos which, thanks to some smart arrangement of microcameras, projected images of the background to each piece of flesh, so that their heads and hands looked invisible. They were even wearing softscreen contact lenses over their eyes, and their heads must be shaven of hair and lashes and beards.

  Of course the illusion wasn’t perfect; there was a vague sense of shape and form in the diffraction of light through the imaging systems, and whenever a hand or face was moved to quickly the imaging systems would lag, and the illusion would be briefly lost. But perhaps those imperfections, Fahy thought, merely added to the oddly repulsive fascination of the adornments.

  She pointed them out to Jiang, who looked surprised.

  “You’ve not seen this before? It is a new cult among the young. The Nullists. The cult of non-existence of the self.”

  “Good grief… I thought I’d seen everything. What is this, some kind of protest against the net clampdown?”

  “You are being parochial, Barbara. Remember, we never enjoyed the brief freedom of the net indulged by the West. No, it is, I think, a consequence of the way we explain ourselves and our world to the young. Science and economics: science, which teaches that we come from nothing and return to nothing; economics, which teaches us that we are all mere units, interchangeable and discardable. Science is already a cult of non-existence, in a sense. The most extreme adherents coat their bodies in image-tattoos, hiding themselves utterly. The Nullists are a strange mixture of scientific and Zen influences.”

  “Good grief. It’s the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m sorry. An old Kurt Vonnegut book. I haven’t seen this before.”

  “But the world is a small place. I’m sure it will spread to the US…”

  Fahy thought again of Xavier Maclachlan, of the anti-science mood he seemed determined to tap.

  Jiang said, “What does the Nullist phenomenon say about the world we are constructing for the young, Barbara?”

  Fahy looked out, at bustling Shenzhen. “Perhaps that it is hell indeed,” she said. She looked up; the Moon was rising, its face still bearing American footprints—battered and lifeless. “And there is no escape.”

  The two of them left the tea shop and walked back towards the hotel.

  In the distance, a couple of blocks away, she saw some kind of disturbance. A pack of children were attacking a sack of what looked like food—tangerine fruit, maybe. They attacked the pack like animals, she thought; their hunger was not feigned. Adults were joining in, beating at the children with sticks. She caught a glimpse of running police, the distant crackle of gunfire.

  Day 169

  Siobhan Libet pulled herself out of the hab module, and crawled through the flexible access tunnel into the farm.

  The CELSS farm—CELSS, for closed environment life support system was a basic pressurized cylinder sixteen feet long and fourteen across, fitting neatly into Discovery’s payload bay. It had been improvised from a couple of old Spacelab modules. Spacelab was the pressurized workshop provided by the Europeans for firing aboard Shuttle. Now that Spacelab wasn’t going to fly any more, the redundant hardware had been turned to better use.

  As she closed the hatch behind her, Libet felt an immediate sense of coziness, of warmth, of brightness. The pressure was high in here. The glow of the banks of lights was warm on her face, and the air seemed thick and humid and full of the smell of chlorophyll, of growing things, it was, simply, like being inside a compact greenhouse.

  The equipment racks and data processing consoles of the old low-Earth-orbit experimenters had been stripped out, and replaced by three racks of plants. The racks were thick, with tat pipes carrying nutrient solution that flowed beneath them. Fluorescent tubes were poised above each of the racks, flooding the place with a cool white light, and bundles of fiber-optic cables brought light to the darker corners of the farm. The racks were immersed in pipes and cabling and sensors, and there was a constant hiss of fans and extractors, a warm gurgling of fluids through the pipes. There was a gap down the center of the racks, just big enough to admit a human to work.

  Looking into the farm racks was a little like looking into a huge refrigerator, the green of the growing plants somehow dulled and coarsened by the flat white light of the tubes. As technology, the whole thing always looked strangely primitive to Libet.

  But it was working, after a fashion. Plants, green and spindly, strained upward towards the lights, from the plastic surfaces of the racks. This was a salad machine, in the jargon, the best-studied form of closed life support system; the other choices had been a yogurt box—algae—and a sushi maker, a fish farm.

  There was a locker close to the hatch. When Libet opened it, the usual jack-in-the-box effect shoved out a lightweight coverall, gloves, a hat and a small toolkit. She pulled on the coverall and hat, and donned the gloves. Humming, she prepared to work.

  It was actually Bill Angel who noticed the SPE problem first.

  Inside the hab module he was working—in conjunction with the ground—through a check of Discovery’s navigation systems; and, as usual, he was royally pissed off.

  He was finding life in Discovery a lot more irritating and frustrating than he’d expected. His uppermost beef today was that nothing ever seemed to be stowed in the right place. There was supposed to be a computer tracking system, at JSC, that would keep track of every item on the ship, but that had soon broken down when his asshole crewmates insisted on not putting stuff back where it belonged. As a result he spent half his precious time raking through drawers and lockers, and every time he opened a drawer all the crap would come spilling out all over the place and he’d have to hunt it down and ram it back…

  Ah, the hell with it. At least the work he was doing today had some intellectual meat to it.

  But he was having problems with the navigation systems.

  The point of navigation, and the mid-course burns called trajectory correction maneuvers—TCMs—was to keep the spacecraft on its planned trajectory for the duration of the flight. For six years, Discovery was going to coast, mostly unpowered, all the way to its rendezvous with Saturn. The way Angel thought of TCMs, it was like cheating at pool. It would be much easier to sink a long shot if, after the ball had been struck, you were allowed to nudge the ball a couple of extra times with the cue stick as the ball headed towards the pocket. Well, that was the idea of the TCMs; without those small adjustments the spacecraft would miss Saturn by many millions of miles.

  But it all depended on precise navigation.

  There were actually three navigation techniques in use on Discovery: doppler, ranging, and optical navigation. The first two could be run from Earth. Doppler was a way to measure the speed the ship was approaching or receding from the Earth, and ranging exploited the finite speed of light to measure the distance from the spacecraft to Earth. When used together, Discovery’s position and speed could he determined very accurately…

  But not accurately enough, over the billion miles Discovery was to travel. The only way was to navigate from the spacecraft itself, by the stars.

  There was a kit of hand-held gear, a sextant and low-power optical telescope, and there were camera systems. The most basic systems—and the most heavily used—were the simple light-sensing star trackers that had been installed around Discovery, in the wings and boattail and nose. Without intervention from the crew these could fix on the sun and Earth and maybe a fixed star, like Canopus, allowing Discovery to triangulate its position.

  But today something was wrong; the star trackers kept losing their locks.

  Angel—ill-tempered, impatient—probed at the problem. The trackers seemed to be picking up a lot of false images, whole constellations of them, that made it impossible for them to recognize their stellar targets. That wasn’t so unusual in itself
—the spacecraft was habitually surrounded by floating chunks of debris, flecks of paint or insulation that had broken away, all of which glittered like stars in the intense sunlight—but it was unusual for such a flood of false readings to hit all the trackers, all at once. Maybe something had come loose in the cargo bay, he thought.

  Then the word came up from the ground.

  “Discovery, Houston…” They didn’t wait out the time delay for his reply. “We’ve been looking at your anomalous tracker readings. We figure that what they’re seeing is Cherenkov radiation. Repeat, Cherenkov…”

  Oh.

  Angel knew the implications.

  When a high-energy subatomic particle hit a star tracker, it could rip through the tracker’s glass window faster than the speed of light in the glass. There would be a kind of optic boom—a blue flash, a burst of Cherenkov radiation, a spark confusing the sensors.

  Cherenkov radiation meant that from some source, heavy, fast-moving particles were scouring through Discovery.

  Angel acknowledged the message, and asked for a confirmation.

  Most of the plants were growing hydroponically, with their roots bathed in a liquid nutrient solution called Salisbury/Bugbee. As a backup, others were growing in an experimental soil substitute based on zeolite granules impregnated with potassium and nitrogen and other nutrients, like little time-release pills, with enough nutrients to last years.

  In the hydroponic racks, plant stems protruded through little holes in plastic sheeting, straining up at the artificial lights. Water flowed through the solution and air bubbled up from below, while carbon dioxide was pumped in over the plants and oxygen sucked away by a miniature air conditioning system.

  Libet’s main job today was to pull out the plastic irrigation nozzles from a couple of the racks, which had become clogged. She had to disassemble the base of the rack to get to the nozzles. She opened up her toolbag. Pliers, small hammers, screwdrivers and spanners came floating out at her face, chiming gently against each other. She retrieved the tools, picking out the screwdriver she wanted, and went to work on the rack. Soon she had a handful of screws, nuts, washers and other small parts from the rack. She put all this in a pocket, carefully buttoning it up. When she’d started to work in microgravity she had tried leaving such items suspended in mid-air. But that didn’t work in the farm; if you looked away for more than ten seconds or so your nut or washer would go sailing off in the powerful breezes in here.