Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  She turned so that she was working uphill. That brought the regolith closer, and made it a little easier on her back, but it was still difficult, heavy work. Her EMU wasn’t made for heavy labor; it was hot, confining, uncomfortable, and she wished again she could take it off.

  She thought about Angel. Now he was humming, the same marching tune as before.

  Perhaps it was the climb. She felt vaguely exhilarated herself—liberated by the steady exercise, the sense of altitude, the crispness of the icy regolith.

  She realized now that she’d never truly gotten over her sense of confinement after being cooped up in Discovery for all those years; Titan, with its lousy visibility, socked-in clouds and gloopy, impeding surface, wasn’t much of a release.

  Maybe the same factors are working on Angel, she thought. Maybe this is working to clear out the contents of his head.

  All he needed, she supposed, was a little space.

  The light changed, subtly. It became somehow pearly.

  She lifted up her head.

  Raindrops were falling towards her face.

  It wasn’t like rain on Earth.

  It was methane rain.

  The biggest drops were blobs of liquid a half-inch across. They came down surrounded by a mist, of much smaller drops. The drops fell slowly, perhaps five or six feet in a second. It was more like being caught in a snowstorm, with the flakes replaced by these big globules of methane liquid. The drops weren’t spheres; they were visibly deformed into flat hockey-puck shapes, flattened out, she supposed, by air resistance. They caught the murky light, shimmering.

  The first drops hit her visor.

  Each drop impacted with a fat, liquid noise; their splash was slow and languid. The drops spread out rapidly, or else collapsed into many smaller, more compact droplets over the plexiglass. Low surface tension, she thought automatically Some of the liquid trickled down the contours of her visor, but the evaporation of the drops, over such a large area, was rapid, and each drop dried quickly.

  Her face felt a little cooler, she guessed because of the evaporation of the liquid, carrying away some of her heat.

  She leaned forward, compensating for the mass of her pack, and looked down. As it hit the ground, each raindrop broke up into many smaller drops, which trickled rapidly into the regolith, rinsing the tholin streaks off the ice.

  Bill Angel turned his head this way and that, letting the rain fall over his faceplate and helmet. “It sounds beautiful,” he said. “Like being a kid again. Lying under a wooden roof at night, hearing the rain come down…”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And in that moment she felt closer to Angel than at any time since they left Earth.

  “You know,” Rosenberg said, “of all the worlds in the Solar System, only Earth and Titan know rain. I wish I was there.”

  “Next time, Rosenberg.”

  She stood in the rain, wishing it would go on forever. Not for the first time she was lulled into a kind of peace by the slowness of Titan, the paradoxical heaviness of time in this thin gravity, the slow rhythms of nature here; it was as if she was shedding the frantic, energy-laden pace of Earth, and becoming a creature of Saturn twilight.

  At last, the slow patter of drops against her helmet stopped. She felt a sharp stab of regret.

  There was still a faint wash of small droplets around her, but these were dissipating quickly. And now there was a mist in the air, a light, yellowish fog; it made the air seem brighter, like the air after a storm on Earth. Angel, standing before her, looked as if he had some kind of halo around him.

  She reported all this to Rosenberg.

  “That’s a rain ghost, Paula. I want you to take a sample…”

  She dug a sample bottle out of a pocket on her EMU, and opened it to the air. “Why?”

  “The rain starts by nucleating around particles in the upper atmosphere. That stuff is usually suspended higher up, and won’t reach the surface. But it can be transported down by the weight of the rain, down to lower altitudes. When the rain stops, the last drops evaporate, leaving their cores exposed. The rain ghost. You see? Paula, what we have is a free sample of upper-altitude haze particles.”

  “Terrific.” She stoppered the bottle, labeled it with her propelling pencil (not a pen—ink froze), and put the bottle back in her pocket.

  She looked around. The rain had gone: evaporated from her visor, and was absorbed into the ground. Above them, the clouds methane, evidently rained out, had cleared to a scattered, broken layer of dark fragments, revealing an orange glow above.

  Save for the lingering rain ghost, it was as if the storm had never been.

  “I guess we can go back,” Benacerraf said. “The sleds are full.”

  “Yes,” Rosenberg said. “Your walk-back limit—”

  “Oh, fuck our walk-back limit,” Angel said abruptly. “Rosenberg, how far are we from the top of this mountain?”

  Rosenberg said reluctantly, “Give me an altitude.”

  Benacerraf consulted her altimeter. “Around eight thousand feet.”

  “That leaves you three thousand shy of the summit. I don’t recommend going further,” Rosenberg said strongly. “You’re climbing above the planetary boundary layer, and the winds are going to pick up. And in another thousand feet or so you’ll be in the methane cloud layer.”

  “Actually, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Benacerraf said slowly. “The cloud is pretty broken up after the rain, Rosenberg.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Rosenberg snapped. “Maybe the altitude’s affecting your oxygen supply.”

  “Come on, double-dome,” Angel said. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Bill—” Rosenberg hesitated. “What’s the point? You won’t be able to see anyhow. I’m sorry to be brutal, but—”

  “The point, dipshit, is that I’ll make it to the top The point is, I haven’t crossed two billion miles just to stop a few thousand fucking feet shy of the highest point on the moon. Or isn’t that logical enough for you?”

  “Paula, if you go along with this, you’re as crazy as he is.”

  Anger flared in her. “Drop it, Rosenberg.”

  They were, she decided there and then, going to climb the mountain.

  For today, anyhow, Bill Angel was out of his craziness. And if anything was going to keep him together, this kind of experience was.

  Anyhow he was right. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of exploration they had come so far to make?

  She floated over to Angel. She took his hand. “Rosenberg, I’ll leave markers, and give you an altitude every few hundred feet.”

  “How can I stop you doing this?”

  “You can’t,” Angel said. “So shut the fuck up, and enjoy the ride.”

  Hand in hand, Benacerraf and Angel began to climb the icy regolith.

  With the methane clouds broken up, it was bright enough to walk without helmet lamps.

  Free of the gumbo, free of the sled, the landscape opening up around her, she felt as if she was floating above the surface. She felt the way Marcus White and some of the others had described walking on the Moon. Only the stiffness of her surface suit, the disconcerting mass of her backpack, encumbered her now.

  It was like being eight years old again, she thought: her adult cares sloughed away, her body light and compact and the air fresh and new and full of light.

  Soon they were in the lower layers of the cloud. It was like being in a thick, dark mist, like smoke from a forest fire. Benacerraf could still see, roughly, where she was, but she was glad to have the slope of the ground for orientation.

  After a couple of hundred feet they emerged above the cloud layer, into clear orange air. The regolith here was still pretty much gray-white, cleansed by methane rain. The lighting was orange and gray, surreal, dim like an early dawn, but bright enough they didn’t need their helmet lamps to see.

  She strode on, into the light.

  They came upon the summit suddenly.

  The regolith slo
pe foreshortened before Benacerraf, and she realized they were approaching some kind of ridge. She slowed, and pulled at Angel’s hand to warn him.

  Still hand in hand, they approached the ridge. The slope flattened out, to a broad ledge maybe twenty feet wide. Leaving Angel behind, Benacerraf walked cautiously forward.

  She was standing on the rim of a crater, puncturing the summit of Othrys.

  “Take it easy, Paula,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t know how friable that surface is. Don’t go close to the edge.”

  The crater was like a huge amphitheatre, bathed in the ubiquitous orange glow. “It must be four miles across, maybe five… I can see the far rim quite clearly. And in the base there is a dome structure. No central peak—”

  “It’s a caldera,” Rosenberg said. “A cryovolcano. Fueled by ammonia-water lava, a remnant of the primeval ocean.”

  She looked down towards the ground.

  The light was bright—better than twilight up here, like an autumn sunset, perhaps. The sky was empty of cloud, save for a scattering of light cirrus clouds around the zenith, probably methane and nitrogen ice.

  The methane clouds formed a distinct layer, a thousand feet below her. They were black, fat cumuli with lumpy tops and flat bases, like froth riding on an invisible membrane in the air. The clouds stretched to the horizon, but through them she could make out the ground. It was an orange sheet, punctured by the jet black of ethane crater lakes, like a photographic negative of the Everglades. She thought she could make out Clear Lake, its compact cashew-nut shape far below, all but hidden by cloud and mist.

  The horizon was visible, even through the orange haze. It was the dark hand where the parallel sheets of sky-haze, methane cloud layer and punctured land met, all around her. It seemed close bv: seventy or eighty miles away, she judged. And it was curved, quite sharply, as if seen through a distorting lens.

  Titan was visibly round; she had a powerful sense that she was standing on a sphere, that she was clinging to the surface of a small, three-dimensional object, suspended in space, swathed by a thick layer of air.

  “Paula.” Angel was waiting for her, a few yards short of the summit. “Are we here?”

  “Yes, Bill. We made it. We climbed Othrys.”

  He was standing slumped forward to balance his pack, and with his arms held loose at his sides. It was like an ape’s gait, she thought.

  And so they were: two clever apes, who had made it to the highest point on Titan.

  She walked down, took Angel’s hand, and began to lead him to the summit. “It’s beautiful, Bill, so beautiful.”

  His blind face turned, the orange curve of Titan reflected in his visor. The crunch of the regolith beneathhis boots was loud and sharp in the still, huge air.

  When they got back to Tartarus, Rosenberg insisted on passing the Titan water through the life support system’s filters to get rid of the remnant tholins. At last, though, he was able to bring Benacerraf a bowl—in fact an EMU visor—brimming full of cool, clear Titan water.

  She raised it to her lips.

  It was the finest drink she’d taken in seven years, sweeter than wine.

  Jiang Ling first saw the asteroid with her naked eyes when Tianming was ninety days out from Earth, ten days from its closest encounter.

  At first the asteroid was barely more than a point of light indistinguishable from the remote stars, had she not known where, precisely, to look. But by the day after that 2002OA had grown to a distinct oval shape: almost like a potato, she thought irreverently, battered and irregular. She knew that from now on the asteroid would grow visibly, day by day, and then hour by hour, until at last its battered gray hide filled the small viewing window of her living compartment.

  After the closest approach, the asteroid would then recede, just as rapidly.

  But that, for her, was only a theoretical possibility.

  Every day she performed two softscreen shows: one in Han Chinese for the benefit of her countrymen, one in English for the foreigners. She was allowed to say what she wished, although the Party expressed clear, it rather obvious, preferences.

  Jiang adjusted the angle of her big S-band antenna, ensuring it was centered on the fat disc of Earth. Then she positioned herself before the Tianming’s single camera, fixed to a bracket on the wall. She had no props or charts or effects; none were necessary. It was sufficient that she simply talk into the camera, smoothly and plausibly, and production crews on the ground would later patch in such illustrations and other footage as was required.

  She anchored herself over her table, and prepared what she would say.

  … In the ninety days since it had been pushed out of orbit by its solid-propellant injection engine, Tianming had coasted slowly away from Earth, heading outward from the sun. It had dogged the heels of the home planet, she thought, as a dog will track its owner. Thus she had drifted more than three and a half million miles from Earth, and when the Tianming’s slow thermal roll brought the small viewing window into the right direction, she could see Earth and Moon together: twin crescents before the huge glare of the sun, the smaller brown alongside the latter blue-white, so close to each other she could cover up both Earth and its satellite with the palm of her right hand, upheld before her.

  And there was her theme.

  She said: “It is precisely three thousand, nine hundred and sixty-seven years since Chinese astronomers witnessed an extraordinary heavenly event.

  “The motions of all five naked-eye-visible planets brought them together in the sky. Above the crescent Moon at the horizon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were strung out like lights on some celestial road, near the great square of Pegasus. That unique conjunction must have been a transfixing event. It was the beginning of the planetary cycles of our ancient astronomers.

  “There has been no other time in the last four thousand years, and there will not be in the next four thousand, when such a spectacle will be visible again. But I am reminded of it now, as I study the Earth, Moon and sun framed together in the window of my capsule. How appropriate it is that a Chinese person should be here, to witness this unique conjunction!”

  The joy in her voice was unfeigned. Jiang Ling was happy and proud to be here. She said that in her broadcasts, and she meant it.

  The habitable compartments of Tianming were small, confining. The craft was improvised, of course, and much of its mass besides was given over to the weapon and its support systems, rather than to her comforts. But she was comfortable here, in this little spinning metal shell in space, and she was not given to claustrophobia.

  Her mother told her she was happy in space, and nowhere else. It was true.

  Sometimes it struck her as remarkable, however, how everything in the Universe had become separated into two distinct categories, characterized around herself: within a few feet of her body, contained in this compact craft, or else they were millions of miles away.

  She continued with her broadcast, and other duties.

  Her shelter in space consisted of cylindrical compartments, strung together along a common axis, like a collapsible telescope. Its curved hull was swathed with a powder-white insulating blanket, which shone brightly in the sun. Three huge solar panels were fixed around the module’s widest section; they could be swiveled, like the faces of flowers, to trap the sunlight, and they were covered with cells, big black squares neatly aligned.

  The smaller cylinders were used for docking with ferry craft and experimental work, and they were crammed with storage lockers, science equipment and control panels. The main body of the craft was called the working compartment, some fourteen feet wide.

  There was a small table at which she could sit, by wrapping her legs around a rudimentary T-shaped chair. There were control and instrument panels, and command and signal equipment of the type used in Lei Feng spaceships. There were a number of work positions, where she could take measurements of such items of scientific interest as the interplanetary plasma environment surrounding the ship. T
here was a single, rather small porthole. During the cruise, the Tianming was rolled, continually, to ensure a uniform heating by the sun’s rays; this had the effect of limiting her useful observations.

  To the left and right of the workstations there were controls for the craft’s basic systems: air regulation filters and pumps, temperature and humidity controllers, as well as more equipment and biomedical research apparatus.

  There was a small galley area, with enough supplies, she was told, for a mission of one hundred days, with a small margin, There was an exercise cycle into which she could strap herself. Her orders were to use this for no less than three hours a day, in order to reduce the risk of muscle wastage and bone erosion.

  Beyond the working chamber, inaccessible to Jiang, was a small hemispherical module containing rocket motors and propellant tanks.

  Her home in space was brightly lit, compact and cheerful. She felt liberated, after the confines of the Lei Feng capsule, within which it had been barely possible to move. Everything was new and clean, even the lavatory section, the drawers full of neatly folded coveralls and underwear. The fans and pumps hummed comfortingly, and there was a smell of freshness—not a natural smell, but like a new carpet, she thought.

  She slept in a cupboard, a box little larger than she was. Inside, however, tucked into her sleeping bag with the folding door drawn to, she was secure.

  She had brought with her the small brass bell that had accompanied her on her first flight, in Lei Feng Number One—how long ago that seemed! As she prepared for sleep, she watched it drift in stray currents in the circulating air, on its curling length of vermilion ribbon, occasionally ringing. The inscribed face of Mao was intermittently visible, like the Moon hidden by clouds.

  During her hundred-day flight, she performed science experiments with her space aquarium.

  It looked like a suitcase containing two carousels from a compact disc player; but the walls of the carousels were clear, and murky water was visible within. The aquarium contained one thousand mussel larvae, thirty thousand sea urchin eggs and six thousand starfish embryos. One carousel spun up, imitating the Earth’s gravity, and the other provided a gravity-free environment. The experiment had begun three hours after departing Earth orbit, when Jiang had injected a sperm concentrate into a container full of sea urchin eggs.