Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  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.”

  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 gotten of ammonia life.

  They walked for a couple of miles, away from the cliffs. The ground started to slope downwards, as it 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-gray 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 shore, 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 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 he 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 posttraumatic 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-gray 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 thumblike 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 suits 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 front 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.

  When an ammono walked, its limbs would straighten out. Then icicle legs would ripple around the rim, flashing pink highlights, their motion too complex to follow. The table-top body of the ammono would glide evenly over the surface, through seven or eight yards, until it found another place to sample.

  Actually, the ammonos hardly ever moved.

  Only one in a hundred would be in motion at any time, save for the delicate clatter of limbs; this scattered herd of them together was almost stationary, eerily so, their Zenlike stillness quite unlike the chaotic jostling of terrestrial creatures.

  She remarked on this to Rosenberg.

  He grunted. “Paula, chemical reactions are dependent on temperature. By the time you get to the region where ammonia is a liquid—under thirty degrees below zero—you’re looking at a relative rate of maybe a hundred to a thousand times as slow as at room temperature for us—”

  “You’re saying these creatures have a slower metabolic rate.”

  “Much slower, yeah. You can see it in the way they move: those long periods of gathering energy, then a quick burst of motion. But it’s not going to be as simple as that, of course … reactions with the right activation energies won’t chill out, so they would be selected preferentially. And all that ammonia will have a complex effect, helping or hindering reactions. The only way to know for sure would be to take one of those critters apart, and see what’s sloshing about inside its carapace.”

  That suggestion offended her.

  She bent to pick a flower. “Maybe we shouldn’t be asking questions.”

  “Huh?”

  “Here we are at the end of time. Everybody we knew—everything we understood—is long gone. What does science, figuring things out, matter now? These ammonos seem to have given us a place we can live. Maybe we ought to be content with that.”

  He laughed. “If my forebrain had an off-switch, I’d agree with you.”

  She dropped the flower and walked on.

  When she looked back, after a few paces, an ammono had crawled laboriously over to the flower and was picking it apart with its scalpel-sharp claw.

  They took breakfast on the hoof. Benacerraf tore off handfuls of mushroom flesh and washed it down with water from an ice-flecked brook they found. She splashed water mixed with snow over her face and scalp; the cold was sharp and refreshing. One good thing about being hairless, she thought: at least it was going to be easier to keep clean.

  As she walked on, her breath steaming ahead of her, she started to warm up. Soon she had to pull open the seams at her shoulders to keep cool. But the suit must be porous; it wasn’t trapping excessive amounts of heat and sweat.

  “Somebody remade Titan, Rosenberg. Engineered it so we could live here. Breathe the air, eat the fruit. Who? People?”

  “No. I think it was the ammonos, after the sun got too hot for them, and they had to retreat. Titan ice is primordial stuff, Paula. It probably contains dissolved carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, organic molecules, sulphur, salts. When it melted it must have outgassed volatiles. Good for building a new atmosphere.”

  “Volatiles I can understand. But this is an ice moon. Where did the topsoil come from?”

  “Any particulate matter in the ice would settle out, as dirt on the sea beds. Maybe the ammonos dredged that up. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Why, Rosenberg? Why did they do all this? Why are we here, for Christ’s sake?”

  He had no answer.

  As they neared the base of the horizon-spanning cliffs, the ground began to slope upward and grew harder and colder underfoot. The topsoil was sparser than on the lowland plain, the vegetation struggling to get a foothold, although the
re were still clumps of tough dunelike grass struggling out of cracks in the ice bedrock.

  Soon it became more of an effort for Benacerraf to continue her steady Moonwalk bound over the surface.

  There were fewer ammonos here; in their shining transparent suits they trooped, in their reptilian spurts, back and forth, evidently shuttling between the plain and some kind of base on the Cronos plateau.

  A wind blew up, pushing parallel to the cliff face and across their path. Clouds shouldered across the sky: tat cumulus clouds of water vapor, just like Earth’s. And then a rain began to fall, big fat heavy drops that descended with a snowlike slowness, and splashed noisily against her golden-brown suit.

  The horizon disappeared, and an orange-gray mist closed in around her, obscuring the cliffs.

  Rosenberg came up to Benacerraf. He had slipped his hands inside his sleeves, and wrapped his arms around his body; rivulets of water ran down from the dome of his head. “If this cliff is the edge of Cronos,” he said, “we’re heading due east, roughly.”

  “Or maybe west,” she said. “We don’t know which side of the continent we’re on.”

  He shook his head, and water sprayed off around him. “No. This has to be the western periphery.”

  “How do you know?”

  He pointed upwards, then tucked his hand back under his armpit. “We can’t see Saturn. I figure we’ve been returned to the region of Tartarus Base. Anyhow, the winds are blowing out of the north. Which is what I expected.”

  “How come?”

  “Titan is still a small world, Paula. The weather system is going to be simple. Like on Earth, the sun’s heat at the equator pushes up piles of moist clouds. The clouds flow north and south, dumping their rain on the way. But here, the gravity is so low and the distance to the poles so short that I’d expect the hot air to make it all the way to the poles. When it descends, that’s where you’ll find the deserts…”

  Mercifully, he stopped talking.

  Benacerraf looked up. The huge sun was visible as a brighter disc above the gray-white clouds. Raindrops, fat and slow, fell towards and around her, like a hail of bullets falling from infinity. Some of them had turned to snow, now, and they swirled languidly in the updraughts.