Titan (GAIA)

by John Varley

  Name: Cirocco Jones. Age: thirty-four. Race: not black, but not white, either.

  She was a stateless person, legally an American but actually a member of the rootless Third Culture of the multi-national corporations. Every major city on Earth had its Yankee Ghetto of tract houses, English schools, and fast-food franchises. Cirocco had lived in most of them. It was a little like being an army brat, but with less security.

  Her mother had been an unmarried consulting engineer who often worked for the energy companies. She had not intended to have children, but had not counted on the Arab prison guard. He raped her when she was captured after a border incident between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While the Texaco ambassador negotiated her release, Cirocco was born. A few nukes had been sown in the desert by then, and the border incident was a brush-fire war by the time Iranian and Brazilian troops overran the prison. As political balances shifted, Cirocco’s mother made her way toward Israel. Five years later she had lung cancer from the fallout. She spent the next fifteen years undergoing treatments slightly less painful than the disease.

  Cirocco had grown up big and lonely, having only her mother for a friend. She first saw the United States when she was twelve. By then she could read and write, and could not be developmentally harmed by the American school system. Her emotional development was another matter. She did not make friends easily, but was fiercely loyal to those she had. Her mother had firm ideas on how to raise a young lady, and they included handguns and karate as well as dancing and voice lessons. Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. Only she herself knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret—one she kept so well that she fooled the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.

  And how much of that was true? she wondered. There was no point in lying here. Yes, the responsibility of command frightened her. Perhaps all commanders were secretly unsure of themselves, knew deep inside that they were not good enough for the responsibility thrust upon them. But it wasn’t the sort of thing one asked about. What if the others weren’t scared? Then your secret was out.

  She found herself wondering how she had come to command a ship, if it was not what she wanted. What did she want?

  I’d like to get out of here, she tried to say. I’d like something to happen.

  Presently, something did happen.

  She felt a wall with her left hand. In time, she felt another with her right. The walls were warm, smooth, and resilient, just as she imagined the inside of a stomach would be. She could feel them moving past her hands.

  And they began to narrow.

  She lodged, headfirst, in an uneven tunnel. The walls began to contract. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic. Tight spaces had never bothered her before.

  The walls pulsed and rippled, pushing her forward until her head slipped through into coolness and a rough texture. She was squeezed; fluid bubbled out of her lungs and she coughed, inhaled, found her mouth filled with grit. She coughed again and more fluid came out, but now her shoulders were free and she ducked her head in the darkness to avoid getting another mouthful. She wheezed and spit, and began to breathe from her nose.

  Her arms came free, then her hips, and she began digging at the spongy material that enclosed her. It smelled like a childhood day spent in a cool, bare earth basement, in the narrow space adults visit only if the plumbing is acting up. It smelled like nine years old and digging in the dirt.

  One leg came free, then the other, and she rested with her head bent into the air pocket formed by her arms and chest. Her breath came in wet spasms.

  Dirt crumbled behind her neck and rolled down her body until it nearly filled her air space. She was buried, but she was alive. It was time to dig, but she could not use her arms.

  Fighting panic, she forced herself up with her legs. Her thigh muscles knotted, her joints cracked, but she felt the mass above her yielding.

  Her head broke through into light and air. Gasping, spitting, she pulled one arm out of the ground, then the other, and clawed at what felt like cool grass. She crawled from the hole on hands and knees and collapsed. She dug her fingers into the blessed ground and cried herself to sleep.

  Cirocco didn’t want to wake up. She fought it, pretending she was asleep. When she felt the grass fading away and the darkness returning she opened her eyes quickly.

  Centimeters from her nose was a pale green carpet that looked like grass. It smelled like it, too. It was the kind of grass found only on the greens of the better golf courses. But it was warmer than the air, and she couldn’t account for that. Perhaps it wasn’t grass at all.

  She rubbed her hand over it and sniffed again. Call it grass.

  She sat up and something clanked, distracting her. A gleaming metal band circled her neck, and other, smaller ones were on her arms and legs. Many strange objects dangled from the large band, held together by wire. She slipped it off and wondered where she had seen it before.

  It was amazingly difficult to concentrate. The thing in her hand was so complex, so various; too much for her scattered wits.

  It was her pressure suit, stripped of all the plastic and rubber seals. Most of the suit had been plastic. Nothing remained but the metal.

  She made a pile of the parts, and in the process realized just how naked she was. Beneath a coating of dirt her body was completely hairless. Even her eyebrows were gone. For some reason that made her very sad.

  She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

  Cirocco did not cry easily, nor often. She was not good at it. But after a very long time she thought she knew who she was again.

  Now she could find out where she was.

  Perhaps a half hour later she felt ready to move. But that decision spawned a dozen questions. Move, but to where?

  She had intended to explore Themis, but that was when she had a spaceship and the resources of Earth’s nest technology. Now she had her bare skin and a few bits of metal.

  She was in a forest composed of grass and one species of tree. She called them trees by the same reasoning she had used on the grass. If it’s seventy meters tall, has a brown, round trunk and what looks like leaves far above, then it’s a tree. Which did not mean it might not cheerfully eat her if given the chance.

  She had to get the worries down to a manageable level. Rule out the things you can do nothing about, don’t fret too much about the things you can do little about. And remember that if you’re as cautious as sanity would seem to dictate, you’ll starve to death in a cave.

  The air was in the first category. It could contain a poison.

  “So stop breathing, at once!” she said, aloud. Right. At least it smelled fresh, and she was not coughing.

  Water was something she could do little about. Eventually she would have to drink some, assuming she could find it—which should go right to the top of her list. When she found it, perhaps she could make a fire and boil it. If not, she would drink, microscopic bugs and all.

  And then there was food, which worried her more than anything. Even if there was nothing around that wanted to make a meal of her, there was no way of knowing if the food she ate would poison her. Or it might be no more nourishing than cellophane.

  If that wasn’t enough, there was the calculated risk. How do you calculate what is risky when a tree might not be a tree?

  They didn’t even look that much like trees. The trunks were like polished marble. The high branches were parallel to the ground and ran for a precise distance before making a right angle. Above, the leaves were flat, like lily pads, and three or four meters across.

  What was foolhardy and what was overcautious? There was no guidebook, and the dangers would not be marked. But without a few assumptions she could not move, and she had to get moving. She was getting hungry.

  She set her jaw, then stamped over to the nearest tree. She smacked it with the palm of her hand. It just stood there, supremely indifferent.

  “Just a dumb tree.”

  She examined
the hole she had emerged from.

  It was a raw brown wound in the neat expanse of grass. Patches of sod, held together by a feathery root structure, lay upside-down around it. The hole itself was only half a meter deep; the sides had crumbled to fill the rest.

  “Something tried to eat me,” she said. “Something ate all the organic parts of my suit, and all my hair, then excreted the junk right here. Including me.” She noted in passing that she was glad the thing had classified her as junk.

  It was a hell of a beast. They knew the outer part of the torus—the ground she was sitting on—was thirty kilometers thick. This thing was large enough to snag Ringmaster while the ship orbitted 400 kilometers away. She had spent a long time in its belly and for some reason had proved indigestible. It had burrowed through the ground to this point, and expelled her.

  And that just didn’t make sense. If it could eat plastic, why couldn’t it eat her? Were ship’s captains too tough?

  It had eaten her whole ship, pieces as large as the engine module, others just tiny bits of glass or rumbling, dwindling spacesuited figures with dented helmets …

  “Bill!” She was on her feet, every muscle in her body straining. “Bill! I’m here. I’m alive! Where are you?”

  She slapped her forehead with her hand. If only she could get through this muddy-headed feeling when thoughts were coming so slowly. She had not forgotten about the crew, but it was not until that moment that she connected them with the new-born Cirocco standing naked and hairless on the warm ground.

  “Bill!” she shouted again. She listened, then collapsed with her legs folded under her. She plucked at the grass.

  Think it through. Presumably, the creature would have treated him as another piece of debris. But he had been injured.

  So had she, now that she thought of it. She examined her thighs and found not even a bruise. It told her nothing. She might have been inside the creature for five years, or only a few months.

  Any of the others might arrive and be pushed out of the ground at any time. Somewhere down there, about a meter and a half deep, was some kind of excretory outlet for the creature. If she waited, and if the creature didn’t like the taste of all humans and not just ones named Cirocco, they might all get together again.

  She sat down to wait for them.

  Half an hour later (or was it only ten minutes?) it didn’t make sense. The creature was big. It had eaten Ringmaster like an after-dinner mint. It must extend through a great part of the underworld of Themis, and it didn’t make sense to think this one orifice could handle all the traffic. There could be others, and they could be scattered all over the countryside.

  A little later she had another thought. They were coming far apart, but they were coming, and she was grateful for that. The thought was simple: she was thirsty, she was hungry, and she was filthy. What she wanted most in the world was water.

  The land sloped gently. She was willing to bet there would be a stream down there somewhere.

  She stood and poked at the pile of metal pieces with one foot. There was too much to carry, but the junk was all she had for tools. She took one of the smaller rings, then picked up the larger one which had been the bottom of her helmet and was still connected to the dangling electronic components.

  It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She slung the large ring over her shoulder and started down the hill.

  The pool was fed by a two-meter fall from a rocky stream which wound through a little valley. The huge trees arched overhead, completely blocking her view of the sky. She stood on a rock near the edge of the pool, trying to judge its depth, thinking about jumping in.

  Thinking about it was all she did. The water was clear, but there was no telling what might be in it. She jumped over the ridge which produced the waterfall. It was easy in the one-quarter gee. A short walk brought her to a sandy beach.

  The water was warm, sweet, and bubbly, and easily the best thing she had ever tasted. She drank all she wanted, then squatted and scrubbed with sand, keeping an eye open. Watering holes were places for caution. When she was through she felt reasonably human for the first time since her awakening. She sat on the wet sand and let her feet trail in the water.

  It was cooler than the air or the ground, but still suprisingly warm for what looked to be a glacier-fed mountain stream. Then she realized it would make sense if the heat source in Themis was as they had deduced: from below. The sunlight at Saturn’s orbit wouldn’t provide much ground heating. But the triangular fins were under her now, and were probably designed to capture and store solar heat. She envisioned huge subterranean rivers of hot water running a few hundred meters under the ground.

  Moving on seemed to be the next order of business, but which way? Straight ahead could be ruled out. Across the stream the land began to rise again. Downstream should be easiest, and should bring her to flatlands soon.

  “Decisions, decisions,” she muttered.

  She looked at the tangle of metal junk she had been carrying all … what was it? Afternoon? Morning? Time could not be measured that way in here. It was possible only to speak of elapsed time, and she had no idea how much had gone by.

  The helmet ring was still in her hand. Now her brow furrowed as she looked closer.

  Her suit had once contained a radio. Of course it was not possible that it had come through the ordeal intact, but just for the hell of it she hunted for and found the remains. There was a tiny battery, and what was left of a switch, turned on. That ended that. Most of the radio had been silicon chips and metal, so there had been some faint hope.

  She looked again. Where was the speaker? It should be a little metal horn, the remains of a headset unit. She found it, and lifted it to her ear.

  “… fifty-eight, fifty-nine, ninety-three-sixty …”

  “Gaby!” She was on her feet, shouting, but the familiar voice kept counting, oblivious. Cirocco knelt on the rock and arrayed the remains of her helmet on it with fingers that trembled, holding the speaker to one ear while pawing through the components. She found the pinhead throat mike.

  “Gaby, Gaby, come in please. Can you hear me?”

  “… eighty—Rocky! Is that you, Rocky?”

  “It’s me. Where … where are …” She calmed down deliberately, swallowed, and went on. “Are you all right? Have you seen the others?”

  “Oh, Captain. The most horrible things …” Her voice broke, and Cirocco heard sobs. Gaby poured out an incoherent stream of words: how glad she was to hear Cirocco’s voice, how lonely she had been, how sure she had been that she was the only survivor until she listened to her radio and heard sounds.

  “Sounds?”

  “Yes, there’s at least one other alive, unless that was you crying.”

  “I … hell, I cried quite a bit. It might have been me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gaby said. “I’m pretty sure it’s Gene. He sings sometimes, too. Rocky, it so good to hear your voice.”

  “I know. It’s good to hear yours.” She had to take another deep breath and relax her grip on the helmet ring. Gaby’s voice was back in control, but Cirocco was on the edge of hysterics. She didn’t like the feeling.

  “The things that have happened to me,” Gaby was saying. “I was dead, Captain, and in heaven, and I’m not even religious, but there I was—”

  “Gaby, settle down. Get a grip on yourself.”

  There was silence, punctuated by sniffs.

  “I think I’ll be all right now. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. If you went through anything like what I did, I understand perfectly. Now, where are you?”

  There was a pause, then a giggle. “There’s no street signs in the neighborhood,” Gaby said. “It’s a canyon, not very deep. It’s full of rocks and there’s a stream down the middle. There’s these funny trees on both sides of the stream.”

  “It sounds pretty much like where I am.” But which canyon? she wondered. “Which way are you going? Were you counting steps?”

 
“Yeah. Downstream. If I could get out of this forest, I could see half of Themis.”

  “I thought of that, too.”

  “We just need a couple landmarks to tell if we’re in the same neighborhood.”

  “But I thought we must be, or we wouldn’t be able to hear each other.”

  Gaby didn’t say anything, and Cirocco saw her mistake.

  “Right,” she said. “Line of sight.”

  “Check. These radios are good for quite a distance. In here, the horizon curves up.”

  “I’d believe it better if I could see it. Where I am right now could be the enchanted forest at Disney World in late evening.”

  “Disney would have done a better job,” Gaby said. “It would have had more detail, and monsters popping out of the trees.”

  “Don’t say that. Have you seen anything like that?”

  “A couple insects, I guess they were.”

  “I saw a school of tiny fish. They looked like fish. Oh, by the way, don’t go in the water. They might be dangerous.”

  “I saw them. After I was in the water. But they didn’t do anything.”

  “Have you passed anything that’s remarkable in any way? Some unusual surface feature?”

  “A few waterfalls. Two fallen trees.”

  Cirocco looked around and described the pool and waterfall. Gaby said she had passed several places like that. It might be the same stream, but there was no way to know.

  “All right,” Cirocco said. “Here’s what we do. When you find a rock facing upstream, make a mark on it.”

  “How?”

  “With another rock.” She found one the size of her fist and attacked the rock she had been sitting on. She scratched a large “C” on it. There could be no mistaking its artificiality.

  “I’m doing that now.”

  “Make a mark every hundred meters or so. If we’re on the same river one of us will come up behind the other, and the one in front can wait for the other to catch up.”