Analog SFF, June 2007

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  THE SANDS OF TITAN by RICHARD A. LOVETT

  * * * *

  Illustrated by David A. Hardy

  * * * *

  Almost any struggle is as much internal as external...

  I'd always wondered what it would be like to be dead. Not that I've been in a big hurry to find out. And certainly not three times in one day.

  Obviously, I'm not talking about dead dead. Not yet, anyway. I'm talking about that “Oh crap, this is it,” feeling that (I now know) is the closest I'll ever get to having my life flash before my eyes. The type of feeling my parents must have had in San Francisco, when the Big One dropped half the Terra Bank Tower on them and a whole street full of others. Only in their case, that really had been “it.” I was seven at the time, but I vividly remember learning, when the clean-up crews finally dug out the bodies, that they'd died right next to each other, apparently holding hands. That's the type of thing that haunts a kid's dreams: knowing they'd had at least a couple of heartbeats to see what was coming and realize there was no escape.

  In my case nothing was falling on me, though it kind of looked like it as the red-orange surface of Titan rushed toward me, way too fast. It was like a scene from Hell: dirty-orange sky, duller orange clouds. Orange-brown haze merging into the distance; orange and black shapes below. All of it no better illuminated than a ship cockpit, dimmed for direct-view navigation. Only now, there was nothing between me and all that orangeness but a skinsuit and a lot of ... well, can I call it “air” if it's four times thicker than ship-normal, laced with methane, and at a temp of ninety-five Kelvins? If it is air, it's air that would probably freeze me faster than it would asphyxiate me if I was unfortunate enough to still be alive when the impact ripped a hole in my suit.

  My name is Floyd Ashman, though that's just the handle I was born with. Most people call me Phoenix, because it's one of the places I come from, and the play on my real name is kind of clever—though right now I certainly wasn't rising from anything.

  Moments earlier, I'd been dangling from a parachute, light as a feather. Then there'd been a sickening lurch, and here I was, no longer dangling but back in free fall, which this close to a planet's surface isn't a good thing—even if my spacer reflexes were insisting that rather than me being the one who was moving, it was the planet that was reaching up like a giant flyswatter, about to whack me out of the sky.

  Not that it made any difference. Impact is impact. Though it was weird how it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, with way too much time to wonder, for what I figured was the final time, what exactly my parents had thought as they watched all that plate glass shower down in a deadly rain of knives. I even had time to wish I had someone to hold hands with, although I guess that would mean she'd be about to die, too, so maybe it was a good thing I'd never been the type to put down roots, even temporarily.

  * * * *

  All told, the fall took about three eternities, though I couldn't have said whether they were milliseconds or years.

  Then we hit.

  I'm a spacer, not a ground rat (at least, not for a long time), so when the tumbling ceased, I had no idea why I was still alive. Though one thing was obvious: it was my lucky day. I'd survived the demise of my tug and a dicey entry into the atmosphere in a damn cargo canister. Then, since the canister had been designed for a twenty-gee impact and I wasn't, I'd been forced to jump with a jury-rigged parasail, cobbled together from the canister's stabilizing chute in the way-too-few minutes Brittney and I'd had to try to figure out if there was a way to survive a drop onto this forsaken smog ball.

  Now, somehow, I was down alive. So it was either the luckiest day of my life or the worst, depending on how you looked at it. If I lived long enough, maybe someday I could sort out that type of philosophical stuff. Meanwhile, I just wanted to know why I was still around to think about it.

  Happily, I didn't have to figure it out myself.

  "Bull's-eye!” a perky voice said, sounding like it was right in my ear. Brittney can do any mood she likes, but perky is her favorite. “Though it would have helped if you'd bent your knees and braced for impact, rather than screaming all the way down."

  I thought I'd been remarkably calm, but I've learned not to argue with her about things like that. She has a nasty tendency to have recordings.

  "You mean you did that deliberately?” I asked instead.

  From the moment we'd touched atmosphere, Brittney had had control of our descent. Not that there'd been a whole bunch to control. Once the canister had dropped its heat shield and was down to a reasonable velocity, it was mostly a matter of popping the hatch and leaping out.

  In the panicked preparations back on the tug, there had been time (barely) to give Brittney radio control over the servomotors that ran the smart-chute's shrouds—though without the weight of the capsule, the whole contraption had proven about as steerable as a feather in a hurricane. I'd also given her control of the chute release, so we wouldn't get wind-dragged if we actually reached the surface alive. But I'd never expected her to trigger the damn thing when we were still I-don't-know-how-far up.

  "Sure.” Brittney doesn't actually speak, though it seems like it. In theory, she could use the suit radio, but her voice usually comes to me via a nerve implant in my right ear. “We were heading toward a lake, so I dropped us on a big dune. We hit the slip face, which cushioned the impact just enough to keep you with me.” She was chattering, as in the aftermath of adrenaline shock, even though she has no adrenaline and should damn well be immune to mine. “I'll admit it was a bit iffy for a moment. In one-seventh gee with four standards air density and way more wind than there's supposed to be, the drift radius was a bit wide."

  I'd never heard of drift radius, though I got the idea. “Wouldn't the lake have been softer?"

  I'd swear she sighed, though technically, that's not possible. “And what do you think the lake is made of?"

  Brittney is my symbiote and lives in a distributed chip network beneath my ribs. She keeps telling me she'd be safer in my skull, which might be true, but I'm not letting anything share space with my brain. Until she went sentient, she was the best investment I ever made, if a drunken wager of everything I owned qualifies as an investment. Since then, she can be a real pain. I keep threatening her with reprogramming; to start with, there's nothing like mixing your consciousness with something that sees itself as a seventeen-year-old girl to put the kibosh on ever having a real person with whom to hand-hold while facing imminent death. But Brittney's terrified of personality adjustments, even though other AIs tell her they're no worse than memory upgrades.

  Telling Brittney to shut up is useless. Partly it's the age thing. It's kind of like dog-years, I guess. It was only ten months ago that she went sentient; now she thinks she's on the verge of adulthood. Who am I to argue? When she goes pedantic on me, it's easier just to play her game.

  I considered what little I knew of Titan. Not much, I'm afraid. I'd been kicking around Saturn since I'd come here from Jupiter, two years ago, but my knowledge of its largest moon could be summed up in a few sentences. Big gravity hole. Dense atmosphere. Great for parachuting supplies down to the scientists, who thought it was the coolest place ever. But scientists always think that about anywhere, so I'd not paid much attention. One of my contracts is to catch supplies E-railed to them from Earth orbit and line up the canisters to parachute to the surface. It takes a couple of weeks per annum, pays well enough, and is one of those great jobs where nobody bothers you unless you screw up. Good stuff, in other words, for an orphan whose psych profile probably said things about attachment disorder or whateve
r they call it when you think alone is the best place to be.

  It also had to have been one of the dullest jobs in the System until something smacked me good—probably a comet chunk on a hyperbolic slingshot from outer nowhere. Then it got way too exciting, and I'd been forced to drop myself along with the supplies. Or more precisely, without them, because they were still in the damn canister. Right now, all I had was myself, my skinsuit, and Brittney ... who, in whatever it is that passes for AI adrenaline shock, was babbling about lakes. Someday I really will have her reprogrammed.

  In the meantime, though, I had to live with her, so I forced myself to think. Methane atmosphere. Lots of sunlight at the top. Smog central at the bottom. Something that would be liquid at ninety-five Kelvins. I'd read about that, long ago. Hell, it was probably back in grade school. It's amazing how that type of stuff sticks. I could still name the capitals of half the member states of the U.N, and I'd not been on Earth in nearly twenty annums.

  "Liquid ethane? Hydrocarbons of some sort.” Anything else would be frozen solid. Hell, the dune I'd landed on was probably ice grains, dirtied by something orange and chemically weird. But it sure looked like good, old-fashioned sand. A bit coarser than Earth-normal, but sand nonetheless.

  "Not bad,” she said. “Most likely methane. Or a mix. Any guess what would happen if we hit a lake of methane?"

  I swear, I really am going to reprogram her. “We'd go splash?"

  "Well, yeah. But then?"

  "Swim?” The skinsuit was designed for vacuum or atmosphere, but would probably keep me warm in liquid, at least for a while.

  "Not likely. What are you made of?"

  "Damn it, Brittney..."

  "Okay. The answer, genius, is water. Mostly, anyway. Specific gravity, 1.0, give or take a bit. Ethane has a specific gravity of 0.57. Methane's worse. Something like 0.46. It doesn't matter that this is a low-gravity world; the ratio's the same. The point is, we'd sink like a stone. Right now, you'd be walking around on the bottom of a methane lake, trying to find the way out, and I do not give either of us a good chance of that."

  Okay, so maybe I won't reprogram her. Though it would have been nice if she'd told me what she was doing before cutting us loose from the chute.

  For that matter, where had the chute gone? Not that it made any difference. What I needed was the canister. Somehow I had to find it with the suit's short-range com and its supplies, survival-rated for twenty-four hours average EVA—plus whatever Brittney had learned about Titan from my ship's library while I'd been jury-rigging the chute and shoving everything I could lay hands on into the canister.

  The dune was nearly a hundred fifty meters tall and steep, which was why I'd rolled forever when I hit. Based on the furrow I'd plowed at one point, there'd even been an interlude when I'd been more or less body surfing. When I was eight, I'd done that on the Kelso Dunes in the Old Mojave Desert—the part of the desert that had existed before global warming expanded it across big chunks of four states. Those dunes, which had been there since the last ice age, had incredibly fine sand piled at just the right angle that you could slide headfirst on your belly, propelling yourself with breaststroke-like swimming motions. If you did it just right, the sand would emit this wonderful bass tone that would persist until the slope abated and swimming turned into useless flapping. The guidebook said they were one of the world's few “booming” dunes, though the tone I got sounded more like an oboe.

  I loved those dunes. I think it was the first time I'd been happy after my parents died, and I ran up and slid down all day, until it got dark and my foster parents took me away, saying they were never going to let me near a sand dune again. They weren't mean people; they were merely way too conventional for a kid who craved open spaces where there was nothing to fall on you and no people who could up and die on you, because there were no people at all.

  At least, that's what the shrinks said when they green-lighted my tug license but felt obliged to warn me I was running “away,” not “to,” and that until I reversed that I'd never find what I craved.

  Well, now I was about as far away as one could get. And unfortunately, not only was I out of practice on dunes, but I'd not been doing more than minimal strength training for years, which meant that one-seventh gee might be all my muscles were adapted for. After all, muscles were for ground rats. And my ground-rat days, I'd thought, were long gone.

  * * * *

  The sand was weird stuff. Not because it really was strange but because it looked so normal. Even the color wouldn't have been all that out of place at Kelso, at least in the tail-end dusk of the perfect sunset that ended that glorious day. Who knows, maybe an eight-year-old could make these dunes boom, too.

  They were also just as hard to climb.

  Halfway up, I wondered if maybe I was doing it the hard way. To cushion the impact, Brittney had dumped me on the steepest spot she could find, so it stood to reason that there might have been an easier way. I was kind of surprised she'd not said anything, but maybe she too was anxious to see the view. On the ship, she could tap into any properly telemetered interface; now, all she had was the ear implant and a feed from my optic nerve. She didn't even have my other senses because, useful as she was, there was only so far I was letting her into my mind. For the same reason, I speak to her aloud, via the ear implant. A subvocalizer might be more private in a crowd, but I'm seldom in crowds and there's too much risk of subvocalizing your thoughts.

  It probably took less than five minutes, but my heart was going like a trip-hammer when I finally ran out of “up.” Bent over, gasping, I crested the dune—and damn near got blown off my feet. No wonder the chute had been so hell-bent on landing in the lake. In this atmosphere, that wind packed a serious punch.

  "For heaven's sake,” Brittney's voice pierced through the hammering of my heart, “would you look up? All I can see is sand!"

  It was my lungs that were on fire, not hers, but I compromised by sitting down so I could recover while we scanned the view.

  * * * *

  The lake was out there, just as she'd said. Wind kicked up weird whitecaps on its surface. It had been years since I'd left San Francisco and never again gazed on an ocean, but something about the waves seemed wrong. Too steep? Too slow? The wrong spacing? I couldn't place it. The dune had looked remarkably earthlike. The lake did not.

  Brittney either didn't notice or didn't care. “Oh, cool,” she said. “See the chute? It's that white blotch, a few hundred meters out. I'd have expected it to sink, but maybe it trapped a bubble. That's more or less where we'd have wound up if it weren't for the dunes. And see that beachlike area between us and the lake? What do you bet it's saturated with liquid? Kind of like quicksand or mud. Super nasty to walk through. We really did hit the right place!"

  The lake was big, but not huge, because I could see hills on the far side: wrinkled slopes that seemed to float above the horizon like a damn mirage. I thought it took heat to produce that, but maybe it was the curvature of the planet. Brittney would know or be able to work out the physics from scratch, but I needed her to calm down and concentrate, or neither of us was getting out of this alive. She'd last a bit longer than me, but she needs me alive and twitching to power her piezoelectrics. Not that she doesn't know this. She's never going to forget how close she came to dying that time the geyser went off under us on Enceladus and I became the first person in history to get knocked unconscious inside a pressure suit and live to tell the tale. I didn't wake up for a week, and after she linked to my ship to call for help, she had to conserve power for days until the rescue crew got to us.

  That was when she'd truly been born. Nobody knows why a few AIs achieve sentience, while most, like my ship's computer, are nothing but imitation intelligences. Really good at what they do, but with nothing to go with it but artificial personalities. In Brittney's case it had happened when she was waiting for rescue. By the time the doctors eased me out of my coma, she'd named herself and become a chattery twelve-year-old. However tho
se AI dog-years work, they're not linear.

  It's odd how her childhood, if I can call it that, mirrors mine. A true mirror, that is, in which things are partially but not completely reversed. In her case, she was the one who got to watch for days (an eternity in AI time) as death closed in. For me, death came when I wasn't around, and it was only afterward that I got to think endlessly about it.

  For months, she'd harangued me for bigger batteries, so she'd have a longer survival time if something again immobilized me. Then she refused them when I finally gave in. She wouldn't explain why, which is odd because normally, Brittney will yammer about anything and everything as though she thinks that's synonymous with life. I talk, therefore I am. Eventually, I realized that if there's one thing she fears more than a power failure, it's being alone. Which makes us a truly odd pair.

  The lake wasn't the only thing I found confusing. The dim light, haze, and relatively distant horizon made it hard to get a feel for the scale of this place.

  "That's because Titan is about ten times bigger than the moons you're used to,” Brittney said. She never mentioned Enceladus unless she had to. “But it's only one-third the diameter of Earth. From this elevation, the horizon's going to be about—"

  "So what you're saying,” I said to cut off the inevitable lecture in spherical trigonometry, “is that this place is big, but not as big as Earth?"

  She hesitated, which meant I'd hurt her feelings. “Yeah."

  "Where's the canister?” I hoped like hell it was somewhere high and dry, because she had me thoroughly spooked of lakes. Wading on the bottom, indeed. In the dark. Too much like having a building fall on you, even if we weren't talking about anything sharp and heavy. If I was going to die, I was damn well going to do so up here, where I could at least see. Or sort-of see. Which raised another question. “And how long do we have until night?"

  I think Brittney grew up another year right then. I was expecting some kind of sarcastic what-do-you-think-genius comeback, pointing out that by necessity she hadn't seen anything I hadn't, so I could damn well guess where we were. Which was true, but she could calculate descent paths and wind drift and heaven knows what far better and faster than me.