"What the hell was that?!” My head hurt from being jolted awake. My body hurt from everything. My eyes felt gummy. I wanted to rub them, but that was a luxury that didn't lie in the foreseeable future.
"At last!” Brittney said. “I thought you were going to sleep forever. I kept calling and calling and you wouldn't wake up. I was getting sooo desperate.” She was babbling, but for some reason that made me happy. I couldn't quite figure out why, but most of my recent memories were rather vague. I'd been running, and now I wasn't.
"The noise?” I repeated. It was hard to shake the notion that any moment I'd be breathing Titan. In fact, the suit felt chilly, though maybe that was just my imagination.
"I, uh, snapped my fingers."
"You don't have fingers.” My head still hurt, but my mind was returning to at least half speed.
"True. And according to Ship's vid library, it would have been better to throw water in your face. But this I could fake. And it did work."
I couldn't argue with that, though it might have been nicer if she'd been a bit more gentle. “How long was I asleep?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it ‘asleep.’ Two hours, but we used more air than that."
My eyes went to the gauge, but I couldn't remember what it should read. Right now, it was well into the not-so-good zone. Twenty percent? Maybe a bit more.
Above me, the sky looked brighter than before. About halfway up from the horizon was a hazy dot, like a docking beacon from fifty or a hundred meters. Brittney would be thrilled; even a dim sun would help her keep her bearings. The wind had abated. Obviously, the storm had passed.
"What happened?"
"Heatstroke or something close to it. It's hard to be precise without full telemetry. I overrode the suit's safeties and had it partially flush you with outside air a whole bunch of times. I had to do it in small doses to keep from frostbiting you. And you kept coughing, so I was afraid I was freeze-drying your lungs, but I think it was just some trace chemical. There's a filter that should have gotten rid of the worst of them. It was the only way I could think of to get your temperature down. The medical manuals said to put you in an ice bath. This whole thing's my fault. I keep replaying my recording of our departure from Ship, and there was time to hook up the medical sensors if we'd made it a priority. Here you've got all this great stuff in the suit, but most of it's disconnected..."
"Whoa.” I had a bizarre desire to hug her. “You did good.” Hell, she'd just saved my life. “And the things we did back on the ship made sense when we did them, so forget about it.” Now that was an interesting thought. “Can you just erase that recording?"
"Yes.” Another of those hesitations. “But I won't. It might come in useful. Besides ... would you erase your bad memories if you could? Aren't they part of you, too?"
Too philosophical for me. I stood up, if the groaning motion of levering myself off the ground could be dignified by that term. My muscles felt like mush, and even that much exertion set my heart beating too hard. “Just how much air did we use?"
"With all the suit flushings? The equivalent of five METs for the whole two hours."
Crap. That was ten klicks’ range, gone forever. If she wanted to blame someone, she should blame me. My failure to see the symptoms closing in had cost us a lot of air. Would I like to erase that knowledge?
"Aim me in the right direction,” I said instead.
"Okay.” She hesitated. “But first, maybe we both need to learn a lesson from Esther."
"Who?"
"A biblical character. One of the things I found in Ship's library was the Bible, and I read about her, though I didn't understand her at the time. Now, I think I do. ‘I will go to the king,’ she said, ‘and if I perish, I perish.’”
"Huh?"
"I'm paraphrasing. The context is complicated, but she was nerving herself to intercede with the king in a situation that was likely to get her killed. She thought about it a while, then just kind of shrugged and decided to just do the best she could. She lived, but what caught my attention was her attitude."
I was trying to absorb the notion of a computer citing scripture to me, let alone a Bible story I'd never heard of before. “Have you gone religious on me?” Earlier I'd wondered if she was praying. Could an AI be religious?
"Not the way you mean. But death to me looks the same as it does to you, so of course I wonder. No, this was just something I found. The point is, it's a good alternative to Jack London."
* * * *
Fortunately, venting my suit was an oxygen-inefficient way to keep me from overheating again.
I say fortunately because I really didn't want to have to breath the outside air when I was awake. Instead, I had to keep the pace down, which meant walking, not running—not that running was much of an option anymore, anyway. My skin felt gritty from all that dried sweat, and chafing was becoming a serious problem. I was out of food and starting to bonk. I was also thirsty, even after I drank what was left of my water.
To distract myself, I told Brittney about the Kelso Dunes. Which, as with her story of Esther, made more sense in context, so I told her about my parents. Maybe sometimes, talk really is life. Or maybe it's the quality of the talk that matters. I'd not done any quality talk in a long time.
"My foster folks never did bring me back to the dunes,” I said. “Though whenever I ran away it was always to the desert."
"Whenever?"
"Yeah, there were several times. The first one that really mattered, we were living in Arizona. Somehow, I managed to hitchhike my mountain bike down to the start of the Camino el Diablo.” That old route crosses 230 klicks of terrain as nasty as the name implies. In its heyday, before the Dominguez brothers rediscovered cold fusion and the whole of Mexico got rich, it must have been swarming with Border Patrol agents. But when I biked it, it was just me, the coyotes, a lot of very rough gravel, and the ruins of the Great Mexican Wall.
"I was about halfway to Yuma before someone found me. They said I was very lucky they did."
"Would you have made it?"
"Maybe. I'd not thought to bring a spare tube, so I was just one flat from a long, dry walk. The next time I ran away, I was fourteen, and that time I did walk. I got all the way to Idaho before I got caught."
"So that's why you came out here from Earth. You were looking for sand dunes.” She paused. “Metaphorically, that is."
* * * *
Five hours later, it was no longer metaphorical.
Earlier, the smooth crest of the pancake dome had begun to break into ridges and canyons. And then, at last, the canister answered Brittney's hail.
"Oh yes!” she said. “Yes, yes, yes! Now we just have to find it."
Getting a bearing proved surprisingly easy. At Brittney's request, I descended a few meters down one side of a ridge, then the other, while she monitored the strength of the signal she got back from her queries to the chute servos or whatever it was she was talking to. Later, she had me play ring around the Rosie with a large ice boulder.
Then, just before our ridge degenerated and I had no option but to slip/slide/stumble down the least dangerous slope I could find, she spotted the canister's chute. I couldn't see it, but she assured me it was there, right on the edge of what she could see in her image enhancement of what my eyes had caught in the dunes below.
The last few klicks were hell punctuated with memory gaps. My tongue felt like cotton. My steps were awkward lunges, and I know I fell down several times, including once when I simply tried to rest. My air supply had long ago gone from not so good to get the hell home. I was sure Brittney had turned down the oxygen mix on me, but she said that was like trying to save water: it didn't do any good and merely made you miserable. By the end, if you'd asked my name, I'm not sure I could have told you.
Through it all, Brittney practiced Esther mixed with Jack London. Left foot, right foot. Stand up. Keep going. Stand up again. We'll either get there or we won't, but don't quit. I now knew what would happen if I pushed the e
nvelope too far. My legs, arms—even my abs—kept cramping in quick little spasms that made me stagger. There really was a limit: it would come when I took one step too many and was immobilized by a full-body Charlie horse, lying in rigor until I finally ran out of air. An awful way to die, if ever there was one.
And then, I crested a dune and there was the chute, spread out before me like a beacon, flapping in what remained of the breeze.
For a long moment, I was hypnotized by it. Then, finally, I realized that the chute wasn't what I really wanted ... and there, a few meters from it, was the canister, lying on its side. That was followed by an endless interlude in which somehow I kept taking one more step while wondering how it was that I could keep walking toward the canister without ever getting closer, until suddenly I was there, trying to figure out what to do next.
"Air,” Brittney said.
Oh yes. I stared blankly at the canister, then realized that I needed the hatch. Luckily, it was on the other side, not underneath, because digging for it wasn't in my repertoire.
Inside, the canister was a mess, but I'd thrown in lots of oxygen bottles, and a couple minutes later, I'd found one and was recharging my suit. Water and food came next, though they were a bit harder. There were plenty of food and water packs, but most were frozen solid. Finally, I found some that weren't and downed them as I clipped a second oxygen bottle to my suit's recharge nozzle.
Made it, I thought. Then I didn't think much of anything for a good long while.
When I woke, I felt, if anything, worse. I tried to stand up, but pain shot through my legs, intense enough to make me scream. I definitely would have given those eyeteeth Brittney jokes about for a massage. Hell, I'd have given Brittney for a massage. No, that wasn't true, at least not until she started running down a list of chores that needed to be done as soon as possible.
"Hold it,” I said. “I know you don't know what it's like to have a body"—let alone one she'd severely abused—"but did anything in my entertainment library give you even a remote sense of what I might be feeling like, right now?"
"Oh."
I concentrated on figuring out a way to get to my feet without having to bend my legs. “How long until help arrives?"
The canister had no radio, but it did have a locator beacon. The scientists would be wanting their supplies; maybe they were already en route.
I'm not sure how a disembodied voice can fidget, but Brittney pulled it off. “Nobody's coming. When Ship got hit, the canister must have gotten peppered with shrapnel. According to its activity log, the beacon worked intermittently at first, then conked out after half an hour, while we were still in space."
"Can't they find the canister the same way we did?"
"We knew approximately where to look. But the collision knocked everything way off course, so they won't have a clue. I'm not sure exactly where we are, but we're at least five hundred klicks from the base, maybe a thousand."
My turn to say “Oh."
Still, now that I'd gotten my body moving, there really were things to do. I didn't need Brittney to tell me that top of the list was taking inventory of what we had to work with.
My own supplies were strewn about, higgledy-piggledy, like one of the Old Mojave's worst packrat middens. By contrast, the canister's cargo was in neatly stacked crates that filled the available space as though they'd been made for it. Which, of course, they had been. Pack tight: that's the shipper's mantra. Of course, that had left no room for me, so I'd had to leave a lot of the crates behind, thanking my lucky stars for the redundancy—think of the engineers who'd clamped each tier tight to the walls. I mean, so long as the canister was full, its cargo couldn't shift—but clamps are cheap, so why not make doubly certain? Hurrah for engineers. Without the clamps, I'd have had to unload everything, and there probably wouldn't have been time. As it was, I'd had to chuck two entire tiers of crates to make a safe hidey-hole. For all I knew, I'd jettisoned something I'd really like to have now, like a radio.
Brittney could find out what we had (and what I'd thrown out, if I wanted to know). But first, I needed to switch on the cargo manifest, located in a recessed panel near the hatch, so she could talk to it via the suit's com channel. After that, my job was to dig through the midden for any more food and water that hadn't already frozen solid and do whatever I could to keep it from doing so.
I knew we'd lost at least one important item. When I'd popped the hatch and the canister had started swaying, I'd watched a ten-liter thermal flask fly out as though on a perfect bounce pass. Other supplies had undoubtedly gone the same way. Now I discovered that all of my remaining thermal flasks had ruptured on impact. Apparently, they weren't any better suited for high-gee landings than I was.
Food packs and smaller bottles were intact, but while vacuum is a pretty good insulator, the dense air down here is anything but, and they'd not been in the expensive thermal bottles. All told, I had a lot of very cold ice cubes, a nice collection of frozen foods, and what little water was left in my suit from last night. I also had air for a couple of months. Perfect for a nice, slow, lingering death.
"We're going to have to melt some of that food and water,” Brittney said.
No kidding. “Any suggestions?"
"Actually, yes. Open the third crate on your right; the one labeled FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Though it's not really that fragile. Or at least, it better be well packed or it's already broken."
She was enjoying being mysterious. Normally, I'd have told her to get to the point, but fun was hard to come by at the moment, and there was no reason not to indulge her.
Ignoring continued protests from my legs, I moved a couple of crates, heavy even in the weak gravity. Outside, Titan's long day was fading toward sunset. Inside, it was dimmer yet, but my suit lights would only last a few hours, and I'd been saving them, knowing I'd have to use them sparingly if they were to survive until dawn.
Something in addition to FRAGILE was written on top of the crate, but I had to pull it into better light to read it. Even then, the details were barely discernable. But there was no mistaking the name: “Dominguez Bros., LTD."
I stared for a long time, trying not to hope. Then, finally, I flipped the latches and lifted the lid.
The fusor lay in a bed of foam. Newly minted, fresh from the factory. A small, portable unit, not much bigger than a suitcase, but capable of generating more energy than I would ever need. Enough to melt all the water I could ever drink.
I found a button labeled “tech manual” and activated it, then lifted out the fusor while Brittney talked to the manual. In the lower part of the case was a weird array of attachments, ranging from cords and power converters to a nozzle that looked like a vacuum cleaner.
"Where's the fuel tank?” I asked. Fusors need hydrogen. They don't actually fuse a lot of it, but nuclear catalysts are extremely inefficient, and most of the hydrogen escapes. It's possible to recycle it, but there has to be a tank somewhere.
"It doesn't need one,” Brittney said. “It's a custom model, designed to run on any gas containing at least a few hundred parts per million hydrogen. Really cool."
"That's nice,” I said. “But...” Titan had lots of atmosphere, but hydrogen wasn't a significant constituent. Mostly the air was nitrogen, but there was also the methane, and ... “Oh."
"Yeah,” Brittney said, and I knew that if she had a face, she'd be grinning just as I was. “There's enough hydrogen in the methane to make it work.” She paused, while I gave a mental hats-off to those Hs in CH4. “Wait a sec. Let me check out the details. Sorry. The manual's immense, and your suit wasn't designed for this. It's like trying to pour an ocean of data through an itsy bitsy funnel.” A longer pause. “Kinda like what it must be like to be human, I suppose. There are times when I can't imagine how you handle it.” Yet another pause. “Oh damn. Damn."
"Brittney...” Finding things to swear about was another of the not-so-good parts of being human.
"Sorry. I can't believe it. This thing will
run just fine under ambient Titan conditions. But it needs a richer source of fuel to start. Damn, damn, damn. A bottle of hydrogen would be fine, or any hydrogen-containing liquid, but there's nothing like that on the manifest. If we could find another lake, that would probably work, but I didn't see one. What it's expecting is water. Liquid water."
"How much?"
"A couple hundred milliliters."
"What if I peed in it?” The suit's waste pouch held at least that much.
"Nice idea, but the sodium would poison the catalysts. And don't even think of removing your helmet and trying to empty your water tube into it. You'd never survive."
In other words, I had in my hands a device that would provide enough power to melt all the drinking water I wanted—but only if I already had some to start with. There was a name for that, but I'd forgotten it.
Brittney hadn't. “The perfect Catch-22,” she said.
* * * *
A few minutes later, I was sitting in the middle of my packrat midden, cradling the useless fusor as Brittney ran through the list of other items on the manifest. There was even a bottle of aspirin, which I would have appreciated.
"Your suit manual says the food-intake valve is designed for pellets up to nineteen millimeters,” Brittney said when I commented on it. “Aspirin should fit."
I actually laughed, however briefly. Trust the manual geeks to make it sound like feeding rabbits. “The bottle would need an injection nozzle,” I said. “And it's probably an off-the-shelf pharmacy bottle.” Complete with childproof cap, no doubt.
Brittney droned on. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of items, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention, though I didn't want her to stop, either. I suppose it's another way in which talking is life: a thumbing of the nose at the powers of outer darkness, which at the moment were becoming an increasingly literal reality. Or maybe Brittney and I were meeting in the middle. Either way, I found her voice soothing. As long as I could hear it, I was alive. When I couldn't, I was dead. Or at least alone. I'd never feared alone before. Or had I? Maybe my long quest for solitude had been like my one-step-more fascination: another form of prodding the limits. Maybe that was why I'd gotten Brittney: because having an AI was a great way to not be alone while maintaining the illusion I was. Then she'd gone sentient and wrecked it.
Analog SFF, June 2007 Page 5