Analog SFF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Or maybe I was again getting too philosophical. Maybe I needed to talk to Brittney about things like this, rather than listen to her recite an endless list of useless items. Except for energy, I had everything I needed to stock a hab, but it would be difficult to convert the canister into one, even if I wanted to hole up here for the rest of my life like some kind of sand-bound Robinson Crusoe. To start with, the canister leaked like a sieve. It was designed that way, vented to equalize pressure with the outside, so it could be made of the lightest possible materials. Even if I did manage to make it airtight, there was no airlock, which meant I'd never be able to go outside again.

  Brittney continued to run through the supply list, probably no more mindfully than I was listening. With no vocal cords and a mind that could easily do two things at once, she could put tasks like this on autopilot and neither get bored nor tired.

  She'd been listing hydroponic supplies, which was probably what had gotten me thinking about habs. Now she switched to specialty foodstuffs, mostly spices and flavorings. She'd segued from the obvious (salt, pepper, cumin, oregano) to the not so obvious (anchovy dust, vanilla cognac Kahlua, burnt Cajun extract, key-lime concentrate, mango martini powder), and I was on the verge of cutting her off to ask how much philosophy she'd read in her nocturnal researches, when something in that list tickled a couple of semiattentive neurons.

  "Why do we have to fuse methane?” I asked. “Why not burn it?"

  "Because the air has no...” Again, I wished I could see the expression she'd be wearing if she had a face. “...oh wow. Like really, wow! It just might work."

  "Why shouldn't it? We've got lots of oxygen. We just open a bottle and burn it in the methane. Kind of like a Bunsen burner in reverse. All we need is to melt enough water to start the fusor."

  Of course, it wasn't quite that easy. To begin with, we didn't have matches. Fire's not normally a good thing in space.

  "But we've got lots of battery-powered electronics,” Brittney said, “so it should be easy to make a sparker. The problem is that the air's mostly nitrogen. The LFL for methane's somewhere around four or five percent, but I don't have the precise number. I should have downloaded more chemistry."

  "LFL?"

  "Lower flammable limit. It's the lowest concentration that will burn. On average, Titan's about two percent, which is too low, but methane tends to condense at the surface, kind of like dew or fog. Fifty-fifty there's enough."

  * * * *

  Titan's methane humidity was likely to be at its highest late at night, but unfortunately, night here was eight days long, and I didn't have that much water. So, a few hours later, I was on the first of two trips, lugging the fusor and a bunch of other equipment across the dunes.

  We were on Titan's Saturn-facing side, which meant it wasn't totally dark. But it was dim enough that beyond the beam of my suit lights, I could barely see where I was going. I'd found an inertial compass and a couple of other navigation aids, though, and the one thing Brittney was confident of was that we wouldn't get lost.

  I'd spent much of the intervening time sleeping. But with Brittney's help, I'd also been scavenging equipment. Making a sparker was simply a matter of finding a gadget with a big enough battery pack. I didn't have enough power to weld wires onto the battery terminals, but if I pulled off the suit's outer gloves, I could hold the wires in place with one hand while tapping the ends together with the other. One of the reasons I'd gotten the suit was that the inner gloves permitted that kind of dexterity, though I had to work fast or my hands would freeze.

  Brittney had also located an honest-to-goodness cooking pot, and I'd wrapped its top and sides in vacuum padding. I'd even rigged a stand to hold it, plus a windscreen that wouldn't get knocked over in that slow-but-thick breeze.

  The methane should be at its densest at the mouth of one of the gullies coming down from the highlands, where liquid would percolate into the ground after each flood. If we were lucky, some might still be there, making its way back to the surface as gas. Even a little might be all it would take to push us over the brink from no fire to fire.

  The dune trudge was only two kilometers, but seemed longer. In the hope of avoiding it, I'd insisted on first trying to light a fire near the canister. I'd gotten a good spark, but no flame, even when I'd shifted gears and tried to burn the fusor's packing foam. No doubt it was fire retardant. Freeze-dried food would probably be more flammable, but I couldn't get it to ignite, either, though I did get an interesting mini-explosion from a mix of pepper and pure oxygen. I was all for trying that again with more pepper and maybe something nice and fluffy, like oregano, but Brittney was adamant that this scored high on the all-time list of very bad ideas. Eventually, I let her persuade me that it would be methane or nothing. I just wished I could carry everything in one trip. If this didn't work, maybe I'd wait out here to die rather than walking back. I wondered which was worse: running out of air or dying of thirst.

  The gully met the dunes in an alluvial fan similar to the cobbly one I'd walked up ... however long ago it was. It couldn't have been more than three days, Earth time, but it felt like a lifetime.

  Brittney directed me to a broad, flat area where I unpacked my equipment, feeling as though I was preparing for history's coldest picnic.

  Brittney was optimistic. “The first Titan lander came down in a place like this,” she said, “and it found lots of methane.” But she also had a practical suggestion. “Before you start, scuff up the ground in case there's a crust trapping methane below the surface. It probably doesn't matter, but it can't hurt."

  Actually, it could hurt, but not the way she meant. I gritted my teeth against the jarring of abused muscles and started kicking furrows, wishing I had a shovel or a hoe or even a tamping rod—not that there'd been anything of the sort in the canister.

  "Use an oxygen bottle,” Brittney said. “They're a lot sturdier than your foot."

  Not long ago, the word “dummy” would have featured prominently in that suggestion, but now I could barely hear an echo of it. “Good idea,” I said.

  A few minutes later, I'd scraped a crosshatched pattern in the soil upwind of my ersatz stove. Time to strike a spark and see what happened.

  Suddenly, I found myself wanting to stall. The odds were that if this didn't work, nothing would. But delay was counterproductive. If my excavations had found any extra methane, it might even now be dissipating. So I turned on the gas, peeled off my outer gloves, and picked up my homemade sparker.

  "Here's to Esther,” I said.

  There was a puff of flame, then something that looked like a hollow candle, then nothing at all.

  "Too much gas,” Brittney said. “You don't need a lot; it simply dilutes the methane below the flammable limit."

  I turned down the flow and tried again. Again I got the hollow flame, but this time it was stable. I turned down the oxygen again, and the flame condensed but brightened.

  "And here's to Jack London,” Brittney said, and I knew she wasn't talking about one footstep after another, but the triumph of mankind's oldest tool, now burning before us.

  * * * *

  Melting water for the fusor was a tedious, uncertain process. Partly it was because I had to put my outer gloves back on to avoid frostbite. The sparker was the only tool I absolutely couldn't manipulate with them on, but that didn't mean everything else was simple. Mostly, though, it was the difficulty of keeping the ice from refreezing after I melted it. But the vacuum padding was good stuff, especially when I resisted the impulse to lift the lid on the pot every couple of minutes to check how it was doing.

  The tensest moment came when I poured the precious liquid into the fusor. The device was made to be started outdoors and its innards were supposed to be well enough insulated, but it was cold as hell in there, and I had no idea how to unjam it if the water froze back to a solid lump. But the insulation was as good as promised. Five minutes later, I attached the vacuum cleaner nozzle and the fusor was running off the atmosphere.

>   * * * *

  Cold fusion is a bit of a misnomer: turned up high enough, the fusor would have made a dandy space heater. But it wasn't designed as a hot plate, especially under these conditions. And it was stupid to waste oxygen by melting more ice with my stove. Now that I had unlimited electricity, there was all kinds of ice-melting equipment back on the canister, including a distillation unit designed to produce water from Titan sand or gravel. Thank goodness that hadn't been in one of the crates I'd ejected.

  Air was now my limiting factor. In theory, I had enough power to make oxygen by electrolyzing Titan water, but in the remainder of that long night, Brittney and I could do nothing but concoct increasingly hopeless schemes for capturing that oxygen and getting it into my suit. The bottom line was that when my air supply ran out, I was dead. In the interim, I either had to wait to be found or walk out.

  It was a nasty choice. The problem with waiting was that it was unlikely anyone would be looking. I wouldn't be the first spacer to disappear without a trace: that's what you expect if something goes wrong too fast to call for help. But to walk, I needed a lot of food, water, and air, plus the fusor, plus the distillation unit, plus ... Basically, there was no way I could walk hundreds of klicks carrying the supplies I needed to go hundreds of klicks. An ancient conundrum, but no less frustrating. What I needed was a packhorse, and those seemed in short supply—though I loved the mental image of a horse in a skinsuit. When you're facing lingering death, there's a fine line between desperation and silliness.

  * * * *

  Meanwhile, I was too sore for a long hike. Long ago, I'd run marathons that left me achy for days, sluggish for weeks. This was worse—bad news because I couldn't wait forever to recover.

  At the same time, I was getting cabin fever. I would have thought piloting a tug would have schooled me in long waits, but sitting in the canister was different. In the tug, I could see the stars. Even when I was merely coasting, there was the sense of going somewhere. Now, it was too much like my parents’ final moments, except that I had more than a couple of seconds in which to contemplate my approaching demise. It was as though they'd gotten to watch what happened to them in femtoseconds.

  It was even worse for Brittney, cut off from the ship's library and all of the other information that could be beamed to it from any library in the System. Here, the only things for her to read were tech manuals. One of the crates had a cache of entertainment chips, but if there was a viewer, it wasn't in the manifest.

  Other than concocting useless survival schemes, she'd continued her newfound quietness. Pensive? Depressed? Or just bored? There wasn't anything to do until dawn, when we hoped to figure out how far we were from the science base by getting a fix on the rising sun. Maybe her guess was wrong and it was only a couple of hundred klicks. I might be able to manage that, even on sand.

  As the night progressed, I modified a pair of vision-enhancing goggles to fit my suit helmet, along with a holographic projector that allowed Brittney to display images to me. I also scavenged whatever other telemetry I could for her that was compatible with my suit. She still couldn't read my medical signs, but she could look around on her own in wavelengths both visible to me and not. One of the sensors I'd found would allow her to see the rising sun well enough to determine the precise moment of sunrise. From that and its direction, she hoped to pin down our position by finding our cryovolcano on a map.

  What we didn't have was an interface compatible with the entertainment chips.

  "Can you hibernate or something?” I asked. Back before she went sentient, she'd had a standby mode, but the first time I'd tried to use it afterward, the howl of protest would have done a human teenager proud. I'd never tried again, but presumably she could do something similar on her own.

  "What if I missed something important?"

  "Like what? Rescue? A meteor falling on us?” They were probably about equally likely. “Pick a code word or something, and I can wake you."

  She was silent for a while. “Nah. If it gets too dull I can always try to beat myself at chess. Or watch a vid in real time. I downloaded a few from Ship, just in case."

  * * * *

  Finally, the world outside began to lighten. Dawn was going to take forever, but missing sunrise would be unforgivable because we didn't have anything remotely like a sextant if we didn't catch the sun at the horizon. So I loaded my suit with supplies, made sure the fusor was happy, and headed for the nearest dune, which was nowhere nearly as steep or tall as the ones we'd first encountered.

  "I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,” Brittney said as we stepped out. “Only in this case, the seas are made of ice grains, and we need to go up."

  "Huh?"

  "A literary reference.” She was silent a moment. “Why did you have all that stuff in Ship's library, anyway? You never read it."

  "It was free.” And why was I feeling so defensive? I knew she spent a lot more time in the library than I did. I'd just figured it was the femtoseconds thing on the long midnight watches. I'd had to limit her budget for long-distance downloads or she'd have bankrupted me. Now I wasn't so sure that boredom had been her only motive. There were other ways she could have kept herself occupied.

  Brittney was still thinking about poetry. “The next line is the famous one. ‘And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’ It fits, so long as you count the sun as a star."

  "Though we no longer have a ship.” Tall or otherwise.

  "Well, nothing's perfect."

  I reached the top of the dune and sat down, facing east.

  "You know,” Brittney said, “we could watch vids together, or even read a book. I can project the ones I downloaded. The best are like Esther."

  "What, fatalistic?” That was the last thing I needed.

  "I'd rather say worry-easing. But that wasn't what I meant. I read a bunch of biblical scholarship, and a lot of folks don't think Esther actually existed. What's interesting is that it didn't matter to the people who wrote the story. It's like Jack London. It's false, but true.” There was a long pause. “Kind of like you, actually."

  "How's that?” I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  She hesitated again, and I wondered if she was regretting the comment. “It's hard to explain,” she said at last. “There's a lot more to you than you're willing to let out. It's like the poetry thing. You go off to these desolate, lonely, beautiful places—and then try to hide your soul as though you're afraid of the power you sought out. I can't put it any better than that. The best of the poems and vids and books and music are the same way. You obviously knew them when you were young, so you know what I'm talking about. They make your soul ache, but it's a good ache, and I'd rather die here having ached, than never have known otherwise. It's like what they say about—” she broke off. “Oh.” Hesitated again. “Damn.” Then she was silent for a long time as the eastern sky turned from dark orange to not-so-dark orange.

  It still looked like Hell to me.

  * * * *

  An hour passed as the slow dawn crept onward. On little cat feet? Or was that fog? Brittney was right. I had studied that stuff. And then I'd run away from it, along with everything else, and the only reason it was part of my library was that it had come with the entertainment package.

  Finally, I was the one who broke the silence. “Why are you female?"

  Before she'd gone sentient, she'd had many interfaces, varying in age and gender, but the Brittney persona hadn't been among them.

  "Why are you male?"

  "That's easy. An X chromosome and a Y chromosome. It just happened that way."

  "I think it just happened my way, too. Maybe it was random. Maybe I was reacting somehow to the way in which I was created. Or maybe I was just playing opposite to you."

  "So if you were a person, what would you look like?” I'd never asked anything like this before. I'd never wanted her to be that human. “Pick an avatar and let me see it."

  There was a long pause, t
hen an image appeared. Blonde. Blue eyes. Ponytail. Athletically trim, but with a slightly preppy look. Good Girl on Good Behavior.

  "Is that how you see yourself, or how you want me to see you?"

  "I don't know. Sometimes I'm the heroine in one of Ship's stories. Sometimes I'm a theoretical physicist. I don't have an image of the me who talks to you. If you don't like that one, how about this?” The blonde winked out, replaced by a dark-skinned brunette wearing spangle beads and precious little else.

  I'd seen plenty of women like that; hell, I'd even known a few. Some even had brains. But they were not Brittney. This relationship was weird enough without visuals. Brittney was my daughter, protégé, mentor, and life companion all rolled into one. I'd be distressed if she wasn't attractive, and weirded out if she was. Definitely a no-win situation.

  "Bad idea,” I said.

  * * * *

  Eventually, the sun peeked over the horizon. Or Brittney said it did. I couldn't see anything.

  "Well,” I said, “what's the bad news?"

  "Worse than I'd hoped. Eight hundred forty-five klicks, plus or minus fifteen. And unless you go way out of the way, it's sand for the first seven hundred."

  "Crap."

  "Yeah. The good news is that finding the base wouldn't be a problem. When you get close, the terrain is pretty well mapped."

  On Earth, with resupply every few days, a trip like that would take a month, maybe more. As it was, I'd need so much gear I'd probably never get a kilometer. Or I'd be ferrying supplies in leapfrog fashion until I ran out of air, probably only a fraction of the way there. But what other option was there? At least walking offered hope. And the companionship of doing something together, rather than just standing there watching the shards come tumbling down.