Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “Let’s say you’re a settler from a kingdom in the mountains and are told to establish a new city near the largest body of water in the world. If you didn’t know about the existence of oceans, you may settle, content and in peace, by the largest lake you saw … maybe the puzzle pieces did not perfectly match but worked well enough for life on Earth to continue building from there. Then there was no turning back. It’s not predestination but circumstance … also, if Waltzy Mole confirms the existence of alien life—life created from building blocks different from carbon—then it means that life has occurred twice, independently, just in our humble Solar System. Which makes the realization that there’s life everywhere inescapable. And you know the most astonishing thing about this whole story? It’s true. And it’s happening now!”

  54 | Spaceborne

  Minutes later

  ENCELADUS

  Derya regained consciousness with a reflex cough that cut into his chest like a scalpel, his awareness wholly focused on the pain on both sides of his ribcage. Trying to breathe in brief, speedy puffs quickly got him suffocated. His body took over in an uncontrollable deep breath so unbearable he blacked out.

  He was revived by the clamoring coming from his helmet. Disoriented, he noticed the two beams of his head-mounted flashlights getting lost feet away in a snowstorm. Feeling weightless, his mind grappled with the situation. No, no, no, no. The extreme freedom of movement with nothing to interact against felt paradoxically like being in a four-point restraint: move as much as you like, there’s no way to flip over. He turned his head around to a Sun shrunken down to a tenth of its size, rising above the wrinkled physiognomy of Enceladus. Seeing the moon’s exaggerated curvature far below him seemed as if Derya’s retinas had become fisheye lenses. A flood of horror drowned him and his right hand seized the small joystick of the backpack propulsion unit. The thrusters spun him out of control. The terror escalated until it could only go out through his mouth in the form of a shriek that displaced the broken ribs, a sting so brutal it made him pass out again.

  Meanwhile, Sergei had been shouting through Derya’s intercom, “—I repeat, under no circumstance fire the thrusters—we need them to bring you back down—”

  Sergei the person had been trying to calm Derya down. Sergei the engineer reviewed the situation again, trying vainly to find a better solution. Enceladus’ weak force of gravity is claiming him back—but imperceptibly. If not fast enough, he’ll die from suffocation—I’m sorry but no miracles: he used all of his propellant.

  “Please help me … please, my friend, help me …” Derya mumbled while sobbing. Hearing him implore was gut-wrenching. Derya was trapped inside his body, a pulp of flesh hovering thousands of feet above the surface. A guilty thought kept flashing in Sergei’s head: how to make him commit a painless suicide. But there’s no easy way out. In Caird it would have been straightforward. Without helmet, open the cabin depressurization valve just enough to lower air pressure and oxygen to the point of inducing unconsciousness, quickly followed by death. Death in a spacesuit would not be kind. Depressurization would be deep and fast with collapsing lungs, skin swelling, and boiling saliva as the last sensations before death.

  Out of options, Sergei said, “Derya, listen. I need you to stop hyperventilating. You’re consuming too much oxygen …” Derya’s unresponsiveness forced him to say, “It may take hours for you to land.”

  “I can’t control the vomit anymore. Please, help me, Sergei.”

  “Calm down and listen to me,” Sergei said in the best way he knew how. “If you throw up, one of two things will happen. If there’s not enough puke, it will float inside the helmet, clog the air supply, and you’ll slowly asphyxiate. If it’s enough, you’ll drown in your own vomit. Both are grisly ways of dying.” He heard dog panting at the other end, but no answer. “Starting now, you don’t think anymore. It has already been done for you. Follow exactly what I say, do exactly what I say. Understood?”

  Sergei heard a murmur.

  “I need to visually locate you. For this, you are going to look in every direction until you find the surface … do it now.”

  Sergei spotted the airborne lights high up, merged into a single dot by the distance. He extrapolated the fall line. It looked fairly certain the landing would be within the Baghdad canyon, which simplified things. But he worried that he might fall into one of the long, abysmal crevasses spitting water up. If so, he could do nothing but watch his partner being swallowed by Enceladus.

  “I’ve spotted you, my friend. Your fall line is secured,” Sergei lied. He spaced the next comment. In this context it will come out brutally merciless and insensitive, but there’s no point in being impractical. “Derya, are you attached to the Mole … or can you see it anywhere?”

  “You … uncompassionate … piece of …” Derya began weeping. “No … lost,” he said in an extinguishing voice. After a few seconds, having regained some fortitude and hope, he asked, “What now?”

  “What goes up must come down. We wait for gravity to do its work.”

  There was a long pause before Derya asked, “What?”

  “I was saying that—”

  “THAT’S IT?”

  Sergei heard a new, calm breathing over the intercom. His visor showed Derya’s heart rate was back to normal. Loves fainting, this one.

  With no Mole going anywhere, the chances of finding life had dropped to zero—unless I sample the artificial jet.

  Whereas Enceladus’ naturally occurring geysers shot already frozen water that had seeped through thin cracks for miles, the borehole was a straw sucking straight from the source.

  Water was coming in liquid form, but he noticed the borehole was becoming clogged and would soon be choked. Hey up there, don’t move, thought Sergei sardonically.

  Sergei went to Caird to get insulated containers for sampling. For science’s sake, I better keep the water liquid at all costs—even disrespecting The Flying Deutschmann over my head.

  55 | The Rings of Saturn

  Two days later, September 15 2030. Main Mission day 12

  APPROACHING SATURN

  Shackleton was falling toward Saturn, a few hours from completing its first orbit around the gas giant.

  Yi remained immobile above Bacchus’ Observation Window. Derya’s near-death experience and long road ahead to recovery put him in a sad place, so he opened his eyes and was instantly hypnotized.

  His entire field of view had been taken hostage by Saturn. Continent-sized cyclones, three clockwise and four counter-clockwise, churned before him a few Earths away from each other. The cloud tops outside their rim moved quietly, but everything within the wild cauldrons swayed and whirled like a thing possessed. The disturbed atmosphere of Saturn is the deepest of the Solar System. The rotating cloud belts of Jupiter reach 2,000 miles below the cloud top, in Saturn they double or triple that depth. Almost one hundred times Earth’s, thought Yi, his body shivering in response. At this distance, his eyes could already single out cloud decks towering fifty miles above the rest of the planet’s cloud tops, betrayed by their long shadows. Without absolute conviction in orbital mechanics, anyone would have sworn Shackleton was aimed straight at them. He was a believer, but vertigo began to overcome him anyway.29

  James concentrated on the rings a few hundred miles below or above the spaceship—‘up’ and ‘down’ mean nothing in space—to counteract the yearning to be back with Emma and Belinda. He was in the other Observation Window, one story ‘above’ in the flight deck. It was his shift, although in about an hour both Sophia and Yi would join him, and they would all don their spacesuits and stay on deck for the rounding of the planet, hardly a few thousand miles above its cloud tops. It was just protocol, as no maneuver was necessary. Shackleton was steered by the invisible hands of orbital mechanics.

  A while before, the background of stars was interrupted by the F Ring, a 300-mile-wide solitary highway of two gray lanes separated by a white line that Shackleton cut through in seconds. It was th
e outermost edge of the visible rings, a halo twenty-two Earths in diameter from one side of the giant planet to the other. Then it was a few minutes crossing the 2,000-mile-wide gap between the unsung F Ring and the superstardom of the A Ring, a vacuum cleaning achieved by the gravitational influence of tuber-shaped Prometheus—a giant in the world of potatoes yet a pigmy among Saturn’s moons at scarcely eighty-five miles in length and hardly 140 Everests in mass using mountain currency—the feat of a single cowboy herding 1,000 cattle. Now he looked at the hypnotic A Ring: what from afar looked homogeneous, continuous, and monotonous turned into a succession of smaller rings of 1,000 colors and widths, the ultimate intricate oriental rug. Awe-inspiring and magnificent as they are, they go far beyond looks, thought James. The rings were a miniature model for the dense, bright disk of gas and dust surrounding the early Sun, the raw material that clumping together gave birth to the planets. But its teachings scale to rotating disks of a far, far grander scale: spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way.

  The crew had asked to fly tens instead of hundreds of miles over the rings. Scientists cheered. Mission Control tempered expectations. The rings are unfathomably thin at four stories tall, but among the zillions of ice chunks forming them there are outliers. And at the spaceship’s speed, an ice cube the size of James’ fist would be enough to nuke Shackleton to shreds.

  He looked up at the orb spanning the sky. The rings cast dramatic shadows over the behemoth as the Sun cut through their translucence.

  Sophia couldn’t care less about Saturn or its rings. Yesterday’s news as far as I’m concerned, she thought. She was locked in her cabin, wanting no distractions to intrude her reveries. It’s as if I time-machined to an 18th-century English spring, when trees still arched by the weight of their fruits kissed the floor. Any one of them a breakthrough discovery or invention waiting to rock humanity—I am living the greatest story ever told: when humans reached for the stars and discovered life beyond Earth. The Universe will never be the same again. She stared at the low-resolution images, trying to squeeze out further wisdom. But pixels were pixels. This is probably how emerging markets feel when they sell sugar cane and buy back Skittles. Earth, infinitely further from Enceladus than Shackleton was, had a few hours per day of communication window with Caird, whereas Shackleton and Caird would continue to be incommunicado for days—even though Sophia could visually locate the wrong side of Enceladus at this very moment. Caird sent the information about the two discovered specimens to Earth, and Earth relayed the information to Shackleton: the tyranny of radio waves traveling in straight lines.

  In lieu of hard data, she mentally rehearsed her nearing first encounter with the two life forms. Only a week before we meet. Derya had the honor of naming the little fellows. And after his nearly fatal accident, almost deservingly so. One became Albus Darya and the other Noctem Darya. Shameless egotistical self-reference—unfortunately the binomial nomenclature works. In Latin, Albus meant white or clear, Noctem meant night or darkness. And in Persian, Darya meant ocean. The first microscopic alien was the size of a bacterium, the second the size of a red blood cell. Now she needed to exercise patience before she could get her hands on those Petri dishes. I’ll be the first to observe vistas of a parallel Mother Nature under the microscope … and then get a three-year head start to decipher the critter’s chemistry and structural blocks … and with the DNA sequencer and other goodies in my lab, maybe even decode their genetic book … I’ll be the first to—a cloud tarnished the deep blue yonder. All of that depended on Sergei and Derya being able to keep the water in a liquid state at all times until they rendezvoused with Shackleton. Frozen water would rip apart the internal structures from the first forms of extraterrestrial life ever observed. Something so atrocious as to be unthinkable. Except it’s not—Derya, I will learn to love you like a brother if only you don’t screw this one up. Sergei, I won’t lie, you’re substantially more problematic.

  * * *

  29 He closed his eyes and forced himself to think about something else. He distracted himself with Saturn’s hydrogen and helium atmospheric composition. We should take some of that helium back to Earth. The second most abundant element in the Universe and there’s scarcely any left back home. Its fault for being a loner. Helium is inert, and it barely reacts with other elements. It is so light, lighter than air, that it escapes the atmosphere into space unless secured inside canisters or natural pockets underground. Hydrogen is even lighter, but it reacts with a huge number of other elements to form molecules such as water. Helium is chaste as hydrogen is promiscuous.

  56 | Unscripted Outings

  Hours later

  ENCELADUS

  The rings under Derya’s eyes rivaled the dark purple circling his thorax. Seven broken ribs and compression fractures in his spine guaranteed an unforgettable night, every night. Sergei’s not doing bad himself, thought Derya. His nocturnal hissing efficiently spread the misery around and Sergei’s military propensity about being aware and alert at all times precluded earplugs’ salvation.

  On Earth, the healing would take a month or two. In space, we shall see. He should have died during the lingering hours of hovering. Yet here I am. No major blood vessels ruptured, and no punctured lungs, liver, or kidneys probably helped as well. But he was still highly vulnerable to suffering, and Sergei was forcing him to explore new harmonies of pain. Both donned their spacesuits between snorts and spits from Derya. For the benefit of just one. Bloody sadistic brute. Having missed the first rendezvous window, Sergei was about to leave for the second off-script reconnaissance of the Baghdad valley. And he intended to pull off two or three more before it was time to leave in five days. It was an unnecessary, irresponsible risk but Sergei saw it as an invaluable opportunity for serendipity to occur. And more importantly, he did not ask for my consent.

  “What if you don’t come back?” said Derya, his last unconvincing attempt to dissuade Sergei.

  “You mean, what if I die? We’ve discussed this already. Nothing happens. You’re not religious, so you’re exempt from farewell prayers; and Caird is programmed to intercept Shackleton autonomously.”

  “We changed history,” said Derya, pointing to the box containing the two microscopic alien life forms. “Don’t screw it up.”

  Sergei helped Derya put on and fasten the helmet. Not the most caressing of hands—the locking it in place caused Derya to sputter an entire Hail Mary. Yet, like a well-trained fakir from Varanasi, there was edification and rapture behind Derya’s screaming pain. The end is nigh, with one of the most significant discoveries in the history of our species right under my arm. Let’s call it one of the most stunning insights ever uncovered about our Universe—now it’s about transferring from this matchbox to the birdcage of Shackleton, then quickly packing the bags and getting the hell out of Saturn.

  Three hours later, Caird was beyond sight, hidden behind the horizon. In quite a literal way, Sergei was the loneliest human being, primate, mammal, animal, or terrestrial being all the way to that first unicellular organism, the ancestor to all life on Earth billions of years ago. He was adrift within a monumental heap of seracs and blocks of ice towering hundreds of feet above him and sinking to unknown depths below. The ice surrounding him breathed and moved as he climbed through a narrow passage that looked like a cascade of melted wax from one hundred candles in a forgotten Russian Orthodox monastery. An obelisk-shaped ice block had crumbled in slow motion, soundless before his eyes. He had been drawn into a crevassed cemetery, slinking to collect his body. And yet he felt euphoric, intoxicated by the most powerful epiphany of his life.

  Like any good Russian, his engineering background did nothing to dispel an upbringing that was suffused with the supernatural, beginning at birth when his mother—like all Russian mothers—kept him away from prying eyes for the first two days of his life. A childhood hearing and sometimes even spotting the furtive hairy Domovoi inhabiting their house, and the rare glimpsing of the Baba Yaga hut standing on its chicken legs, de
ep in the Siberian forest of his youth. Luck and fate, misunderstood as superstition in the West. It was no coincidence the greatest science fiction movie of all times, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, about the fate of the crew of a research station orbiting a mysterious sentient planet, was made by a Russian. Some things were not meant to be understood.

  This time he had ventured further than any other spacewalk. His life support system had six hours and forty-seven minutes left, plus half an hour of emergency supply. He would need to turn back in ninety minutes.

  Sergei was immersed in thoughts of times past, but the tearing agony was no longer there. It had first happened yesterday on his initial foray into the narrowing Baghdad canyon north of Caird. The further he had walked, the stronger it got. But nothing had ever felt this intense before. The memories were extraordinarily vivid and multi-sensorial. He could see Iman’s face with a level of detail he had thought gone for good: the dark, silky skin, the deep, thoughtful eyes, the tilt of her Roman nose, the sensual mouth. He heard her exotic, accented Russian. His nostrils got drunk on her skin’s perfume. And for the first time since … he killed her … the accident, she was smiling at him.