Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “This is likely the most spectacular view in the Solar System,” said Sergei.

  “Fools seldom differ,” answered Derya. He kept trying to discern the granularity of the rings for the first time in history, but it was too dark and they were likely still too high.

  Before them laid the Keeler Gap. For extra safety they would move Caird a few miles inside it, which they had confirmed through radar as well as visually to be devoid of ring particles.

  “Shall we move to our new zip code until—and if ever—Shack tries to rescue us? Tomorrow is harvesting season and I need to sleep well and long before it begins,” said Derya.

  I should go to bed now, Derya thought while watching Sergei snore. Bed? Caird was not only missing beds, it also butchered the going-to-sleep ritual. Brush teeth, swallow the toothpaste, close your eyes. Sleep? He was overdosing on pain medication and sleeping pills, yet ‘a good night’s sleep’ was still beyond his horizon.

  He stared through two opposing windows. They had already dropped to ring plane height and both ring shores were clearly visible. It was a peaceful, dreamy spectacle. The perks of sailing the dark waters of the Acheron, separating the realm of the living from the underworld.

  Tomorrow after breakfast they would carefully move back to one of the ring shores to attempt collecting ice from the inexhaustible assortment in all shapes and sizes, to melt into water and cook into oxygen.

  * * *

  30 But acting assuming that would be fatal, thought Derya. Already in 1859, James Clerk Maxwell—responsible for unifying electricity, magnetism, and light, widely considered to be the third greatest physicist of all time—had used his formidable powers to deduce and demonstrate that Saturn’s rings could not remain stable if made of unbroken solid or liquid. Meaning they’re made of countless particles, each independently orbiting the giant. The particles are 99.9 percent pure water ice and the rest are the impurities that explain the wide color gamut of the rings. The particles range from the size of tiny marbles to the size of mountains, but the overwhelming majority sits between half an inch and four inches. And yet, the particle density is such that they behave as a fluid.

  31 The inner edge of the D Ring and the outer edge of the A Ring, the closest and furthest of the main rings, travel around Saturn at 14.7 and 10.1 miles per second respectively.

  32 Five hours later, having dropped to thirteen miles above the ring plane and closing in on the outer edge of the A Ring, any preconceptions about coming near to the moon Atlas flew out of the window. Bye-bye Sergei’s landing delusions, thought Derya. The sight was unforgettable even by Saturnian standards. Discovered in 1980 in a corner of one of Voyager 1’s images, the closest Cassini ever got in its thirteen years exploring the Saturn system was an Earth away, managing a few high-resolution pictures and no video footage. Until today.

  Atlas was some 120 miles ahead of Caird, floating in space while almost grazing the ring’s border. If it wasn’t twenty-five miles too big, you could have confused it with a flying saucer prop from a 1950s B-movie set. Gazing at it, it was evident to Derya that the baptism by astronomers was sheer poetic license: the moon’s chaotic orbit stumbling around the dark did not agree with holding the rings on its shoulders like its namesake, the Greek god Atlas, held the sky above the Earth.

  66 | The Harvest

  A day later, September 18 2030. Day 15

  Derya stared at the nutrition bar with contempt. “I can no longer trick this throat into passing down the soap bar, and then scrubbing its starchy excrement texture with fruit-flavored powder juice. I’m done with this breakfast, now and in general—feel free to steer Caird.”

  Since arriving at the rings Caird had pointed in the direction of their rotation, west to east, same as all planets in the Solar System—a relic from the spinning hot gas cloud that formed it all. Now, Sergei rotated the spaceship ninety degrees to approach the ring shore.

  Derya was the first to sense the soaring shadow and his instinct fused his hand to a rail while letting a shriek loose. Sergei turned over.

  The vision was a geometrical upheaval seemingly cheating the laws of physics. About to reach them, the smooth flat rings had folded into the phantasmagorical vertical waving of a planet-sized magic carpet, some of its crests miles above them, some troughs deep under the ring plane. The flapping was in slow motion, as if certain that no matter what Caird did, the impending doom was no longer avoidable.

  It was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a world of absurdity resembling reality by traces of believability. Like prey hypnotized by the rhythmic rocking of a cobra, Sergei stared at the reality-bending source of all this, a giant rock cruising in the middle of the Keeler Gap yet barely using a fourth of the cleared highway, floating unhurriedly as it advanced toward them.

  Derya was curled into a ball, moaning like a newborn from twitching his broken ribs. “—DO … SOMETHING—”

  Sergei finally disentangled his own stupefaction. It’s Daphnis, Saturn’s smallest satellite, he reasoned. It had been on their heels since the day before. But without a rearview mirror, we couldn’t see it.

  “It appears to be getting closer but it’s an optical illusion,” he said. Derya’s panicky, bloodshot eyes did not seem relieved, whenever they weren’t squeezed shut by the pangs of abdominal cramps. “It’s all good.”

  Daphnis, hardly five miles in diameter, managed to clear the gap from all debris. A vacuum cleaner operating on force fields. Come to think of it, size is relative. An asteroid this size obliterated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Sitting it on Earth’s surface would require cruising commercial airplanes to alter their course to prevent collisions.

  As they closed in on the A Ring coast, its solid-looking nature became gradually diffuse. Yet transparent it’s not, thought Derya. The Sun glared off of the ring on one side and scarcely three stories in length later, the light escaping out the other side dropped to 1/100 and its color transmuted from whitewash to blue tinge.

  When Caird got within 1,000 feet, it became clear to Derya that the poaching wouldn’t be hassle-free. Individual particles jumped out of the ring thickness like a flea infestation on a dog’s coat.

  “If this is how the rings behave …” said Derya. Both stared through the windows. “If we can see the catapulted stones from here, it means they’re large and it means it’s a battlefield down there.”

  As they got a few hundred feet closer, the swarming trebled. Bees protecting the hive. And we’re the lame fruit fly busybody—one kiss from a refrigerator-size particle is all it would take for us to go belly-up.

  “What now, boss?” said Derya.

  “We spy.”

  They spent the morning analyzing the frequency, size, and jumping height of the outliers, assessing the probability of getting hit and the speed plus magnitude of the impact. The results were dreadful.

  Caird drifted away from Daphnis by moving forward inside the Keeler Gap, with the hopeful or hopeless expectation that the frenetic activity was influenced by the moon. If not, checkmate.

  It was. The ring shore eventually calmed down.

  As they got closer and closer, the ring edge turned into a semi-transparent white ocean floating in outer space. The sunny side sparkled with untold diamonds, making it easy to spot the rare outlier. They soon heard the first clang against Caird’s hull quickly followed by many more, but the intensity was that of a hailstorm drumming on a car. In fact, being inside the ring morphed it into a low-visibility snowstorm of fluffy snowballs.

  We’ve just bought an extension on our termination date, thought Derya. We are not dying in this ocean, at least not of thirst just yet.

  When three-quarters of an hour later the hatch opened, Derya leaned out but couldn’t muster the presence of mind to follow Sergei, even after the other started giggling and was soon laughing contagiously, a chortle that reminded him of his niece, the innocent early-age glee of discovering the world.

  The Ruski exited as a poor Santa with an empty sack and came back a r
ich snowman. Sergei floated back inside the capsule covered in woolly white, particles sticking all over his spacesuit.

  That night they had guests over their house. Three ice blocks floating inside an improvised impermeable bag. They looked the same as any on Earth: mostly clear with minor impurities. No major surprises here. H2O is H2O in this galaxy or the next, thought Derya.

  Once the melting started, they would supplement their diet with extraterrestrial water. It wasn’t clear the exact mass of the harvest but assuming 300 pounds of ice and using two-thirds of that for water splitting would get them 180 pounds of oxygen. Enough to survive for a couple more weeks. One less thing to worry about, 1,000 more to go.

  “‘For once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return,’” quoted Sergei. “Leonardo da Vinci. And a century later came the great man that forged their future and made our present. How do you think Galileo would have reacted if someone had told him that one day humanity would extend its arm and touch the very thing he discovered through his telescope? We have touched the stars!”

  “And starting tomorrow, we’ll drink them,” said Derya. Bravo, Sergei. That was a strong deviation from an entire life dedicated to servicing the art of the monosyllable. After weeks living secluded together in a space so small he could hear Sergei’s neurons synapse, Derya had become convinced any intimate conversation with him was off-limits. But something’s going on. Sensing the vault half open for the first time since he had known Sergei, he said, “Can I ask what’s going on? I feel something happened to you. It’s about Iman, isn’t it?”

  But Sergei didn’t acknowledge the question, verbally or physically.

  They had a silent dinner. Derya’s contentment withered. Their kinship was his invention. A delusion.

  And then he experienced a spine-chilling vision. There was no blood and guts about it. It was worse. It was the sinister silence and desolation after that last candle of hope called Shackleton had been extinguished. They would be floating much as they were now, but it would be over. Each of them the executioner of his own destiny, choosing his way to die. He thought in dread about those last hours when there would be nothing left to say. When the last strand of human interaction would have passed. When each one would await for Death to impart its judgment. Not five feet from each other, yet divided by a gaping chasm.

  “Something happened on Enceladus … can’t put it into words,” said Sergei in a soft, meditative voice. Derya felt a rising tide of joy. “Her presence … it engulfed me. Iman was there, embracing me.” Sergei sounded to Derya as though he was deciphering an old manuscript for the first time, hitting the right words but not quite sure of what they meant. “She forgave me. I don’t deserve it and never will, but she did … it felt like a gust of crisp mountain air after holding my breath since … the acci … since her death. This may be impossible in your astrophysical Universe, and there’s nothing tangible to show, but it happened. I know it did.”

  “The Standard Model of cosmology,” said Derya, “our best theory so far, says that out of the total mass-energy of our Universe barely 5 percent is ordinary matter with the remaining 95 percent comprised of dark matter and dark energy, two phenomena we haven’t the faintest clue about. We don’t even know what or where they are. As for the ordinary matter, weighing all visible stars and gas inside galaxies—the matter we can interact with—hardly gets us to 10 percent of the 5 percent … then when 99.5 percent of our Universe remains not just unexplained but completely out of bounds, when we’re still so far from the absolute truth, well, that was an astrophysicist’s abridged way of saying, what do I know? Can I ask how you’re doing? And … were you … suicidal?”

  “I lost count of the times I prepared to commit suicide. I decided to do it as a spacewalk …”

  “Why?”

  “To spare you from dealing with a corpse on board.”

  “Well, that’s considerate … and what kept you from doing it?”

  “The four of you. I didn’t deserve to live, but you don’t deserve to die. We depend on each other. The torture did not free me from duty … so I tried to stay afloat amidst the stormy sea of my mind. Waves of depression set out to drown me, sometimes a dozen times a day. They would viciously seize and drag me to the bottom. I survived in part by being knocked unconscious most of the day with drugs, but mostly by finally confronting the truth. It’s counterintuitive: by diving into the wave like surfers do, you dodge its aftermath. But it meant facing up to what I did. It’s impossible to describe …”

  As Sergei’s words dried up, Derya took over. “It’s a prison where you’re both the prisoner and the captor … it’s a cathedral of shadows that veils time: a day morphing into months and weeks spanning hours … it’s a traitor that poisons your memories and drains the present into a perennial sepia … it’s your worst enemy, living inside the one part of your body you can’t sever … it’s the moment your will to live is conquered by your desperate search for relief.”

  Sergei looked baffled as he asked, “How do you know?”

  “I know a thing or two about dark places, having nosedived deep inside one. See, before the Arcturus breakthrough I had a falling out with my own life: disowned by my family, scarcely any friends left, my career as a physicist in tatters. And one day I caught my fiancée cheating on me—in our own bed. My meltdown happened right as the university where I taught ended its academic year. I stayed in bed for weeks, comatose, unable to really sleep, barely eating, mulling over the dead end of my existence. Until one rainy day I put on some clothes, went to a pharmacy, and bought a double-edged razor blade. Coming back, my survival instinct raked my feverish head for something, anything, to justify living. Lying in bed defeated, I decided to give myself some resemblance of pleasure before my final act. I played my favorite record, the Brahms second piano concerto with Emil Gilels, Eugen Jochum, and the Berliner Philharmoniker. What came out of the speakers was rubbish. That was the final nail. I could no longer even enjoy something that used to be so dear—I thought about writing a note, but to whom? I had no one.”

  Derya noticed the moist redness in Sergei’s eyes. “I rested the blade against the jugular but couldn’t force my arm to cut. ‘You’re not only a wreck but a coward,’ I kept provoking myself. But it was the unbearable agony of being alive that did it. I put the blade on my left arm, resting it below the elbow joint, and drove down until it touched the bone. The blood came gushing along with acute pain, but I felt I wasn’t dying fast enough so I somehow grabbed it again with trembling fingers and extended the cut. I felt the electrical impulses in my arm getting short-circuited. The white sheets soon became a red halo around me. I was surprised at the blood’s thickness as it coagulated. I put my head down and closed my eyes. My mind started quieting down, finally finding peace as life ran out of me. When that cunt … my former partner, Karl … opened the door I remember his muted screams but mostly my disbelief and disappointment. I had been so close, minutes away … I crawled back into recovery, relearning to walk through life.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Sophia and I were terrified of you, waiting for the rampage. I thought your soul was unreachable—that’s an alternative way of saying I didn’t think you had one.”

  “How did you manage to trick the mission’s recruiters? It’s as much ground for disqualification as missing all four of your limbs.”

  “I suffered a terrible barbwire accident a few days after learning about Shackleton,” said Derya, as he showed a scar running erratically around the circumference of his left forearm.

  Sergei guffawed with his big, loud register for the first time since Derya knew him, and he followed right after.

  “You have some balls, man,” said Sergei.

  “They never produced enough testosterone for Father’s liking, though … mate, I’m telling you all this because the roots of our depression are different but the solutions
to fight it tend to be common. Depression hasn’t made you fallible, it has reminded you of what it means to be human. It’s spirit-crushing but if you survive, it can be your best teacher. It leaves no choice but to revise, rethink, and reorganize your life.”

  “The grief I felt when our child—my life’s path had always been clear and then I found myself lost in a black forest. We tried so hard for so long, and when it finally worked and then he died—well, I blamed her. That unborn child who was becoming the center of our existence suddenly turned into an irreparable chasm branded in the soul. When she needed me most …”

  “When you confess all your sins, you realize there aren’t that many.”

  “Two capital ones is all it takes. I killed everything I loved.”

  “And you hit the bottom, the pit of your life. Now—now you are ready to commit to the second half. You have been forgiven and get to have a second chance. Honor your wife and son by making the best out of what you have left.”

  There was a new silence in Caird. A silence of communion. Simple, unassuming happiness.

  Maybe it’s the soothing peace preceding some form of death, like hypothermia, thought Derya. The merciful cherubim masking the horror of death beneath hills of white flowers—so be it, Death be damned. “I don’t care about alien life anymore,” he said, “I have found life where I thought there could be none … in you.”