Killing Titan

by Greg Bear

  “I don’t know,” I say. What in hell are bogglers? Scientists?

  “Or… maybe t’ey’ll be raised a go out a te old moons beyond.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I wish I did, wish it would put you at ease.”

  Then more sharply, reminding me of the old Teal, she says, “So many dead. Who wants what, who does a t’ing and why, nobody tells, nobody has the trut’ or will part it wit’ us.”

  My throat is too tight to even attempt to apologize. Besides, how is any of this my fault?

  Joe and Kumar and DJ enter. Mushran is talking outside, maybe to Borden. “Ready for a rest?” Joe asks.

  My vision is swimming. I want to lay my head down on the table, but I’ve kept my eyes on Teal. We’re not going to be together much longer. I know that. I hate that.

  “He is sa tired,” Teal says. “He has been wrung out.”

  Joe helps me stand.

  Teal is in the far light, tall, skinny, trying to look back, as her two tall friends lead her away. One has her own baby at her breast, and it’s sucking and cooing.

  Then… Can’t see them at all. My whole body trembles.

  “Good-bye, Michael!” I hear. “Get rest. See you soon.”

  I shove against Joe, frantic, losing it all, but he holds me. I slowly work my way back, but hate them all.

  BUG DREAMS AND OTHER ODYSSEYS

  They take me to a side chamber, outside and away from the annex. I lie on a small cot: dim lights, cool air. Jacobi and Ishida and Borden stay with me, but Teal is gone. Joe shows up for a minute, then Tak. I don’t want any of them. So fucking tired.

  “You did good,” Joe says. “Take a break.”

  “Where’s Teal?” I can almost see her next to me, like an afterimage. Did she turn glass? Is she going to be in my head all the time now? “Where are we going next?” I ask.

  Jacobi touches my forehead. “He’s got a fever,” she says. Alice blurs into view. Her face swims in the shadows. “It’s the tea, he’s feeling it strong,” she says. “Go to sleep, Venn. Sleep it off.”

  “I want to stay with Teal,” I say.

  “Not a choice,” Borden says. “She’s getting a rest, too.”

  “I need to stay close.…”

  “No one who stays will survive,” Mushran says. He looks furtive, disappointed. I know that look. Chain of command. Bad orders.

  I try to get up, but Jacobi and then Ishida hold me down. Ishida could hold down a gorilla. “You don’t know that!” I shout.

  “Teal isn’t staying on Mars,” Kumar says. “There will be ships enough to carry them back to Earth.”

  “All of them?” Jacobi asks, looking up at the others.

  Kumar looks away.

  “Why didn’t you send them back with their babies?” I ask.

  “We could have planned better,” Kumar says. “But this is where we start again.”

  “How can I believe any of you?” I ask, woozy, studying them, looking for pressure points, places to put a knife—I want to kill them all, honest to God, I want to fucking gut them. Kumar is aloof, oblivious. In a fight he’d go down squealing like a shoat. Or maybe life doesn’t mean anything to him, not if he can’t be in charge, play the political power game. Maybe that’s it—he’s just a political drone.

  Joe pulls up a chair beside Borden. She looks at Joe. He folds his arms and lets Kumar fumble his way through. They’re arguing about something. I’ve missed part of it. In and out. I brush away Jacobi’s hand. Alice is firmer. She takes my temperature. “Same as DJ’s,” she says.

  “There is no assurance,” Kumar is droning on. “To keep privilege and power, many on the division boards have deceived and been deceived.”

  “What about Mushran?” Joe asks. Mushran appears to have left. Disagreements, arguments… Like listening to my mom and dad yelling at each other in another room, while I lie in bed with the flu. “Perhaps he is still lying.”

  “We don’t have any other options,” Borden says. “We’re told by people we trust that the ships are coming, and that Teal and some of the settlers will return to Earth—and that DJ and Venn will continue with us to Titan.”

  “Why not take us all to Titan?” I murmur.

  “Stop it,” Joe says. “We’re Skyrines.”

  “I am?” I shout. “Who the fuck says?”

  Joe shakes his head. “We go where we’re told and do what we’re told,” he says.

  “Told by who, goddammit?” I hate him when he feels he has to spell out the way things are to me, of all people.

  “The President,” Borden says, jaw tight. She still believes in chain of command, God bless her little pea-picking heart. Bad orders. I was right. They’re all facing up to receiving bad orders.

  “You don’t know that!” I say.

  “I’m told the President is now with our program,” Kumar says.

  “He’s flexing whatever muscle he has with the divisions,” Borden says. “Some commanders are refusing his orders. But… that’s enough for me.”

  “And for me,” Joe says, patting his knee and standing. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Where are you going?” I ask him. “Earth or Titan?”

  “Titan.”

  “Good!” I cry out. “I’ll get it done there.” I don’t know what I’m talking about, clearly, but that’s never stopped me. Didn’t stop me from banging on my parents’ bedroom door and shouting for them to be quiet, let me die in peace—swear to God. Then I fell over and puked on the carpet and my pajamas. “What about Teal?”

  “Alice will accompany Teal and the others back to Earth,” Joe says.

  “Yeah,” Alice says. “Lucky me.”

  “You’ll die, right?”

  “I hope not.”

  “They’ll reunite Teal with her child,” Borden says.

  Joe is talking now. Wow, is he ever far away. “Jacobi’s Ops team will finish here and six will go with Alice and the settlers, six will go with us. Litvinov is prepping his own team. I don’t know how many of the Russians will come along to Titan.”

  “Fucking Titan!” I mumble. “Who’s in charge of our sisters?”

  “They’re under my command,” Borden says.

  Somehow, I doubt that.

  “They’re with us,” Joe says. “You think this place is a mess, I hear Titan is a fucking nightmare. Biggest goddamn weapons in the solar system, biggest battles, diving through methane seas to tunnel below thick ice to underlying oceans… ugly and old and cold. But somebody thinks it’s worth claiming and saving, and maybe they’re right. Maybe out there we can learn the truth.”

  “What about everyone we leave behind?”

  Joe shakes his head. “I don’t know how many will have to stay.”

  “I have asked for as many landers as they can spare,” Kumar says.

  “What about the Antags?”

  “We assume their goal is to recover all the fragments.”

  “What will that get them?” I say. “We’re human. The dust speaks to us. The Antags aren’t human. That’s how the tea works, isn’t it?”

  Kumar watches me, inclines his head, says nothing. I know more about this than any of them except DJ. Borden is smart enough not to claim expertise when I’m so obviously upset. Is she worried I might puke on her? I reach down and feel the tunic. Not pajamas. A tunic. Christ, am I confused. “I can’t think now,” I say, but nobody’s paying attention, because I’m so clearly out of it. That pisses me off and I struggle. Ishida holds me down. I get fascinated with the way her arm works, lying across my chest. It’s such a pretty arm, all shiny metal and composite.

  “Maybe they’ll allow the settlers to live,” Kumar says. Did I hear him right? We’re leaving settlers behind? “To provide them with assistance,” he adds.

  I heard it right. “Then shouldn’t we kill the settlers ourselves, to keep them from helping the Antags?”

  Joe can’t answer, Kumar can’t answer. The variables are too many. One step at a time, one
problem at a time.

  “Teal will be reunited with her baby,” Borden says quietly. “We all want that.”

  The knot just gets tighter. My becoming valuable, for whatever reason, is the worst thing that could have happened to me. Or to them. I could just blow it all right now. I could become a prodigal goddamned monster, shooting tea dust from my fingers, spraying everybody until they’re flocked with a thick coat of powdery green. I want to. Part of me really wants to self-destruct.

  “What does Coyle say about this?” Borden asks, taking me by surprise.

  The dead Captain Coyle is lost in the haze. “She hasn’t checked in,” I say. “She isn’t real. She can’t be.”

  “In any other time, under any other circumstances, I would agree,” Kumar says. “I do not believe in survival after death. But it seems that turning glass elevates you to a quite different plane.”

  I look around the shadowy group. This is weirdly important to Kumar, to Borden. Joe doesn’t commit. “You believe she’s still here?” I ask. “I mean, floating around—but talking only to me and DJ?”

  Long quiet. Sounds outside. People moving.

  Kumar says, “Your experience is not unique.”

  Joe says, “Kazak saw Coyle, too. Really chafed that DJ was the only one who supported him. But before he died, Kazak was tuned in stronger than anyone. Mushran says it’s not a plague. It’s a fucking investment opportunity. If we can find and protect everyone who’s tuned in, we might have a direct way into the old data. That’s what Division Four’s thinking—isn’t it?”

  Kumar maintains his steadfast expression. Borden nods once. Joe stretches. All this weirdness doesn’t sit well with him. I’ve become a big part of the weirdness.

  Kumar says, “If Antagonists attack with full force, this mine will become just like the Drifter. We have, I believe, less freedom of action if everyone is black glass and no one is free to interpret.”

  “Will the Ants attack?” Joe asks me, leaning in close. His nose bobs over my head.

  “How the hell should I know?” I ask.

  “A few hours ago DJ just sat by his sketches,” Joe says. “He didn’t draw, he just whispered over and over about big change coming, like what happened when they dropped the load on the Drifter. He felt that one before it happened, too. So did Kazak.”

  DJ senses it. He’s right. I sense it, too. Coyle isn’t being drowned out by my confusion—she’s gotten lost in coming change.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Something big, anyway.”

  “Okay on that,” Joe says with a deep sigh. “Here’s what the last bitburst has to tell us. At least seven space frames are entering orbit, along with one or two bigger vessels. No guarantee what they might be.”

  “Spook or Box,” Borden says.

  Kumar looks languid, like a nap would be a good idea. Weird fucking reaction.

  “Let’s hope,” Joe says. “As soon as the landers drop, we’re pulling out.”

  I’m fazing. My head hurts.

  “Hey!” Joe clamps his hand on my shoulder. “Still with us, Vinnie?”

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  Joe pats my shoulder. “All right, then.”

  Borden looks disgusted. No letup, no certainty. She’s made her pact, received her orders, and she’ll follow through, but she doesn’t trust Kumar and can’t figure Joe. To her, I’m a crazy burden, neither ally nor asset. Teal and DJ and the Muskies are deep-sea mysteries. And nobody trusts Mushran.

  “Your turn, ladies,” Joe says to Jacobi and Ishida.

  “Ma’am?” Jacobi asks Borden.

  Given all Borden’s learned and seen, and reflecting on the implications of her orders, she can’t trust herself, either, or her past views on reality. So we’re all square. Every one of us is nuts.

  “Just give us some time,” Borden says to Jacobi.

  I close my eyes.

  That’s a big mistake.

  AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS

  I’m usually smarter when I’m not thinking. My subconscious soup simmers all the time, even without the spice of Ice Moon Tea.

  Now that I’m out of it, my inner Bug is eager to raise my level of education before we arrive in Saturn space. Proximity to Titan being important. Maybe crucial. I see and feel the broken bits slowly come together—the history of a massive undertaking, the best times of that old moon become clear, but out of sequence—

  I take what I can get. And here it is, for what it’s worth:

  Back then, Saturn was a brilliant yellow-green ball, slightly bulging around the equator, while chains of small storms drew pastel whorls across her tightly banded surface. No rings, but at least fifty moons, and twelve were big. So how did the bugs see that, know that?

  Hush. Close focus in time, more detail:

  Our bug ancestors began their push by erecting a huge tower on the seabed, beneath a great wide hollow in the overarching ice shell. The builders were philosophers or thinkers. If you thought it, proposed it, you did it—no delegating back then. Strong minds implied strong backs.

  Almost all of the “thoughts” and opinions appear to have come from the smaller, spidery bugs that rode and guided the bigger ones. They discovered through long, careful calculation (what did they count on? They had eleven sets of legs and I can’t begin to figure the bits around the eyes and mouth—) that the fluctuating tides and currents and even heat came from a huge body some distance away. They didn’t then know what a planet is. They’d never seen the stars. But they were intent on solving the problem of where the tides and frictional heat came from. The bugs were digging their way up through the icy crust to find out.

  Over a couple of bug lifetimes, the tower rose from the ruined site of their oldest city—which had collapsed long ago in a cataclysmic quake or volcanic eruption. Volcanism on the old ice moon meant eruptions of slushy liquid water filled with gases like ammonia or methane or even cyanide. Up from the rocky core welled regular flows of compressed mixes of water and all these gases, highly saline flows that dissolved buildings and killed hundreds of thousands of fellow bugs.…

  But that was okay, apparently; the bug thinkers knew that the interior heat and mix of poisons helped explain their origins, how life began here in the first place. Death became a kind of deity to the thinking bugs, as much as they had a god—death and, for an increasing crowd of rarefied intellectuals, whatever caused the tides and friction. Whatever it was that kept them alive. Their god was something they thought they could find. I’m okay with that. I wish it were true for me.

  The crustacean intellectuals, crawling hordes of engineers and architects turned builders, carved great chunks of ice and rock and stacked them precisely to rise almost fifty kilometers from where the old city had been, a sacred site for a sacred project. Nearly all of the crustacean cultures and subcultures were down with this, cooperative and cooperating. They seemed to have been more integrated and less argumentative than we are. Maybe more dangerously curious. What would they find as they punched upward with massive drills, manufactured with tremendous effort out of chunks of ancient nickel-iron in the ice moon’s deep core? This is some time before the bugs started creating their crystalline records.

  In this bit of history/memory, my most constant point of view is that of a bug who’s going to be the third in line to poke through the hole they dig, rise from the liquid water that fills the hole—capped with a rapidly refreezing crust.

  I REFUSE TO be completely subservient. Some of my own memories are rising now. As a kid, I watched documentaries on YouTube about Arctic seals biting through the thin ice to open breathing holes and places to pop up and look around. My inner Bug is nothing like receptive to these memories, but as judge of all that’s emerging from our relationship, I decide it’s a perfect metaphor.

  Our bugs are going to wear the crustacean equivalent of pressure suits, big sealed tanks with portholes sized to accommodate their many eyes. The bigger bug will of course get the larger suit, but connections between the suits will continue
the interchange both consider essential to life. Designing and making these connections has jump-started new segments of bug industry and communication.…

  Oh my goodness. The bigger bug is not an “it.” The bigger bug is female. They’re quite good friends, have known each other since they were krill, raised together in crèche, assigned to each other by a master midwife/matchmaker. Now they’re partners. Husband and wife. Not sure what Jacobi or Ishida or even Borden would think of this.

  Back to the history lesson. The drills have finished and been withdrawn. A kind of methane-acetylene bomb with a charge of pure oxygen is set off at the center of the bore-hole. The ice flies up into the space beyond. Liquid water floods the open hole, which becomes a giant crack that spreads about half a klick to either side, causing alarming vibrations in the tower and even partial collapse, and sending cascades of ice from the bottom of the ice shell, which kills dozens of bug couples in the viewing stands.

  But we’re not distracted. We’re focused in a way that only a bug can be!

  And then…

  First bug couple is up and out. The larger support suit’s crawling legs and tracks carry it a dozen meters across the darkness beyond, across the rugged and unknown top of their world. Jesus, are they excited—and terrified. Fear is amazingly similar for these bugs, very like fear as I experience it.

  Fear and excitement.

  Second bug couple is up. No instant death awaits, which some of the more conservative engineers had predicted.

  And then…

  We compare notes through constant clicking chatter, sonic rather than radio. We don’t know anything about electromagnetism or radio waves. A great civilization, but physics is not our specialty. We do very well with chemistry, better than humans, maybe. As if being blind to the sort of things that enchanted Maxwell and Tesla and Marconi and Einstein gives us extra strength and sensitivity in other disciplines.

  The sky is black. We don’t call it the sky—we call it something like roof. (My tongue tries to shape the word—but they don’t have tongues or teeth or lips… so I return to being a bug and don’t try that again.)