“Anna, say something. Are you there?”
“Of course I’m here, you idiot.”
Her voice appeared in his head, so she must be right behind him. Relieved, he turned around, but didn’t see her anywhere.
“Anna, where are you? I don’t see you.”
“I’m right above the Dragonfly.”
“Oh. Can you—”
“No, I can’t.”
“Shit.”
They both knew what that meant. Anna was trapped in the methane ice. At least she was lucky it wasn’t water ice. Unlike water ice, methane’s volume didn’t expand when it froze, or she would have been crushed. But she had to be back in the tank in about two hours, because that was about how much time she had until she’d use up all the resources stored in her outer skin.
“Are you doing okay?” Anna asked.
Boris snorted. As if that mattered right now. How could he be doing okay when his sister was stuck in ice? He had to get her out of there. But how? He couldn’t get help from the station. They only had two hours. The Snarushi were all busy working in other places on Titan. And a Wnutri wouldn’t be any use to them down here, because the spacesuits were not designed for diving. The helper would inevitably get frozen in the ice, too.
“I’m okay,” he said. “But I wish our situations were switched.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to be able to grant your wish.”
“I’m going to get you out,” he said. “Don’t worry. Let me think.”
“Okay, think away. And tell Frida that I love her.”
“That’s something I’ll let you do yourself.”
Boris looked at his hand display. Thirty minutes had passed. He had contacted Geralt by radio, but there weren’t any Snarushi anywhere nearby. He had just barely been able to convince Geralt that it wouldn’t do any good for him to rush off in a spacesuit to try to help. He was a good guy, the archeologist. He’d passed the situation on to the rest of the collective, so Boris was no longer the only one thinking of ways to save Anna. That was reassuring, at least a little.
It was still true that each of them would do anything to help another. At least they’d been able to preserve that across all the generations. It was also more than just mere family ties. The fact that all of them descended from the founders had resulted in there being few surnames. That was one reason they switched to using a maternal naming convention four generations ago.
“Boris?”
“Yes, Anna?”
“There’s nothing you can do. Whatever happens now, promise me you won’t blame yourself.”
“Okay, I’ll try.” But of course he blamed himself. He’d failed. He hadn’t properly watched out for his little sister.
“Promise me.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Say it, ‘I promise I won’t blame myself.’”
“I promise I won’t blame myself.”
“Thanks, little brother, that makes me feel better. Only in the event that my plan doesn’t work.”
“Your plan?”
“I can’t talk anymore. You’ll understand. Think about what you’re supposed to tell Frida.”
“Anna, please don’t do anything stupid.”
She didn’t answer. What was she planning? Did she want to end her life herself on her own terms? He looked through his goggles in her approximate direction. The radar couldn’t penetrate far enough and didn’t show anything. But he could make out some shapes and contours in infrared. He identified a flat structure that had Anna’s approximate dimensions. What was she doing? Was she warming up her outer skin somewhat, just enough to melt the ice above her?
Could that work? He estimated the necessary melting heat and compared the value with the energy reserves in his outer shell. Anna’s shell had to have had about as much residual energy as his own. Her plan could work only under one condition—she would have to deactivate her life support and lower her body temperature. That was a perilous move, but it fit her. He also couldn’t think of any other options.
He watched the shape in infrared as it appeared to be slowly rising. The ice had to be coldest at the very bottom, so Anna would need the most energy there. She seemed to have taken that into account. If she could continue her current progress, she should be with him in about seven minutes, he estimated.
Seven minutes! Three minutes without oxygen and her brain would die. But maybe not at these low temperatures. And, maybe not with the repair machines in her bloodstream. But after that? He would have to carry her another hour across the lowlands before they would reach the station. It would be too late, no matter what.
But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to take away Anna’s last hope. Was she still conscious? Her arms and legs appeared to be moving, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe she had programmed the force boosters to operate automatically. And all of this for a piece of junk from Earth! It really wasn’t worth it. But fate didn’t ask what a life was worth.
She had almost reached him. He started to melt the ice from above. He had to be careful not to use too much of his own energy, though, because he would still have to carry her back home somehow. Then at least Frida and all the others could say goodbye to her.
There she was! He grabbed her arm. It was stiff. He had to pull with lots of force. The half-melted ice was thick as honey. There, now he had her. He rose as quickly as he could.
“Anna?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ve got her!” he called by radio.
“That’s good. I’m at the shoreline,” Geralt answered.
“What? What are you doing there?”
“The mobile tank. I thought you might need to use the mobile tank.”
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself? Geralt was a genius. He didn’t need to bring Anna to the tank, when the tank could come to her. He emerged from the lake out of breath and lifted Anna across his arms. She was surprisingly light and appeared to be frozen stiff. But that was just her outer skin, all that he could feel. When it had no more energy, it assumed a solid state as much as possible, in order to still be able to protect the person inside. In this form, a Snarushi could even survive in one of Io’s lava lakes.
He saw the vehicle with the mobile tank. Geralt must be in the driver’s compartment. He wouldn’t be able to come outside to help, but Boris knew what to do. He activated the remote control on his hand control panel. With a radio signal, he switched the membrane of the right-side tank to be permeable. Normally, Anna would then have to pull herself headfirst into the tank, but because her body was so stiff, he should be able to push her through the membrane without a problem.
The tank contained a 310-degree liquid that supplied the Snarushi in the tank with everything their bodies needed, and absorbed all the Snarushi’s excretions by osmosis. If Anna’s life force was still slumbering somewhere inside her, the tank would wake her up.
“Thanks, Geralt, that was an excellent idea to come here. Please take her home now.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
He didn’t want to have to watch the doctors working on his lifeless sister.
4790.4
Boris was watching Anna through the observation window. She was floating peacefully in her tank. White light, which appeared to come from all sides, seemed to transform his sister into a classical Roman statue that could have been sculpted out of alabaster. Her outer skin had turned the same color all over. Only her sensory organs were slightly defined, because they were closed with special membranes, so that the Snarushi could also communicate with the world in the conventional way. Anna’s eyes glistened as if they were wet, but that was from the special lenses that could also be used as simple magnifying glasses or telescopes.
His sister’s chest lifted and sank slowly. She was in a deep sleep. The 274-degree water in the tank contained an agent that prevented her from regaining consciousness. The machines in her bloodstream needed time to repa
ir the damage. Whether they would be successful was not yet clear, because they couldn’t replace lost nerve cells. They merely boosted the natural regeneration cycles.
He shouldn’t have taken her with him. No, that was nonsense. Nobody could stop Anna from doing something once she’d made up her mind. But he should’ve recognized the dangers. The temperature display had been clear. The fact that he had never experienced such a phenomenon before was no excuse.
“I’m ready for you now,” Geralt reported.
The archeologist had invited him to come and examine the Dragonfly. Martha and Grigori, two other Snarushi, had retrieved the object from the lake that morning. Boris looked at Anna one last time. He hoped she would be back to herself when the doctor brought her out of the coma tomorrow.
Geralt was waiting in the laboratory building. He walked across the Snarushi’s meeting place. The central area was covered by a tarp to protect the space from methane rain. He had to duck his head somewhat here. There were benches made of water ice on all four sides. They were uncomfortable, but that was a Snarushi’s fate. There wasn’t any substance that remained soft at 90 degrees.
Boris carefully opened the steel door to the lab. Metal quickly became brittle under Titan’s conditions. He couldn’t let it slam shut behind him. There wasn’t an airlock here. Some of the brownish atmosphere came into the lab with him, but that wasn’t a problem. The organic substances were suctioned into a filtration system until a pure nitrogen atmosphere remained. The door primarily existed because it was 30 degrees warmer in the lab than outside.
Without a spacesuit, Wnutri would still freeze in here, but Boris found the temperature to be almost summery-warm. The Snarushi’s outer skin didn’t tolerate air temperatures over 250 degrees very well. Its basic structure consisted of a fungus genetically modified for low temperatures and Titan’s biochemistry. This had the advantage that it could heal itself if it was damaged, much like real skin. But it also meant that Boris could never shake Geralt’s hand.
He wasn’t the first one in the lab. Martha and Grigori were already waiting in front of the barrier. Because their outer skin hid all individual features and differences under a uniform shell, adult Snarushi could only be distinguished by size and sex, unless you knew each other very well. Martha, for example, had the habit of repeatedly running her hand through her non-existent hair when she was bored, like now.
Grigori came up to Boris and hugged him. “I’m sorry for what happened, my boy,” he said.
Grigori was his uncle, and Anna’s, of course. Everyone here was someone else’s uncle, aunt, or cousin. Grigori was only 200 orbital periods older than himself. Nevertheless, he always called him ‘boy.’ Boris detached himself from the hug.
Martha reached out her hand to him. He kissed it and she smiled. That was one of the few facial expressions that was still identifiable even under the outer skin. Martha had the quirk of always wanting to be treated like a lady. But you could always rely on her.
“Chin up, Boris. Everything’s going to be okay,” Martha said. “Anna’s strong like her mother.”
Martha had been good friends with their mother. Now and then she told them about things the two friends had done together from the time around when Boris was born.
“Are you all there?” Geralt asked.
The barrier moved slightly. At first glance it looked just like a regular curtain, but it had a few tricks up its sleeve. It was made from an extremely tough, single-layer monofilament. As they looked, it became transparent and the archeologist appeared. He was unbelievably thin and tall with wildly untamed dark-brown hair and dressed in a blue coverall. He waved at them. On his side of the barrier, the room was filled with oxygen, and the temperature was a warm 294 degrees.
The terrestrial object had been placed on a shiny metallic table. It was already thousands of orbital periods old, but still looked like new. It consisted of a box-shaped body sitting on two skids, and had four rotors, one mounted at each upper corner. Geralt was standing in front of the table.
“The Dragonfly received commands from Earth with these antennas here,” the archeologist explained. “Primitive software executed the instructions, allowing the Dragonfly to fly from location to location to perform measurements. Then it transmitted its data to a relay satellite in orbit around Titan, and this relay forwarded the data to Earth. I’ve determined its storage capacities and estimated the data rates. The transfer to Earth must’ve taken a long time—much longer than the time it took to record the data.”
“So most of the time the Dragonfly was just sitting around, doing nothing?” Grigori asked.
“That’s probably what it would have looked like,” Geralt said, walking around the Dragonfly. “Right here, you can fold out a kind of control panel,” he explained.
Pressing a button, Boris zoomed his vision to take a closer look. The panel consisted of keys with characters, probably more than 50. He could see a flat display screen above the keys.
Geralt pressed a few keys, and some characters appeared on the screen. They seemed to be letters and numbers. Boris couldn’t read all of them. They must’ve been Old English characters.
“The probe was sent by a country on the North American continent,” Geralt explained, “one of the world’s superpowers at the time. Their working language there was Old English, and the characters that you see here belong to that dead language.”
Dead? Geralt couldn’t be sure about that, could he? Maybe not everyone had died in the Great War back in those years. Surely there had been some survivors. But perhaps the archeologist knew more about it than he did. Maybe there were some Titanians who had gotten around the prohibition against contact—one of the three big taboos.
“Our ancestors must’ve known how to make good batteries,” Grigori said, “if that display is still functional now.”
“That’s true. One of the rotors also turned on for a short time during recovery,” Boris said. It made him a little sick to remember that, because it had been Anna who had reported that observation.
“Actually, it doesn’t have batteries,” Geralt said. “The Dragonfly has what was called an RTG, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Its capacity for power output diminishes very, very slowly.”
“Would it still be able to fly?”
“No, Grigori, probably not. But if we ever wanted to revisit the idea of broadcasting at terrestrial frequencies, we should be able to use the Dragonfly to do that. It should be able to manage all the old Earth protocols that have been forgotten here over the years.”
“But we’d also need a relay in orbit, right?” Boris asked. “And someone who can speak Old English.”
“That would be me,” Geralt said.
“You, a relay in orbit?”
“No, Boris, you wiseass. I can speak Old English. Most of the old documents were written in Old English and Old Russian.”
“But what about a relay?”
“I’ll have to think about that one. You all know that weapons, space travel, and contact with Earth were the three big taboos that the founders passed on to us as instructions for survival.”
“That’s true,” Boris said. “To break one of the taboos here, we’d have to do away with the other two at the same time.”
“Yes. If we reestablish contact with people on Earth, we’d be unlikely to survive without weapons,” Martha said.
“Don’t get your hopes up so fast,” Geralt said. “The taboos aren’t likely to fall any time soon.”
“Not soon?” Boris asked. “What do you mean?”
But the archeologist didn’t answer. He was pressing keys on the control panel, and more characters were appearing on the display. Boris recognized an A, an M, and some numbers.
“You want to take a closer look at this thing, Boris?” Geralt asked.
“Yes, I think I’ve earned that much at least.”
“Okay, then let me get my things and get out of here.”
Geralt looked at the terrestrial probe once mo
re, then packed up his tools and carried them to the back wall of the lab. Then he waited.
A second barrier, another curtain, came down from the ceiling in the center of the room, the material reaching the floor. Nothing happened for a few minutes, or at least that’s what it looked like. The barrier was extending tendrils down into the floor and making a tight, solid connection. The floor of the laboratory was providing it with nutrients. Simultaneously, it was establishing an electric field that made the curtain transparent or opaque depending on direction. It was a very impressive exchange and supply system that the founders had been able to build here, one that could also tolerate two very different temperatures at the same time.
The process now seemed to have finished, because the barrier closer to Boris had started to retract into the ceiling. Clouds of gray mist swirled around the transition zone as the different gases mixed, the oxygen atmosphere freezing due to the ice-cold nitrogen on their side of the laboratory. Boris bent down in order to duck under the barrier as it rose. He was eager to reach the table with the probe, the thing that Anna had nearly died for. Their ancestors’ artifacts were of no use, except for causing suffering for everyone. The founders were right.
But it was an exciting piece of technology, given that it showed the people’s thinking at that time. Instead of exploring a new world themselves, they had sent a machine. Data was more important to them than personal experiences.
Boris ran his hand over the black-painted metal of the probe’s body. Many small ice crystals remained on his fingertips. He felt the hard edges of the metal. Then he looked at his fingers. The crystals glistened. His outer skin insulated his body so well that they didn’t melt. He blew against his fingertips and the ice crystals scattered. Magnified, it looked almost magical.
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