by Jack Dann
Her voice was hardly more than a breath, blowing through my earphones: "They're not really two dimensional creatures."
It's not Flatland. They're not waxy paintings on the surface of the ground.
Fire blossomed under the cone and it lifted off, climbing out of the picture, and all the remaining blue dots turned black before vanishing.
After a while, more of them crept from the edge of the picture, creeping through the pink toward the place where the cone had been. At first, the leaders turned black and died, but only for a little while. In time, they finished their investigations, then went sliding on their way.
The blue plain with its empty pink strip vanished suddenly, and the beach was empty again.
I turned to her and said, "Why'd you show me this?"
Seen through the faceplate, she was nothing but eyes. Big blue eyes. Serious. Frightened. "I won't make this decision by myself. I'm not . . ." Long hesitation. "You know."
Yeah. Not God. That's how that one goes.
Back at the habitat, after a long, silent ride, we sat together in our longjohns, made tea and drank it, made small talk that went nowhere, circling round and round, as if something had changed, or nothing.
We're dead men here, I'd thought on the way back, watching a snowdrift blow across the beaten path before the halftrack, slowing down as if to stop, then suddenly lifting off in the wind like a flock of birds making for the sky, clearing the way for us.
Fewer than two thousand survivors . . .
In the old stories, old movies, that would've been more than enough, two thousand hot, eager Adams and Eves, getting about their delving and spanning, wandering the freshly butchered landscape, pausing by the shores of an infinite, empty sea, being fruitful, multiplying until they'd covered the Earth again.
This star system no longer contains an inhabitable planet.
Bits of memory, snatches of Moonbase newsreel. When Oberth gets home with the crew of the Venus orbital station, who hadn't had to commit suicide, she'll be bringing a stockpile of hardened probes intended for research on the surface of Venus.
Hardened probes, and, of course, one of the piloted Venus landers.
Then we'll know for sure. Then we'll . . .
Couldn't stop myself from imagining, ever so briefly, myself on that first damned crew, riding the Venus lander down through howling brown muck, down to a soft landing in my own backyard.
I've been on Venus. I'm qualified for Venus EVA ops. I . . .
Read a science article when I was a kid that described the Chicxulub impact at the KT Boundary as being "like taking a blowtorch to western North America."
The image in my head was a double exposure, the image of collapsed and burned-out cities, like something from an atomic war fantasy, superimposed over the reality of a cooling lava ejecta blanket.
Just wisps of smoke.
That's all that's left of her.
Christie, face pushed down in the steam from her teacup, was looking at me strangely. God knows what my expression must have been like. Did you have anyone, Christie Meitner, or was it only strangers that died? Billions and billions of strangers.
She said, "I guess we'd better talk about it now." Unsaid, Whether we want to or not.
I nodded, not knowing what I wanted, looking into a face that wasn't all that expressive. A face not so different from my own. I tried to remember what I looked like, call up the man in the mirror, but there was only fog, no way to know what she was looking at now with those big, hollow eyes.
She said, "It's so simple, Hoxha: They're alive, and this is their world. If we stay here, even just the few score of us. Titan's environment will slowly change; until this is no longer an inhabitable world for them."
And then?
Right.
"Does it make a difference now that we know they're intelligent?"
She shook her head. "If we work together to keep it secret, to keep the others from stumbling over this, once we go away, back to Moonbase . . ."
I said, "The Earth's not going to recover and we can't survive forever at Moonbase. The Saturn system's our best bet, otherwise were spread too thin. Even Mars . . ."
She said, "The odds are against us, no matter what."
I nodded.
"So we come here, obliterate the Titanians, and then die out anyway, erasing their future as well as ours."
Does this mean anything? What's my next line? I know: Christie, this is proof positive life is common in the universe. Right. Idiot. I remember the way she'd looked, face so pale, eyes so big, standing behind me with the ice axe, willing herself to kill. How many Titanians would've exploded and burned under the beach had my blood been spilled?
I said, "So that's what all this is about? Some good old- fashioned eco . . ." Right. Like the idiots who protested Cassini's launch all those years ago while not doing a damned thing about the world's hundred thousand hydrogen bombs.
Pick your targets. Some are easier than others.
She seemed tired. "It's not just that. If it was just about them being living things, intelligent living things, you wouldn't be sitting here now."
"Dead and buried?" I smiled. "That would've been hard for you to explain."
"I wasn't thinking clearly. I was panicked that you'd . . ."
"What, then? Why am I still here?"
Long, long stare, still trying to fathom if there was a human being behind my face, someone just like her. She said, "Day before yesterday, I found evidence that their life process involves some kind of directed nucleosynthesis."
You could see the relief in her face. There. I've said it. And . . .
Nucleosynthesis?
Talking about details is what we're doing.
In those old stories, old movies, the details are always important, imaginary science chatted up by happy, competent characters until God springs from the machine and utters his funny-elf punchline.
Now?
Not important.
Not anymore.
And yet . . .
I said, "That could tip the scales in our favor. We come here, we learn to exploit them, we survive as a species."
Her face fell.
I don't think she expected me to see it that easily.
Probably there was a scenario in there in which the pedantic teacher explains things to the gaping mechanic in the simplest possible terms. That's the story way, isn't it?
She sat back in her chair and sighed. "I don't know what we should do. Do you?"
People love to pretend they make rational decisions. It's called excuse-seeking behavior. Christie and I sat facing one another for a long time, tension making it seem we were about to speak, but we never did. You want to be the first one to start offering up excuses? No, not me. How about you? If it was important enough to reach for that axe, surely . . .
I wasn't thinking clearly.
Right.
So we talked about the evidence, which she explained to me in the simplest possible terms, until I was able to pick up the thread and begin spooling it into my own knowledge base, understanding it in my own terms. Understanding. That's an important part of making excuses for what you do, isn't it?
Or what you fail to do.
Think about the possibilities, Christie.
Think about the technology we could build here. Think of the resource base. And the Titanians? Is it important what happens to them?
In the end, we slept, I curled up on the floor, Christie huddled in her bed, back toward me, curled in on herself, head down in the vague shadows between her body and the wall. I lay awake for a while, trying to think about the whole damned business, trying to convince myself, God damn it, that it mattered.
When I awoke, however many hours later, Christie was on the floor beside me, asleep, not touching me, head on one corner of the folded-up blanket I was using for a pillow.
Lisa never did that. Lisa always had to touch me while we slept together, sometimes huddling against my back, other times insisting that I c
url myself around her like a protective shell. I remember when we were very young and new to each other, how I used to wake up sometimes to find her breathing right in my face.
Breathing in each other's breath, I used to call it. As intimate a thing as I could possibly imagine.
So, awakening, breakfasted, we got in the halftrack and went back down to Waxsea beach, where the fairy tales of science were waiting after all.
I don't know what made me stop the halftrack up on the terminal scarp. Maybe just some . . . sense of impending something. Maybe just a longing for the view. Christie stared at me for a second or two when I told her to get out, Stirlings vibrating the frame below us, idling down in the track trucks. Then she nodded, folded her helmet over her face, pressurized the suit, wrinkly off-white skin suddenly growing stiff and shiny, obliterating her shape.
When the depress valve had woofed, when I could see her out the cockpit window, I had a sudden memory of an old TV commercial from the retrofad going on when I was in grammar school. Pillsbury Doughboy.
Doughboy. Funny. Wonder if those long-dead copywriters imagined him with a tin-plate helmet and bayoneted Enfield, marching upright and stalwart into the machine-gun fire of no-man's-land.
I think she was relieved when I joined her on the surface, no way to tell through the suit visor, just those same eyes, with their same expression, a pasted-on affect of surprise, fear, resentment. But she followed me to the edge of the cliff, where we stopped, and I let her get behind me, image of the ice axe fresh enough, hardly mattering.
And, of course, there was the cliff. One hard shove and I'd float on down to . . . I don't know. Gravity here's low enough I might survive the fall, given that two bar atmosphere, but . . . would my suit?
I imagined myself exploding like a bomb.
Overhead, the sky stretched away toward the absent horizon like a buckled red blanket, crumpled clouds of coarse wool, dented here, there, everywhere with purple-shadowed hollows, little holes into nothingness.
Down on the silvery beach, the instrument platform was ringed by motionless blobs, each ring a single color, blue, green, red, violet, working their way outward from the hardware.
Christie grunted, "Never saw that before." Radio made it seem like she was inside my suit, pressed up against my back, chin on my shoulder, speaking into my ear.
If you looked closely, you could see the blobs were connected by thin strands, monochrome along the rings, blended between. Slowly, one of the blobs extended a pseudopod toward the platform. That's right. In a minute, it'll blacken and curl, shriveling in on itself until the parent blob goes belly up an sinks out of sight. Will the ring close up then, each soldier in that row taking one easy step, forward into an empty space, like Greeks in a phalanx?
Christie said, "I wonder why they do it?"
Inviting certain death in the pursuit of knowledge?
Good question.
The pseudopod slowed as it came close, flattening, widening, forming a sort of two-dimensional cup on its end, a cup that drifted slowly back and forth, arcing along the surface, a few centimeters out. After a moment, beads of yellow began forming at the cup's focus, detaching, speeding back up the pseudopod to the parent blob. From there, they replicated, spreading around the ring, then outward.
I said, "Think they know we're here?"
The first blob withdrew its pseudopod, while the next one in line extended an identical . . . instrument? Is that the right word? Examining the next section of the platform's heat shield.
Christie said, "I don't know. Their radio sensitivity's not that great. I always have to turn the carrier wave full blast to get their attention."
I turned away, stepping back the way we'd come. "I guess we should just go on down and . . ."
Not sure what I was going to suggest. Christie gasped and put out a hand, gripping my forearm hard enough that my suit was compressed, forcing the liner up against my skin, feeling like cold, damp plastic, making me shiver slightly.
When I looked back, down on the beach, the rings had broken up, blobs perfectly spherical now, appearing and disappearing in the cracked ice, like colored ping-pong balls bobbing in a tub of water. Bobbing in unison.
One, two, three . . .
They exploded like so many silver raindrops, reaching out for one another, merging, spreading like a cartoon tide, until the beach was a solid silver mirror filling the space between the cliff, the sea, the instrument package, reflecting a slightly hazy image of the red sky above, complete with streamers of golden light coming through little rents and tears, picking out the drifting snowbanks like dustmotes on a lazy summer afternoon.
Somewhere overhead, I saw, there was a tiny fragment of rainbow floating in the sky.
The image in the mirror grew dark, dimming slowly, as though night were falling, though the real sky hung above us unchanged, streamers of light tarnishing, red becoming orange then brown, bruise blue, then indigo, almost black.
Almost, for freckles of silver remained.
Freckles of silver in a peculiarly familiar pattern, bits of light clustered here and there, gathering to a diagonal band across the middle and . . .
Christie's gasp made me imagine warmth in my ear as she recognized it a fraction of a second before I did. Well, of course. She'd seen the real thing a lot more recently than I had.
The stars dimmed, Milky Way becoming just a dusty, dusky suggestion of itself.
Christie's voice: "How? How could they see . . ."
A bright silver light popped up in the center of the starfield, circled by dimmer lights, some brighter than others, most white, some colored, this one blue, that one red.
Tiny bright beads began flying from the blue light, swinging by orange Jupiter, heading for yellow Saturn, some stopping there, others flying on, disappearing from the scene.
In a row across the bottom of the image, bottom being the side facing us, flat, near-schematic representations of spacecraft appeared, matching each tiny bead as it flew. Little Pioneer. The Voyagers. Cassini and Huygens . . .
Voice no more than a hushed whisper, Christie said, "I wonder how long they knew? Why they waited so long and . . . why me ?"
If they knew about Pioneer, then they knew about us when my father was a little boy, my grandfather a young man, reveling in the deeds of space, imagining himself in the future, still young, strong, alive and happy.
Down on the beach, the solar system faded, leaving the hint of starfields behind; then, like a light winking on, blue Earth appeared, oceans covered by rifted clouds, continents picked out in shades of ocher, hard to recognize, circled by a little gray Moon.
I could feel Christie's hand tighten on my shoulder, knowing what was coming.
There. The asteroid. The brilliant violet light of the hydrogen bombs. The spreading of the fragments. The impacts. The red glow of magma. The spreading brown clouds.
I wondered briefly if they'd had something to do with the rock coming our way. No. That's just an old story thing, pale imagination left in my head when I was a child.
One of those damned things we teach our children because we don't know what's real. Don't know and don't care.
Somewhere in my head, a badly fueled story generator supplied images of what would come next. Down on the beach, the image of a tentacled alien would form. Something not human, but within the reach of terrestrial evolution, would stretch out a suckered paw, inviting.
Take me to your leader.
What was I remembering?
"The Gentle Vultures"?
Maybe so.
Down on the beach, the end of the world faded, replaced by a white disk, wrinkled in concentric rings. It tipped around, as if in 3D motion, showing us complex mechanisms, considerable mechanical detail, obvious control systems.
I said, "Fresnel lenses."
Christie said, "They could see through the clouds with that, if they could build it for real. See the sun, the larger planets, the brighter stars, as patches of heat in their sky. But . . ."
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The infrared telescope was replaced by an image of Titan, recognizable by the topography of Terra Noursae, Titan stripped of its clouds. The image rotated, showing the Waxsea hemisphere, Waxsea bearing interconnected concentric rings, some gigantic version of the array we'd first come upon here.
Christie said, "Long baseline interferometer. With enough computation . . ."
If they could build it.
Nucleosynthesis?
I said, "How do you distinguish between a life process and a technology?"
Christie said, "Oh," sounding surprised.
Imagination builds nothing. Not even the knowledge of how to build. Not unless you can somehow project it into the real world.
Down on the beach, another image formed, a fantastically detailed portrait of the cosmodrome, showing the two landers upright on their pads. On the ridge above, tiny blue Titanians waited at a safe distance, ominous, like Indians looming above the ambush, foolishly cavalry waiting in the defile.
A blue sphere rolled down, making for the little ships. I waited for them to be spun down, like tenpins before the ball.
It rolled to a stop, not far from the ships. Tiny, spacesuited humans connected a blue thread to the ball, to the ships. The ball shrank away to nothing. The ships took off, unrolling red flame as they climbed through an orange overcast and were gone.
Behind them, the base and cosmodrome disappeared, one component at a time, leaving an empty landscape behind.
Christie sighed in my headphones.
Just one more all-too-familiar fairy tale, that's all.
Below, the silver screen cleared again, reforming as faint stars against velvet dark, surmounted by a slow-moving orrery of the solar system. Beads of light moved from Saturn to blue Earth—brown, I thought. They should've made it brown.
The sky stood empty. Christie said, "I guess . . ."
I whispered, "Sending us home to die then?"
Another bead appeared, crossing from Earth to Saturn, then going home again. Then again. Then again. More beads, this time from Saturn to Neptune. After a while, the voyages began a three-way trip, Saturn, Neptune, Earth.
What's at Neptune?
Triton, of course.