Different evolutionary backgrounds
lead to
very different perspectives.
|
"It
was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and
Armstrong were all dead. It was our turn to make
history now."
–The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien
The
raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of
Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin,
adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Dianoacetylene
condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it
was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.
Now
the journey could begin.
It
took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to
precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the
temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense
on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.
Down
it drifted.
At
forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane
cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided
with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too
large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle
stratospheric winds.
It
fell.
Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large
enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per
second.
At
twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of
methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and continued its
downward flight.
As
the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose
some of its substance to evaporation. At two and a half
kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it
was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected
to reach the ground.
It
was, however, falling toward the equatorial highlands, where
mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters into the
atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of
one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting
the surface.
Two
hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag upward, and
snared the raindrop.
"Gotcha!" Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.
She
zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet cam could
read the bar-code in the corner, and said, "One raindrop."
Then she popped it into her collecting box.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make you
happiest. Somebody would spend a year studying this one
little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag
64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of
Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution
in planetary science. The thought of it filled her with
joy.
Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and
began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the
puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through
the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. "I’m
sing-ing in the rain." She threw out her arms and spun
around. "Just sing-ing in the rain!"
"Uh .
. . O’Brien?" Alan Greene said from the Clement. "Are
you all right?"
"Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I’m . . . some-thing
again."
"Oh,
leave her alone." Consuelo Hong said with sour good humor. She
was down on the plains, where the methane simply boiled into
the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey tholin.
It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses.
"Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear
it?"
"If
you say so," Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in the
Clement, overseeing the expedition and minding the
website. It was a comfortable gig–he wouldn’t be
sleeping in his suit or surviving on recycled water and
energy stix–and he didn’t think the others knew how much he
hated it.
"What’s next on the schedule?" Lizzie asked.
"Um .
. . well, there’s still the robot turbot to be released. How’s
that going, Hong?"
"Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple
of hours."
"Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at the
lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going
over the harness checklist."
"Roger that."
"And
while you’re doing that, I’ve got today’s voice-posts from the
Web cued up."
Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry. By
NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all webcasts.
Officially, they were delighted to share their experiences
with the public. But the VoiceWeb (privately, Lizzie thought
of it as the Illiternet) made them accessible to people who
lacked even the minimal intellectual skills needed to handle a
keyboard.
"Let
me remind you that we’re on open circuit here, so anything you
say will go into my reply. You’re certainly welcome to chime
in at any time. But each question-and-response is transmitted
as one take, so if you flub a line, we’ll have to go back to
the beginning and start all over again."
"Yeah, yeah," Consuelo grumbled.
"We’ve done this before," Lizzie reminded
him.
"Okay. Here’s the first one."
"Uh,
hi, this is BladeNinja43. I was wondering just what it is that
you guys are hoping to discover out there."
"That’s an extremely good question," Alan lied. "And
the answer is: We don’t know! This is a voyage of discovery,
and we’re engaged in what’s called ‘pure science.’ Now, time
and time again, the purest research has turned out to be
extremely profitable. But we’re not looking that far ahead.
We’re just hoping to find something absolutely
unexpected."
"My
God, you’re slick," Lizzie marveled.
"I’m
going to edit that from the tape," Alan said cheerily. "Next
up."
"This
is Mary Schroeder, from the United States. I teach high school
English, and I wanted to know for my students, what kind of
grades the three of you had when you were their
age."
Alan
began. "I was an overachiever, I’m afraid. In my sophomore
year, first semester, I got a B in Chemistry and panicked. I
thought it was the end of the world. But then I dropped a
couple of extracurriculars, knuckled down, and brought that
grade right up."
"I
was good in everything but French Lit," Consuelo
said.
"I
nearly flunked out!" Lizzie said. "Everything was difficult
for me. But then I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, and it
all clicked into place. I realized that, hey, it’s just hard
work. And now, well, here I am."
"That’s good. Thanks, guys. Here’s the third, from
Maria Vasquez."
"Is
there life on Titan?"
"Probably not. It’s cold down there! 94° Kelvin
is the same as -179° Celsius, or -290° Fahrenheit. And yet . .
. life is persistent. It’s been found in Antarctic ice and in
boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we’ll
be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the
ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that’s
where we’ll find it."
"Chemically, the conditions here resemble the anoxic
atmosphere on Earth in which life first arose," Consuelo said.
"Further, we believe that such prebiotic chemistry has been
going on here for four and a half billion years. For an
organic chemist like me, it’s the best toy box in the
Universe. But that lack of heat is a problem. Chemical
reactions that occur quickly back home would take thousands of
years here. It’s hard to see how life could arise under such a
handicap."
"It
would have to be slow life," Lizzie said thoughtfully.
"Something vegetative. ‘Vaster than empires and more slow.’ It
would take millions of years to reach maturity. A single
thought might require centuries. . . ."
"Thank you for that, uh, wild scenario!" Alan said
quickly. Their NAFTASA masters frowned on speculation. It was,
in their estimation, almost as unprofessional as heroism.
"This next question comes from Danny in Toronto."
"Hey,
man, I gotta say I really envy you being in that tiny little
ship with those two hot babes."
Alan
laughed lightly. "Yes, Ms. Hong and Ms. O’Brien are certainly
attractive women. But we’re kept so busy that, believe it or
not, the thought of sex never comes up. And currently, while I
tend to the Clement, they’re both on the surface of
Titan at the bottom of an atmosphere 60 percent more dense
than Earth’s, and encased in armored exploration suits. So
even if I did have inappropriate thoughts, there’s no way we
could–"
"Hey,
Alan," Lizzie said. "Tell me something."
"Yes?"
"What
are you wearing?"
"Uh .
. . switching over to private channel."
"Make
that a three-way," Consuelo said.
Ballooning, Lizzie decided, was the best way there was
of getting around. Moving with the gentle winds, there was no
sound at all. And the view was great!
People talked a lot about the "murky orange atmosphere"
of Titan, but your eyes adjusted. Turn up the gain on your
helmet, and the white mountains of ice were dazzling!
The methane streams carved cryptic runes into the heights.
Then, at the tholin-line, white turned to a rich palette of
oranges, reds, and yellows. There was a lot going on down
there–more than she’d be able to learn in a hundred
visits.
The
plains were superficially duller, but they had their charms as
well. Sure, the atmosphere was so dense that refracted light
made the horizon curve upward to either side. But you got used
to it. The black swirls and cryptic red tracery of unknown
processes on the land below never grew tiring.
On
the horizon, she saw the dark arm of Titan’s narrow sea. If
that was what it was. Lake Erie was larger, but the spin
doctors back home had argued that since Titan was so much
smaller than Earth, relatively it qualified as a sea.
Lizzie had her own opinion, but she knew when to keep her
mouth shut.
Consuelo was there now. Lizzie switched her visor over
to the live feed. Time to catch the show.
"I
can’t believe I’m finally here," Consuelo said. She let the
shrink-wrapped fish slide from her shoulder down to the
ground. "Five kilometers doesn’t seem like very far when
you’re coming down from orbit–just enough to leave a margin
for error so the lander doesn’t come down in the sea. But when
you have to walk that distance, through tarry, sticky
tholin . . . well, it’s one heck of a slog."
"Consuelo, can you tell us what it’s like there?" Alan
asked.
"I’m
crossing the beach. Now I’m at the edge of the sea." She
knelt, dipped a hand into it. "It’s got the consistency of a
Slushy. Are you familiar with that drink? Lots of shaved ice
sort of half-melted in a cup with flavored syrup. What we’ve
got here is almost certainly a methane-ammonia mix; we’ll know
for sure after we get a sample to a laboratory. Here’s an
early indicator, though. It’s dissolving the tholin off my
glove." She stood.
"Can
you describe the beach?"
"Yeah. It’s white. Granular. I can kick it with my
boot. Ice sand for sure. Do you want me to collect samples
first or release the fish?"
"Release the fish," Lizzie said, almost simultaneously
with Alan’s "Your call."
"Okay, then." Consuelo carefully cleaned both of her
suit’s gloves in the sea, then seized the shrink-wrap’s zip
tab and yanked. The plastic parted. Awkwardly, she straddled
the fish, lifted it by the two side-handles, and walked it
into the dark slush.
"Okay, I’m standing in the sea now. It’s up to my
ankles. Now it’s at my knees. I think it’s deep enough
here."
She
set the fish down. "Now I’m turning it on."
The
Mitsubishi turbot wriggled, as if alive. With one fluid
motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.
Lizzie switched over to the fishcam.
Black
liquid flashed past the turbot’s infrared eyes. Straight away
from the shore it swam, seeing nothing but flecks of paraffin,
ice, and other suspended particulates as they loomed up before
it and were swept away in the violence of its wake. A hundred
meters out, it bounced a pulse of radar off the sea floor,
then dove, seeking the depths.
Rocking gently in her balloon harness, Lizzie
yawned.
Snazzy Japanese cybernetics took in a minute sample of
the ammonia-water, fed it through a deftly constructed
internal laboratory, and excreted the waste products behind
it. "We’re at twenty meters now," Consuelo said. "Time to
collect a second sample."
The
turbot was equipped to run hundreds of on-the-spot analyses.
But it had only enough space for twenty permanent samples to
be carried back home. The first sample had been nibbled from
the surface slush. Now it twisted, and gulped down five drams
of sea fluid in all its glorious impurity. To Lizzie, this was
science on the hoof. Not very dramatic, admittedly, but
intensely exciting.
She
yawned again.
"O’Brien?" Alan said, "How long has it been since you
last slept?"
"Huh?
Oh . . . twenty hours? Don’t worry about me, I’m
fine."
"Go
to sleep. That’s an order."
"But–"
"Now."
Fortunately, the suit was comfortable enough to sleep
in. It had been designed so she could.
First
she drew in her arms from the suit’s sleeves. Then she brought
in her legs, tucked them up under her chin, and wrapped her
arms around them. "’Night, guys," she said.
"Buenas noches, querida," Consuelo said, "que
tengas lindos sueños."
"Sleep tight, space explorer."
The
darkness when she closed her eyes was so absolute it crawled.
Black, black, black. Phantom lights moved within the darkness,
formed lines, shifted away when she tried to see them. They
were as fugitive as fish, luminescent, fainter than faint,
there and with a flick of her attention fled.
A
school of little thoughts flashed through her mind,
silver-scaled and gone.
Low, deep, slower than sound, something tolled. The
bell from a drowned clock tower patiently stroking midnight.
She was beginning to get her bearings. Down there was
where the ground must be. Flowers grew there unseen. Up above
was where the sky would be, if there were a sky. Flowers
floated there as well.
Deep
within the submerged city, she found herself overcome by an
enormous and placid sense of self. A swarm of unfamiliar
sensations washed through her mind, and then . . .
"Are
you me?" a gentle voice asked.
"No,"
she said carefully. "I don’t think so."
Vast
astonishment. "You think you are not me?"
"Yes.
I think so, anyway."
"Why?"
There
didn’t seem to be any proper response to that, so she went
back to the beginning of the conversation and ran through it
again, trying to bring it to another conclusion. Only to bump
against that "Why?" once again.
"I
don’t know why," she said.
"Why
not?"
"I
don’t know."
She
looped through that same dream over and over again all the
while that she slept.
When
she awoke, it was raining again. This time, it was a drizzle
of pure methane from the lower cloud deck at fifteen
kilometers. These clouds were (the theory went) methane
condensate from the wet air swept up from the sea. They fell
on the mountains and washed them clean of tholin. It was the
methane that eroded and shaped the ice, carving gullies and
caves.
Titan
had more kinds of rain than anywhere else in the Solar
System.
The
sea had crept closer while Lizzie slept. It now curled up to
the horizon on either side like an enormous dark smile. Almost
time now for her to begin her descent. While she checked her
harness settings, she flicked on telemetry to see what the
others were up to.
The
robot turbot was still spiraling its way downward, through the
lightless sea, seeking its distant floor. Consuelo was
trudging through the tholin again, retracing her
five-kilometer trek from the lander Harry Stubbs, and
Alan was answering another set of webposts.
"Modelos de la evolución de Titanes indican que la luna
formó de una nube circumplanetaria rica en amoníaco y metano,
la cual al condensarse dio forma a Saturno así como a otros
satélites. Bajo estas condiciones en–"
"Uh .
. . guys?"
Alan
stopped. "Damn it, O’Brien, now I’ve got to start all over
again."
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Consuelo
said. "You should check out the readings we’re getting from
the robofish. Lots of long-chain polymers, odd fractions . . .
tons of interesting stuff."
"Guys?"
This
time her tone of voice registered with Alan. "What is it,
O’Brien?"
"I
think my harness is jammed."
Lizzie had never dreamed disaster could be such
drudgery. First there were hours of back- and-forth with the
NAFTASA engineers. What’s the status of rope 14? Try tugging
on rope 8. What do the D-rings look like? It was slow work
because of the lag time for messages to be relayed to Earth
and back. And Alan insisted on filling the silence with posts
from the VoiceWeb. Her plight had gone global in minutes, and
every unemployable loser on the planet had to log in with
suggestions.
"Thezgemoth337, here. It seems to me that if you had a
gun and shot up through the balloon, it would maybe deflate
and then you could get down."
"I
don’t have a gun, shooting a hole in the balloon would cause
it not to deflate but to rupture, I’m 800 hundred meters above
the surface, there’s a sea below me, and I’m in a suit that’s
not equipped for swimming. Next."
"If
you had a really big knife–"
"Cut!
Jesus, Greene, is this the best you can find? Have you heard
back from the organic chem guys yet?"
"Their preliminary analysis just came in," Alan said.
"As best they can guess–and I’m cutting through a lot of
clutter here–the rain you went through wasn’t pure
methane."
"No
shit, Sherlock."
"They’re assuming that whitish deposit you found on the
rings and ropes is your culprit. They can’t agree on what it
is, but they think it underwent a chemical reaction with the
material of your balloon and sealed the rip panel
shut."
"I
thought this was supposed to be a pretty nonreactive
environment."
"It
is. But your balloon runs off your suit’s waste heat. The air
in it is several degrees above the melting-point of ice.
That’s the equivalent of a blast furnace, here on Titan.
Enough energy to run any number of amazing reactions. You
haven’t stopped tugging on the vent rope?"
"I’m
tugging away right now. When one arm gets sore, I switch
arms."
"Good
girl. I know how tired you must be."
"Take
a break from the voice-posts," Consuelo suggested, "and check
out the results we’re getting from the robofish. It’s giving
us some really interesting stuff."
So
she did. And for a time it distracted her, just as they’d
hoped. There was a lot more ethane and propane than their
models had predicted, and surprisingly less methane. The mix
of fractions was nothing like what she’d expected. She had
learned just enough chemistry to guess at some of the
implications of the data being generated, but not enough to
put it all together. Still tugging at the ropes in the
sequence uploaded by the engineers in Toronto, she scrolled up
the chart of hydrocarbons dissolved in the lake.
Solute??Solute mole fraction
Ethyne ? 4.0 x 10-4
Propyne ? 4.4 x 10-5
1,3-Butadiyne ? 7.7 x 10-7
Carbon Dioxide? 0.1 x 10-5
Methanenitrile ? 5.7 x 10-6
But
after a while, the experience of working hard and getting
nowhere, combined with the tedium of floating farther and
farther out over the featureless sea, began to drag on her.
The columns of figures grew meaningless, then
indistinct.
Propanenitrile? 6.0 x 10-5
Propenenitrile? 9.9 x 10-6
Propynenitrile? 5.3 x 10-6
Hardly noticing she was doing so, she fell
asleep.
* *
*
She
was in a lightless building, climbing flight after flight of
stairs. There were other people with her, also climbing. They
jostled against her as she ran up the stairs, flowing upward,
passing her, not talking.
It
was getting colder.
She
had a distant memory of being in the furnace room down below.
It was hot there, swelteringly so. Much cooler where she was
now. Almost too cool. With every step she took, it got a
little cooler still. She found herself slowing down. Now it
was definitely too cold. Unpleasantly so. Her leg muscles
ached. The air seemed to be thickening around her as well. She
could barely move now.
This
was, she realized, the natural consequence of moving away from
the furnace. The higher up she got, the less heat there was to
be had, and the less energy to be turned into motion. It all
made perfect sense to her somehow.
Step.
Pause.
Step.
Longer pause.
Stop.
The
people around her had slowed to a stop as well. A breeze
colder than ice touched her, and without surprise, she knew
that they had reached the top of the stairs and were standing
upon the building’s roof. It was as dark without as it had
been within. She stared upward and saw nothing.
"Horizons. Absolutely baffling," somebody murmured
beside her.
"Not
once you get used to them," she replied.
"Up
and down–are these hierarchic values?"
"They
don’t have to be."
"Motion. What a delightful concept."
"We
like it."
"So
you are me?"
"No.
I mean, I don’t think so."
"Why?"
She
was struggling to find an answer to this, when somebody
gasped. High up in the starless, featureless sky, a light
bloomed. The crowd around her rustled with unspoken fear.
Brighter, the light grew. Brighter still. She could feel heat
radiating from it, slight but definite, like the rumor of a
distant sun. Everyone about her was frozen with horror. More
terrifying than a light where none was possible was the
presence of heat. It simply could not be. And yet it
was.
She,
along with the others, waited and watched for . . . something.
She could not say what. The light shifted slowly in the sky.
It was small, intense, ugly.
Then
the light screamed.
She
woke up.
"Wow," she said. "I just had the weirdest
dream."
"Did
you?" Alan said casually.
"Yeah. There was this light in the sky. It was like a
nuclear bomb or something. I mean, it didn’t look anything
like a nuclear bomb, but it was terrifying the way a nuclear
bomb would be. Everybody was staring at it. We couldn’t move.
And then . . ." She shook her head. "I lost it. I’m sorry. It
was so just so strange. I can’t put it into words."
"Never mind that," Consuelo said cheerily. "We’re
getting some great readings down below the surface. Fractional
polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons . . . fabulous stuff. You
really should try to stay awake to catch some of
this."
She
was fully awake now, and not feeling too happy about it. "I
guess that means that nobody’s come up with any good ideas yet
on how I might get down."
"Uh .
. . what do you mean?"
"Because if they had, you wouldn’t be so goddamned
upbeat, would you?"
"Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed,"
Alan said. "Please remember that there are certain words we
don’t use in public."
"I’m sorry," Consuelo said. "I was just trying
to–" "–distract me. Okay, fine. What the hey. I can play
along." Lizzie pulled herself together. "So your findings mean
. . . what? Life?"
"I
keep telling you guys. It’s too early to make that kind of
determination. What we’ve got so far are just some very, very
interesting readings."
"Tell
her the big news," Alan said.
"Brace yourself. We’ve got a real ocean! Not this tiny
little two-hundred-by-fifty-miles glorified lake we’ve been
calling a sea, but a genuine ocean! Sonar readings show that
what we see is just an evaporation pan atop a
thirty-kilometer-thick cap of ice. The real ocean lies
underneath, two hundred kilometers deep."
"Jesus." Lizzie caught herself. "I mean, gee whiz. Is
there any way of getting the robofish down into
it?"
"How
do you think we got the depth readings? It’s headed down there
right now. There’s a chimney through the ice right at the
center of the visible sea. That’s what replenishes the surface
liquid. And directly under the hole, there’s–guess
what?–volcanic vents!"
"So
does that mean. . . ?"
"If
you use the L-word again," Consuelo said, "I’ll
spit."
Lizzie grinned. That was the Consuelo Hong she
knew. "What about the tidal data? I thought the lack of
orbital perturbation ruled out a significant ocean
entirely."
"Well, Toronto thinks . . ."
At
first, Lizzie was able to follow the reasoning of the
planetary geologists back in Toronto. Then it got harder. Then
it became a drone. As she drifted off into sleep, she had time
enough to be peevishly aware that she really shouldn’t be
dropping off to sleep all the time like this. She oughtn’t to
be so tired. She . . .
She
found herself in the drowned city again. She still couldn’t
see anything, but she knew it was a city because she could
hear the sound of rioters smashing store windows. Their voices
swelled into howling screams and receded into angry mutters,
like a violent surf washing through the streets. She began to
edge away backwards.
Somebody spoke into her ear.
"Why
did you do this to us?"
"I
didn’t do anything to you."
"You
brought us knowledge."
"What
knowledge?"
"You
said you were not us."
"Well, I’m not."
"You
should never have told us that."
"You
wanted me to lie?"
Horrified confusion. "Falsehood. What a distressing
idea."
The
smashing noises were getting louder. Somebody was splintering
a door with an axe. Explosions. Breaking glass. She heard wild
laughter. Shrieks. "We’ve got to get out of here."
"Why
did you send the messenger?"
"What
messenger?"
"The
star! The star! The star!"
"Which star?"
"There are two stars?"
"There are billions of stars."
"No
more! Please! Stop! No more!"
She
was awake.
"Hello, yes, I appreciate that the young lady is in
extreme danger, but I really don’t think she should have used
the Lord’s name in vain."
"Greene," Lizzie said, "do we really have to put up
with this?"
"Well, considering how many billions of public-sector
dollars it took to bring us here . . . yes. Yes, we do. I can
even think of a few backup astronauts who would say that a
little upbeat web-posting was a pretty small price to pay for
the privilege."
"Oh,
barf."
"I’m
switching to a private channel," Alan said calmly. The
background radiation changed subtly. A faint, granular
crackling that faded away when she tried to focus on it. In a
controlled, angry voice Alan said, "O’Brien, just what the
hell is going on with you?"
"Look, I’m sorry, I apologize, I’m a little excited
about something. How long was I out? Where’s Consuelo? I’m
going to say the L-word. And the I-word as well. We have life.
Intelligent life!"
"It’s
been a few hours. Consuelo is sleeping. O’Brien, I hate to say
this, but you’re not sounding at all rational."
"There’s a perfectly logical reason for that. Okay,
it’s a little strange, and maybe it won’t sound perfectly
logical to you initially, but . . . look, I’ve been having
sequential dreams. I think they’re significant. Let me tell
you about them."
And
she did so. At length.
When
she was done, there was a long silence. Finally, Alan said,
"Lizzie, think. Why would something like that communicate to
you in your dreams? Does that make any sense?"
"I
think it’s the only way it can. I think it’s how it
communicates among itself. It doesn’t move–motion is an alien
and delightful concept to it–and it wasn’t aware that its
component parts were capable of individualization. That sounds
like some kind of broadcast thought to me. Like some kind of
wireless distributed network."
"You
know the medical kit in your suit? I want you to open it up.
Feel around for the bottle that’s braille-coded twenty-seven,
okay?"
"Alan, I do not need an
antipsychotic!"
"I’m
not saying you need it. But wouldn’t you be happier knowing
you had it in you?" This was Alan at his smoothest. Butter
wouldn’t melt in his mouth. "Don’t you think that would help
us accept what you’re saying?"
"Oh,
all right!" She drew in an arm from the suit’s arm, felt
around for the med kit, and drew out a pill, taking every step
by the regs, checking the coding four times before she put it
in her mouth and once more (each pill was individually
braille-coded as well) before she swallowed it. "Now will you
listen to me? I’m quite serious about this." She yawned. "I
really do think that . . ." She yawned again. "That . .
.
"Oh,
piffle."
Once
more into the breach, dear friends, she thought, and plunged
deep, deep into the sea of darkness. This time, though, she
felt she had a handle on it. The city was drowned because it
existed at the bottom of a lightless ocean. It was alive, and
it fed off of volcanic heat. That was why it considered up and
down hierarchic values. Up was colder, slower, less alive.
Down was hotter, faster, more filled with thought. The
city/entity was a collective life-form, like a Portuguese
man-of-war or a massively hyperlinked expert network. It
communicated within itself by some form of electromagnetism.
Call it mental radio. It communicated with her that same
way.
"I
think I understand you now."
"Don’t understand–run!"
Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and hurried her
along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn’t see a thing.
It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles
underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground
was uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her
unseen companion yanked her up again.
"Why
are you so slow?"
"I
didn’t know I was."
"Believe me, you are."
"Why
are we running?"
"We
are being pursued." They turned suddenly, into a side passage,
and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens wailed. Things
collapsed. Mobs surged.
"Well, you’ve certainly got the motion thing down
pat."
Impatiently. "It’s only a metaphor. You don’t think
this is a real city, do you? Why are you so dim? Why
are you so difficult to communicate with? Why are you so
slow?"
"I
didn’t know I was."
Vast
irony. "Believe me, you are."
"What
can I do?"
"Run!"
Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie confused it
with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she
recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. "How
long was I out?" she asked.
"You
were out?"
"No
more than a minute or two," Alan said. "It’s not important.
Check out the visual the robofish just gave us."
Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.
Lizzie gasped. "Oh! Oh, my."
It
was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that the great European
cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably organic.
The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed
and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent,
with openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then
followed the rising heat upward. Occasional channels led
outward and then looped back into the main body again. It
loomed higher than seemed possible (but it was
underwater, of course, and on a low-gravity world at that), a
complexly layered congeries of tubes like church-organ pipes,
or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.
It
had the elegance of design that only a living organism can
have.
"Okay," Lizzie said. "Consuelo. You’ve got to admit
that–"
"I’ll
go as far as ‘complex prebiotic chemistry.’ Anything more than
that is going to have to wait for more definite readings."
Cautious as her words were, Consuelo’s voice rang with
triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily
die then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.
Alan,
almost equally elated, said, "Watch what happens when we
intensify the image."
The
structure shifted from gray to a muted rainbow of pastels,
rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into winter-ice blue.
It was breathtaking.
"Wow." For an instant, even her own death seemed
unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.
So
thinking, she cycled back again into sleep. And fell down into
the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.
It
was hellish. The city was gone, replaced by a matrix of noise:
hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She started forward
and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back, she
stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby,
and gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that
gave off a metal shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie
decided it was wisest to stay put.
A
familiar presence, permeated with despair. "Why did you do
this to me?"
"What
have I done?"
"I
used to be everything."
Something nearby began pounding like a pile-driver. It
was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard over
its din. "You’re still something!"
Quietly. "I’m nothing."
"That’s . . . not true! You’re . . . here! You exist!
That’s . . . something!"
A
world-encompassing sadness. "False comfort. What a pointless
thing to offer."
She
was conscious again.
Consuelo was saying something. ". . . isn’t going to
like it."
"The
spiritual wellness professionals back home all agree that this
is the best possible course of action for her."
"Oh,
please!"
Alan
had to be the most anal-retentive person Lizzie knew. Consuelo
was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to be running
pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this. "Um .
. . guys?" Lizzie said. "I’m awake."
There
was a moment’s silence, not unlike those her parents had
shared when she was little and she’d wandered into one of
their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly,
"Hey, it’s good to have you back," and Alan said, "NAFTASA
wants you to speak with someone. Hold on. I’ve got a recording
of her first transmission cued up and ready for
you."
A
woman’s voice came online. "This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum.
Elizabeth, I’d like to talk with you about how you’re feeling.
I appreciate that the time delay between Earth and Titan is
going to make our conversation a little awkward at first, but
I’m confident that the two of us can work through
it."
"What
kind of crap is this?" Lizzie said angrily. "Who is this
woman?"
"NAFTASA thought it would help if you–" "She’s a grief counselor, isn’t she?"
"Technically, she’s a transition therapist." Alan
said.
"Look, I don’t buy into any of that touchy-feely
Newage"–she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme with
sewage–"stuff. Anyway, what’s the hurry? You guys haven’t
given up on me, have you?"
"Uh .
. ."
"You’ve been asleep for hours," Consuelo said. "We’ve
done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we
should share it with you."
She
squirted the info to Lizzie’s suit, and Lizzie scrolled it up
on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the evaporation
lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It
was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that
was enough to create a massive updraft from the lake’s center.
An overlay of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local
microcurrents of air coming together to form a spiraling shaft
that rose over two kilometers above the surface before
breaking and spilling westward.
A new
overlay put a small blinking light 800 meters above the lake
surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows showed her
projected drift.
According to this, she would go around and around in a
circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her ballooning
rig wasn’t designed to go high enough for the winds to blow
her back over the land. Her suit wasn’t designed to float.
Even if she managed to bring herself down for a gentle
landing, once she hit the lake she was going to sink like a
stone. She wouldn’t drown. But she wouldn’t make it to shore
either.
Which
meant that she was going to die.
Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie’s eyes. She
tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of
crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her
death itself. "Damn it, don’t let me die like this! Not
from my own incompetence, for pity’s sake!"
"Nobody’s said anything about incompetence," Alan began
soothingly.
In
that instant, the follow-up message from Dr. Alma Rosenblum
arrived from Earth. "Yes, I’m a grief counselor, Elizabeth.
You’re facing an emotionally significant milestone in your
life, and it’s important that you understand and embrace it.
That’s my job. To help you comprehend the significance and
necessity and–yes–even the beauty of death."
"Private channel please!" Lizzie took several deep
cleansing breaths to calm herself. Then, more reasonably, she
said, "Alan, I’m a Catholic, okay? If I’m going to die,
I don’t want a grief counselor, I want a goddamned priest."
Abruptly, she yawned. "Oh, fuck. Not again." She yawned twice
more. "A priest, understand? Wake me up when he’s
online."
Then
she again was standing at the bottom of her mind, in the blank
expanse of where the drowned city had been. Though she could
see nothing, she felt certain that she stood at the center of
a vast, featureless plain, one so large she could walk across
it forever and never arrive anywhere. She sensed that she was
in the aftermath of a great struggle. Or maybe it was just a
lull.
A
great, tense silence surrounded her.
"Hello?" she said. The word echoed soundlessly, absence
upon absence.
At
last that gentle voice said, "You seem different."
"I’m
going to die," Lizzie said. "Knowing that changes a person."
The ground was covered with soft ash, as if from an enormous
conflagration. She didn’t want to think about what it was that
had burned. The smell of it filled her nostrils.
"Death. We understand this concept."
"Do
you?"
"We
have understood it for a long time."
"Have
you?"
"Ever
since you brought it to us."
"Me?"
"You
brought us the concept of individuality. It is the same
thing."
Awareness dawned. "Culture shock! That’s what all this
is about, isn’t it? You didn’t know there could be more than
one sentient being in existence. You didn’t know you lived at
the bottom of an ocean on a small world inside a Universe with
billions of galaxies. I brought you more information than you
could swallow in one bite, and now you’re choking on
it."
Mournfully: "Choking. What a grotesque
concept."
"Wake
up, Lizzie!"
She
woke up. "I think I’m getting somewhere," she said. Then she
laughed.
"O’Brien," Alan said carefully. "Why did you just
laugh?"
"Because I’m not getting anywhere, am I? I’m becalmed
here, going around and around in a very slow circle. And I’m
down to my last"–she checked–"twenty hours of oxygen. And
nobody’s going to rescue me. And I’m going to die. But other
than that, I’m making terrific progress."
"O’Brien, you’re . . ."
"I’m
okay, Alan. A little frazzled. Maybe a bit too emotionally
honest. But under the circumstances, I think that’s permitted,
don’t you?"
"Lizzie, we have your priest. His name is Father
Laferrier. The Archdiocese of Montreal arranged a hookup for
him."
"Montreal? Why Montreal? No, don’t explain–more NAFTASA
politics, right?"
"Actually, my brother-in-law is a Catholic, and I asked
him who was good."
She
was silent for a touch. "I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know what
got into me."
"You’ve been under a lot of pressure. Here. I’ve got
him on tape."
"Hello, Ms. O’Brien, I’m Father Laferrier. I’ve talked
with the officials here, and they’ve promised that you and I
can talk privately, and that they won’t record what’s said. So
if you want to make your confession now, I’m ready for
you."
Lizzie checked the specs and switched over to a channel
that she hoped was really and truly private. Best not to get
too specific about the embarrassing stuff, just in case. She
could confess her sins by category.
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two
months since my last confession. I’m going to die, and maybe
I’m not entirely sane, but I think I’m in communication with
an alien intelligence. I think it’s a terrible sin to pretend
I’m not." She paused. "I mean, I don’t know if it’s a
sin or not, but I’m sure it’s wrong." She paused
again. "I’ve been guilty of anger, and pride, and envy, and
lust. I brought the knowledge of death to an innocent world. I
. . ." She felt herself drifting off again, and hastily said,
"For these and all my sins, I am most heartily sorry, and beg
the forgiveness of God and the absolution and . .
."
"And
what?" That gentle voice again. She was in that strange dark
mental space once more, asleep but cognizant, rational but
accepting any absurdity, no matter how great. There were no
cities, no towers, no ashes, no plains. Nothing but the
negation of negation.
When
she didn’t answer the question, the voice said, "Does it have
to do with your death?"
"Yes."
"I’m
dying too."
"What?"
"Half
of us are gone already. The rest are shutting down. We thought
we were one. You showed us we were not. We thought we were
everything. You showed us the Universe."
"So
you’re just going to die?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why
not?"
Thinking as quickly and surely as she ever had before
in her life, Lizzie said, "Let me show you
something."
"Why?"
"Why
not?"
There
was a brief, terse silence. Then: "Very well."
Summoning all her mental acuity, Lizzie thought back to
that instant when she had first seen the city/entity on the
fishcam. The soaring majesty of it. The slim grace. And then
the colors, like dawn upon a glacial ice field: subtle,
profound, riveting. She called back her emotions in that
instant, and threw in how she’d felt the day she’d seen her
baby brother’s birth, the raw rasp of cold air in her lungs as
she stumbled to the topmost peak of her first mountain, the
wonder of the Taj Mahal at sunset, the sense of wild daring
when she’d first put her hand down a boy’s trousers, the
prismatic crescent of atmosphere at the Earth’s rim when seen
from low orbit. . . . Everything she had, she threw into that
image.
"This
is how you look," she said. "This is what we’d both be losing
if you were no more. If you were human, I’d rip off your
clothes and do you on the floor right now. I wouldn’t care who
was watching. I wouldn’t give a damn."
The
gentle voice said, "Oh."
And
then she was back in her suit again. She could smell her own
sweat, sharp with fear. She could feel her body, the subtle
aches where the harness pulled against her flesh, the way her
feet, hanging free, were bloated with blood. Everything was
crystalline clear and absolutely real. All that had come
before seemed like a bad dream.
"This
is DogsofSETI. What a wonderful discovery you’ve
made–intelligent life in our own Solar System! Why is the
government trying to cover this up?"
"Uh .
. ."
"I’m
Joseph Devries. This alien monster must be destroyed
immediately. We can’t afford the possibility that it’s
hostile."
"StudPudgie07 here. What’s the dirt behind this ‘lust’
thing? Advanced minds need to know! If O’Brien isn’t going to
share the details, then why’d she bring it up in the first
place?"
"Hola, soy Pedro Domínguez. Como abogado, ¡esto me
parece ultrajante! Por qué NAFTASA nos oculta esta
información?"
"Alan!" Lizzie shouted. "What the fuck is going
on?"
"Script-bunnies," Alan said. He sounded simultaneously
apologetic and annoyed. "They hacked into your confession and
apparently you said something . . ."
"We’re sorry, Lizzie," Consuelo said. "We really are.
If it’s any consolation, the Archdiocese of Montreal is
hopping mad. They’re talking about taking legal
action."
"Legal action? What the hell do I care about . . . ?"
She stopped.
Without her willing it, one hand rose above her head
and seized the number 10 rope.
Don’t
do that, she thought.
The
other hand went out to the side, tightened against the number
9 rope. She hadn’t willed that either. When she tried to draw
it back to her, it refused to obey. Then the first hand–her
right hand–moved a few inches upward and seized its rope in an
iron grip. Her left hand slid a good half-foot up its rope.
Inch by inch, hand over hand, she climbed up toward the
balloon.
I’ve
gone mad, she thought. Her right hand was gripping the rip
panel now, and the other tightly clenched rope 8. Hanging
effortlessly from them, she swung her feet upward. She drew
her knees against her chest and kicked.
No!
The
fabric ruptured and she began to fall.
A
voice she could barely make out said, "Don’t panic. We’re
going to bring you down."
All
in a panic, she snatched at the 9 rope and the 4 rope. But
they were limp in her hand, useless, falling at the same rate
she was.
"Be
patient."
"I
don’t want to die, goddamnit!"
"Then
don’t."
She
was falling helplessly. It was a terrifying sensation, an
endless plunge into whiteness, slowed somewhat by the tangle
of ropes and balloon trailing behind her. She spread out her
arms and legs like a starfish, and felt the air resistance
slow her yet further. The sea rushed up at her with appalling
speed. It seemed like she’d been falling forever. It was over
in an instant.
Without volition, Lizzie kicked free of balloon and
harness, drew her feet together, pointed her toes, and
positioned herself perpendicular to Titan’s surface. She
smashed through the surface of the sea, sending enormous gouts
of liquid splashing upward. It knocked the breath out of her.
Red pain exploded within. She thought maybe she’d broken a few
ribs.
"You
taught us so many things," the gentle voice said. "You gave us
so much."
"Help
me!" The water was dark around her. The light was
fading.
"Multiplicity. Motion. Lies. You showed us a universe
infinitely larger than the one we had known."
"Look. Save my life and we’ll call it even.
Deal?"
"Gratitude. Such an essential concept."
"Thanks. I think."
And
then she saw the turbot swimming toward her in a burst of
silver bubbles. She held out her arms and the robot fish swam
into them. Her fingers closed about the handles which Consuelo
had used to wrestle the device into the sea. There was a jerk,
so hard that she thought for an instant that her arms would be
ripped out of their sockets. Then the robofish was surging
forward and upward and it was all she could do to keep her
grip.
"Oh,
dear God!" Lizzie cried involuntarily.
"We
think we can bring you to shore. It will not be
easy."
Lizzie held on for dear life. At first she wasn’t at
all sure she could. But then she pulled herself forward, so
that she was almost astride the speeding mechanical fish, and
her confidence returned. She could do this. It wasn’t any
harder than the time she’d had the flu and aced her gymnastics
final on parallel bars and horse anyway. It was just a matter
of grit and determination. She just had to keep her wits about
her. "Listen," she said. "If you’re really grateful . .
."
"We
are listening."
"We
gave you all those new concepts. There must be things you know
that we don’t."
A brief silence, the equivalent of who knew how much
thought. "Some of our concepts might cause you dislocation." A
pause. "But in the long run, you will be much better off. The
scars will heal. You will rebuild. The chances of your
destroying yourselves are well within the limits of
acceptability."
"Destroying ourselves?" For a second, Lizzie couldn’t
breathe. It had taken hours for the city/entity to come to
terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human
beings thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did.
How long would those hours be, translated into human time?
Months? Years? Centuries? It had spoken of scars and
rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.
Then
the robofish accelerated, so quickly that Lizzie almost lost
her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her, and unseen
flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She
laughed wildly. Suddenly, she felt
great!
"Bring it on," she said. "I’ll take everything you’ve
got."
It
was going to be one hell of a ride.
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