Titan (28 page)

On the day, if the call came, he would be ready to fly.

A
t last, the schedule
for STS-147 was firmed up.

STS-147 would be the last Shuttle launch: the last flight of
Endeavour,
the mission that would take the crew—including Paula Benacerraf—up to Earth orbit.

When the launch date was finalized, Benacerraf found herself staring at it, on her softscreen, for minutes at a time. It was like the date of her own execution. She would not see the dawn of the following day—and, perhaps, no dawn on Earth ever after.

As that epochal day approached, the tempo of Benacerraf’s life accelerated. She was doing three jobs now. As head of the Shuttle program she had responsibilities to discharge beyond the Titan mission, such as the disposal of the program’s assets around the country after the final flights—including thousands of staff. Then, too, she retained a lot of responsibility for the Station hab module conversion, and she spent long hours at Marshall and Seattle working on that.

Finally she was an astronaut, trying to prepare for the mission itself.

And, in the midst of this crescendo of activity, Paula Benacerraf—human, grandmother—prepared to leave Earth.

After all, the Titan expedition was going to be an open-ended mission. So she figured she ought to shut down her life, here on Earth, as if she was indeed going to die.

She spent a lot of hours scanning images—photographs, movies and videos of Jackie and the grandchildren, a couple of pictures from the walls of her home—onto high-capacity, radiation-toughened discs. She sold everything she owned of value—her apartment, her car, her furniture, her books, her clothes—and what she couldn’t sell she was going to give away to friends, or to charities. She wanted Jackie to have first choice. All she saved for herself was the few pounds of personal items she was going to be able to take to Titan. She had some bits of jewelery, and even a couple of precious paper books, sealed in baggies and wrapped up in her fireproof Beta-cloth Personal Preference Kit.

Benacerraf made out a will. But she tore up the draft. Instead she had her hank draw up authorization for Jackie to become a joint holder of Benacerraf’s accounts.

But she would need to meet Jackie, one last time, to finalize the transfer. And Jackie had refused even to take her calls, for more than a year.

Benacerraf kept trying.

Jackie would only agree to meet her in Green Town, a net Island.

Benacerraf hated the net and she resisted this. It was just another way of Jackie expressing her disapproval. But she had little choice.

Benacerraf had always refused to have any kind of net interface equipment in her home, beyond simple e-mail and browser But there were plenty of public net cafés in downtown Houston; she found one in the Galleria which—though expensive—had a good variety of up-to-date equipment, and private booths you could lock yourself into.

Inside her booth, she wrapped the sensor mask across her face, and the gloves over the palms of her hands. She stood on the treadmill-like motion simulator, and—tumbling a little with the switch—dimmed the lights.

The mask on her face was soft and damp like flayed skin, she thought and, in the first few seconds of the immersion, quite dark. Then the moist contact pads on the surface of her eyes filled with light, blurred shapes of silver, black and green. She forced her vision muscles to relax; the images were set at virtual-infinity, and it did her no good to try to focus on the covers on her eyes.

The image resolved.

She was standing on a lawn of green grass.

Her arms held out for balance, Benacerraf stepped cautiously forward, over the glowing grass. It felt cool and damp under her feet; it was fresh cut, and she could smell the rich domestic scent of the crushed blades. A sprinkler was turning, droplets of water dancing in the sunlight.

She looked up, taking care not to move her head too quickly. Even so there was a characteristic delay between the motion of her head and the change in virtual scene in response; they said you got used to that with time, your sensorium accommodating the built-in delay. Benacerraf wasn’t adapted and sure as hell didn’t want to be, and the delay just made her feel motion-sick.

The lawn she was standing on was a little square, bordered by empty roads. The town was green and still. She could see houses of red brick and white-painted wood, with little white picket fences around their lawns. There were maples, elms and horse chestnut trees, their branches softly rustling in the breeze. There was even a church steeple, with a bell hanging silently. There was some kind of ornament on the lawn, a sculpture; it might have been an iron deer.

The sky was tall and blue, scattered with fluffy clouds. It felt like morning, and the sun was low, its light on her face flat and warm…

The sky wasn’t all that impressive, actually. The color looked pretty-pretty fake and too uniform, and those clouds were lumpy, a fairly obvious application of fractal technology. That lawn sprinkler was actually the most ambitious part of this whole scene, she thought. The motion of the droplets had been modeled realistically, with the effect of the gentle breeze on the shape of the droplet cloud captured well. And when she looked more closely she could see how each droplet splashed and broke up when it hit the grass, and scattered in dewlike beads over the blades.

She could see nothing that looked as if it post-dated, say, 1940. But there was nothing to pin down the time and place here specifically, one way or the other. This was Green Town, probably Illinois, and as far as she was concerned it was just an anal-retentive fantasy, a dream of a middle America that had never existed anyhow, modeled with gigamips of processing power and the most up-to-date VR technology.

Decadent as all hell.

One of the houses seemed to stand out from the rest, its colors and outline a little more vivid. So that was probably where she was supposed to go. It was a tall brown Victorian design, the low sunlight making it look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was elaborately adorned, covered with rococo and scrolls, and its windows were stained, blue and pink, made, of diamond-form leaded glass. There was a broad porch at the front, with a swing that rocked gently back and forth in the breeze, creaking.

She walked towards the house. She stumbled once, but recovered easily. The little iron deer was in her way, but she didn’t bother to step around it; she walked right through the deer, and it disappeared in a burst of pixels.

She tramped heavily up the wooden stairs of the house, and onto its porch. The front door was open. She walked in, through a bead curtain. Wind chimes tinkled as she passed.

She entered a parlor. The furniture was old, covered in a maroon fabric, worn with use and obviously comfortable. There was a piano—an acoustic one—its legs covered up Victorian style. There was a piece of sheet music on the stand.
Beautiful Dreamer

Jackie emerged from a door at the back of the room. She was wearing a trim long dress of gingham, that pretty much covered her from neck to toe. Her hair was brushed back, and her face was recognizably her own—though, Benacerraf thought sourly, rather smoothed-over and more symmetrical than the real thing.

“Hi,” Jackie said neutrally. She was carrying a glass pitcher of iced lemonade, which moved in viscous waves as she walked. “You want some lemonade?”

“Hell, no. I mean, no thanks.” Eating or drinking in here meant letting the mask push its way into her mouth and throat.

They sat on overstuffed Morris chairs, beside a fireplace, under a framed painting.

Jackie poured herself a glass, and sipped it deliberately, watching her mother. Benacerraf thought she wore the same stubborn look she’d had since she’d learned to be defiant, at the age of five.

“Are the kids here?”

“They’ll be over later,” Jackie said. “It’s a school day. So they’re over on Nintendo Island right now. You have any trouble getting here?”

Benacerraf didn’t much feel like playing this game; she didn’t reply.

Jackie lit up a cigarette. The smoke curled into the air, blue and white, its form another complex application, Benacerraf thought, of fluid-mechanical modeling. And all utterly pointless.

“You know, you’re honored,” Jackie said. “Your fame must have spread. The great Saturn explorer.” Her tone was contemptuous. “They don’t normally let you land in the square; there’s a port on a neighboring island, and you have to get a boat over here, then walk from the coast.”

“So many rules,” Benacerraf said.

Jackie shrugged. “It’s a world in here, Paula. Of course you have to have rules. They underpin the world. Like the physical laws that govern us in RL—”

“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf snapped. “This is virtual reality, for God’s sake. Why the hell shouldn’t I fly like Superman if I want to?”

“You think this is all too cute,” Jackie said sourly. “Well, maybe. It’s pretty much all we’re allowed since the government opened up the net again. You know, police monitoring engines consume twice as many mips as the VR software itself.”

Benacerraf waved a hand deliberately quickly, so fast the processing couldn’t keep up, and she left a trail of pixels, ghostly shadows of her fingers. “But so what? None of this is real. None of it is even unpredictable, challenging. You bind yourselves up in these endless rules, and—”

“And by contrast,” Jackie said coldly, “you and your little band are going off to break ground on the high frontier.”

“Isn’t that true? Isn’t that more worthwhile, more
real
than this?”

Jackie said bleakly, “There’s nothing out there but a collection of dead rocks and ice balls. Even the Earth is falling apart.”

“So where else to go but inward, retreating into your own head? Right?”

Jackie sighed. “Is this why you’ve come here, Paula? To attack me again? Because if it is—”

Benacerraf held her hands up. “Time out, kid. Whenever we get together, we fall into the same old rut.”

Jackie shrugged and didn’t respond.

Showing she didn’t care about their flawed relationship was, Benacerraf thought, the most hurtful response she could have made.

“So,” Jackie said at length. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I need you to sign some documents.”

Benacerraf explained her plan.

“Virtually all my assets are in the accounts, and my salary will continue to be paid into it, as long as I’m alive. I think you ought to have immediate access to those funds. But you have to sign authorization papers; we can do that here, electronically, in Green Town. I also tried to have my pension contributions made over in your favor, but they couldn’t do it. Administrative reasons.” It was ironic, thought Benacerraf; here was NASA busting all the technical and political barriers in the way of a ten-astronomical-unit mission to Titan, but the bean counters couldn’t find any way around their own rule books…

Jackie listened to all this, her virtual face expressionless and unreadable. Benacerraf realized, belatedly, that she didn’t even know where her daughter was.

In the end, Jackie wouldn’t agree to Benacerraf’s proposals.

“Look, Mother, you don’t really care about me, or the kids. If you did you wouldn’t be indulging yourself in this ludicrous jaunt to Saturn.”

“I’m trying to make you a gift, of all my property, for God’s sake—”

“No,” Jackie said, with a harshness not matched by the china-doll prettiness of her virtual face. “You’re just trying to ease your damn conscience. Well, I don’t see why I should make it so easy for you. I won’t sign anything; I won’t have any part of this.”

They started to argue again.

It was like resuming a conversation, even though they hadn’t spoken for so long.

Benacerraf struggled to understand.

Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.

In another century, we may not recognize each other.

Or maybe, she thought gloomily, I’m just getting old.

Maybe it’s just as well I’m getting the hell out, of a world I don’t understand any more.

She tried, one last time, to marshal her thoughts.

“Jackie, your life is your own—as is mine, to do with as I please. And I think it’s better to do this, to go to Titan—or die in the attempt—than to stay around here, getting steadily older, becoming a cliché for you. I’m sorry if it hurts. But I don’t owe you anything.”

“And what about the kids? What will I tell them when I have to explain they can’t see grandma any more?”

“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf said sadly. “In a few years they wouldn’t be interested anyhow. And besides, there will be telecasts from the mission—”

Jackie stood up. “Don’t you get it? Nobody will watch the telecasts. Nobody has cared for years. Only you, you old people. Nobody will give a damn, as you drift off into the darkness. If you go, I’ll tell the boys you’re dead,” she said evenly. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? What is this, but an elaborate suicide?”