Titan (57 page)

When she was on her feet again, she was exhausted anew. She looked down at herself. Her arms, legs and much of her chest were smeared with purple-brown gumbo.

She walked back to Mott. She bent and dug her hands under Mott’s shoulders again, and pulled her all the way out onto the ice. Her hands left tholin streaks on Mott’s pressure suit.

She turned Mott over. Mott’s visor was smashed, her helmet full of slush. Benacerraf reached inside and scooped the slush away from Mott’s face. Mott’s eyes were open. Benacerraf tried to push closed the lids, but they were frozen, even the eyeballs hard.

Rosenberg said, “Do you have her?”

“Yes, Rosenberg. I have her.”

Rosenberg fell silent.

There was Titan slush in Mott’s mouth. Benacerraf dug it away with a finger. Her gloved finger seemed too fat for Mott’s mouth; it was like clearing vomit from the mouth of a sick child.

“So,” Rosenberg said. “Then there were three.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Paula.”

“Me too. Rosenberg, prepare a message for the ground. Her parents…”

“Sure.”

Benacerraf straightened up and returned to
Jitterbug.
By touch, in a storage compartment behind the head of Mott’s couch, she found a spade, and a little packet of cellophane that contained the Stars-and-Stripes. The spade was broad-bladed, like a snow-shovel. It had a handle that telescoped out. She walked a few yards away from the apex of
Jitterbug
and began to dig.

The blade penetrated the gumbo easily, and she could lift big shovelfuls away into the thick air. But the stuff clung to the spade and was difficult to shake off. And the walls of the little trench she dug kept collapsing inwards. It was like digging into wet sand.

She kept going, until she was four feet down.

She scraped gumbo off Mott’s chest, exposing the Union Jack sewn there. Then she opened the cellophane packet. She shook out the flag, and laid it over Mott’s body. She wrapped it underneath, making a neat parcel. Now the weak gravity helped her; Mott was feather-light, easy to handle, like a small child.

Two flags, two bodies, she thought.

Benacerraf laid Mott in the trench she had dug.

It was easy to fill. She just pushed the mounds of slush back over the body. The bright orange of Mott’s pressure suit, the brave red and blue and white of the flag, were soon obscured, claimed by the ubiquitous brown of Titan. The clinging stuff oozed quickly back to smoothness.

Benacerraf rested her shovel against the hull of
Jitterbug,
and stood at the head of Mott’s grave.

“No words this time, Paula?”

“She should have been the first,” Benacerraf said. “Not me. She should have been first… That’s all, I guess.”

Her exhaustion was immense, crushing, beyond anything she had known before.

“Paula,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s go open up
Discovery.”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly, standing here in the slush and dark, the idea of the glowing lights of the orbiter’s flight deck and the cramped, clean confines of the hab module, the warm growing smells of the CELSS farm seemed welcoming to Benacerraf.

She could see, in the murk, Rosenberg plodding away from
Bifrost
towards
Discovery,
the dangling form of Angel limp over his shoulders.

J
ackie Benacerraf sat alone
on the floor of her lounge, waiting for the pictures of her mother’s first footsteps on Titan.

So far the big softscreen on the wall was blank, save for schematics and timelines and a couple of animated sponsors’ logos. But sound was coming through: traditional astronauts’ voices, distorted and overlaid with pops and crackles, and with a judder imposed by the lousy bandwidth of the compressed signals.

For the record, we have a go for vent… Affirmative, we’re all sealed up. Go for vent… All right.

Jackie couldn’t even tell which voice was her mother’s. There they were, the astronauts, solemnly reporting each step as if working on an unexploded bomb. All for the benefit of those who might follow one day.

But, of course, nobody would. Not ever.

Anyhow, it was hard to concentrate. She was worried about the kids.

She was always worried about the kids.

At least Fred had grown out of his Nullist phase, and he was having some of the image-tattoos removed. That was leaving marks on his skin, but the doctors were saying they shouldn’t be permanent—unlike hers—because he was still young enough. That skin cancer he’d developed when one of the laid-bare patches had been exposed to the sun was more worrying, but again the specialists said it would clear up…

What bothered her more right now was his determination to quit school and go join the Hunter-Gatherers in Central America.

She’d listened to the arguments and lectures until she thought her head would bust open.

The agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago was now pretty much accepted by the academics as a global disaster. So her son told her, anyhow. The archaeology showed the incidence of tooth cavities rose seven-fold; mothers were badly undernourished; anemia became much more common, and so did tuberculosis… We were better off, ran the argument, so argued Fred, before agriculture. It was true that farming a piece of land could support ten times as many people as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but that didn’t buy you much; today there were seven billion people in the world, almost all of whom were worse nourished than their Stone Age ancestors … and so on.

Once, Jackie would have been passionate about such arguments, either for or against. Now, all she cared about was Fred.

The governments cooperating in the Central American park scheme—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize—had pledged to protect and shelter the young Americans and New Columbians flooding down there to—in theory—rediscover an ancient lifestyle. There was supposed to be no regulation, beyond a simple limit on numbers—but, of course, no communication was possible once you went inside.

Jackie pulled at a tuft of hair. All she could do was keep talking, trying to persuade Fred to think again, to wait, to stick with college…

It was just like the arguments her mother had had with her. Maybe she was doomed to turn into her mother, just as her own kids seemed to be turning into
her.

Okay. Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…

You ready for your one small step?

Astronaut humor, Jackie thought bleakly.

The irony was, science was making a certain comeback. The environmental problems were becoming so pressing and complex that Maclachlan had re-opened some of the university science labs and departments he’d ordered shut down. Even in Seattle, a clear-plastic uv filter over your lawn was now almost as common as a sprinkler system.

It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we’ve reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we’ll understand how it all used to work.

You’re lined up nicely Come back towards me… Okay, put your foot down … you’re doing fine… A little more.

It was the plankton crash in the oceans that seemed to be scaring the scientists most. The plankton crisis, it was said, might actually make the planet uninhabitable, ultimately. And in the short term the big problem was the rice crop. There was a blight with an unpronounceable name that was laying waste to rice crops all over the planet. The price of rice in the Seattle stores—particularly Italian rice, for some reason—had gone through the roof. In the longer term, it was said, people would soon be starving, especially in the major rice-producing countries: China, India, Britain.

It was all to be expected, said the doom-mongers. World-wide, humanity got more than fifty percent of its calories from three carbohydrate-rich crops: wheat, rice and maize. Gigantic monocultures, exceptionally vulnerable to disease.

It was all hubris, fourteen-year-old Ben explained to her earnestly. Humanity had been pursuing a gigantic project, the construction of a technosphere, within which the human species could effectively be freed of its dependence on the Earth: isolated, like grandmother in her metal ship, Ben said…

She let him talk. Jackie had a bigger argument to win with Ben. The destiny of the species was a piece of ground she could afford to concede.

Okay, the picture’s good. A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can’t fix.

Now, at last, the screen filled up. In the foreground Jackie could see what looked like the white-tiled hull of a Command Module, splashed with some kind of mud, and a little further away the ghostly form of an astronaut, a bulky suit topped by a visor that returned brief highlights from the cabin lights. Beyond, no landscape was visible, save only a few yards of what looked like orange-brown swamp.

The astronaut seemed to be pawing at the surface with one foot.

It was, Jackie thought, probably her mother.

The picture was full of digital flaws, rectilinear cross-hatchings and missing pixels, so that you could never forget it was artificial. When the astronaut moved about, so poor was the image quality that she trailed ghosts, pale shadows of limbs and head and torso. It was oddly like the films she’d seen of the first, crude television pictures from
Apollo 11
, Armstrong and Aldrin moving around like ghosts up there.

I’m in the hatchway. The Command Module has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can’t see any exposed ice…

Still analyzing, Jackie thought. Still doing science, even out there, a billion miles from home, one little woman scratching at the surface of a whole world. As if any conclusions she came to made a damn bit of difference.

Still, this
wasn’t Apollo 11.
Hardly anyone was watching these four-hours-old images. The broadcast, on a minor cable channel, wasn’t exactly illegal, but it also wasn’t encouraged by the authorities either. After all, here were these Americans bounding around in a place the current orthodoxy said didn’t even exist…

What bullshit it all was; what damage space had done to the cause of science, in America and the rest of the world. Twenty-billion-dollar golf shots. Maybe, she thought, we ought to see the space program—not as the culmination of some huge project of science and technology—but as a gigantic, alienating disaster. Maybe if not for the space program, my kids wouldn’t be forced to listen to two-thousand-year-old cosmology every day.

If only it had been done
differently:
with imagination and daring and style. NASA’s ultimate triumph had been to reduce everything—even the Moon, even Titan—to the dull, the bland, the predictable.

But probably, on the other hand, space had made no difference. Jackie was becoming receptive to a thesis put about by some academics now that science and technology had anyway reached the end of their usefulness. Humans were becoming overwhelmed by their own sophisticated machinery, because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than that needed to survive it. There were endless examples: all the nuclear-industry catastrophes leading up to Chernobyl, her own mother’s
Columbia
crash, even the new airborne AIDS variant…

Her mind came back to the kids, to Ben, with a wrench.

To hell with science, the future of the species, the space program. Who is there to tell you what to say when your fourteen-year-old son comes home and says he wants to get pregnant?

Ben said he was gay. He was in love, with a boy a couple of years older. He wasn’t a virgin any more, he said. And, he said, he wanted a kid.

Of course that was possible now, with cloned fetuses being implanted directly into the stomach wall of a father. It was even safe, they said, more so than natural childbirth.

Jackie argued against it. She had found herself sounding like her own mother again, and she hated it. You’re too young. Wait. Don’t make any decisions now that you can’t unpick later. Finish your education…

But then, she reflected, if it made Ben happy
now,
maybe she should let him go ahead. Maybe I should just let Fred go too, go seek a better solution in the jungles.

She wasn’t convinced that to plan for a long and happy life was a rational decision any more. In her opinion, you could forget the plankton and the uv; the most likely thing to end it all for them was a bunch of Chinese ICBMs flying over the Pacific.

Sometimes she fell into despair, when she thought about the future her kids were going to have to negotiate. She hated her own lack of control over that future, her impotence in the face of the huge changes sweeping like winds across the planet.

Her mother, moving about in the dense orange atmosphere of Titan, looked less than human. Like some kind of deep-sea fish.

All right. I’m going to step out of Bifrost now.

Jackie leaned forward. This is it, she thought. This is the peak of my mother’s life. Her crowning achievement, her moment in history.