Titan (66 page)

This was a factor which she took into account, in the course of her decision to accept the mission.

To fly in space:
to venture once again beyond the atmosphere, to become the first Chinese to venture beyond low Earth orbit, the first Chinese to spend a hundred days in space—for that, she had, to her own surprise, been willing to exchange everything. Her life.

Even her place in history.

Jiang Ling was a spaceflight junkie.

It was even possible, she mused, that had this flight been offered even to some of the one hundred frustrated American astronauts, dispersing slowly from Houston, some of them may have accepted, so great was the lure of returning to the secret place, to space.

And having made her bargain, she would, of course, complete her mission.

It was conceivable that the detonations would he observed from the United States itself, and elsewhere. If they were, the Party had a further plausible cover story, she knew: that the explosions were being used in a scientific analysis of the asteroid’s structure.

The light faded rapidly The debris cloud dispersed quickly—or rather, the asteroid’s new orbit took it away from the fragments blown out of it by the weapons.

The dosimeter aboard
Tianming
indicated that the radiation dose she had already taken exceeded nominal safety limits.

Jiang Ling smiled.

She picked up her optical navigation gear—a sextant with a simple telescope—and began to study the new position of the asteroid.

On the last day before closest approach, she found it more difficult than before to comply with the order to complete her three hours’ cycling.

For her final broadcast she chose to feature the aquarium. She positioned the camera so that it focused on the apparatus, and then moved so that her own face was in the shot, close to the aquarium. For the benefit of the video camera, she made a show of peering into the microscope; her vision filled with blue water light. She spoke in her broadcast about th
ese little creatures being her fellow passengers aboard
Tianming.

It was a little corny, but it contained the essential truth. Somewhere in the milky-blue images of squirming sea urchins and eerily human starfish embryos, somewhere in this drop of the primeval sea which she had carried with her, so far from Earth, there was a sense of unity with all life, a hope of salvation.

She was not alone, even here, so far from the planet which had spawned her; she was still as one with all the creatures of the world.

Her greatest regret, in fact—which grew as 2002OA loomed—was that the thousands of creatures in this aquarium could not hope to survive the events to come.

Jiang Ling could no longer see Earth, Moon or sun.

On this, the hundredth day, the dark hide of 2002OA slid past the small window of
Tianming.

It was as if she was flying over some miniature Moon, she thought. The surface was so pierced and broken by craters of all sizes that it was impossible to tell, by eye, how far away it was; she might have been in an Apollo spacecraft sailing over the surface of the Moon, sixty miles below, or peering through some camera at a plaster mockup, just out of arm’s reach.

The spacecraft was in the shadow of the asteroid now, and only the spotlights of
Tianmimg
illuminated the surface, less than a mile from the craft: she fired her camera through the window, and the digitized photographs of churned regolith were sent immediately to the ground stations.

She heard the clatter of solenoids, felt the judder of the craft as it was pushed by squirts of the automatic reaction control system.

She was beyond the useful reach of her optical navigation; now, the automatic systems of the spacecraft had come into their own—particularly the radar, which would determine
Tianming
’s distance from the asteroid surface, and match it to the ground-based calculations using her astronomical observations of the asteroid’s new path.

For optimal yield, the warhead required a standoff detonation, with the warhead placed forty percent of the object’s radius above the surface. There, the weapon could irradiate an ideal thirty percent of the surface of 2002OA.

The weapon had been engineered to maximize its production of neutrons, which would be absorbed by the top few inches of the crust. The irradiated shell would heat, expand and spill away, thus imparting a rocketlike stress wave impulse to the asteroid.

From now on, until the mission reached its conclusion, Jiang Ling was a passenger.

She found the thought oddly restful.

She went to her sleeping cupboard, and retrieved the small brass bell. She rattled it, and the small clapper rang against the wall of the bell, and she stared into the corpulent, smiling face
of ta laorenjia.

She ate a final breakfast. She found the ground crew had packed a special, final meal: duck, pork with rice, and even a small bulb of
chemshu,
a rice liqueur.

She ate with relish. Then she carefully tidied away the plate and cutlery and enclosed microgravity cups.

It was hard to imagine that in a few minutes none of this familiar cabin and environment would exist; it was right to behave as if that were not so.

According to her mission clock, the final moment was mere seconds away. She had requested that the cabin camera be disabled, and that the radio link be kept silent.

She didn’t want a countdown. And she had said her goodbyes.

The last person she had embraced, on Earth, was her mother.

A little before detonation, Jiang Ling pressed her fists into the sockets of her eyes.

She saw the complete bone structure of her hands, like an X-ray, drenched in pink light.

There was a moment of heat—

I
t was Benacerraf who
found the methane vent.

She continued to ban any EVA beyond the walk-back limit, despite her mountain-top adventure. Rosenberg had set up a systematic program to take atmospheric and surface samples from the area around Tartarus they could reach in a couple of hours. So he sent Benacerraf in her snowshoes striking across the featureless, dull ground to the northwest. After a couple of miles, as he had instructed, she filled up her little sample bottles and started to return.

As she returned—taking a sighting on the white crest of Mount Othrys, visible as a hulking silhouette through the haze—she came upon a place where the gumbo appeared to have a different consistency, a lighter color.

She stopped, right in the middle of the discoloration patch.

She dug at the gumbo with her snowshoe, and bent down to take a closer look. The light was even worse than usual; they were coming to the end of one of the eight-day-long Titan “days,” and the methane overcast was heavy. But even in the dim, dried-blood light, she could see there was something unusual about the gumbo here. It was peppered by big, flattened bubbles. And as she watched, a fresh bubble emerged from under the tholin, spreading and flattening, streaks of color swimming in its surface.

She must have walked right over this patch on the way out. Whatever this was, it was out of the ordinary, surely the kind of thing Rosenberg had them out here looking for.

She bent, awkwardly, and took fresh sample bottles from her EMU pockets. She took a scraping of the gumbo itself, the air above the gumbo, and—with reasonable skill, she thought—managed to insert the plastic needle of a syringe into a bubble without breaking the sticky meniscus, and was able to draw out the uncontaminated gases within.

She straightened up, labeled the bottles, noted her location and walked on.

Back at Tartarus, inside the scuffed, patched-up, shacklike interior of the hab module, Rosenberg was distracted. He was busy trying to rebuild a balky nutrient pump from the CELSS farm, and he told her to store her sample bottles and he’d check them when he had time.

Meanwhile, Angel was having one of his bad days. He raged around the hab module, frustrated at his inability to perform the simplest task unaided. He railed at the equipment, at the assholes at NASA who wouldn’t speak to them any more, at his crewmates.

For all the difficulties his presence posed on even the simplest EVA, it was outside the cramped, battered, stale confines of the hab module that Angel seemed most stable. The opportunity to get him outside hadn’t come up for a couple of days, though, and now they were likely to he shut in through the eight-day Titan night. And already, Benacerraf thought, they were paying the price.

She made a meal for Angel, and sat him down in the Apollo couches. He rambled about his life, his space missions, his career, his father, even his sexual experiences. She sat and endured.

Listening to him was an easy safety valve.

Rosenberg padded around them in house shoes improvised from Beta-cloth scraps, and got on with his work on the pump. He didn’t actually do anything to help her with Angel; it was clear that as far as Rosenberg was concerned, Angel was Benacerraf’s problem, a waste of resources who ought to be pushed out the airlock.

It took Rosenberg two hours to get around to those anomalous samples.

Then he came bustling in from the Spacelab, shouting about an immediate EVA.

Benacerraf glanced uneasily at Angel. But he seemed to be heading into one of his inward-looking, passive phases. He was rocking to and fro in his couch, his right leg tapping rapidly, his head turning to and fro. She had learned to read Angel’s moods; if he stayed in this state, he was so shut-in it was beyond the power even of Rosenberg’s noisy, unstructured ranting to irritate him.

Rosenberg was still talking about going out.

“Slow down, Rosenberg,” she said. “You know we’ve avoided EVAs at night.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. But this is exceptional. We have an opportunity, right now, and we don’t know when it will recur. We’ll miss out on it if we wait seven or eight days for the fucking sun to come up.”

“What opportunity?”

“Paula, I analyzed those samples you brought back. The anomalous tholin, the bubbling—”

“I remember.”

“You know what I found, in the sample you took from within the bubble?” He grinned. “Guess.”

“Don’t play games, Rosenberg.”

“Methane,”
he said. “Almost pure methane gas. You see?”

She thought it over. “No. No, I don’t get it. The air is full of methane. We even produce it ourselves. Why should we care enough about methane to risk our necks out there in the dark?”

“Because of where the methane comes from,” he said rapidly. “It has to be from an underground reservoir. There are probably pockets of methane scattered all through the bedrock ice, though not all so close to the surface… It has to be an intrusion of the magma, the deep ammonia-water, which is forcing that methane to the surface now. And if that’s so, the site you found is one of the best possibilities for finding traces of ammono-analogue biology. Short of dropping into the caldera on Othrys, we—”

“Woah.” She held up her hands again. “Tell me slowly.”

“I’m talking about life
, Paula,” he said softly. “Titan life: life beyond Earth. That methane vent represents one of our best chances of detecting it. If we sit in here on our butts, we may miss it.” He was struggling to be patient, she saw. “Do you get it? I’m not interested in the methane for itself. I’m interested in the ammonia-water magma.”

“Because—”

“Because if we’re going to find life anywhere, ammonia-analogue life, it’s in the fluid of the ancient oceans. Where liquid ammonia is still available, as a solvent. And that’s bubbling up out of the ground, a couple of miles away.”

Angel turned his ruined face to Rosenberg. “Titan life, huh. So, what use is that? Can we eat the shit?” He shook his head, mumbling irritably, and retreated inward to his crooning.

“Actually,” Benacerraf said drily, “he has a point, Rosenberg. This is science, not survival. I don’t think we should put ourselves in a life-threatening situation for—”

Rosenberg seemed to snap.

She’d never seen him so angry. He came up and loomed over her, screaming at her. “This is precisely the reason we came to Titan in the first place. We have to be able to do more than sit around in here recycling Bill’s piss and waiting to die. Paula, either you come out with me now, or I go out there myself. Right now.” There were flecks of spittle on his lip, and behind his glasses his red-rimmed eyes were staring.

She closed her eyes, and wished she was in her wardroom.

She was sick of juggling them, these two assholes, both as difficult as each other in their ways, both demanding that she soak it all up, run their lives for them.

… The news from Earth, sent up to them in digital packets by the last DSN dish at Goldstone, was dire. More ecological decay, more flashpoint wars over crop failures and water shortages, more floods of refugees washing across the southern continents, more saber-rattling between the Chinese and Maclachlan’s government. In a way, the Chinese issue scared her most. It was like the Cold War all over again. Except that she sensed those old bastards in Beijing
meant it,
in a way the Kremlin never had.

Well, maybe they could actually do some good up here. Maybe news of life outside Earth might actually lift some hearts, down on the bleeding ground. As Rosenberg said, it was why they’d come here, after all.

“You win, Rosenberg. We’ll go.”

He backed off, trembling.

“But,” she said evenly, “it had better be worth it.”

Angel, blind face turning this way and that, cackled as he rocked.

They stepped outside the orbiter, emerging into the pitch dark of a Titan night.

Benacerraf insisted the two of them rope themselves together.

Rosenberg laughed at her. “For Christ’s sake, Paula. The tholin out west is as flat as a pancake for miles. What are you expecting to happen?”

She confronted him. “I don’t know. I’ve only taken a walk over a methane vent once before, and last time I didn’t know I was doing it. If we have to be out here at all, we take precautions. Take the damn rope, Rosenberg.”