Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

We’d had to expand the dig marker to excavate the left wing, which had fossilized fully extended. The tissue and acetate glue painted on the weaker bones contrasted brightly against the soil, and gave us a visual hint at the full size — three point two one metres on the stretched wing. A jaw large enough to swallow a hare whole. Proportions said the primary feathers would have been as wide as a hand and as long as a man is tall.

We dug trenches into the tuff around the bones, and when enough of the skeleton was exposed Morgan used the humerus and tibiotarsus for calculation. The bird would have weighed eighty kilos and had a wingspan of six to eight metres. Morgan spread his arms — he was nowhere near the size. Wind flapped his shirt, torn and dusty, under the canopy.

Another few weeks and we’d finished trenching and started on the underburden, replacing supporting dirt with sandbags. Jacketing took longer than anticipated. We had to haul water in order to mix the plaster, and the cliffside wing required us to lie under the bones and hold the plastered burlap in place. Forty percent of the time the strips dried before we’d managed to get in position, and we ended up covered in plaster and dirt ourselves.

The afternoon humidity stayed consistent. Clouds rose, rain fell, and mist cleared as the sun set. Each night twilight gave the sky a yellow colour, like nothing I’d ever see again anywhere else, all of it pale and bright, then becoming translucent in a thin, breathless way.

No one told Howie about the oxygen tank, and since he wouldn’t brave exertion, for the most part we forgot about him. He walked below, poking the ground before him with a stick, not yet counting on himself to make the ascent of barely a hundred metres. Always the empty tank hugging his chest, the straw Galveston and the spaniel. Kids kept him company in the corral, running Polaroids we took of the dig down the cliff so he could see.

“Do you think he’ll fund us again?” I could hear Morgan from where I lay, half under the huge skull on its pedestal.

“No,” I said. There was no way. “Almost done,” I called. Still, thinking back to how long he’d watched us when we first met him on Milk River, that he’d passed over the clinic to bring us here, the way he searched for the dog — “Maybe,” I changed my mind. The real answer. Look at what we found.

“It’s ready,” I said. “I’ll push on this side. You got it?”

“On three,” Morgan said.

We lifted. Turned the half-finished jacket onto its back. Morgan packed sand and damp tissue on the underside and I laid strips of burlap over that. When we were done I spat in the dirt and sat with my hands on my jeans. Across the dip of the valley: mountaintops, glaciers, volcanoes, and distant ricochets of crumbling rock. The bright sun washed the peaks and there was a headiness to the elevation.

I set down my trowel. “Howie,” I called.

Morgan stood and yelled, “Howie — Argentavis magnificens! ”

“Look here,” I called. “Howie.”

When Howie looked, I don’t know if he understood. I can’t describe how it felt. The kids in the field raised their arms, imitating us, caught in our excitement. We lifted the head of the huge teratorn, jacketed in white plaster and burlap, ready to be shipped home and uncovered. I threw my head back and laughed. “Howie,” we shouted, and went on shouting.

Finally, data transmission from Corporate: a video file projects recent satellite footage of Saturn as a hologram above the galley table between Barry and me. The light of the little ringed planet casts a tan hue upwards onto the galley’s overhead shielding and over the metal table where the two of us are seated, in the centre of TitanMineZero’s Habitat Module waiting out the Megastorm.

The hologram starts with rotation; the satellite’s long-range imager pulls away from Saturn and shifts focus to one of Saturn’s moons — Titan is a hazy brown marble. Then the visual constricts to the moon’s northern hemisphere and zooms in on a swirl of orange cloud where I approximate our outpost — and current location — to be. The glow from the holoprojection brightens the galley we’ve barricaded ourselves inside: four hundred square feet, absolute shielding. All hatches to the garden, equipment, and living modules double-sealed in case of a breach in thermal containment (it’s cold out there, and the thunder, abated now, was so frequent it shook us like a train passing my living complex back home).

I laugh, I can’t help it. We’re both startled by the transmission popping into life, but holy 他妈的, that splash of colour above the table is a relief — it means telecommunications is chatting with the satellite again, and that Barry and I are back in touch with Earth. I know we’re a couple billion kilometres from the home planet, that we’re planted on Titan under the atmospheric mess flickering in the hologram, but we’re no longer alone. I mean, I no longer feel alone.

And neither does Barry. He gives me a look through the moon that holds position over the table. Fingers crossed, his look says, and he touches a line of text that blinks in the air under the satellite footage of Titan. An audio file begins a voice-over of the looped video:

Earth to Titan CorporateHabitatZero:

Good news is we were able to run your stats and Habitat is cleared for safety — no leaks — so go ahead and unseal all junctions. More good news: the Megastorm broke — check the satellite images and put together a report.

Now for the bad news — TitanMineZero is only intermittently responding to our ping and we need you to fix the connection or override manually and route through a second dish. Also a problem: a mudslide washed out the collection barrels and TitanMineZero’s entire output for your term. There’s no way you can make your HydrocarbonExtractionTarget, so there won’t be any bonuses. We’re sorry, we know you had this in the bag. Expect repairs from here forward, supervise clearing the landing pad, wait for materials to ship from the Belt Mines to rebuild or repair barrels, and set up for the next team’s arrival in thirteen months.

Personal note: Nina and Barry — glad you two are alive. Stories to send home, hey? Speaking of which, it’s been a while since we were able to forward the mail, so attached is a backlog of messages from family.

Barry waves his hand through the holo and the video loop pauses.

“Are they for real?” I wave the message back on. The Megastorm broke, actually finished and isn’t a lull in the winds — that’s a relief, but we need those bonuses. That cash goes to family on Earth. The extra chunk of pay is the reason we signed on — is the excuse I fed myself for leaving, anyway.

Barry enters the shield codes and presses his palm to the wall scanner. The overhead metal dome parts down the centre and retracts as two slabs, leaving the exterior window exposed. Clouds. Red-black and vicious, but tamer than when we sealed ourselves in here two months ago.

“Didn’t you hear what I heard?” I ask. TitanMineZero is the biggest hydrocarbon extraction program Earth has, bigger than the various asteroid Belt Mines and way more efficient, since the automation is self-propelling, self-building, and self-evolving — when I was a kid, Corporate launched a rocket that dropped a couple million build-bots on Titan and let the place grow. Basically, Barry and I are a two-person checkpoint to an absurdly automated mine. They can afford our bonuses.

Barry waves the holo off again, and without the light from the projection we both notice personal files pop green on our private tablets.

“Backlog of mail.” He pushes my tablet across the table toward me.