Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

Then a few more years of boredom before rolling into the Saturn system — its gallery of cratered moons. Barry next to me in the observatory. The walls behind us covered with clips and paper and Velcro.

A gap in the bright rings below, Saturn’s silent roll to our left. A moon blazed with light — I gasped, suddenly dizzy, directionless. We were falling, not floating, and falling endlessly — there was nothing to hit. I grabbed for a wall.

Barry let go and spun weightless. “Afraid of a collision?”

“Tell me this tub knows where it’s headed.”

Out the portal, the rings looped shadows over the pastel giant. Barry unclipped an ancestral placard from its shrine and hung it in the air in front of the window. He lit a stick of incense and set it to float alongside.

“There,” he said. “Let them have a view.”

What a view: those rings — at first a solid and uniform white, but as we grew closer we saw ridges and shadows. Closer still, aggregates of icy particles — a compilation that continually formed and dispersed.

Barry pointed to the orange-and-brown haze that was Titan, our outpost-to-be. “That’ll be us, Nina.” The moon minuscule next to the planet, next to the teal shadows stretched across the giant’s tan and green gases.

I groped for the wall again. Barry’s placard floating in front of Saturn didn’t help, it just bared the universe: a struggle to grasp — to retain perspective — and an overwhelming veneration that science couldn’t hold at bay. The fire on the incense burned spherical and purple then snuffed itself — filled the Ferry with faux jasmine.

Five years Barry and I had floated in the Deep Solar Ferry. We took down pictures and personals — the photos at the shrine, drawings, holiday decor, Sudoku — before packing ourselves into the lander. Point the cameras toward the ground and launch. Control the burn during descent, parachutes, then Titan.

We first saw the moon’s surface through the fish-eye cam in our lander. Orange cloud rushed the windows, thinned, and gave way to a continent of ochre ridges and flats. The craft burned closer, eastern plains filled the screen, dunes to the south slipped from view, and we were right on top of the site: a monumental, maze-like system of pipes drew oil from the lake, automation continuously scratched methane and water ice from the regolith, and behind the mine the shiny speck of Habitat’s dome and a meandering staircase cut into the hill. At the top of the stairs, circles that we realized were huge telecommunications dishes — it all said civilization, humanity, Earth Was Here .

Faster, closer, the jolt of landing — the cam full of brown ice pebbles and mud — and holy 他妈的, the weight of our bodies, the crush of the gravity of even that small moon after years of zero-g, of having to lift your tongue to talk.

On the surface, Titan seemed so much like Earth: atmosphere, ground — even if the air was unbreathable and the moon only a brown, muddy basin, Titan had creeks, rivers, steam. The rain was methane and the lakes liquid hydrocarbons, but the fact it had any form of precipitation at all brought back the memory of home, true home: the city hunkered under deep purple cloud, a white-blue flash of lightning, the whimper of Gran’s dogs, and the scurry of neighbours adjusting the angle of funnel collectors and setting any canister that could catch water on their balconies.

Inside Habitat, Barry and I hauled our atrophied asses through procedure — acclimatized to humidity and changes in air and temperature from the Deep Solar Ferry — and collapsed in the galley. To be sitting again, feeling our own weight, while the clouds darkened above us in the overhead dome. That above was a direction, and the smell from the garden module: wet dirt.

The previous team had left us a seasoned cast-iron pan we could barely lift. We managed, instead of cooking, to rehydrate a package of nutrient gruel and drink it from mugs at the galley table. Barry hooked his portable to Habitat’s telecommunications system and tapped messages to Corporate and to home: Made it.

Sending the message woke the Habitat console, and brought to life the holoscreen. Images of what the last team had been researching appeared over the table.

“Enceladus,” I said. Titan’s sister moon, her white pole tinted lilac and cracked with turquoise. Next, a shot with the moon blackened, and the ice jets’ fine mist against the black. “Water vapour, salt crystals, ice particles.” Overlaying the moon, a network of lines showed blueprints for a mining expansion. Ice, for water and oxygen.

“Looks like Titan will gain neighbours — go Corporate.” There was energy to Barry’s voice. I don’t know how he summoned so much excitement for Corporate. More ships, faster ships, asteroid mines, now Enceladus, and off in the future at the edge of nullity, the ludicrous fantasy of exoplanet colonies — he was more of a dreamer than I was that way. I was too tired, too sore to care, and I wanted home. I slid my chair under the galley overhead and tilted back under the deep brown haze. Titan sat midway through its day cycle (fifteen point nine Earth days), careening behind Saturn into dark.

“Open a pic of Earth,” I said.

Barry brought up an image — a dot, a speck at the edge of Saturn’s rings.

“Something closer.”

He looked at me, took his legs off the table, and pulled up a photo from the Ferry trip. Two hundred and fifty miles above Europe, a satellite hung over scattered white clouds, solar panels glinting copper, spread like some mechanical dragon. Next pic: Eastern North America pale with winter storms. Then Southeast Asia at night, lit electrically, playing at its own night sky. More photos — a pebbled mosaic of land, atmosphere, oceans.

Barry set his mug in the air and we were both shocked when it smashed to the ground.

Next months, us versus gravity. Next years—

Transmissions: Merven posed with a hand on the cab of his new junk truck. The family cheered “Hellooooo Nina!” from an apartment with forty percent more square footage. Gran did a hand-held tour of her garden — container-grown peanuts on the shiny glass balcony. Rinella, officially back home in the second bedroom (“A second bedroom, can you believe it?”), held twins on her lap. And the puppies — that wriggle of yellow that came and went while Gran, or Merven with his sweat-stained shirts and greying hair, filmed their greetings.

The more videos they sent, the less I found to say. How many times could I describe a moon with constant cloud cover? Barry and I — we visited each other at night. During the day, we bled time with cards and Sudoku, gardening, exercises, maintenance checks in ExothermWearables, and updating mine reports. Slowly, Merven’s “News Reels” started to sound more like jabs — a close-up of a picture on the wall: me, surrounded by sketches of the retired or deceased brood dogs, pressed flowers, and incense sticks.

It’s me, not them , I reminded myself, and scattered food to the crickets. Untangled fine red worms from soil and separated them to new bins in the garden module. Inflated cryoballoons and monitored weather patterns in the south. But I watched fewer videos, then quit entirely, and eventually the transmissions stopped coming. We’d always been moving on, I told myself, gaining distance over time until we faded from each other’s view. If we’d even been looking toward each other to start.

Barry and I reach the lookout and telecommunications tower on the summit of the hill. The main dish for the mine hangs at an odd angle, and must have been knocked off target by the storm. That it hasn’t righted itself will be an automation issue, and as soon as we’ve caught our breath from the hike we’ll check that the system has begun self-repair. Barry leans against the wall that rings the lookout.