Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

I listened absently as Poole and the others talked through their science programme. The atmosphere was mostly nitrogen, just as on Earth, but it contained five per cent methane, and that methane was the key to Titan’s wonders, and mysteries. Even aside from its puzzling central role in the greenhouse effects which stabilised the atmosphere, methane was also central to the complicated organic chemistry that went on there. In the lower atmosphere methane reacted with nitrogen to create complex compounds called tholins, a kind of plastic, which fell to the ground in a sludgy rain. When those tholins landed in liquid water, such as in impact-warmed crater lakes, amino acids were produced – the building blocks of our kind of life . . .

As I listened to them debate these issues it struck me that none of them had begun his or her career as a biologist or climatologist: Poole and Berg had both been physicists, Dzik an engineer and more lately a project manager. However, both Berg and Dzik had had specialist training to a decent academic standard to prepare for this mission. Ambitious types like these expected to live a long time; periodically they would re-educate themselves and adopt entirely different professions. I have never had any such ambition. I had a good education that had bequeathed me a good vocabulary and got me selected for my sinecure as a curator, along with my father’s influence – but that was about as much use as it had been to me. Why waste time going through it all again? Besides, somehow, despite AS technology, I do not imagine myself reaching any great age.

Their talk had an edge, however, even in those first hours. They were all ethically troubled by what they were doing, and those doubts surfaced now that they were away from Harry Poole’s goading.

‘At some point,’ Miriam Berg said, ‘we’ll have to face the question of how we’ll react if we do find sentience here.’

Bill Dzik shook his head. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe we’re even here, that we’re having this conversation at all. I remember exactly what you said on Baked Alaska, Michael. If we couldn’t protect the ecology, “we’ll implode the damn wormhole. We’ll get funds for the Cauchy some other way.” That’s what you said.’

Poole said harshly, clearly needled, ‘That was thirteen years ago, damn it, Bill. Situations change. People change. And the choices we have to make change too . . .’

As they argued, I was the only one looking ahead, the way we were drifting under our balloon. Through the murk I thought I could see the first sign of the ethane lakes of the polar regions, sheets of coal-black liquid surrounded by fractal landscapes, like a false-colour mock-up of Earth’s own Arctic. And I thought I could see movement, something rising up off those lakes. Mist, perhaps? But there was too much solidity about those rising forms for that.

And then those forms emerged from the mist, solid and looming.

I pulled my helmet on my head and gripped my couch. I said, ‘Unless one of you does something fast, we may soon have no choices left at all.’

They looked at me, the three of them in a row, distracted, absorbed by their science. Then they looked ahead, to see what I saw.

They were like birds, black-winged, with white lenticular bodies. Those wings actually flapped in the thick air as they flew up from the polar seas, a convincing simulacrum of the way birds fly in the air of Earth. Oddly they seemed to have no heads.

And they were coming straight towards us.

Michael Poole snapped, ‘Lethe. Vent the buoyancy!’ He stabbed at a panel, and the others went to work, pulling on their helmets as they did so.

I felt the balloon settle as the hot air was released from the envelope above us. We were sinking but we seemed to move in dreamy slow motion, while those birds loomed larger in our view with every heartbeat.

Then they were on us. They swept over the gondola, filling the sky above, black wings flapping in an oily way that, now they were so close, seemed entirely unnatural, not like terrestrial birds at all. They were huge, each with a wingspan of ten, fifteen metres. I thought I could hear them, a rustling, snapping sound carried to me through Titan’s thick air.

And they tore into the envelope. The fabric was designed to withstand Titan’s methane rain, not an attack like this; it exploded into shreds, and the severed threads waved in the air. Some of the birds suffered; they tangled with our threads or collided with each other and fell away, rustling. One crashed into the gondola itself, crumpled like tissue paper, and fell, wadded up, far below us.

And we fell too, following our victim-assassin to the ground. Our descent from the best part of eight kilometres high took long minutes; we soon reached terminal velocity in Titan’s thick air and weak gravity. We had time to strap ourselves in, and Poole and his team worked frantically to secure the gondola’s systems. In the last moment Poole flooded the gondola with a foam that filled the internal space and held us rigid in our seats, like dolls in packaging, sightless and unable to move.

Even so I felt the slam as we hit the ground.

The foam drained away, leaving the four of us sitting in a row. We had landed on Titan the way we had entered its atmosphere, backside first, and now we lay on our backs with the gondola tilted over, so that I was falling against Miriam Berg, and the mass of Bill Dzik was weighing on me. The gondola’s hull had reverted to opacity so that we lay in a close-packed pearly shell, but there was internal light and the various data slates were working, though they were filled with alarming banks of red.

The three of them went quickly into a routine of checks. I ignored them. I was alive . I was breathing, the air wasn’t foul, and I was in no worse discomfort than having Dzik’s unpleasant bulk pressed against my side. Nothing broken, then. But I felt a pang of fear as sharp as that experienced by the Virtual copy of me when he had learned he was doomed. I wondered if his ghost stirred in me now, still terrified.

And my bowels loosened into the suit’s systems. Never a pleasant experience, no matter how good the suit technology. But I wasn’t sorry to be reminded that I was nothing but a fragile animal, lost in the cosmos. That may be the root of my cowardice, but give me humility and realism over the hubristic arrogance of a Michael Poole any day.

Their technical chatter died away.

‘The lights are on,’ I said. ‘So I deduce we’ve got power.’

Michael Poole said, gruffly reassuring, ‘It would take more than a jolt like that to knock out one of my GUTengines.’

Dzik said spitefully, ‘If we’d lost power you’d be an icicle already, Emry.’

‘Shut up, Bill,’ Miriam murmured. ‘Yes, Emry, we’re not in bad shape. The pressure hull’s intact, we have power, heating, air, water, food. We’re not going to die any time soon.’

But I thought of the flapping birds of Titan and wondered how she could be so sure.

Poole started unbuckling. ‘We need to make an external inspection. Figure out our options.’

Miriam followed suit, and laughed. She said to me, ‘Romantic, isn’t he? The first human footfalls on Titan, and he calls it an external inspection.’ Suddenly she was friendly. The crash had evidently made her feel we had bonded in some way.

But Bill Dzik dug an elbow in my ribs hard enough to hurt through the layers of my suit. ‘Move, Emry.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘We’re packed in here like spoons. It’s one out, all out.’

Well, he was right; I had no choice.

Poole made us go through checks of our exosuits, their power cells, the integrity of their seals. Then he drained the air and popped open the hatch in the roof before our faces. I saw a sky sombre and brown, dark by comparison with the brightness of our internal lights. Flecks of black snow drifted down. The hatch was a door from this womb of metal and ceramics out into the unknown.