Titan (74 page)

Understanding it, though, didn’t make it any easier to contain.

After the meal, they went to work on each other’s wounds.

Benacerraf had developed hemorrhoids, a consequence of the sweat and moisture trapped inside her suit. Rosenberg had brought a cream she could apply. Her back, shoulders and stomach were sore continually now, from their battering by the sled harness. It felt as if her pelvis was starting to protrude through the raw patches over her hips, as her body fat fell away. Her lips were still a problem; the scabs and crevices stubbornly refused to heal, and she still swallowed salty blood with every mouthful of food.

And she had indeed developed crotch rot; her inner thighs and the area around her pubic hair were rubbed raw by the inner layers of her suit, even though she treated the area with Canesten powder.

Rosenberg had a dose of crotch rot, too. With the innocence of a child, he showed her his genitals. His scrotum was a shrunken bag, red raw from the rot. And somehow his penis had gotten nipped by the frost. It had swollen up to a shapeless mass, and the end was blistered. He shrugged. “What you pay for being circumcised. One less layer of insulation. Add that to the list, Paula.
No Jews on Titan, without boxer shorts.”

He took a look at Benacerraf’s right foot. For days she had been favoring the foot as she marched, but that had just generated more problems. Now she had an abscess, swollen up on her Achilles tendon, where her heel was pressured by the rim of her boot. Rosenberg had been giving her antibiotics from their precious, dwindling supply, but they seemed to be doing little but give her the squits.

Today, Rosenberg said he would have to operate.

He gave her two deep injections of Xylocaine. For a couple of minutes he covered up her foot, protecting it from the cold while the anesthetic took hold. Then he took a scalpel blade—one he’d sterilized back in
Discovery
—and plunged it deep into the swelling. He made diagonally crossed incisions with brisk, confident strokes.

Yellow pus poured out of the wounds, and he collected it in an empty ration bag.

When he was done he cleaned the wound, coated it with antiseptic, and bound it up with bandage.

Benacerraf turned and began to pull on her sock.

When she sealed herself up again that night, Benacerraf found herself immersed in a deep animal stink. She knew that inside her high-tech suit she was becoming progressively more foul and filthy. She was an animal, stranded far from home and encased in this technological bubble, gradually fouling her own mobile nest.

The hell with it. For now, the dirt was another layer between her and the cold.

She turned her face to the tent wall. She pictured the way Rosenberg flicked icicles of snot out of his nose-hairs. Warmed by irritation, she sought sleep.

At last the giant ice ridges began to diminish.

She came to a place where the waves, somehow sheltered from the wind, were smaller—no more than six or seven feet high, reduced almost to a human scale. Benacerraf decided to change her tactics, to attempt a frontal assault.

She waited to make sure Rosenberg was in view; then she donned her skis again and set out directly east, cutting across the first wave, a characteristic frozen wave-shape.

Hauling her sled behind her, she made it to the narrow ridge at the top of the wave. Her sled was suspended halfway up the slope, and the harness hauled back at her, rubbing the chafed parts of her skin. The ridge of the next wave was only about four feet away, and she reached out towards it, hoping to bridge across the gap with her feet. But the sled fouled on a ridge of the ice, and jammed; she was hauled backwards, and almost lost her balance.

Irritated, she leaned forward and lunged, trying to clear the sled. It bounced into the air and came free suddenly; unbalanced again she tumbled forward, scrambling with her skis to avoid falling down on the steep far side of the second wave.

So she proceeded.

The waves gradually declined in size, until she found herself skiing almost unimpeded over a plain of ridged ice, scattered with gumbo and pockets of gritty granules.

Gradually, they penetrated the heart of Cronos.

On the ninth day she started to find the going harder. After a while she realized the ground was sloping up beneath her. She pushed on through the uniform haze, ignoring the pain in her knees and feet.

The slope became dramatically steeper.

The ground was pushed up into a wall as far as she could see, from north to south, like one giant wave, its termini disappearing into the misty horizon. The ice was uneven, scoured by ankle-snappers: narrow, gumbo-streaked gullies which plunged down the steepening contours.

She walked a zig-zag path, at an angle to the line of steepest slope, and that got easier on her feet, because the skis, sideways on, laid over all but the widest of the gullies. But the gullies snagged repeatedly at the runners of her sled, jerking her backward.

Beyond the miniature horizon created by the crest of the wall, a mountain was rising, its gray-white flanks streaked by gumbo, like a model of Othrys.

The crest of the ridge came up suddenly. The ground leveled out and she found herself on a narrow, eroded shelf, maybe fifty yards across, puddled with gumbo. With a final effort she hauled her sled up and over the edge. She unbuckled her harness, and dropped it gratefully to the ice.

She looked back the way she had come. Her runners and skis had left no visible trail on the bone-hard ice. She could see how this great wall swept up out of the plain in a smooth concave sweep. Much further down the slope she could see Rosenberg; he was a dark, toiling speck, dwarfed by the bulk of the sled he hauled.

She turned and walked forward to the far edge of the wall. The ice here was smooth and relatively free of gullies and crevasses, and she slid easily on her skis.

She reached the edge of the wall. She stepped carefully, avoiding the edge and any brittleness there.

The wall stretched to left and right, foreshortening and dimming out in the horizon mist. Its inward curve was just visible. That mountain peak, a neat cone, lay dead ahead of her, its base lost in the murky haze of distance.

She was clearly standing on the rim of a crater, a great walled plain which curved around that central peak. It looked too symmetrical to be natural, like a huge artifact.

She looked down into the crater plain. The wall here was steeper than on the other side; the crater was clearly a wound dug deep into the countryside. In a belt at the foot of the wall the ice surface was shattered into giant chunks which would make traveling difficult. But beyond that chaotic country, the land smoothed out, and was coated by a thickening layer of purple gumbo.

The sky was a dome of unbroken, twilight orange, empty of cloud save for a high, light scattering of nitrogen-ice cirrus.

Rosenberg came up to her. Like Benacerraf he’d discarded his harness; as he stood alongside her he leaned forward, letting the mass of his pack settle over his center of gravity, and his arms dangled, limp. His breathing was as noisy as ever.

“El Dorado,” he said. “I guess we made it. It looks just like in the radar images.”

She stared at the crater floor gumbo. She could see that it wasn’t the uniform purple-black bruise color she’d become used to, back around Clear Lake. Purple predominated, but there were streaks of lighter reds—even a trace of scarlet—mixed in. The whole mess looked like a puddle of oil paints, the multiple colors mixed up and streaked together.

“Well, it’s different,” she said. “Do you think there’s kerogen?”

“I can’t tell,” he said testily.

“Try your IR.”

He reached up to switch on his night-vision visor. “I don’t know if this tells me anything or not.” Then he lifted his head, and in his visor she could see the reflection of the mountain, the orange sky.

“… Oh, wow,” he said. “Look up there, Paula. Use your infrared. Oh, wow.”

She turned on her own visor, and looked up.

Through the milky-gold haze, beyond the feathering of cirrus cloud, was rising the huge, multicolored crescent of Saturn.

It was almost local noon here, so the sun was directly over her head. Saturn looked as if it was tipped on its side, a half-shadowed hemisphere with its bright round belly thrusting upwards. And jutting ahead of the globe of the planet, pointing vertically up towards the sun, she could see the brilliant rings, thin, striped ellipses.

It was the first time she had seen Saturn since they had dropped out of orbit.

Suddenly she realized where she was. It was a surge of perspective, as if the walls of the Universe opened out around her.

She had let this sunless bubble-world of ice and gumbo and haze and crotch rot eat into her imagination, until it was as if the gumbo extended on, beyond the visible, to infinity.

In fact, she was crawling over a ball of ice, a billion miles from the warmth of the sun.

I’m on Titan, she thought. Here I am—Paula Benacerraf, human, American, grandmother—gazing up at the rings of Saturn.

I made it.

They camped in the lee of the crater wall, on the edge of the chaotic terrain.

Rosenberg, a shapeless mass in the layers of his grimy suit, crawled over the tent floor and inspected Benacerraf’s feet. That early injury to her right foot still hadn’t healed up, and now she had frostbite in a couple of the toes of her left.

Rosenberg himself had developed some kind of tremor, rendering his own fingers too clumsy to apply the scalpel precisely. Benacerraf did most of the doctoring for both of them now.

Under Rosenberg’s direction, she lanced the swollen lump on her right foot, and the worst frostbitten toe on the left. Multihued liquid matter pulsed out of the new wounds.

The throbbing pain ebbed slightly.

“I don’t think that right foot of yours is good news, Paula,” Rosenberg said. “I think you have a deep-seated infection in the bone itself.”

“Terrific,” she said.

“I’ll increase your antibiotics. We still have some Metronidazole and Flucloxicillin. They’re not the most effective, but—”

“It’s all we have. I know.”

She used the scalpel to slice off squares of paraglider fabric, and plastered them all around the wounds. She pulled her socks back over her feet, wincing when the fabric tore at her new incisions.

She helped Rosenberg pull open the layers of his own suit. She had to pull carefully at the fabric, she found, or she would tear away great transparent strips of flesh, like sheets of onionskin. The flesh seemed loosely attached, but nevertheless caused a lot of pain to Rosenberg when they came loose.

It was scary. She had problems herself, but loose skin wasn’t one of them.

Inside the suit she could feel Rosenberg’s ribs, the bony ledges of his pelvis, the slack thinness of his legs. The bulk of the suit masked this degeneration; out on the surface all she could see was his clumsiness, his slumps and lousy posture. It was astonishing he could walk at all, let alone haul a heavy load across the surface of Titan.

She rubbed cream into his armpits and stomach, the raw regions of his crotch. She even worked the cream into his frost-nipped penis, which was still swollen and sore.

Hemorrhoid cream was all they had left. But it seemed to soothe.

She hated to do this, to be so close to another human. She’d make a lousy nurse, she thought. To get through, she made herself think of how she’d handled Jackie as a kid.

He lectured her about their Belsen-like boniness.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise, Paula. We’ve been expending calories at a hell of a rate. More than we’ve been replacing them with food. We’re slowly starving, in fact. We’ve already metabolized a lot of our body fat, shifting it as a fuel supply into the bloodstream. All this is part of our bodies’ strategy to cope with what we’re putting them through: heavy exercise, without enough fuel. Our bodies are eating themselves up, trying to keep going as we demand…”

“Eat your soup, Rosenberg.”

With his hands swathed in lengths of parachute canvas, Rosenberg tried to raise his soup spoon to his lips. His hands shook too much, and the spoon clattered pitifully against his teeth, like a bird tapping on a window.

She put her arm round him to steady him, and guided his hand to his mouth. He sucked the soup gratefully.

Later they lay, back to back, in the confines of the tent. There was nothing before Benacerraf’s eyes, through the window of her helmet, save a patch of plastic wall reflecting the dim low-energy bulb, and a couple of piss bags, slowly freezing.

“You know, Paula—”

“What?”

“Sometimes I want to give up. Just stop. Lie down on the ice, or in the granules or the gumbo or whatever damn stuff, and just stop. Go to sleep. You know?”

“We can’t call in a rescue chopper.”

“I know, Paula. It makes no damn difference.”

She lay silently for a moment. “Then why do you go on?”

“Why do you?”

She thought that over.

“Because of Jackie.”

“Your daughter.”

“Yes. And her kids. In case they’re watching me, the stills and video we transmit.”

“Paula, we haven’t heard from Houston since—”

“I know. I didn’t say it was logical.”

“So it’s
the clan.
Right? You got the clan in your heart, even here, a billion miles away, on Titan. So far away you can never do anything to affect them again, for good or ill, or they you. Even though the world has ended.”

“Yes,” she said. “If you want to be anthropological about it. I’m doing it for them. Can’t you understand that, Rosenberg?”

“Sure. It’s just primate logic.”

“So what about you? What stops you giving up?”

He slouched; it was a shrug, masked by the layers of his suit.

She turned over, to face his huddled back. She reached over his waist and put a gloved hand over his; his glove felt as if it was empty. “Listen, after eleven years I know you. You back off into generalities and theory whenever anyone gets too close. Tell me why you keep going, Rosenberg.”

At length, reluctantly, he said: “Curiosity. I always wanted to know how it all worked, Paula. It drove me crazy to think that one day I would die, and I’d never see all the science and exploration and discovery that would follow me, all the things people would figure out. And now, here I am on Titan, for God’s sake. A world nobody’s visited before. Every hill we climb offers the prospect of something new, something nobody’s seen. Right now I’m excited.” He smiled at her weakly. “I mean it. I’m looking forward to getting this kerogen, or whatever it is, back to the hab module. Maybe it will keep us alive a little longer. And even if not, it’s something nobody’s seen before.”