Titan

26 December 2095: Morning

Malcolm Eberly had worked hard to reach his lofty position as Goddard’s chief administrator. Plucked from an Austrian prison cell on the promise that he would set up a fundamentalist government to rule the habitat’s ten thousand souls, he had outmaneuvered the murdering zealots who’d been sent to keep watch over him and now he stood at the head of the habitat’s administration, admired and respected.

Truth to tell, most of the habitat’s population didn’t give a damn about their own government so long as no one bothered them with rules and regulations. They had been picked from the dissatisfied, disaffected free thinkers, men and women who had run afoul of the authoritarian fundamentalist regimes of Earth. They were dissidents, idealists, troublemakers. Now they were more than a billion kilometers away from Earth, and for the most part both they and the Earthside politicians felt better for it.

But they admire me, Eberly told himself as he strolled down from the center of Athens to the lovely little lake at the village’s edge on his morning constitutional. They voted for me overwhelmingly. As long as I don’t saddle them with too many restrictions, they ought to keep on voting for me.

That business a few days ago with Pancho Lane troubled him, though. She certainly surprised me. Eberly touched his jaw where Pancho had hit him. It still felt slightly swollen but the teeth weren’t loose, thank goodness. The people are all buzzing about it: Pancho Lane knocked down the chief administrator and he just laughed it off. Does it make me look noble, forgiving? Or weak and cowardly?

He ambled once around the lake, passing people afoot or on electrobikes. They all gave him respectful hellos or smiled their greetings at him. He nodded and smiled back automatically. Normally he would bask in their admiration, but this morning his mind was on Pancho Lane. Why did she come here? A woman of her wealth and power doesn’t travel to the edge of civilization merely to see her sister. She could talk to Holly electronically any time she wishes. There must be something more to it. There’s got to be.

He barely noticed that the sunlight didn’t seem as bright as usual as he finished his morning’s walk and started back up the slight rise of Athens’s main street, heading for the administration headquarters at the top of the hill. Once in his office, he leaned back in his desk chair and steepled his fingers before his face, considering this new aspect of his situation. What are Pancho’s intentions? Does she plan to stay in this habitat indefinitely? Will she apply for citizenship? She was the CEO of a huge corporation until she retired. What if she’s come to take control of this habitat? Will she run against me in next year’s election? Could she throw me out of office?

His face clenching into a worried scowl, Eberly regretted allowing the habitat’s constitution to call for elections every year. His original reasoning had been clear enough: Give the population the illusion that they have control over their government by allowing them to vote every year. They’ll think their leaders will be responsive to their wishes because there’s always a new election coming up. In actuality, Eberly had figured, the more often they have to vote the fewer of them will bother. Most of our so-called citizens are lazy and complacent. As long as they don’t have any major grievances with their government they’ll allow me to stay in office.

And I’ll be a good ruler for them. I’ll be just and fair. I’ll do what is needed. I’ll use my power for good, he told himself. Leaning back in his desk chair, Eberly pictured an endless future of power and happiness. Power brings respect, he knew. After two or three elections everyone will admire me so much that I’ll be able to do away with elections altogether. And with life-extension therapies I can be the head of this habitat indefinitely. Me, Malcolm Eberly. They’ll all look up to me. They’ll have to.

But Pancho Lane is a force to be reckoned with, he told himself, simmering resentment clenching his teeth. She made me look like a fool. That can’t go unavenged, unanswered. I’ve got to deal with her. I’ve got to get even with her.

His decision made, Eberly told his computer to display his morning’s appointments. The list appeared immediately on the smart wall to his left. He found it easier to read off the flat wall screen than to peer at a three-dimensional image hovering in the air above his desk.

The chief of the maintenance department wanted to see him. Frowning, he returned the call. The engineer’s image appeared on the wall opposite the appointments list.

“We’re having a problem with one of the solar mirrors,” said Felix Aaronson, the maintenance chief. His round, fleshy face looked nettled, more irritated than worried. Something about his complexion seemed different, as if he’d been sunning himself and had acquired a light golden tan. How can he do his job and have time for sunbathing? Eberly asked himself.

Eberly did not particularly like Aaronson. The man was a paranoid, always full of anxiety. Still, he put a smile on his face as he replied, “A problem?”

“One of the mirror segments’s out of alignment. Not much, but we might have to send a crew outside to set it right again.”

So why bother me? Eberly complained to himself. But he kept his smile in place and replied, “If the mirror needs to be fixed, fix it.”

Stubbornly, the maintenance chief shook his head. “But it shouldn’t be out of alignment, man. All the diagnostics check out. Nothing’s hit it and nobody’s given a command to shift its position.”

“It’s a piece of machinery,” said Eberly. “Machinery doesn’t always work the way it should, does it?”

“You don’t get it. We’ve got all the diagnostics and the computer extrapolations and this shouldn’t have happened.”

“But it did.”

“Yeah, it did,” Aaronson answered sullenly.

“Then please fix it and stop bothering me with your responsibilities. I have other things to do.”

The maintenance chief mumbled an apology and promised to get right onto the problem.

“Good,” Eberly snapped. As soon as the man’s face winked off his wall screen Eberly told his phone, “Call Holly Lane. Tell her I want to see her at”—he studied his appointments list for a moment—“ten-fifteen this morning.”

Precisely at ten-fifteen Holly appeared at his office door, dressed in a sleeveless pale green blouse and darker green slacks that emphasized her long legs. Tasteful hints of jewelry at her wrists and earlobes. No tattoos or piercings, Eberly noted thankfully. Holly had outgrown those fads. Yet even though she nominally followed the dress code he had set down more than a year ago, her blouse was cut off to reveal her flat midriff. Others did such things, too, he knew. They obeyed the letter of the code but wore mesh see-throughs or snipped strategic cutouts in their tunics or wore skintight outfits that left little to the imagination.

“You wanted to see me?” Holly asked from the doorway. Once, when they had first started on the journey to Saturn, she had been like an eager little puppy whenever Eberly deigned to notice her. Now she was more adult, more sure of herself, less worshipful.

“Have a seat, Holly,” Eberly said, pointing.

She went to the minimalist Scandinavian chrome-and-leather chair before his immaculately clear desk and perched on its front six centimeters.

“I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes,” Holly informed him. “Water allotment committee.”

“This won’t take long. I was just wondering about your sister.”

Holly frowned. “I’m sorry Pancho socked you. She can be a real wrecking crew sometimes.”

“Tell me about it,” Eberly said ruefully, rubbing his jaw.

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them for several moments. Then Holly asked, “So what do you want to know about Panch?”

Eberly hesitated a heartbeat. “Why is she here? Does she intend to stay, or will she return to Earth?”

Shrugging, Holly replied, “She says she came here to spend the holidays with me. As for how long she’ll stay, you’ll have to ask her.”

“I was hoping that you could ask her,” said Eberly. “My one meeting with your sister wasn’t all that friendly.” He rubbed his jaw again.

Holly suppressed a giggle, just barely. “Okay, sure. I click. I’ll ask her, no prob.”

“Good,” Eberly said. “Thank you, Holly.”

“No prob,” she repeated, as she got up and left his office.

Briefly, Eberly thought of calling Aaronson back to soothe his ruffled feathers. Then he decided against it. He’ll be calling me for every little piece of equipment that goes out of whack, Eberly said to himself. Fixing machinery is his job, not mine.

On the other side of the village called Athens, Nadia Wunderly sat in her laboratory and stared disconsolately at the video imagery hovering before her eyes. It was as if the lab’s far wall had disappeared, to be replaced by the black depths of space—and the glittering splendor of Saturn’s rings.

She saw again that wandering chunk of ice-covered rock that had blundered into Saturn’s gravity well. A fugitive from the Kuiper Belt, she told herself for the thousandth time; a Trans-Neptunian Object that got kicked out of its orbit all the way out there and fell into Saturn’s grip.

In the speeded-up video the icy rock dived past Saturn once, twice, and then looped around the planet to fall into an orbit within the rings.

“Extreme slo-mo,” Wunderly called to the lab’s computer.

The new arrival’s motion slowed to something like taffy being pulled on a cold day. Wunderly saw the rock plow into the B ring, the broadest and brightest of Saturn’s intricate complex of rings.

To be greeted by a flurry of ring creatures. Like glittering snowflakes they swarmed over the new arrival and began chewing it apart. Of course, Wunderly admitted silently, it looks like a blizzard engulfing the newcomer. It’s a big leap to say that those particles are alive, or have living creatures in them, directing them, steering them to the new ice chunk like a pack of scavengers swarming around a fresh carcass.

The top biologists back on Earth flatly refused to believe that the ring particles contained living creatures. Too cold for active biology, they claimed. What do they know? Wunderly grumbled to herself. So it’s near absolute zero in the rings; so what? Those Earthworms can sit in their campus offices and claim I haven’t proven they’re alive. Well, I’m going to. I’ve got to. My career depends on it.

That can’t be a natural, abiological reaction, she told herself as she watched the swarming ice particles eat through the new moonlet. It can’t be just natural abrasion. Those particles actively moved to the intruder and chewed it down to the bare rock. She backed up the video and watched it all happen again, in ultra-slow motion.

“Damn!” she said aloud. “Why don’t they believe me?”

She knew why. Sagan’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. She was claiming that there were living creatures in the ice particles of Saturn’s rings, and that they actively maintained the rings, kept them big and dynamic, despite the fact that particles were constantly bleeding off the inner edges of the rings and were pulled down into Saturn’s clouds in a perpetual snowfall.

Wunderly was convinced that if the rings weren’t being constantly added to by the deliberate actions of living creatures, they would have disappeared eons ago. Hell, she said to herself, Jupiter’s bigger than Saturn and its ring system is just a puny sliver of carbon particles. Soot. Same thing for Uranus and Neptune. Saturn’s rings are huge, beautiful, so bright that Galileo saw them with his dinky little telescope nearly five centuries ago.

But the big-shot biologists back Earthside won’t believe me until I can give them enough proof to choke a hippopotamus. And the only real evidence I’ve got is these views of the ring dynamics, and Gaeta’s dive through the rings. They won’t believe a stuntman’s testimony, even though the creatures almost killed Manny while he was in the rings.

My career hangs on this, she thought. My whole life. I’ve made an extraordinary claim. I need to get enough evidence to prove it’s true. Otherwise I’ll be finished as a scientist.

I need to send probes into the rings, Wunderly told herself. I need to study them close up, in real time. I need some biologists here, and some way to capture a sampling of the ring creatures. Otherwise nobody who matters will believe me.

She consoled herself by remembering Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

By elderly Clarke meant over thirty, for a physicist. That means I’ll be elderly in another year, Wunderly realized. With a weary sigh she told the computer to shut down the display. I’ve got to get help. I’ve got to get enough evidence to prove that I’m right and they’re wrong. But Urbain’s so warped over his precious Titan Alpha lander that he won’t even talk to me.

Wunderly sat alone in her silent laboratory, a chubby young woman with hair dyed brick red, wearing a shapeless knee-length tunic of sky-blue faux silk, wondering how she could get her superior’s attention long enough to get the help she so desperately needed.

Then she sat up straighter and smiled. Manny Gaeta! He went into the rings once. Maybe he’ll do it again—not as a stunt this time, but as a scientific expedition.