Titan

20 March 2096: Evening

Where were you this afternoon?” Yañez asked his wife over their dinner table. ”I called from the hospital and you weren’t home.”

Estela replied, “I went to a political rally.”

His brows rose. “A political rally? You?”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t know that Eberly held a rally this afternoon.”

“It wasn’t for Eberly,” Estela replied.

Yañez put his soupspoon down on his place mat. “Whose rally was it, then?”

“Holly Lane’s,” she replied calmly. “It was about this ZPG business.”

Frowning, he picked up his spoon and ladled some soup to his lips.

“She’s written a petition against the ZPG protocol. I signed it.”

“Estela, no!”

“So did plenty of other women.”

“Sheer nonsense,” he muttered into his soup.

If she heard him, she gave no sign. They finished their light dinner cheerily enough, then Yañez went to the living room to watch the news while Estela cleared the table and put the dirty dishes in the washer. She heard Holly Lane’s voice and looked up: Oswaldo was watching the evening news. But he quickly turned it to an entertainment channel.

Once the kitchen was tidied, Estela went to her desk, next to the pantry, and took a copy of the ZPG petition from the top drawer. She walked into the living room and deposited the petition in her husband’s lap.

He looked up at her. “What’s this?”

“The petition.”

He scanned it, then handed it back to her. “Very competently drafted.”

“Sign it,” she said.

“What?”

“Sign it. We need six thousand and seven hundred signatures. Sign it, please.”

“Estela!”

She dropped the petition back on his lap.

“No!” he said.

Estela did not argue. She said nothing; she simply left the flimsy sheet on her husband’s lap and sat beside him to spend the rest of the evening watching entertainment vids beamed from Earth and Selene.

They retired to bed. Once the lights were out, Yañez laid a hand on his wife’s bare thigh and began stroking her skin.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“Sign the petition.”

“Estela! I’m shocked! This is … it’s not right!”

“Sign the petition.”

“I have my rights as your husband!”

“Once you sign the petition we can discuss your rights as my husband. Not until then.”

He glared at her in the darkness. She turned her back to him. Furious, he turned his back to her. They both fell asleep that way.

Urbain spent the evening shuttling between his office and the mission control center. While his engineers and technicians were trying to trace out the ghostly trail of the tracks Alpha had left on Titan’s frozen ground, Urbain had presided at a meeting of the biologists on his staff. They had crowded into his office, bubbling with excitement at their observations of Alpha’s ghost tracks.

“I’ve set up a timeline,” said Negroponte. She clearly had assumed leadership of the group. “The tracks are smoothed down in a matter of hours.”

“How many hours?”

“Hard to say, exactly,” she replied, pushing back that stubborn lock of hair that swept across her face. “It’s between four and ten hours, that’s the best we can come up with, so far.”

“It’s got to be biological,” one of the other biologists said. “It can’t be anything else.”

“May I point out,” Urbain said, trying to regain control of the meeting, “that we do not know enough about erosion mechanisms on Titan to make such a definite statement.”

“Yeah, maybe,” the biologist replied, “but what else could it be?” He was young, earnest, agog with the idea that they were actually watching a biological process at work on the surface of Titan.

“I agree,” said Negroponte. “I can’t imagine any weathering process acting so fast.”

“We do not know enough to say that,” Urbain repeated firmly. “We should call in the geologists to look at this.”

They all stared at him, sitting behind his desk like the lord of a castle while they huddled on the other side like a knot of beseeching peasants.

“However,” Urbain added, “I see no reason why we cannot proceed on the hypothesis that we are witnessing a biological process. Until further data is produced.”

There, he thought. That ought to keep them satisfied. He got up from his chair and headed for the mission control center, to see if they had made any progress. The biologists continued discussing their data, throwing off ideas and theories like a St. Jean Baptiste fireworks display, while Negroponte sat back and encouraged them.

Holly was dead tired, emotionally drained from her afternoon speech, but still she spent the evening in a long and repetitious panel discussion with six other residents—including Professor Wilmot—in front of Berkowitz’s cameras in the communications center’s studio. The panel wrangled over the ZPG issue and Holly’s announcement that she had started a petition drive to repeal the zero-growth protocol.

It seemed to Holly that they covered the subject pretty thoroughly in the first half hour, but the panel members droned on, rehashing the issue endlessly. They’re talking just to hear the sound of their own voices, Holly thought. All of them except Wilmot; he was the panel moderator, and he kept his opinions to himself, except for an occasional wry smile or a subtle lifting of his gray brows.

Citizens phoned in their questions and comments, as well:

“You don’t expect men to sign this petition, do you?” a woman asked. “They don’t want children. All they want is sex without the responsibilities.”

A man remarked, “You take away the ZPG law and this place’ll look like Calcutta before the biowar inside of a few years!”

“We came out here to get away from those religious nuts and their holier-than-thou regulations. Why do we need this ZPG protocol? Aren’t we responsible enough to regulate our own affairs?”

“Birth control is a personal matter. The government shouldn’t be poking its nose into our bedrooms.”

“We live in a limited environment, for god’s sake! How’re we going to feed double, triple, five times our current population?”

Wilmot allowed each of the panelists to speak to each caller. Holly found herself making shorter and shorter responses.

“We have the intelligence and the understanding to allow responsible population growth,” she repeated several times. “Not unlimited growth. But not zero growth, either.”

Wilmot finally spoke up. “Yes, but who will make the decisions about growth? Will you appoint a board that will decide who will be allowed to have a child and who will not?”

Holly stared at him, her mind churning. At last she heard herself reply, “I honestly don’t have an answer for that. Not yet. I’m hoping we can bring together a group of people who can offer suggestions about that. Then the general population can vote on how they want to proceed.”

That brought an avalanche of phone calls, and the panel all chimed in with their opinions, as well. After what seemed like hours, Wilmot waved them all down and said, “I’m afraid that our time is up. I want to thank all the panelists for their participation, and all you callers for your thought-provoking questions.”

Before any of the panelists could rise from their seats, the professor added, “This subject should be debated thoroughly by the two contestants for the office of chief administrator. I intend to arrange such a debate in the very near future.”

The red eyes of the cameras died, and Holly let out a weary sigh.

“Very good show,” Wilmot said jovially, as he got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. “Capital!”

Holly slumped back in her chair. “I’m glad it’s over.”

The other panelists seemed to feel the same way as they shuffled tiredly toward the studio’s main doors.

Berkowitz was all smiles. “Terrific audience response,” he said to Holly. “All those calls mean that more than half the population was watching. Terrific!”

Holly was too tired to care. She pulled herself to her feet as Berkowitz and Wilmot walked away, deep in amiable conversation. A shower and a good night’s sleep, Holly told herself. That’s what I need.

She was surprised to see Raoul Tavalera standing in the open doorway of the studio. He looked uncertain, hesitant.

“Raoul!” Holly blurted. “What’re you doing here? How long—”

Almost shyly, Tavalera said, “I started to watch you on the vid, then I figured you might like to have a drink or something after you were through, so I came down here.”

“You’ve been waiting outside all this time?”

He looked down at his shoes momentarily. “I slipped in and watched from the back of the studio. I guess you didn’t see me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You want a drink? Something to eat?”

She reached for his arm, suddenly no longer weary. “I’m starving!”

Grinning at her, Tavalera started down the corridor. “Cafeteria’s closed by now, but the Bistro’s still open.”

“Cosmic!”

“Oh, by the way,” Tavalera said, his face turning serious, “I want to sign that petition of yours.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “I might want kids someday.”

Holly felt as if she could walk on thin air.