Titan

24 December 2095: Christmas Eve party

Eduoard Urbain smiled uneasily as he shook hands, one by one, with each member of his scientific and engineering staffs. They shuffled themselves into a reception line the moment he entered the auditorium, like serfs of old lining up with their hats in their hands to receive the Christmas blessing of their lord and master.

Jeanmarie, standing beside him, smiled graciously and spoke a few words to every man and woman presented to her. She is wonderful, Urbain thought, as he shook hand after hand. She is in her element, kind and warm and loving. I would be lost without her. The line seemed endless, and Urbain struggled to find something worth saying, something more than “Merry Christmas” endlessly repeated.

At last it was done. Urbain rubbed his numbed hand and looked out over the assembly. Two hundred men and women, he thought. One hundred and ninety-four, to be precise. It is such a small number to run the scientific investigation of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. But when you must greet each one individually it seems like a very large number indeed.

Nadia Wunderly was one of the last persons that Urbain had greeted. She was the maverick among his scientists, and although she had brought Urbain sudden and unexpected success, he still regarded her with a mixture of disquiet and, yes, jealousy. She had refused to follow his orders and join the others in the study of Titan. Instead she had focused single-mindedly on Saturn’s rings. And discovered organisms living in their particles of ice. A great discovery, if it held true. Wexler and her ICU lackeys seemed to harbor some doubts about Wunderly’s claim.

Now Wunderly drifted from the reception line to the makeshift bar that had been set up along the base of the auditorium’s stage. She was a young woman, not yet thirty, with a rather pretty heart-shaped face. Urbain thought she would look even prettier if she stopped dying her hair brick red and let it grow normally instead of chopping it into those ridiculous barbs; her hair looked like the spiked end of a medieval bludgeon. She was wearing her usual dark tunic and slacks, which was unfortunate: Her figure was ample, too ample for his taste. Buxom, yes, but also heavyset, thick in the waist and limbs.

He mentally compared her to his wife. Slim and elegant, Jeanmarie would commit suicide before letting herself gain that much weight.

Wunderly was also looking at Jeanmarie Urbain. Slim as a stylus, she thought. One of those lucky women who had a metabolism that burned calories faster than she could ingest them. Probably never had to diet a day in her life. She can wear those frilly dresses and look gorgeous in them. I’d look like a hippopotamus in a tutu.

But that’s all changing, Wunderly told herself. I’ve dropped five kilos in the past two weeks and I’m going to lose another three before New Year’s Eve. Now for the real test.

One of the guys behind the bar offered her a cup of eggnog. Wunderly almost took it before she pulled her hand back and asked for mineral water, instead.

The guy—one of the technicians who worked with the Titan Alpha engineers—grinned at her. “One glass of genuine recycled local aitch-two-oh, courtesy of the waste management department,” he said cheerfully, handing her a glass.

Wunderly grinned at him. “You can’t scare me.”

He grinned back. “Ho, ho, ho and all that, Nadia.”

“Same to you,” she said, then walked away from the bar, into the milling throng.

The speakers set up at either end of the stage were pouring out syrupy Christmas tunes. Somehow they made Wunderly feel sad. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Sure. A billion kilometers from home. Well, at least I can go home when I’m ready. Most of the poor slobs in this habitat can’t.

Then she saw him, standing by himself off in the corner where the stage met the auditorium’s side wall. Squaring her shoulders like a soldier heading into battle, she pushed through the crowd at the bar and went toward her target.

Da’ud Habib was chief of the computer group. He didn’t look like the other computer geeks, scruffy and rumpled. He was wearing a crisply pressed red sport shirt over his slacks. Sandals, though, and no socks. Actually he was almost kind of handsome, Wunderly thought. He kept the dark little beard that fringed his jaw neat and trim. His eyes were a deep liquid brown. But he was pretty much of a loner, a quiet guy. His ancestry was Arabic, she knew. She had looked up his dossier: he’d been born and raised in Vancouver, in a Moslem neighborhood, but he was more Canadian than anything else. At least, she hoped so.

“Hi,” she said, as soon as she was close enough.

He looked a little surprised. “Hello.”

“I’m Nadia Wunderly.”

“I know. You found the creatures in the rings.”

Nadia smiled her best. “That’s me. Lord of the rings, they call me.”

He smiled back uncertainly. “Er, shouldn’t it be ‘lady of the rings’?”

“Literary license.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Is it okay to wish you a Merry Christmas?”

“Of course. I’m not anti-Christian. I’ve always enjoyed the Christmas season; the shopping, the music, all that.”

Wunderly took a sip of her water. Habib was drinking something that looked fizzy to her. Probably nonalcoholic, she thought.

“You’re Da’ud Habib, aren’t you?”

“Oh! I should have introduced myself. I’m sorry.”

“No problem. You’re chief of the computing group, right?”

“Lord of the nerds, yes.”

She laughed and he laughed with her.

“Big day tomorrow,” she said, trying to figure out how to turn the conversation into the path she wanted.

Habib nodded again. “Urbain’s Christmas present to himself.”

She took a breath and plunged ahead. “The New Year’s Eve party is a week from tonight.”

“Oh? Yes, I suppose so.”

“Are you going?”

He looked almost alarmed by her question. He actually backed away from her a step. “Me? I … I hadn’t thought about it.”

Wunderly could hear her pulse thumping in her ears. Stepping closer to Habib, she asked, “Would you like to go with me? I mean, I don’t have a date for the party and I thought we could go together.”

His brow wrinkled slightly and she held her breath.

“Go with you?” It seemed like a totally new idea to him, something he would never have thought of by himself.

Don’t make me beg, she pleaded silently.

He seemed to understand, or maybe see it in her eyes. “Why, yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t planning on going …” He brightened slowly and smiled again, wider this time. “But why not? I’d be happy to go with you.”

Wunderly wanted to laugh with delight, but she reined herself in and said merely, “Great! Then it’s a date.”