I suppose this therapy business is helping me. Damned embarrassing, though, talking about your fantasies and desires to some blasted computer program.
Hasn’t done me any harm, I suppose. I haven’t had a peek at any of the vids for months. No dreams about sadomasochistic encounters. Well, the occasional odd fancy, of course. Never had much in the way of dreams, not as long as I had the vids to fantasize about.
Perhaps I actually do dream and I simply don’t remember once I’m awake. Does that count? I’ll have to ask the psych program about that. It probably won’t answer me. Beyond its programming, doubtless.
That blasted Eberly. Him and his snooping. I’ve made him remove all the damned bugs and cameras he and his people had planted in our living quarters. The maintenance people sweep the apartments regularly just to make certain we’re not being spied upon. That’s one thing I’ve insisted on. Even though I’m officially out of power now, I made certain that that has been done.
So now I spend my evenings reviewing the day’s news
events instead of watching Gestapo agents interrogating beautiful female spies. Healthier, I suppose. It’s all computer animation, of course. No one actually gets hurt. There are no real people involved. The therapy program claims there will come a time when I’m no longer interested in S&M vids. Can’t say that I believe it, but I’m willing to proceed with the therapy if for no other reason than to keep Eberly from holding my infatuation over my head.
On the other hand, watching Urbain twist in the wind is almost as pleasurable. Never liked the man. Too excitable. And now he’s hoist on his own petard, as the Bard would say.
I really must get out more. I shouldn’t stay shut up in this apartment. Get out. Meet the people. Study them and their reactions. You have a self-contained anthropology experiment at your fingertips, my boy. It’s time for you to do some field work instead of sitting by passively.
Yes, time to go out and—what is it the politicians say? Ah yes: Press the, flesh.
S
houldn’t you be at your job?” Holly asked, as she stood in the morning sun with Tavalera.
They were waiting in front of the administration building, at the crest of the little hill on which the village of Athens was situated. Low, white-walled apartment and office buildings lined both sides of the village’s gently curving main street. In the distance sunlight sparkled off the lake.
Tavalera’s normally gloomy face took on a slightly stubborn expression. “You oughtta be in your office, too.”
“Nope,” said Holly. “This morning I’m taking a field trip.”
“Me, too, then.”
“Raoul, I don’t need a bodyguard.”
The slightest of smiles sneaked across his lips. “I don’t want you wandering down in the underground alone with that guy.”
“You mean, this is a good excuse for you to take the morning off.”
“I don’t trust Timoshenko. Not with you.”
Holly didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed. “Timoshenko’s no prob,” she said.
“Then why’s he need you to guide him around? Can’t he read a map?”
“He didn’t ask for me to do it. I volunteered.”
Tavalera’s smile grew minimally wider. “Oh, so you wanna take a morning off, too.”
She laughed. Then, pointing at the man in coveralls trudging up the path, she said, “Here he comes, right on time.”
There was a moment of embarrassment as Holly greeted the engineer and introduced Tavalera. How to explain why Raoul’s here with me? Holly wondered.
She heard herself explain, “Raoul wanted to see the underground, too, so I thought the three of us could go down there together.”
“All right by me,” said Timoshenko, eying Tavalera with something like suspicion.
“’Kay then,” Holly said. “There’s an entry port behind the building.”
Slightly more than an hour later, the three of them had walked more than five kilometers through the maze of ducts and electrical conduits that honeycombed the region between the landscaped interior of the habitat and its outer shell. The area thrummed with vibrations from electrical machinery and the flow of water and hydraulic fluids through heavy pipes. Lights turned on automatically as they proceeded along the metal walkway, and turned off again as they passed. Maintenance robots rolled past almost noiselessly on their air-cushioned trunions.
One of the squat little robots stopped in front of the trio of invading humans and scanned them with its camera lenses.
Timoshenko bent over it and said, “Hey, don’t you know I’m your boss?”
The robot rolled off while the three of them laughed.
At one time Holly had used this underground region as a refuge, a place to hide when Eberly’s brutal associates were hunting for her. The area looked unchanged; it still felt dry and warm, smelled of machine oil and, faintly, of dust—despite the constant buzzing sweeping of the maintenance robots.
Timoshenko constantly checked their position against the electronic map displayed on his palmcomp as Holly led them toward the endcap region.
“You don’t need a map?” Timoshenko asked.
“Nope. Got it all memorized.”
“Holly has a photographic memory,” Tavalera said.
Timoshenko snorted. “You better watch out if you marry her. She’ll never forget a word you say!”
Holly and Tavalera looked at other, then back at Timoshenko.
“It’s a joke,” Timoshenko said.
Tavalera started to smile. Holly said, deadpan, “I won’t forget that.”
All three of them burst out laughing.
Later, as they started back toward the ladder they’d come down on, Holly asked, “Do you want to see more? The other side’s pretty much the same as this one.”
“No, this is enough. Besides, my feet hurt.”
“Why’d you want to come down here?” Tavalera asked. “I mean, you’re supposed to be in charge of exterior maintenance, not inside.”
Timoshenko tilted his head slightly to one side. “I don’t believe in watertight compartments. Exterior maintenance shouldn’t be totally insulated from interior maintenance. I want to see what could get damaged if the outside shell is penetrated.”
“Penetrated?”
“By a meteor. A chunk of ice. A big rock.”
“Or by an explosive break in one of the superconducting lines,” Holly added.
Timoshenko dipped his chin to her. “Very smart woman.”
“Come on,” Tavalera said, quickening his pace. “It’s almost lunchtime.”
“Yes, my stomach is already growling,” said Timoshenko. “But I think I’ll go back to the fancy office that Eberly has given me. I have a lot of calculations to make.”
“Damage assessments?” Tavalera asked.
Timoshenko nodded grimly. “And ways to improve the superconductors’ armor.”
As she sat in her cubbyhole of an office, Nadia Wunderly watched glumly the old video of Manny Gaeta’s flight through Saturn’s brightest ring: a lone man in that heavily armored suit disappearing into the vast swarm of glittering icy particles, like an arctic explorer of old trekking across a glacier and being swallowed up by a blizzard.
I bet he’d do it again, she said to herself. He’d do it for me. I could make him feel guilty enough to agree to go out there one more time.
But Kris would kill me. She loves Manny and she’s not going to let him risk his butt for me or anyone else. Especially not for me. She knows Manny and I were sleeping together until she came on the scene and took him away from me.
Wunderly thought she ought to feel resentment toward Cardenas, but she knew she didn’t. Manny was just a fling, she remembered, a lot of fun while it lasted but I knew it wouldn’t last long. What would a dynamo of a hunk like him want with a mousy overweight geek girl like me? He was just using me to get the information he needed for his stunt through the rings.
But she smiled to herself. He used me pretty damned well. And I used him, too.
She had to shake her head to drive those memories away and concentrate on her work. The display screen showed a close-up view of Saturn’s B ring; a swirl of ice particles braided into interconnected ringlets as far as the camera could see, like an enormous intricate pattern of diamonds wheeling, glittering, dancing before her eyes. It was hypnotic; she could watch them for hours.
Clucking annoyedly to herself, she commanded the computer to display the imagery in negative. The glittering jewels
changed instantly to various shades of gray, the infinite space beyond them to pale creamy white. Still she watched, fascinated. Spiral density waves weaved through the rings and the scalloped edges of the gaps between them, delicate threadlike open paths that she knew were the wakes of tiny moonlets racing along the edges of ringlets like sheepdogs herding the particles into line.
What makes them do that? she asked herself. Look at the way the individual ringlets twist around one another, like the threads of a hooked rug that’s made out of jewels. What drives those dynamics? How did they get this way?
A fragment of memory from her high school days popped into her mind, a couplet by Robert Frost:
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
So many secrets in those rings, Wunderly thought, as she watched the swirling ice particles. So much to find out, to learn, to understand. If only Manny—
And then it hit her. Manny doesn’t have to go into the rings! I can do it myself!
Wunderly sat up straighter in her chair, her mind churning. His suit’s here. I can use it; Manny can show me how. He can run the operation from here, he can be the crew chief or whatever they call it. I bet Raoul Tavalera would help him, too. Kris wouldn’t mind if I borrowed the two guys for a while.
She got to her feet and looked around her cramped, cluttered cubicle. I can do it! she told herself. Just one quick zoom through the rings to pick up some samples and bring them back here for analysis. In and out.
I can do it.
T
itan Alpha
crunched cautiously across the frozen landscape beneath the perpetual gloom of dirty orange-brown clouds. Imagery in the range that its sensor program called “visible light” was reasonably good, although infrared was better, even though ground temperatures outside
Alpha
’s armored shell were so low that the infrared images were weak and needed boosting.
Still,
Alpha
trundled along in its lowest gear, picking its way around craters whose walls were too steep to crawl into. The master program compared the incoming sensor data against its memory files and decided that such steep-walled craters were young, formed recently by the impacts of meteors. It stored the information for such time as the primary restriction was lifted or superseded.
One of the master program’s basic commands was to gather data from the sensors, and
Alpha
was faithfully obeying that fundamental command. Since it had started moving across the landscape and turned off its receiving antennas and tracking beacon, the barrage of incoming commands had ceased and the conflicts generated by the primary restriction had faded from its memory.
Alpha
remembered that before it had touched down on Titan’s frigid surface it had orbited the moon, mapping its surface and analyzing its atmosphere remotely. All that data had been uplinked, as commanded.
Now, with no fresh commands coming in,
Alpha
decided to repeat the orbital operation as nearly as it could. It would circumnavigate Titan, traversing completely around this frozen dark world as many times as it could. The master program checked the status of its nuclear power source, then reviewed the energy losses from propulsion and sensor usage, and decided that
Alpha
could circumnavigate Titan at least seven hundred times before the power drain became prohibitive and it automatically shut down everything except the sensors.
The master program reviewed the incoming data as it was registered by the sensors on a leisurely microsecond time scale. Nothing unusual. The ground was basically water ice, covered with a slushy mixture of frozen methane that contained significant impurities such as ethane, acetylene, and minor amounts of other organic hydrocarbons. Some of the organics were motile: they moved over the surface at rates of a few centimeters per minute.
Alpha
’s thick treads sank through the muddy ground cover and crushed the topmost layers of the underlying methane ice and the complex hydrocarbons beneath its massive bulk. It used the megajoule laser at full power to flash the crushed remains into gas, which the mass spectrometer remotely analyzed. Only the crushed ices were analyzed that way; the untouched ground stretching all around
Alpha
was analyzed passively, without even the light touch of the laser disturbing it.
After more than a hundred hours of traversing Titan’s surface,
Alpha
’s forward battery of sensors detected a sharp projection rising three point seven kilometers ahead. The projection was four hundred and thirty-six meters high. It was composed of frozen water, bright and glittering, without any dark methane slush covering it.
Alpha
stopped when it came within half a kilometer of the ice mountain and turned its full panoply of sensors upon it, spending a full trillion nanoseconds scanning the mountain. Frozen water, laced with carbon compounds. Cautiously,
Alpha
began to circle around the base of the mountain. As it did so, its sensors detected a ring of smooth ground surrounding the base of the mountain for two point nine kilometers. The smooth area was also frozen water, although it was dusted over with some methane and other hydrocarbon compounds.
Alpha
’s master program consulted the geology program. The ice formation, it decided, was the result of a fairly recent cryo-volcanic eruption that had ejected a geyser of liquid water from deep underground through a vent in the surface. The water had quickly frozen in Titan’s frigid atmosphere, creating the ice mountain and the ring of smooth ice around it.
Water from deep underground, even frozen, was at the top of
Alpha
’s geology program. It engaged its drive treads and
moved across the broken, rugged ground to the smooth circle of ice. If a machine can be said to be eager,
Alpha
’s geology priorities drove it eagerly out onto the frozen lake.
The microphones built into
Alpha
’s outer shell detected the crisp snapping sound within milliseconds of the strain gauges on the treads reporting that the ice was giving way beneath them. The master program ordered the drive engines to stop but it was too late. The crust of ice crumbled beneath
Alpha’s
ponderous weight and the machine began to sink slowly into the frigid water, nose first.