“Didn’t you hear what I heard?” I ask. TitanMineZero is the biggest hydrocarbon extraction program Earth has, bigger than the various asteroid Belt Mines and way more efficient, since the automation is self-propelling, self-building, and self-evolving — when I was a kid, Corporate launched a rocket that dropped a couple million build-bots on Titan and let the place grow. Basically, Barry and I are a two-person checkpoint to an absurdly automated mine. They can afford our bonuses.
Barry waves the holo off again, and without the light from the projection we both notice personal files pop green on our private tablets.
“Backlog of mail.” He pushes my tablet across the table toward me.
“There’ll be an even nastier backlog of shit when we tell our families there’s no payout.” I glance at my files. There’s a video from my older brother, Merven. I haven’t heard from him in a few years, not since I stopped replying to the messages from him, my sister Rinella, and Gran.
“They have their own stuff going on. They’ll be glad we survived.” Barry casts his files to the holoscreen. Viable exoplanets replace the satellite footage above the galley table; he waves past that to schematics of breakthrough photon trajectory manipulation out of Beijing, and past the floating text and diagrams to a looped video of his sister’s new kid — name and weight in hanzi.
“A nephew. Congrats.” Olive skin, black eyes, and spiky hair. Fat beyond belief. Happy.
“Can’t believe they’re having babies while we’re gone,” I say, at the same time thinking, what else would they do? That’s why we’re here and they’re there. So we have something better to return to.
Barry circles the holo, watching his nephew stuff a hand in his toothless mouth. “Blows the mind,” Barry says. Or something like that — I don’t hear him properly because I’ve tuned out, agitated by my communiqué.
The video Merven sent — my brother looks old. Middle-aged, I mean, with thin hair, and his cheeks have drooped below his jawbone like they’ve begun to melt in the heat. The last file I saw was at least three years back, which isn’t a lot of time, but apparently enough. He’s wearing his junk-hauler’s shirt under a yellow raincoat with reflective stripes down the sleeves — with the money I’ve sent back I thought he would have given up junk hauling. Merven stands in a hallway I don’t recognize, and he doesn’t speak right away. He stares into the camera while people go by in the background, a nurse it looks like, or some other professional who wears one of those mono-coloured medical uniforms. There’s a doctor in a lab coat — so a hallway in a hospital, then. Merven turns his head and says something to someone standing off-camera, and then faces me.
“Gran died,” he says. “She tripped stepping off the subway and hit her head on the platform. She was alone. Across town. Rinella’s in the room now, with one of the dogs. Nina, I don’t know if you’ll watch this. I understand it’s gotta be hard, but if you could write back—”
He pauses and looks off camera again.
“Well,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.” He reaches up and the video freezes, his thumb in the corner of the camera lens when the recording ends.
I replay the message, and then a third and fourth time.
Gran — what was she doing across the city without Rinella or Merven? I can’t picture it. I can’t even picture her unsteady. She always had five or so golden retrievers on leashes while she power-walked the complex. But, like Merven, she would be old now too. She’d been at least seventy-five when I left, so that would put her near her nineties. I can’t think of her that old. What comes to mind instead is the day I told her I’d signed on to the maintenance and observation position at TitanMineZero. Gran tossed a crocheted dishcloth into the sink, her sloppy golden retrievers fanned the kitchen with their tails — three huge, panting beasts. And I told her I was out of there. Vamoose. Twenty-four years old, oblivious. What a prick I was.
“I can’t stand myself,” I say aloud, and then regret it. Barry, less than a couple steps away, flips past a holo of his brother-in-law lifting a net of flapping catfish, and in the cramped space of the galley I know he heard. “ 他妈的 everything, really. Why not.”
“I shouldn’t have taught you to swear.” Barry zooms the holoscreen in on the mouthy barbels of the catfish that poke through the black netting.
“Probably not.”
“Your pronunciation is shit.”
That’s his fault, but I don’t get that far into the joke. Out the window, orange evaporate rises from mud to haze — an ethane/methane atmosphere, −179º C on a beach day, and constantly twilight. Titan allows only one percent of light through to the surface. A little ways off, in the direction of the lake and the mine, three huge rocks sit on the widespread umber mud. They’re new, and the mudslide must have carried them from the hill behind us. Just outside the galley window, the ground looks too bare — the Megastorm erased our footprints as well as the rover tracks that had criss-crossed the sand. A drift of brown silt covers the lower half of the rover bay doors. I guess we’ll be walking the stairs up to the telecommunications tower.
There’s a familiarity to the landscape. That could be because Barry and I have been on Titan in Habitat for almost four years, but I think it’s more. When I was a kid, the dust storms that coated the city streets and the windows of Gran’s apartment were the same shade of ochre. And if you took CityLineTrains from my old apartment complex (the DesertGreen) through the residential high-rises, past warehouses and parkades full of tents and squatters, and carried on to the final stop, you could catch glimpses of something similar. The distant, open desert, right there through the barbed wire, beyond the millet and sorghum fields and the automated combines.
“Final stop” is a misnomer — the trains curved back on themselves in a continuous loop — but Titan is its own similar “end of the line.” Here, Barry and I are as far from Earth as you can work. Earth’s Deep Solar Ferries swing around Saturn, picking up return crews and resources after dropping new teams. We were five years on the Ferry here, almost five years on Titan now, and soon we’ll have five years on the Ferry home.
I replay Merven’s video one more time, hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of who he’s talking to when he looks away from the camera. The best I can guess is that it’s the dogs Gran might have had with her; and then I remember Rinella had twin girls about four years ago, and I realize I don’t have a clue.
The whole message is a blindside, but what can I do for her or them at a mining post a hefty five years’ travel from home? Light a stick of incense and say a word at Barry’s shrine? I suppose that would be a start.
“Take some time, Nina.” Barry flicks his videos off the holo. “However much you need.”
I archive Merven’s file and throw my tablet to the galley table, annoyed that he read me so easily. “I’m good to go.”
The overhead window takes up twenty-five percent of Habitat’s central dome, floor to ceiling. Opposite that, the dome has three main junctions that lead to different wings and allow for microclimates: the garden and protein farm modules; medical and fitness and sleep; rover bay and ExothermWearables and outdoor equipment. I grab the hatch wheel that leads to the garden modules and give it a spin.
“We should get to telecommunications first.”
“I know.” I do know. Titan is swinging around to the back of Saturn, where it’ll stay for about a week. That means no sunlight, and as the telecommunications array sits on the top of the hill behind Habitat, we need what little light we get. I’d hate to navigate the dark stairs with only the head- and hand-lamps on ExothermWearables. But I want to go to the garden module. For the fresh food — yes, we lived off nutrient paste during the storm — but more for the smell. The sulphur tang of the clouds hydrating plants, the plants themselves. The compost and the black soil in the worm bins. You can’t get closer to home — couldn’t be more Earth Ideal.