Stephen Baxter - Ground Truth

Jackie Benacerraf sat alone on the floor of the lounge, waiting for the pictures of her mother's first footsteps on Titan.

The big softscreen on the wall was blank right now, save for schematics and timelines and a couple of animated sponsors' logos. But sound was coming through: astronauts' voices, as per tradition distorted and overlaid with pops and crackles, and with a judder imposed by the lousy bandwidth of the compressed signals.

'For the record, we have a go for vent. Affirmative, we're all sealed up. Go for vent. All right.'

Jackie couldn't even tell which voice was her mother's. There they were, the astronauts, solemnly reporting each step as if working on an unexploded bomb. All for the benefit of those who might follow one day.

But, of course, nobody would. Not ever.

Anyhow, it was hard to concentrate. She was worried about the kids.

This was Jackie Benacerraf's home, in Seattle, capital of New Columbia. It was the year 2014.

She was always worried about the kids.

Their suits were gleaming white, with their names stitched to their chests, and bright blue overboots, and the NASA logo and the Stars and Stripes proudly emblazoned on their sleeves. In the bulky suits, hardly able to move in the cramped cabin, they looked faintly ludicrous, like two snowmen, Paula Benacerraf thought.

One last time, Rosenberg checked his suit display, and the status of the lander from a control panel. Then he closed a switch on the wall.

Vents in the base and apex of the lander opened up. There was a harsh hiss.

There was a muddy brown swirl around Paula's feet. The thick air of Titan was forcing its way into the lower-pressure cabin of Bifrost. She watched the little dials on the instrument panel, yellow and green and red, bright primary Earth colours. The smog of Titan dimmed them, washing the dials over in an orange-brown murk.

'Okay,' Rosenberg said. 'Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalise with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch.'

His voice is becoming stilted, Paula thought. He's speaking for the camera. For the history books.

The hiss died away.

Rosenberg checked his gauges. 'That's it,' he said. 'One and a half bars; pressure has equalised. You should be able to open the hatch now, Paula.'

Her heart thumping, suddenly conscious of the camera on her, Paula turned.

Bifrost's hatch was a rectangle, two feet high and three wide, behind the centre couch of the cabin. There was a window in the middle of it, already stained with tholin smears.

Paula pulled at the hatch's single handle. She could hear the twelve locking latches click open. The hatch swung outward, easily.

The open doorway framed a rectangle of mud-brown ground, laced by some darker substance. The lander seemed to have sunk into the slush, almost to the depth of the door frame.

She looked back at Rosenberg, who was standing between the two couches, watching her, in the heart of this warm Earth-made nest, here on Titan.

At least Fred had grown out of his Nullist phase, and he was having some of the image-tattoos removed. That was leaving marks on his skin, but the doctors were saying they shouldn't be permanent - unlike hers - because he was still young enough. That skin cancer he'd developed when one of the laid-bare patches had been exposed to the sun was more worrying, but again the specialists said it would clear up.

What bothered her more right now was his determination to quit school and go join the Hunter-Gatherers in Central America.

Jackie had listened to the arguments and lectures until she thought her head would bust open.

The agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago was now pretty much accepted as a global disaster. So her son told her, anyhow. The archaeology showed the incidence of tooth cavities rose seven-fold; mothers were badly under-nourished; anaemia became much more common, and so did tuberculosis. We were better off, so ran the argument, so argued Fred, before agriculture. It was true that farming a piece of land could support ten times as many people as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But that didn't buy you much; today there were seven billion people in the world, almost all of whom were worse nourished than their Stone Age ancestors. And so on.

Once, Jackie would have been passionate about such arguments, either for or against. Now, all she cared about was Fred.

The governments cooperating in the Central American park scheme - Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize - had pledged to protect and shelter the young from the US and New Columbia and Canada and independent Idaho flooding down there, to - in theory - rediscover an ancient lifestyle. There was supposed to be no regulation, beyond a simple limit on numbers - but, of course, no communication was possible once you went inside.

Jackie pulled at a tuft of hair. All she could do was keep talking, trying to persuade Fred to think again, to wait, to stick with college.

It was just like the arguments her mother had with her. Maybe she was doomed to turn into her mother, just as her own kids seemed to be turning into her.

'You ready for your one small step?'

Astronaut humour, Jackie thought bleakly.

To get out of the narrow hatch, Paula had to turn around and crawl out backwards. Rosenberg, keeping the camera focused on her, guided her. 'You're lined up nicely. Come back towards me. Okay, put your foot down. you're doing fine. A little more.'

At last she found herself with her head outside the conical hull of Bifrost, one foot on the floor of the capsule, and the other resting on the edge of the hatch.

She looked around.

It was dark.

Darker than she expected, like a late, murky evening. The Huygens images and Bifrost's own monitors, light-enhanced, had fooled her.

The ground was a plain, slightly undulating, thick with slush. A reddish-brown colour dominated everything, although swathes of darker, older material streaked the landscape. The lander sat squat, a metal tent on a muddy, empty plain. The slush must be deep, she thought; even here, at the centre of Bifrost's splash crater, no bedrock water ice was exposed.

She couldn't see the horizon through the dense, smoggy air. She knew that if she could crack her helmet, the air's cargo of hydrocarbons would have made it smell like an oil refinery.

She lit up her helmet lamp. A pool of white light splashed on the ground. Organics glistened on the surface of the slush, moist, like flayed human tissue.

Rosenberg passed her the TV camera. She fixed it to a bracket which folded out of the exterior hull of Bifrost. Rosenberg tested the image on a monitor inside the lander.

It was routine, just like the sims. They worked in silence.

The irony was, science was making a certain comeback. The environmental problems were becoming so pressing and complex that President Maclachlan had reopened some of the university science labs and departments he'd ordered shut down.

Even in Seattle, a clear-plastic uv filter over your lawn was now almost as common as a sprinkler system.

It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we've reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, Jackie thought bleakly, we'll understand how it all used to work.

It was the plankton crash in the oceans that seemed to be scaring the scientists most: a crisis that, it was said, might actually make the planet uninhabitable, ultimately. And in the short term the big problem was the rice crop. There was a blight with an unpronounceable name that was laying waste to crops all over the planet. The price in the Seattle stores - particularly Italian rice, for some reason - had gone through the roof. In the longer term, it was said, people would be starving, especially in the major rice-producing countries: China, India, Britain.

It was all to be expected, said the doom-mongers. World-wide, humanity got more than fifty per cent of its calories from just three carbohydrate-rich crops: wheat, rice and maize. Gigantic monocultures, exceptionally vulnerable to disease.

It was all hubris, fourteen-year-old Ben explained to her earnestly. Humanity had been pursuing a gigantic project, the construction of a technosphere, within which the human species could effectively be freed of its dependence on the Earth: isolated, like his grandmother in her metal ship, Ben said. She let him talk. Jackie had a bigger argument to win with Ben. The destiny of the human species was a piece of ground she could afford to concede.

Okay, the picture's good. A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can't fix.

Now, at last, the screen filled up. In the foreground Jackie could see what looked like the white-tiled hull of a lander, splashed with some kind of mud, and a little further away the ghostly form of an astronaut, a bulky suit topped by a visor that returned brief highlights from the cabin lights. Beyond, no landscape was visible, save only a few yards of what looked like orange-brown swamp.

The astronaut seemed to be pawing at the surface with one foot.

It was, Jackie thought, probably her mother.

She lifted her left foot off the door frame, reached out, and pushed it into the Titan gumbo. She tested her weight. She could feel the slush compacting, but even so her foot sank in several inches.

She tried to lift her foot out. The gumbo was clinging, heavy, and as it came free her boot made a sucking sound that carried through her helmet.

She left behind a saucer-sized crater, into which the gumbo oozed slowly. There was no distinguishable footstep - unlike Neil Armstrong's, she thought wistfully, which ought to persist in the crisp lunar dust for a million years. And when she tried to dig a furrow in the gumbo with her toe, she created a shallow valley that filled in almost immediately, without leaving a mark.

There was already tholin, splashed up from her tentative explorations, staining the white fabric coating her legs.

'The lander has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can't see any exposed ice. The basic colour of the slush is a deep orange, or brown, but it's laced with purples and blacks. Organics, I guess. It looks like nothing so much as mud - Houston gumbo, with a little industrial waste laced in.'

Still analysing, Jackie thought. Still doing science, even out there, a billion miles from home, one little woman scratching at the surface of a whole world and reporting, busily. As if any conclusions she came to made a damn bit of difference.

After all, this wasn't Apollo 11. Hardly anyone was watching these four-hours-old images. The broadcast, on a minor cable channel, wasn't exactly illegal, but it also wasn't encouraged by the authorities either. After all, here were these Americans bounding around in a place the current orthodoxy said didn't even exist.

Jackie was supposed to be studying the Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas. It was what they were teaching the kids at school now; by law, every parent had to learn this stuff too. The Summa - the original written in 1266 - was a kind of theological Theory of Everything, justifying Christian theory by uniting it with Aristotelian physics. Transubstantiation, for instance: the moment in the Catholic Mass in which the bread and wine held by the priest became the body and blood of Christ: the stuff might still look like bread and wine, but - according to Aristotle - the form and the substance of every object were different. And at the moment of transubstantiation, while the form was unchanged, the substance of the bread became that of Christ's body. And so on.

It made a kind of logical sense, Jackie understood. It just wasn't science. Which was why they'd started teaching Aristotelian physics in the schools.

The kids these days were getting the whole shebang. Even the cosmology: the spheres of Moon and sun, the fixed stars beyond. Technology was allowed to continue as long as it was limited to practical, Earth-bound applications. Even low Earth orbit satellites were okay, because they were beneath the sphere of the Moon. But you weren't supposed to look up at the sky, for fear of getting scared. In greater Seattle, they'd even banned telescopes.

The President, Xavier Maclachlan, was putting mankind back at the centre of the universe. He said he wanted to heal the spiritual dislocation that science had caused. Who was she to say Maclachlan was wrong, if it made people happier? To most people the Earth might as well be flat anyhow. The sun might as well be a disc of fire floating round the sky, for all the difference it made. Et cetera. And there were compensations. Aristotle taught the interconnectedness of everything; that wasn't not a bad thing for kids to learn.

It made it difficult, however, to explain to the boys exactly where their grandmother had gone.

'All right. I'm going to step out of Bifrost now.'

Jackie leaned forward. This is it, she thought. This is the peak of my mother's life. Her crowning achievement, her moment in history.

She replaced her left foot, and then lifted her right foot out over the bottom of the hatchway and planted it in the gumbo, still holding onto the hatchway with both hands.

She let the gumbo take her weight.

She sank a few inches. But the combination of the slush's consistency and her own lightness in this one-seventh gravity stopped her falling further.

She let go of the door frame, and she was standing on Titan.

A breeze, fat and massive, buffeted her; the thick air moaned around her helmet.

She took some experimental steps forward, walking away from the lander. She found it a real effort to lift her feet out of the clinging, sticky slush.

She felt light, but there was none of the exhilarating balloon-like floating which the Apollo astronauts had been able to achieve, bouncing off the hard surface of the Moon. The gumbo sucked at her feet, and her backpack, while not heavy, was an obvious mass at her back, throwing off her centre of balance.

She could feel the tubes of warm water wrapped around her limbs; the water seemed to slosh as she walked. Actually she liked the feeling; it was as if she was encased in a little shell of Earth-fluid which cradled her, here in the freezing slush of Titan.

But even so she felt cold. She could feel the heating system of her suit trying to work, the hot little chicken-wire diamonds close to her flesh. It didn't seem to be sufficient. Her fingers, especially, seemed chilled, scarcely protected by the gloves; they were going to have to be careful of frost bite.

In fact, the cold seemed to deepen the further she got from Bifrost.

The picture was full of digital flaws, rectilinear cross-hatchings and missing pixels, so that you could never forget it was artificial. When the astronaut moved about, so poor was the image quality that she trailed ghosts, pale shadows of limbs and head and torso. In fact it was oddly like the films of the first, crude television pictures from Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin moving around like ghosts up there.

What bullshit it all was; what damage space had done to the cause of science, in America and the rest of the world. Twenty billion dollar golf shots. Maybe, she thought, we ought to see the space program - not as the culmination of some huge project of science and technology - but as a gigantic, alienating disaster. Maybe if not for the space program, my kids wouldn't be forced to listen to two-thousand-year-old cosmology every day.

But perhaps, on the other hand, space had made no difference. Maybe science and technology had reached the end of their usefulness anyway. Humans were becoming overwhelmed by their own sophisticated machinery, because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than that needed to survive it. There were endless examples: all the nuclear-industry catastrophes leading up to Chernobyl, her own mother's Columbia crash, even the new airborne AIDS variants.

Her mind came back to the kids, to Ben, with a wrench.

To hell with science, the future of the species, the space program. Who is there to tell you what to say when your fourteen-year-old son comes home and says he wants to get pregnant?

She stopped, maybe twenty feet from the lander, and turned around.

Bifrost was a teepee before her, stuck in a broad splash crater. It had very evidently been dropped, from a great height, into the gumbo. The slush had washed up, viscous and sticky, against the lower hull, swamping the lower reaction thruster nozzles; and the powder-white upper surface was streaked with purplish tholin deposits. In the open hatchway, Rosenberg was framed against a rectangle of glowing white light; it looked blue-green, in fact, Earth-like, in contrast with the burned orange of the rest of the landscape.

The camera sat on its stand, panning and focusing automatically.

She turned away.

Bifrost had come down in a shallow depression. Towards the horizon, beyond this slushy plain, there were rolling hills. They were the foothills surrounding Mount Othrys, she knew, Titan's tallest ice mountain. The horizon itself was lost in gloom and haze.

The peaks were stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks, and streaks of grey, exposed water-ice at the higher elevations. The landscape looked as if it had been water-coloured by an unimaginative, heavy-handed child. There were visible scars in the hills' profiles, left by recent icefalls. The profiles looked oddly softened: these were mountains of ice, not rock, after all. Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills. The clouds were fat methane cumuli, fifteen or twenty miles high, dark and oppressive.

This is ancient, unmarked terrain, she thought. There had been no births here; there were no bodies buried under this complex ground.

It was midday on Titan: as bright as it would get. It was like a dim twilight on Earth. Standing in the gumbo in this muddy light, in fact, was like being at the bottom of a pond.

Ben said he was gay. He was in love, with a boy a couple of years older. He wasn't a virgin any more, he said. And, he said, he wanted a kid.

Of course that was possible now, with cloned fetuses being implanted directly into the stomach wall of a father. It was even safe, they said, more so than natural childbirth.

Jackie found herself sounding like her own mother again, and she hated it. You're too young. Wait. Don't make any decisions now that you can't unpick later. Finish your education.

But then, she reflected, if it made Ben happy now, maybe she should let him go ahead. Maybe I should just let Fred go too, go seek a better solution in the jungles.

She wasn't convinced that to plan for a long and happy life was a rational decision any more.

Her mother, moving about in the dense orange atmosphere of Titan, looked less than human. Like some kind of deep sea fish.

Her visor had gotten streaked with tholin slush, as if she had been caught in some filthy industrial rain. She lifted her right hand and wiped at the visor with her glove, but that just smeared the slush, making it worse.

Suddenly she realised where she was.

It was a surge of perspective, as if the walls of the universe opened out around her. She had let this sunless bubble-world of ice and gumbo and haze eat into her imagination, until it was as if the gumbo extended on, beyond the visible, to infinity.

In fact, she was crawling over a ball of ice, six years and a billion miles from the warmth of the sun.

I'm on Titan, she thought. Here I am - Paula Benacerraf, human, American, grandmother - on Titan, with the rings of Saturn itself somewhere up above the haze.

I made it.

She knelt down, pushing against the resistance of the suit, in the slush. Where her knee took her weight she could feel the diamond patterns of the wires and tubes sewn into her heating garment, and the chill of the slush penetrated to her flesh and bone. The orange-brown, sticky gumbo lapped over her legs, coating the pristine whiteness of her Beta-cloth suit. The ground was streaked, complex, inhomogeneous, full of chemistry.

This was no dead world, of rocks and geology, like the Moon. This material had been processed, for four billion years. She could tell, just looking at it. Save for the home world itself, this must be the most Earth-like world in the System.

She reached down, and dipped her blue gloves into the slush. The sticky gumbo dripped down through her fingers, like ocean bottom ooze.

'This is the stuff of life,' her mother, on Titan, said, as she stuck her hand in the mud.

Oh, God, mother, I wish you were here.