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Christie sighed in my headphones.
Just one more all-too-familiar fairy tale, that's all.
Below, the silver screen cleared again, reforming as faint stars against velvet dark, surmounted by a slow-moving orrery of
the solar system. Beads of light moved from Saturn to blue Earth-brown, I thought. They should've made it brown.
The sky stood empty. Christie said, "I guess..."
I whispered, "Sending us home to die then?"
Another bead appeared, crossing from Earth to Saturn, then going home again. Then again. Then again. More beads,
this time from Saturn to Neptune. After a while, the voyages began a three-way trip, Saturn, Neptune, Earth.
What's at Neptune?
Triton, of course.
I remembered how much I'd always wanted to go there, almost willing to abandon Lisa just so I could see diaphanous
geysers rising against a deep blue world, out on the edge of the infinite.
Christie seemed somehow hollow, as if she were speaking from the depths of a dream. "They send us home to the
Moon. Help us to survive with trade and... I..." She stopped.
What are you thinking about, Christie? That you might see the atmospheres of the gas giants after all? Is that it?
She said, "We could never mine tritium from the atmosphere of Jupiter, where it's free for the taking. Not in that
radiation environment. Not anytime soon."
Tritium. Out of the depths of the past, I suddenly remember the Daedalus designs, so long forgotten.
She said, "Even out here at Saturn, there's a deep gravity well to contend with. And the collision danger from equatorial
ringplane debris spiraling in. Neptune..."
Low-density gas giant with all the tritium we might want. And a big icemoon for the Titanians to...
A myriad of bright sparks suddenly emerged from the Earth, moving not toward another planet, but receding into the
background sky, sky whose stars grew bright again, while the fleet of sparks grew smaller and smaller, until it merged with an
unremarkable pattern of stars.
Christie muttered, "Something in Pavo, I think. I was never very good with the lesser constellations."
Delta Pavonis?
Is there a planet there? A planet just like the one we lost?
I said, "You think their technology's that good?"
She looked up at me, still nothing more than big eyes looking out through scratched, foggy plastic. "Maybe not. Not out
here in the ice and cold. But put together with ours..."
Maybe so.
I said, "I guess the decision wasn't ours to make after all."
j
I awoke in the middle of the night, opening my eyes on darkness defiled by blue light from the instrument panels,
perched on the edge of the bunk, curled inward, shadow of my head, shadow of tousled hair cast on the habitat wall. Christie
was bunched into the space between my body and the wall, curled in on herself, the two of us damp and soft against one
another, sharing some soft old blanket.
Somewhere outside, a new day is dawning.
Some time during that day we'll have to make our decision, get in the halftrack, go on back to base and...
What will happen?
Oh, nonsense. The fantasy we've just been through was no better than one more iteration of White Man's Burden.
The decision's been made. Not by us.
All we have to do is carry out our part, speak our lines according to the script.
Lights. Camera. Action.
Fade to black.
If I held still, paid attention, I could feel Christie's back against my chest, moving slowly in and out as she breathed,
pausing briefly before reversing direction. Asleep, I guess. I tried hard to remember what Lisa'd felt like sleeping against me.
Faded and gone, like just about everything else.
I listened for the soft sound of breath coming and going through what I imagined would be an open mouth, hollow
breathing like the ghost of a snore, but the sounds of Titan coming through the habitat wall blotted it out. Sighing wind
close by. A large wind farther away, moaning in the hills. Tidal creak of the deep crustal ice coming to us through the floor.
Christie seemed to sigh in her sleep, pressing back against me ever so slightly, like something from a dream.
I remembered the lights merging with the stars and found myself dreaming of a new world, of standing on a hillside
under a crimson sunset, alien sun in the sky, sun with prominences and corona plain against the sky, something from a
remembered astronomical illustration. Something from a children's book.
As in all children's books, there's a woman under my arm, standing close against me, standing close.
Below us, below the hillside, was a rim of dark forest, trees like feathery palms swaying in a tropical breeze, beyond it, a
golden sea, stretching out flat to the end of the world.
Us?
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