Anthos Titania

10,100 words

Anthos Titania  

By Eli Uszacki

I am with Inga. We are walking up a stream, the stream near our house where we used to play. I know she is there but I can’t see her face; it blurs and distorts, she is never fully clear. She runs ahead. I hear the sound of rushing water and look down, through the stream I see no riverbed, but a thousand feet below, hazy orange clouds over shining lakes and crumbling mountains in misty half-light, a window to another world. Thunder rumbles, thunder caused by lightning mixed with the thunder of reentry, the roar of supersonic flight.

I wake up.

#

I rolled over to check the clock. I would be the first up. Good. I will be the first to see.

 Summer is a beautiful thing, the beginning of life, the heat and the simmer that draws everything together. As a boy, I remember waiting for the bell at school, the first days of forgetting a jacket, the nights of cool breeze and the few hours of darkness that seemed like such a gift to us then. I woke this morning and walked the cool metallic floors to the porthole, stiffer than I used to be despite the gravity, and felt that feeling. The arrival of something so bright and powerful and somehow so new despite having known it many times before. This morning was unique for me though, special. The first day of Titanian summer, the first in nearly thirty years, and the first time a human being would see a season of summer since the very first people landed on this distant moon of Saturn.

The glass was tinted a dusky orange from methane dust. I couldn’t see much, what little sunlight Titan received being mostly absorbed by the upper cloud deck. Without amplification, day on Titan amounted to a dull orange glow in a cloak of thick shadow. I reached for the display controls and turned up the brightness on the porthole. A series of low hills appeared in the distance, dusty and dune covered, not unlike home. I heard a beeping and looked back into the common area.

“Coffee!” said Anna. I could hear her padded footsteps from the kitchen, putting together breakfast and boiling water for coffee. Her hair was a mess, gray from the faded blue dye she arrived with a year ago.

“Is there extra water?” I asked, noting that despite having lived this long together in the station, she still couldn’t remember that I didn’t drink coffee.

“Oh, yeah! Totally, sorry It just baffles me that someone could live on another planet for six years and still drink chamomile in the morning.”

“I’m from Iceland, Anna. The similarity is striking.”

She chuckled.

I left the booth by the window and made my way to the kitchen corner, where Anna was shaking bread out of the toaster. For some reason, the toaster slots made by the ESA didn’t match with the size of the bread slices supplied by NASA. Anna Johansson was relatively new and hadn’t given up yet. Good for her. 

I grabbed a cannister of chamomile tea from the cupboard and spooned some into a small cup, watching as the powder dissolved in languid circles, slower than it did at home.

“We need to clean the portholes,” I said absently.

Anna was still struggling with the toaster. “Or, we could go outside and enjoy the first day of summer without doing chores! Arahura valley hasn’t been visited since survey one, Sigur, and the forest there hasn’t been seen with human eyes in years.” 

It was true. Arahura valley hadn’t seen surveyors since the first manned mission nearly 30 years ago, and there was supposed to be a vibrant ecosystem that had been overlooked by all the major surveys.

“I suppose I agree. And it’s a holiday” I said, failing to hide my enthusiasm. It was my favorite holiday, in fact.

#

Crumbs left on the table, we dressed and met by the airlock. The rest of the station was waking up now, shuffling to the kitchen and boiling water. Johannson always woke up early, citing something about swim team growing up. I just like mornings.

“Nice tubes, you grow those yourself?” Anna said. Plucking one of the hot water lines on my long underwear. If I had a nickel.

“Yes,” I say, passively.

“Because you’re a robot?” she smiled while removing one of her eyebrow piercings.

“Because I invented a technique for three-dimensional printing in zero-G. before you were born. Smartass.”

She laughed, and I grabbed our helmets from the rack of dark green suits on the wall. Suiting up was a bear, but not so much on a holiday. I even giggled. In the back of my mind, thunder rumbled.

#

The light on the surface of Titan is incredibly dim. Even with brightness and contrast amplified through a helmet, you can’t see the horizon the way you do on Earth. If you look far enough, the land just disappears into the mist in every direction. Today we would follow a stream to the rim of Arahura valley to check flow gauges before moving on to the forest proper. I would say that we were on a mission, but there was nothing of importance to do. The gauges were automated, and we had drones for surveying. Today was about going on a hike and seeing the world, a rare chance to scramble among the rocks and be children for a while. My favorite kind of day.

I followed Anna out of the airlock, cracking a smile. The name badge on her pack still had the second “n” in “Johannson” scratched out. For whatever reason all of her labels had the nordic spelling of the name, so in her first week she walked around with a sharpie and Americanized her name in nearly every document at the station. I made a point of washing off the sharpie at times. She still didn’t know it was me.

The surface outside the airlock was flat with dull hills to the north, on our right. We had to walk for almost half an hour before reaching the stream. Our gait was slow but practiced. Walking in microgravity was strange, requiring one to lean farther forward than on earth, but use less force in your stride.  We kept to rocky outcrops and hills of water ice, picking our way through the lumpy terrain.

“Sigur!” Anna said through the radio, “Check it out!” she was on one knee holding a fist size rock. With a closer look, I saw it wasn’t a rock at all, but a small shell.  

“A fossil?” I asked. Could fossils exist here?

“No,” Anna replied, “It’s the exoskeleton from a tree polyp. It’s old—but not fossilized. I’m taking this one with me.”

“If you start picking up rocks now you won’t be able to carry it all home!” I laughed.  

“Maybe you won’t.” She pocketed the shell and kept moving.

We rounded the base of a low hill and reached a ravine. A small stream was rushing there, flowing over dirty cobbles of water ice and forming dark pools. It is strange, seeing something so familiar but distorted in ways you wouldn’t expect, like a stream that runs in slow motion. At first, you want to believe you are looking at a creek in your backyard, but if you look closer the flow is slower, thicker, the boils and whirlpools more pronounced. The first time I saw this stream I stopped and sat on my heels to watch the flow for nearly half an hour. What was at first familiar suddenly became alien, like when you repeat a word over and over until it becomes nonsense. At first glimpse everything is the same. Upon inspection all things are infinitely different.  

 #

Before I reached the Titan Research Station, and before I was an astronaut, I was an engineer. I was married and had a daughter. I loved being a father. I loved all the easy parts the most, of course. All the laughter and playing and joy of loving a person that believes you are at least half of the whole world.

 My favorite days were spent by the creek. My mother believed that a child would never know boredom so long as they were taught how to skip rocks, and in a way that became my whole philosophy as a parent. Inga and I would fish and walk the banks, leaving our shoes to wade through the current. After a while, the water no longer felt cold, and we could stand and stare at the stream bed the way an astronaut looks back at the Earth. This was how my fatherhood felt. A thing that was daunting as first, but upon immersion revealed a world that I could not have known otherwise. Inga would throw sticks in the current, and we would watch them chase each other. On those days Helen would demand that we both take a bath before dinner. We would smile and giggle at that, It was our thing. It was magic. 

It would not be forever.

#

Anna and I continued up the creek and into the steep hills northwest of Kraken Mare. Approaching the grove, we began to see more signs of life, shells, and pieces of other strange radially symmetric animals. I am an engineer, but the intricacies of Titanian biology escape me. Anna, however, was an expert.  

“Holy shit. No way.”  

“A rock?” I ask.

“Very funny, Sigur.” She delicately pinched a long, white flaky spike off the ground. On closer inspection, it wasn’t flaking apart, but had ridges like one would find on a scallop. “It’s Pigmentless chemotroph, type C.”

I gave her a blank look.

She rolled her eyes a little and explained, “it’s rare to find things without pigment in Titanian biology. The Titanian equivalent of genes, if they actually exist, allow for a creature’s genetic code to change within its lifetime. It’s natural selection at an organismal level. Albinism usually fades over time unless the thing dies young. Can you put this in my pack?”

I walked over to help her. With my hand on the zipper, sealing Anna’s pack, I felt a thump, as though someone dropped a heavy rock at my feet.

“Did you hear that? I said. I could see Anna’s face through the side of her helmet. It had changed. She was confused. I turned to where she was looking and saw why.

The station, normally hazy white in the distance, was mess of steam and rapidly freezing gas. The kitchen wall was missing, Hab material scattered over the rocky surface. There was a body on the ground, moving then still.

“We have to go back.” It was all Anna could say. I followed, speechless. We took three steps each before the second explosion.

#

When Inga was five years old, a special exhibition came to Reykjavik. It was a touring exhibit, the type of thing that filled the guest rooms at the museum for a couple months before moving on. We rarely went to those, but this one was special. It was called “Exobiotica: Titanian Biospheres.” Everyone had heard of it. Part museum exhibit and part Zoo, it was the first chance the public had to see the life of Saturn’s moon with their own eyes, for the life of two separate worlds to meet face to face. We bought tickets a year in advance.

I remember walking slowly, sweeping my gaze to be sure I wouldn’t miss a thing. I held Inga’s right hand while Helen held her left. We walked in that comfortable silence you can only have with those you love. Everything was orange-on-black. We walked past signs explaining the atmosphere, the orbit, the nine year seasons, two week long days and incredibly cold temperatures on Titan. Helen and I read every word, Inga pulling at our hands as we did so.  There was a twinge of methane in the air, something that would normally have gone unnoticed, but was now the center of my attention. That was Titanian atmosphere, leaked in small amounts into the room. I relished it.

The first exhibit was small. A round tank with a what looked like a floral arrangement of black, radially symmetrical… things. I couldn’t place if they were plants or animals. The sign said they were chemosynthetic, living off the ambient hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. A sign explained that some of them had visibly shrunk and showed signs of sickness after being exposed to earth gravity. I felt a pang of remorse.

Inga pulled us around the bend into the main room of the exhibit. There were domes scattered around like the one before with people loosely crowded around them, but most were captivated by the main event: a thick, twenty-meter-long pane of polycarbonate filled with an orange haze. It was a remarkable piece of engineering, stable under immense differences in pressure and temperature, 97 kelvins on one side and 288 on the other. It blocked the extra light from the exhibit, with a transparent screen magnifying the light from the other side, allowing natural levels of light for the beings on either side. I had helped design the material. There were benches along its’ length, and there I could see inga, sitting and marveling at a strange, whimsical form in the orange mist. Helen ran up and swooped her into the air in a storm of laughter. For a moment they were silhouettes, black against orange, smiling and laughing. Behind was a thick, twisting column of hexagonal blocks, weak polyps reaching out through holes, tasting the strange, filtered mist of their enclosure. It was a tree, a hulking column of life from another world.

On our way out of the museum we had to push through a massive crowd. It was confusing at first, until I saw the cardboard signs bobbing in the crowd. We had seen the Ire the exhibit had drawn around the world, but hadn’t expected to see much controversy in our home city. I held my arms protectively around Inga and Helen, shying away from the poisonous stares all around. At first I thought they were animal rights activists and the pang of remorse I felt about the animals in the tanks began to deepen. Then, I read the signs they carried. They showed depictions of Adam and Eve, the apple tree and the serpent. These people belonged to the rare contingent of religious objectionists to the Titan Mission, those who believed it wrong to spoil the gardens once again. Later, as we lay in bed, Helen said something I will never forget:

“I think people are faced with a choice in the face of the unknown,” she whispered, “to feel immediate fear or to be consumed with wonder.”  

There was a long pause, the both of us lost in thought.

“those people believe that choice was already made by someone else.”

#

There was nothing to say. The station was a tattered mess, singed where oxygen, methane and heat had met in a fatal trio. It was not a large building. There were eight people inside, likely all of them dead instantly. From our position in the distance, it was obvious. There were no survivors. And worse, the lander, our only escape from the surface of Titan, had suffered a similar fate and was now lying in pieces.

“Fuck.” Anna said under her breath. “Oh fuck.” 

I had no response. I tried to process. We had been in that station less than an hour ago, I had lived there for six years, and by some miracle we were a safe distance away when it reached a point of catastrophic failure. I ran through the possibilities in my head. I had inspected the station a few days ago and everything was normal: no cracks in the tanks, effective pressure seals, filters working to within the tolerances they were designed for. It had to be a mistake on the part of one of the crew… but what? Everything had backups, there were mountains of checklists and overrides a person had to get through to even get close to causing a disaster of this scale. And the lander too? They were separate systems, no connection at all, for this very purpose. It was mystifying. Anna and I watched as faint winds pushed at the rent-open carcass of our home. We watched for a long time before I spoke.

“We have to move.” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Move?” Anna said, incredulous. “Move where? that’s the only human presence on the whole moon!”

“There is an emergency supply cache. Twenty kilometers from here across the Arahura valley. If we reach it and activate the distress relay, we could have enough supplies to last until the backup lander arrives.” This was the last backup plan, our final contingency. Anna stood perfectly still.

“That’s not supposed to be possible,” she said. I could see the blank stare of shock she wore, the realization that we were now living out the worst-case scenario. This is why we have backups, I thought as we stood there. I gave Anna a moment more to come to terms with the situation before speaking again.

“We have limited air, even more limited heat. We’ll cut it close even if we make it to the supply drop. We need to move.” I spoke robotically. We had trained for these things. Anna nodded numbly. It wasn’t that I felt nothing. In fact, I was feeling a well of panic the likes of which I had only felt once in my life. Maybe that was it—I had been in the worst-case scenario before. Unfortunately, this was Anna’s first catastrophe. 

“Look at me” I said, wanting confirmation that she could understand me. She turned and met my eye. “We need to go. We still have a chance. It is clear that the others are beyond help. We need to go.” She stared for moment before nodding, almost to herself.

“Ok.” She said. “Ok. Twenty kilometers is about as far as we were planning to go today, so we’ll make it there fine.” She focused on the display in her helmet, scrolling through files until she found what she was looking for. “This is the supply drop you’re talking about?” She sent me a map and I looked it over. It marked the cache with a red X, tucked in a boulder field on the far end of Arahura valley. It read: Emergency Drop 1. Comm relay, air supply, food, water, power. 

“Yes.”

“Good. The best route leads us through the heart of the grove. We’ll move slow through there, but it’s our best option. Should take us less than eight hours.” There we go. She was back again. We turned on our heels and walked onwards, faster, with renewed purpose. This was no walk in the woods. We both knew we would be lucky to survive.

#

Rainstorms dot Titan’s northern hemisphere in summer, periodic spats of drizzling methane and ethane with the occasional cyclone gale blowing in from the sea. The first observations of this, by telescope and remote probe, were astounding. Clouds like our own, dotting the smooth expanse of milky orange sky that looped around Saturn at a distance of more than a million kilometers. Data gathered in the long years before deep space explorers could visit the moon showed evidence of wet seasons and dry seasons: a tropical climate pattern on a celestial body that averaged hundreds of degrees colder than Earth. This was confirmed by the first astronauts to land there, as they stood in awe while gentle waves of raindrops pattered against the portholes of their landing craft. Despite the differences, the hydrocarbon fluids and perpetual hazy night, the feeling of a rainstorm is the same. A small darkness, a wall of black and a feeling of incredible release. The summer rains had arrived, the drops thick and slow, nearly twice as large and many times slower than the rain I knew on Earth. The rainfall was languid, almost hovering. Marbles of thick liquid levitated in the playful, kindred gusts of wind.

Anna and I moved quickly. Droplets of rain spattered against our faceplates and disappeared in clouds of steam as our heaters did their work, a disconcerting reminder of the peril we were in. If our heaters failed, we would freeze to death in less than a minute. Despite this, I sweat. The weight of my suit was noticeable even in the low gravity. I followed Anna’s lead, trudging up steep slopes of scree, avoiding clusters of strange black Amphorae, the same plant-like organisms I first laid eyes on in the museum years ago. They grew large, almost waist height, clustered in tight groups that we weaved around, enroute to the valley rim. Trickles of liquid hydrocarbon filtered into the dusty soil, forming a thick oozing mud that was pervasive and inescapable. I stared at the ground and pushed, trying not to think about our predicament, only to move as fast as this dream-like land would allow. I was surprised when I topped the crest of the ridge. The view was incredible.

Anna stood, looking out into what distance we could see through the perpetual haze, the land spread out like an echo in the mist. Below us stretched a kilometer of slopes that leveled out into a bowl-shaped valley. Along the rim of the valley, outcrops of dark water ice eroded and tumbled down the slopes, forming boulder fields of dark, house sized stones: water frozen for longer than the existence of the human race. Below the boulders, a different jumble of shapes stood in a long meadow: the reason we had left the station in the first place, the edge of an ancient grove, one of the densest stands of Titanian polyp trees ever seen. Anna pointed across the valley into the stormy, obscure distance.

“Eighteen kilometers to go, due north. Those trees look dense.” I sensed both apprehension and excitement in her voice. It would be hard travel, perilous given the circumstances, though it would take us through the heart of a thriving Titanian ecosystem, the subject of Annas life’s work. She had been eager to visit the groves of Arahura Valley for years, and the one time she had the chance to go, they stood in the way of her only salvation.

“The storm is easing off.” I said. “Should be gone soon.”

Anna only nodded. She was distracted.

“It will be interesting, seeing the grove after a rainstorm. No one has seen the groves during monsoon season.”  I said, stating the obvious. Anna was the biologist; of course she knew. She sat down, not responding, shoulders shaking gently, barely noticeable through the thickness of her EVA suit. I walked over, joining her. I waited for her to speak, the both of us watching a swirl of cloud pour over the rim of the valley as the storm began to abate. Save for the patter of the final raindrops, all was silent.

“My mom made me promise I would come back.” She sniffled. “I told her I would be home in the blink of an eye and then I left to another planet for eight fucking years.” There was a weight in her voice I hadn’t heard before. She sniffled again, the sound loud and distorted through the radio. “How selfish is that?”

I didn’t know how to respond. We looked over the valley, obscured in the inky shadow of noon on Titan. I felt the urgency to move, but I couldn’t bring myself to ignore my friend. She was in need of something, something to keep her from spiraling when I needed her most. Almost without thinking, I spoke.

“The last conversation I had with my wife was about which one of us should take the car to get serviced. I didn’t think to tell her anything important, we were just talking as we always did. I barely said goodbye.” Silence prevailed. I continued. “You are in luck, Anna. Your family knows where you are, how dangerous it is to be here. Some people never get to say goodbye.”

I didn’t mean to be so dramatic. I hadn’t talked about my family in years, I had been so absorbed in this place and tasks I performed that I rarely thought to touch that wound I kept within. Anna was looking at me now, her eyes softened.

“Better yet, you have a long way to go before we call it quits.” I say, feigning optimism. “We’re not dead yet.”

#

It was morning. Inga was barely awake, 14 years old and slow like molasses. She was almost an adult now. Helen and I were talking about the car.

“It’ll just be the oil change, everything else should be good.” I said. Her back was turned to me.

“Ok. I’ll pay for it on my card, you got the last one,” she said. She was helping pack Inga’s lunch for school. “I’ll see you at six?”

“Yeah. I can do dinner.”

“Perfect.”

She moved to open a drawer for a sandwich bag, gently leaning her hand on my back. I thought nothing of it, but it is the last time I felt her touch. They left quickly, I hardly watched them go. Later that day I got the call in a meeting. I stepped into the hallway.

A car crash. I remember floating, as if everything were a dream. I let my body sink to the floor and stare ahead. Everything was lost.  Within a year I applied for a research position on Titan station. After three years of waiting, training, medical tests and paperwork I found myself in a pressure suit, strapped into the acceleration couch of a shuttle leaving Earth for ten years in deep space, preferably the rest of my life. I was not whole. I was a shell of a man.

#

We started down the hillside, picking our way through the muddy boulders as the storm cleared around us, the change in light almost imperceptible. Anna kept us on course through the maze. I watched her, thinking the same small and passive thought I always do when we are together. She was twenty-five years old, near the age Inga would be. The boulders were crusted with horn-shaped black and gray chemotrophs, dense and reef-like. We weave around them, finding our way through a maze of impossible shapes in the thick methane mud. We walked in silence for a long time before my comm crackled.

“Is that why you left?” Anna asked. She was ahead, picking her way between long, glass- like shells erupting from the ground. It took me a moment to understand the question.

“Yes.” I say, finally understanding. “I couldn’t bear to continue without them.”

“So you travelled almost a billion miles to get away?” Her tone was flat.

“Yes” I said again, almost ashamed. There was a pause; my feet slid in the mud. “I think I believed that going to a new world would start a new chapter for me. I thought I would become a different person, but that didn’t prove to be the case.” there was silence for a moment. “I thought that I was something before and something after. But that is only a half-truth. I am something ever changing. Had I stayed longer, I would have grown and adapted as I needed to. I wanted distance in space, but grief is only solved by distance in time. I know this now. I would like to live again. It’s a shame we’re in this mess.” I said. It was the most I had said about myself since leaving Earth. Certainly the most I had said to anyone on this cold, far moon. Anna was silent for a moment, poking through the dense growth of… not plants, or animals for that matter—things. She would know what to call them.  

“Did you know some of these chemotrophs can survive for thousands of years?”  Anna said, breaking the silence.

“I’ve heard something to that effect, yes.”

“ It’s magic. This… forest, for lack of a better word, is older than most nations on Earth. The oldest have been alive for longer than the existence of the written word, alive since before, like, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. And we don’t even know the upper limit! We just figured out how to determine age in some Titanian lifeforms, and we could be totally wrong.” She stopped, touching a long spindle of black shell attached to a rock, her green gloved hand outstretched. “We’re in the middle of one of the greatest scientific mysteries ever found.” She paused, hesitating, then continued. “I think you chose a wonderful place to escape to. Maybe it helped that you came here.” She looked at me, the melancholy in her eyes visible through her helmet. I smiled. She smiled back before turning and continuing on.

#

The journey from Earth to Titan is long and incredibly expensive. We were never told the dollar amount, but we all knew the figure was astounding. There was interest in those strange, cold forests. More than there was in most other things. I took a position as an engineer. I was well known, and my work required microgravity and alien environments. I was more than qualified, having spent time on a lunar research station early in my career. I knew the risks and requirements of deep space travel.

Our expedition went first to the lunar research base where I worked in my youth, where we stocked supplies and fuel, trained and worked out last-minute details. We then boarded our long-term transport, a one-of-a-kind ship designed for deep space journeys. I spent two years on that ship, swinging past Mars and Jupiter as we gained speed in the direction of the farthest manned outpost in history. I got along with my crewmates, but rarely talked. My wounds were fresh. The of the cloud tops of Jupiter swirled underneath me, a sight more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. The world beautiful was innacurate, deficient in scale for something so grand, so powerful. I was overwhelmed with shame at the sight. Inga would have loved this, would have pressed her face to the porthole as we swooped over a thing larger and more majestic than words can describe. All I could do was feel sadness; the longing for what was surpassing the sublime expanse of what is.

We continued our work on the journey out. I dove into it, spending more time than I should have testing materials and building machines, long hours of coding and repetition. When I wasn’t working, I learned from my co-workers. What they showed me painted a picture of the place we were going, a place stranger than the mind could comprehend.

“We don’t know how they reproduce,” said the lead biologist, Augustus. We were eating in the crew mess.

“What do you mean?” my interest was piqued.

“I mean we literally don’t know. There is no explicable mechanism for the transportation of genetic material from one being to the next. They have something like DNA, and from what we can tell there are many reproductively isolated groups, species even, but no reproduction has ever been witnessed.” His long curly hair bounced around, animated by his excitement. “There aren’t organs either—no genitals or anything so far as we can tell.” He waved his fork as he spoke. “It’s fucking mystifying.”

“You know what’s fucking mystifying?” It was Rita, a physicist. She wouldn’t be joining us on Titan; her team was managing a gravitational wave detector aboard the ship. It was one of the largest of its kind, and the only one to be mounted onboard a moving vessel, built expressly for studying the nature of gravity across great distances. She continued, “The shit we’re seeing past heliopause.” She pulled her tablet from under another crewmember’s bowl of pasta and displayed a diagram for the group to see. “We’ve detected gravitational waves moving in a straight line at exactly the speed of light,” she gestured to the line on the screen. It looked like the waves following a boat on a clear lake, though three dimensional. “This is unexplainable phenomena, the type of thing that could only be produced from colliding black holes or—’

“Echoes from Alcubierre drives with more mass than Pluto.” Augustus interrupted. He was a space nerd like the rest of us. Rita gave him a flat look, palpably sarcastic.
        “Yes, Augie, impossibly massive starships moving faster than the speed of light. Super realistic.” 

The banter went on. As the voyage came to an end, it was clear: we were not only at the edge of human presence in the universe, but the edge of knowledge itself. As we rounded the expanse of Saturn’s rings, turning into view of the strange milky skies of Titan, I felt something I hadn’t felt since leaving Earth: excitement. A new world awaited.

#  

The Forest. Like everything here it was dark, misty, close. As we approached its edge, Anna hesitated. There was something there, something old and incomprehensible, primordial and gestalt. The trees resembled the castles of sand I would make with Inga on the beach, whimsical and improbable in their form, seemingly held together by intention alone. Particles floated in the air. Colors were smeared and blurry, trapped in the arms of undergrowth. We said nothing, but Anna glanced back, betraying her apprehension. This was not a human place, but something totally and completely alien. 

We did our best to find the shortest path, but the going was slow. The life was different there, bigger and healthier, dense and jungle-like. Tall stands of rod-like reeds mixed with bulging vases and solid, spear-like chemotrophs. The polyps were still, peeking out of the openings in their shells, tentacles reflecting undulation, though their forms were nearly still to our human eyes. It was eerie. Anna stopped and pointed out at a pale, long form wrapped around the trunk of a polyp tree and whispered into the radio,

“A shiva worm. They can take years to move a couple of steps.” we stood and watched. I imagined how quick we must seem, how ephemeral our presence was in this place where time is languid, darkness permanent. We kept moving. 

As we walked, Anna stopped occasionally to take samples, recording lengths and diameters and taking notes. I helped with what I could, though I’m basically useless as a biologist. Mostly, I poked about and looked at the undergrowth. During one of those stops, I noticed something.

“Anna, what is this?” I asked.

“What is what?” she was busy, leaning over a large amphorae, her back turned to me. I looked at the strange, red fruit-like form and tried to explain it to her.

“It’s like a cattail, but red. It’s coming off one of the shorter reedish things.” I poked it with my glove. Surprisingly, it deformed. “It’s soft.”

Anna perked up, then turned and walked over. She got down on one knee and examined the thing, her furrowed brow visible through her helmet.

“I’ve never seen this before” she said, almost whispering to herself. She took a bottle and snipped the thing off, taking the whole strange growth and tucking it into a chest pocket.

“What do you think it is?” I ask. She looked at me, her frayed expression briefly replaced by a look of astonishment.

“I have absolutely no idea.” She stood to leave, brushing a clump of mud from her knee. “I hope we live long enough to find out.”

We had ten kilometers to go.

#

I was a child when the first expedition to Titan arrived at their destination. It was April on Earth, and coincidentally the final days of Titanian winter. It was big news. Of course, the crew was American, and not a single piece of equipment or dollar of funding was supplied by my home island of Iceland. This was not discouraging for a boy like me. I knew that only the rich, big countries built spaceships. I was sixteen at the time; I thought I wanted to be a fisherman.

Our classes had been cancelled for the afternoon, the lot of us crammed into our school gym to watch the broadcast on the projector. What we saw was astounding. It wasn’t like the footage of the moon landing, with its bright contrast and rocky landscape. It was dark and cloudy. The mist was shot with beams of light, floodlights from the landing craft piercing the permanent night of that hellish and distant moon. A lone figure climbed down a ladder from the wing of the spaceplane, her helmet glowing with light. We all knew her name: Allison Thorvung. She treaded carefully, peering about the dark misty hills. Her words were full of static and unscripted.

“It’s raining” she said, her voice detached and confused. “Like home.”

It was a historical moment, though not nearly as historic as it seemed. By the time I was in third grade, people had arrived on nearly every moon, orbited all the major planets and established bases on many of them. People were no longer exploring the solar system, but living in it. Allison became famous for something different, something far more important. A day into their mission, the team walked into a cluster of strange rock formations. What they saw was incredible, confusing and impossible. The crystalline structures were glasslike, but unmistakably organic. The crew was speechless. Allison reached out her hand to touch the tip of a long, spearlike chemotroph. Pausing as she felt it through her glove.

 “It’s been awhile.” She whispered. 

         With those words, she sparked a revolution. It was a long-held theory that Earth-life could be related to other life in the solar system, if it existed. Though there was no confirmation of this, Allison’s words were the beginning of the human search for our kin, the confirmation of our oldest ancestors. It was not without controversy. There were many who disagreed with the human presence on Titan, those who believed that a natural ecosystem found free of exploitation should be kept that way. There were objections to the research program, threats from religious groups and extremists. There were protests, and violence in many places. Those ancient forests were in danger, and people were willing to go to great lengths to protect them. I watched it all happen from a distance, living my life, growing and becoming. I never thought I would find myself on that strange faraway world.

 My first steps outside Titan station felt impossible, the pull of a strange gravity, the pervasive hints of hydrocarbons. It was dreamlike, not only in the sense that it was wonderful, but also in the sense that it could become a nightmare at any moment. I knew this fact well, though I never thought the nightmare would materialize.  When I found myself in that ancient forest, trudging slowly as though underwater, everything became real again. I found myself with a singular wish: to go home. Once again, for the first time in nearly a decade, I found the desire to live.

#  

The forest continued. I pushed forward after Anna, my thoughts welling from a place I had not known for years. I thought of my wife, my child. I breathed heavily, almost ten hours of walking in the strange, unnatural gravity through dense atmosphere in a heavy EVA suit was exhausting. I watched as the landscape changed, the life around us shifting in patterns: patches of reeds interspersed with clumps of amphorae, horns and flowers erupting from the ice boulders and all of it filled with the rocky stacks that made up the polyp forest.  It reminded me of the woods near where I grew up: there was a certain repetition of life, like walking across a quilt. At first the landscape was random, but the longer you walked, the more you paid attention, themes revealed themselves—motifs and patterns song-like in their consistency.

Anna had been silent since we took the specimen. She was motivated, moving with purpose, checking the map and making corrections as we walked. Where there was wonder, I now felt urgency as the dire nature of our situation settled into our minds. There was no going back. Our only hope was the rescue beacon ahead of us—if it even worked anymore. Neither of us spoke, but it was obvious we shared a feeling; we wished deeply to survive.

At one point, a glen opened in the forest, reeds rising to shoulder height, black and spearlike. We started into it without thinking, trudging ahead, until I looked up and noticed something.

“Anna!” I said excitedly, “another one!” She stopped and looked back.

“Another one of what?”

“Another one of those… things, the red ones” I said, again unsure of what exactly I was seeing.

Anna stalked over, bending to see what I was looking at. She adopted that same confused look, then stood, turning on her suit’s external lights. What we saw was incredible.

Hundreds of red pods appeared in the thick patch of reeds, heavy enough to cause the black stalks to bend over. We walked into the thicket, each of us examining the strange growths. I found one that was larger than the others, a thin hole open on one side, cilia waving in the cavity within. 

“Flowers.” Anna said, astonished. “Or some analog to a flower at least.” She too was peering into one of the holes, studying its contents.  I looked up, something else having caught my attention. Anna turned to continue her thought but was interrupted. She saw what I was seeing and joined me, her stare transfixed on the inky sky. A miracle was occurring.

Above us, clouds of red and black particles drifted in the wind, mixing and intermingling, dusting the thick clusters of chemotrophs in a fine layer of ochre residue. It was a smeared oil painting, a pair of clouds dancing together in the frigid cold. And then there were the polyps. Tossed in the dense sheets of what we could only assume was pollen, there were small, round, leaf-like creatures. We could see them ejecting from their shells, the tall columns bursting with the small creatures, clouds of them floating off into the misty, ink-black night. It was like snowfall, like streaks of rain against the sun, like the silence between lightning and thunder. We sat and watched for a long time as the forest erupted and came alive in a way we had not thought possible. I saw on Annas face the questions emerging, the answers materializing and washing away. I smiled, then laughed. It was wonderful in the purest sense of the word. I felt the reverberation of my dream from the night before, the wonder of that strange and impossible feeling of peering through a door between two worlds; qualia in stereo.

#  

Once, on a walk through the pasture by my parents’ house, Inga and I came across a bunch of blooming lupines. She was twelve, curious and becoming wise to the ways of the world.  She leaned down to get a closer look.

“Why do flowers bloom?” she asked. To be honest, I was surprised she didn’t already know. She was smarter than many of her classmates.

“To reproduce.” I said, “though I’m not sure how. Something to do with the collection of pollen.”

She furrowed her brow, crouched on one knee. “I wonder why we think they are so beautiful if all they do is live and die.” 

I didn’t know what to say. There must have been something else on her mind. We sat in a hushed silence for a moment. “Maybe beauty has nothing to do with living or dying” I said, hands in my pockets.

She turned, looking up at me and squinting in the light. She had her mother’s eyes.

“Maybe” she said.

Maybe.

#

The dark, misty world had come alive. Anna and I were the only humans on that whole world, one replete with seas and mountains, volcanos, clouds, rain, forests and, now, flowers. Flowers. It was perfect wilderness. There was no other soul for millions of miles; even the emergency shuttle was automated, with enough fuel and supplies to take us to Europa if it could arrive fast enough. We were soiled, covered in mud, our suits scraped by rocks and the sharp carapace of chemotrophs. My suit had developed a leak, and we stopped to patch it, waves of pollen rising into the sky all around. I saw colors I had not thought possible, strange and shining in the shadowed night. We moved onwards.

We stopped only to collect critical samples. Anna or I would see a flower, then immediately call the other over to take measurements. We did this until we ran out of sample tubes. Eventually, we decided we had enough. Our air recyclers could keep us breathing for days, but the heaters in our suits had limited power. We would need a power source soon. Finally, we exited the forest, the rim of Arahura valley appearing through the mists. We trudged up the slope, slow as molasses and breathing heavy, the exhaustion taking a toll. Despite this, there were smiles on our faces. We had unlocked a mystery, opened a door into a new understanding of life on this distant world.

“What will we call them?” I ask Anna. We were nearing the supply cache, our hearts lighter, our voices thicker with emotion through the static of the radio.

She paused, thinking. “Honestly, I don’t think we know enough to name anything yet. It would make sense that this event is part of the reproductive cycle, but we haven’t even proved that.” She caught her breath before continuing, “but if they are really flowers, then we should use a Latin or Greek root.”

“Like what?” I ask, my knowledge or Latin and Greek severely lacking.

“Anthos is the ancient Greek word for flower, which is Flos in Latin”

“Anthos. That’s a pretty word.”

“It is. Anthos Titania. That’s got a ring to it!” Anna giggled, “Anthos Titania, the flower forests of Titan!”

We laughed together, giddy, stopping to catch our breath on the steep slope. We were almost there.

#

I met Helen at a bar in Reykjavík. I was in my final year at the university, and in many respects, I was still a child. Then, as now, I was shy and reserved. She was the opposite. A ray of sunshine, loud and beaming. She physically pulled me from my corner to join her friends, recognizing me from one of our classes. We talked all night, her constant questions keeping me talking. Her interest in me was baffling. After all, she was gorgeous. At one point, I asked her what she studied.

“Sigur!” She smacked my arm and leaned in with a laugh, “What a boring question!”

I laughed. I was bad at making conversation.

“I hate small talk. Ask me about my favorite color or something.”

I paused, thinking for a moment. What is the most interesting question? I stroked my half empty pint of beer. Before I could decide on something appropriate, I opened my mouth, saying something that surprised even me. 

“What will happen to you when you die?” I asked.

Her eyes lit up, locking with mine, then straying into the distance, lost in thought. “Hmmm,” she scooted closer, closing the gap between us in the booth. “That is a good question.”

“Take your time,” I said, smiling. Being near her was like laying in the sun.  She paused for a while.  

“I think,” she said, her words clear through the haze of beer and laughter around us, “there are two options.” She paused for dramatic effect, a twinkle in her eye, a corner of a smile playing on her lips.

“Okay,” I said, raising my hand, stretching out two fingers. She giggled, then suddenly adopted a serious look, furrowing her eyebrows.

“Option one: nothing. That’s what I’m betting on.” She said. I put one finger down.

“Nothing at all?”  

“Not Nothing, in the literal sense, but you know, nothing special. I think when we die, we just become what we always were: matter and energy, the unconscious body of the universe. That’s just as beautiful as any kind of heaven, right? Scattering into the motion of time.” She wiggled her fingers in a scattering motion, then laughed again. Scattering into the motion of time, I repeated in my head. I had never thought of that before. I was still holding my index finger aloft.

“Okay, Reasonable.” I said, “and the second option?”

she smiled again, then reached out and folded my finger into my palm, her face inches away, her hand briefly resting on mine. “Something else happens, and I spend my last moments on Earth thoroughly surprised.”

I returned her smile, thinking of kissing her right then and there. I didn’t. The moment passed and we kept talking until her friends forced her to go somewhere else. She hurriedly scribbled her phone number on a receipt and pressed it into my hand, waving back to me as her friends crowded her into the street.

Six years later, we got married. Twenty years later, I got the phone call, the one that changed my life. In the days after her death, I thought often of the night we met, our youth together. In those dark nights alone I would often stare blankly upward and think of what she said. To scatter into the motion of time, I would repeat in my head. It did not comfort me. When I last visited her, before boarding the shuttle, I left a note on the headstone. I wrote it on the receipt she had given me twenty years before, the one we had framed in our hallway all that time, under her bubbly script. It read:

To my beloved Helen,

         I hope you were surprised.  

#

Thirty years ago, during the construction of Titan research station, a number of supply caches were left in locations within walking distance of the station, in case field teams needed critical supplies and couldn’t make it back to base. As the program wore on, it became clear that fieldwork rarely needed to happen more than four or five kilometers from the station. The emergency caches were never used, and their maintenance was low priority. Eventually they were seen as a relic of the past, hardware that only served as an interesting anecdote in the history of the Titanian research program. Now, they were our only hope. As we crested the ridge, we saw a tattered green flag poking out from the top of an outcropping of ice. 

We squeezed through the boulders, helping each other scramble into an alcove below the lightly waving flag. We turned on our external lights and revealed a stack of thick, ammo-can like boxes. They bore worn marks indicating their contents, paint marred by exposure to the elements. 

“I’ll activate the relay if you can find the RTG,” I said, directing Anna to the small nuclear power supply. She began looking through one stack while I looked through another, eventually locating the large radio transmitter and antenna. I pulled the equipment out of the box and brought it over to Anna, hoping to power up the radio and send a distress message. When I reached the RTG box, I found Anna standing still, looking blankly at the contents.

“It’s broken.” She said, voice level, trying to conceal a wave of panic.

“What do you mean it’s broken?”

“Look” she said, handing me the device. It was a small steel cannister with connectors on one end and a large warning symbols on the sides. I saw the problem immediately. The ports we had to use to transfer power from the machine had cracked, as well as part of the casing. The crucial components on the inside of the cannister had been exposed to the intense cold and harsh chemicals of the Titanian atmosphere.

“It happened right as I opened the case,” Anna said with that same flat tone. I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and locked onto the RTG. “It just cracked right open. I should’ve…” she trailed off. We both knew there was nothing to be done. Despite keeping itself warm all those years, The machine simply wasn’t prepared for such a drastic shift in temperature.  We stood in silence, coming to terms with the situation. After a long time, I spoke up.

“How much power do you have left?” I asked. She snapped out of her daze and looked at her systems guide.

“Thirty percent” she responded.

“Good, me too.” I checked my own systems guide before pulling up the map, furrowing my brow and thinking. “The next cache is roughly thirty kilometers away.” Fuck.

“We’ll never make it.” Anna said, stating the obvious. She spoke quietly.

“True.” I said, before picking up the radio equipment and starting out of the cave. 

“Where are you going?”

“Above, to the top of this cliff band. We’ll get a better field of view for the transmitter there.”

“What? There’s no power! How will you…” she trailed off again as she caught on to the plan. “Oh fuck, Sigur. We can figure something out, you don’t have to do this.”

I turned, locking eyes with her through our helmets. “You’re a scientist, Anna, think about it. There are no other options.” 

She glared at me but said nothing. I turned and started scrambling to the top of the cliff, Anna behind me. Once we made it to the top, I set up the transmitter and unfolded the receiving dish, pointing both into the southern sky. I plugged a thickly insulated cable into the machine, with the other end attached to the batteries in my pack. Thankfully, the transmitter turned on. I selected the emergency broadcast frequency and set an SOS signal on repeat. We sat and waited for ten long minutes, peering out into the mist. Finally, we got a response.

Emergency shuttle enroute. Standby for extraction. ETA four hours, thirty minutes.

I relayed the message to Anna, then sent another message outlining our situation. As I did so, I noticed another emergency message, this time sent to us straight from command, all the way back on Earth:

Evacuate the habitat immediately. We suspect our systems have been compromised by an extremist organization. If you can, disconnect all life support systems from remote control and relocate to the lander.  

Anna had read the message too. We glanced at each other, both of us thinking the same thing: Too late.

It made sense now. There was no way for the station and the shuttle to simultaneously explode unless they were tampered with. I knew that station inside and out, had even designed some of the materials and parts that comprised its structure. I had never thought to consider sabotage as a threat to the building’s integrity, but in retrospect it would have been easy to destroy the station, and the lander for that matter, from the inside if you had access to the system. It disturbed me that someone, a billion miles away, had likely spent the past few months studying the design of my nearly permanent home, finding a way to end my life and the lives of my fellow crew. Fortunately, they spent all that time sinking the ship and somehow forgot to sink the lifeboat. I could tell Anna was thinking the same thing.

“They must have really wanted us dead,” she said.  

“But who?” I asked, turning to Anna, “there’s no way any of those people had enough time or money to hack into NASA’s communications system. Where did they even get the schematics?” It was mind boggling to comprehend. Anna thought for a moment before she responded.

“I don’t know how much you kept up with the news in your absence, but some of those crazy evangelicals were petitioning congress to shut the station down before I left. They thought we had found another Garden of Eden and were afraid of God’s retribution from us disturbing this place. Nobody was taking them seriously though, I mean, the idea is ridiculous!” she put her head in her hands and sighed, before looking up again. “But they are swimming in money.” 

She had a point. I remembered the protesters at the museum that day, so long ago. I had never considered those people to pose any kind of real threat, especially after leaving Earth.  I thought of the angry crowd, and how helen and I had dismissed those people as ignorant and foolish, as people who believed that the choice was made by someone else.

 The Irony of that phrase washed over me. Now, after all this time and all those millions of miles, the choice of where and when I would die was made by someone else. Just like Helen, Just like Inga. It saddened me greatly to think that my crewmates-my friends- had died because of someone else’s fear of God. Anna and I sat in silence for a while before I reached over and unplugged the transmitter, handing the cable to her. We locked eyes again. I could see tears brimming there, through the dull reflection of orange-tan clouded sunlight.  

“How much power do you have left?” Her voice was unsteady, even through the radio. I checked, confirming it twice before responding.

“Ten percent.” The transmitter required a lot of power to run, even for the few minutes I had it turned on. I had enough power to heat my suit for less than an hour.

“We can share power, if we alternate—”

“No. You will barely have enough power if you use all of yours and the rest of mine. You’re the biologist. You need to return the samples we took, tell the world what we found here. I can’t do that.”  I took a deep breath. “I have no family on Earth. I have nothing to return to, and that was my mistake. But you do. I have lived my second life, now you must live yours.” Anna was crying. I was too. I tried to be stoic, but the emotions poured forth. To scatter into the motion of time I thought. The clouds were gorgeous, bringing with them another wave of that slow, heavy rain.

“Okay.” Anna sniffled. “We have sedatives, I can make it easy for you, painless…” Her voice wavered. It was a horrible thing to consider, but a kind offer nonetheless.

“No. I would like to taste the air.” There was nothing else to say. The decision was made.

Catching my breath, controlling my emotions, I took off my pack and disconnected the battery, handing it to Anna. The chill was almost immediate. I shuffled over and put the faceplate of my helmet against hers, so she could hear my words. I spoke loud and clear as the rain began to fall.

“When you arrived here, you said in passing that I reminded you of your father. It was one of the kindest things I have ever heard. If anyone ever doubts you, they are wrong. If my daughter lived, I would have wanted nothing more than for her to be like you. I saw her in your shadow every day.  You have work to do. Set the world on fire, Anna.” She nodded, tearstained, gripping my hand through her glove.

What a strange circumstance I thought, pulling back from Anna. I briefly saw a wave of rain, a cloud of red pollen, dull mist over rocky outcroppings of ice, felt the patter of droplets, the fatigue in my muscles, the biting cold in my fingertips. The sheets of rain looked like stalks of lupine hanging upside down. Saturn was up there beyond the clouds, as well as many other worlds, grains of sand, too many to be counted. I thought about rain, about the few times I stood outside and let my clothes soak and my eyes fill and my skin to finally feel the cold, those few perfect moments of surrender to the dynamo, the chaos and energy in those waves of fragmented ocean. None of it had anything to do with me. My hand rested on the latch on my neck. A thought crossed my mind. How surprising it is to be here at all.

Then, I removed my helmet.

#

The shuttle arrived late. When it did, it landed above the emergency cache in a break between tall, course dunes. A huddled figure made quick time across the flat, crawling up the ladder into the cabin of the craft. When the door was sealed, she cracked her helmet off and gasped, shuddering. It was the coldest she had ever been. As quick as she could, she doffed her suit and tore through the first aid kit, finding an emergency blanket before strapping into the acceleration couch. The shuttle was automated, so as it flew into the dense, cold sky, she looked around at that distant moon for the final time. It was hard to process; her time there had been tumultuous and the fatigue she felt was deep and painful. As she flew, she saw patches of red through the forest, rainclouds and lakes, valleys and mountains of ice. Goodbye Sigur, she thought, with a heavy sense of finality. I will set the world on fire.