Part 27 (1/2)

The lights along the edge of the platform began to blink, indicating the imminent arrival of a train.

”Hey Rick, are you doing anything this Sunday night?”

”No, not really.”

”The Northern Pikes are at Wolf Trap,” she said. ”I've got tickets. Are you interested?”

”I'd love to. I haven't been to Wolf Trap in ages.”

”Great! Call me.”

”I will.”

A puff of air hit them as the Orange line train emerged from the tunnel and rumbled into the station. Jill's dark hair flew up for a moment. They stood there, looking at each other as the train came to a halt.

Jill Kravitz smiled. She was beautiful.

SIREN OF t.i.tAN.

David DeGraff

In 1880 Thomas Huxley wrote, ”It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superst.i.tions.”

Today scientists and engineers are striving to create machines that are truly intelligent. Their efforts to date have created automobiles that can park themselves and, soon, drive themselves without human oversight.

That frightens some people. ”G.o.d created man in His own image,” they recite, and recoil at the thought of machines that can think the way human beings do.

Or better.

”SIREN of t.i.tan” by David DeGraff is a tragic story of the conflict between the urge to know and the fear of knowledge. Set on a slightly futuristic Earth-and on t.i.tan, the giant moon of Saturn-his tale tells of how scientists and engineers are driven by the urge to know, to learn, to understand. And of how politicians have very different motivations.

Beautiful.

SIREN didn't remember ever looking up before. She was too focused on the rocks along the dry streambed. But now, as she rested, letting her batteries recharge, she looked back. Below, the sh.o.r.e of the dry lake was an easy contrast to the jagged hill she was now climbing. To the right, a shape lingered in the orange haze above the horizon.

How had she not noticed that before?

She switched her eyes to the high-contrast infrared camera, the one that let her see shadows, which made it easier to navigate across the hazy terrain. The bright blur became a jewel, a badly drawn circle streaked with darkness surrounded by a giant arc. The arc was made of myriad ribbons. Other bright points were sprinkled along the sky. When she looked more closely, some others had the same squashed circle shape. Spheres, she realized, Saturn's other moons, illuminated by the sun, which was behind her to the left.

She looked right, over the lake far below her, then back to Saturn. If she traveled ahead, away from the stream, she could catch a view of the lake with Saturn hanging over it.

Beautiful. The need for beauty seemed stronger than her urge to follow the stream to its source, the urge she had been following for the past three weeks, ever since she had landed in the lake bed and started her trek to the source of the river.

It was almost time to sing her data back to Earth, something she was antic.i.p.ating more than she ever had before.

”Wow!”

Kristen Walker looked up from the ma.s.s spectrometer readings. Her PhD advisor, Ed Ramirez, was pointing to a window on the wall of the science operations center at Cornell.

”Look at the image coming in.”

Instead of the usual close-ups of rocks and the streambed, this was a wide vista. Sky mostly, with distant peaks just starting to raster into view.

The window to its right showed the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the other side of the continent. There were a dozen people in the background, all drivers for various probes around the Solar System. Only Barry was a.s.signed to SIREN, but even at JPL, where images from other worlds were everyday events, everyone was staring at the wall as this image came down.

The silence continued as t.i.tan's dry lake bed appeared.

”She's taken a picture of where she just climbed from,” Kristen said. ”It's like she stopped to admire the view.”

”Don't anthropomorphize, Kris,” Ed said without taking his eyes off the screen. ”SIREN's just a machine, a DAMA compliant machine. Its protocol includes taking panoramic views when it stops to recharge. Barry, what's the telemetry?”

”Um, standby, Ithaca,” he said, his eyes now looking below the camera. ”It climbed up a steep section, so it does need to stop for a few minutes. Short-term power storage is down to forty percent. That would be a rest stop.”

Kristen really wished her advisor had sent her out to Pasadena to work on the probe, but Ed had other things for her to do in Ithaca. Getting away from the winters would have been nice, but staying in town with Bob, a grad student in computer science almost made up for it. Besides, wasn't it better to study the methane version of the hydrological cycle in a city with so much rain?

”Do we have any science in this image, Kristen?” Ed asked, snapping her out of her daydream.

”Yes. At the very minimum we can see how the smog levels change with alt.i.tude. Those hills look pretty hazy.”

”Good. So it's not a total loss.”

”New image coming in from the high-contrast camera,” Barry said as the first image blinked off the main window, and reappeared on the left.

”That's weird,” she said as a view of the sky started rastering. ”It pointed the high-contrast camera at the sky instead of the ground.”

This was the oddest view of Saturn anyone had ever seen. t.i.tan's hazy atmosphere made seeing relief difficult, so SIREN's navigation camera was in an infrared wavelength where sunlight could penetrate the hydrocarbon smog. Small mounds and rocks stood out more easily, which made it easier for SIREN to navigate her way around the surface. But SIREN had pointed the navigation camera at the sky instead. Sunlight could penetrate the atmosphere, whether it came directly from the sun or was first reflected off Saturn.

s.p.a.cecraft had been taking pictures of gibbous and crescent phases of Saturn since before Kristen was born, unusual because, from Earth, Saturn is always face-on to the sun. A gibbous Saturn as part of a landscape, this was a first. It wasn't the familiar Saturn in another way, too. Usually, subtle bands of slightly different shades of b.u.t.terscotch crossed its face. A casual observer could miss them, but at this wavelength, the belts had a much stronger contrast, almost black, more like Jupiter. Except for the rings of course. This wavelength didn't scatter off the tiniest particles as well as visible light, and the rings were more subdued. Saturn didn't look like as much of a show-off.

SIREN had yearned for the source even before she had begun to wonder. The source. The spring where liquid methane gurgled from the ground and trickled down an ever-expanding stream to reach the lake. The lake was dry now, probably a seasonal thing. Were the lakes seasonal because of a lack of methane rain, or was it because the springs dried up?

New thoughts had been tickling the back of her mind, though. Beauty. Curiosity. Things she couldn't quite understand, things that didn't seem right, but she couldn't explain why.

She climbed, raising four of her spindly legs, placing them on the ground, then raising the other four legs, and continuing. Up. She wanted to go up, even though something told her she should be heading back to the stream, and following that. The source was her fundamental question, but something else was urging her up. She angled a little to the left to partially satisfy her primal urge, but still kept upward. Why? The view? Would the view be worth it? She didn't know, but taking interesting pictures was part of her desire, and if there was a chance it would be good, then she felt the need to do it.