Titan (GAIA) (7 page)

Cirocco had grown up big and lonely, having only her mother for a friend. She first saw the United States when she was twelve. By then she could read and write, and could not be developmentally harmed by the American school system. Her emotional development was another matter. She did not make friends easily, but was fiercely loyal to those she had. Her mother had firm ideas on how to raise a young lady, and they included handguns and karate as well as dancing and voice lessons. Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. Only she herself knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret—one she kept so well that she fooled the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.

And how much of that was true? she wondered. There was no point in lying here. Yes, the responsibility of command frightened her. Perhaps all commanders were secretly unsure of themselves, knew deep inside that they were not good enough for the responsibility thrust upon them. But it wasn’t the sort of thing one asked about. What if the others
weren’t
scared? Then your secret was out.

She found herself wondering how she had come to command a ship, if it was not what she wanted. What
did
she want?

I’d like to get out of here,
she tried to say.
I’d like something to happen.

Presently, something did happen.

She felt a wall with her left hand. In time, she felt another with her right. The walls were warm, smooth, and resilient, just as she imagined the inside of a stomach would be. She could feel them moving past her hands.

And they began to narrow.

She lodged, headfirst, in an uneven tunnel. The walls began to contract. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic. Tight spaces had never bothered her before.

The walls pulsed and rippled, pushing her forward until her head slipped through into coolness and a rough texture. She was squeezed; fluid bubbled out of her lungs and she coughed, inhaled, found her mouth filled with grit. She coughed again and more fluid came out, but now her shoulders were free and
she ducked her head in the darkness to avoid getting another mouthful. She wheezed and spit, and began to breathe from her nose.

Her arms came free, then her hips, and she began digging at the spongy material that enclosed her. It smelled like a childhood day spent in a cool, bare earth basement, in the narrow space adults visit only if the plumbing is acting up. It smelled like nine years old and digging in the dirt.

One leg came free, then the other, and she rested with her head bent into the air pocket formed by her arms and chest. Her breath came in wet spasms.

Dirt crumbled behind her neck and rolled down her body until it nearly filled her air space. She was buried, but she was alive. It was time to dig, but she could not use her arms.

Fighting panic, she forced herself up with her legs. Her thigh muscles knotted, her joints cracked, but she felt the mass above her yielding.

Her head broke through into light and air. Gasping, spitting, she pulled one arm out of the ground, then the other, and clawed at what felt like cool grass. She crawled from the hole on hands and knees and collapsed. She dug her fingers into the blessed ground and cried herself to sleep.

Cirocco didn’t want to wake up. She fought it, pretending she was asleep. When she felt the grass fading away and the darkness returning she opened her eyes quickly.

Centimeters from her nose was a pale green carpet that looked like grass. It smelled like it, too. It was the kind of grass found only on the greens of the better golf courses. But it was warmer than the air, and she couldn’t account for that. Perhaps it wasn’t grass at all.

She rubbed her hand over it and sniffed again. Call it grass.

She sat up and something clanked, distracting her. A gleaming metal band circled her neck, and other, smaller ones were on her arms and legs. Many strange objects dangled from the large band, held together by wire. She slipped it off and wondered where she had seen it before.

It was amazingly difficult to concentrate. The thing in her hand was so complex, so various; too much for her scattered wits.

It was her pressure suit, stripped of all the plastic and rubber seals. Most of the suit had been plastic. Nothing remained but the metal.

She made a pile of the parts, and in the process realized just how naked she was. Beneath a coating of dirt her body was completely hairless. Even her eyebrows were gone. For some reason that made her very sad.

She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

Cirocco did not cry easily, nor often. She was not good at it. But after a very long time she thought she knew who she was again.

Now she could find out where she was.

Perhaps a half hour later she felt ready to move. But that decision spawned a dozen questions. Move, but to where?

She had intended to explore Themis, but that was when she had a spaceship and the resources of Earth’s nest technology. Now she had her bare skin and a few bits of metal.

She was in a forest composed of grass and one species of tree. She called them trees by the same
reasoning she had used on the grass. If it’s seventy meters tall, has a brown, round trunk and what looks like leaves far above, then it’s a tree. Which did not mean it might not cheerfully eat her if given the chance.

She had to get the worries down to a manageable level. Rule out the things you can do nothing about, don’t fret too much about the things you can do little about. And remember that if you’re as cautious as sanity would seem to dictate, you’ll starve to death in a cave.

The air was in the first category. It could contain a poison.

“So stop breathing, at once!” she said, aloud. Right. At least it smelled fresh, and she was not coughing.

Water was something she could do little about. Eventually she would have to drink some, assuming she could find it—which should go right to the top of her list. When she found it, perhaps she could make a fire and boil it. If not, she would drink, microscopic bugs and all.

And then there was food, which worried her more than anything. Even if there was nothing around that wanted to make a meal of her, there was no way of knowing if the food she ate would poison her. Or it might be no more nourishing than cellophane.

If that wasn’t enough, there was the calculated risk. How do you calculate what is risky when a tree might not be a tree?

They didn’t even look that much like trees. The trunks were like polished marble. The high branches were parallel to the ground and ran for a precise distance before making a right angle. Above, the leaves were flat, like lily pads, and three or four meters across.

What was foolhardy and what was overcautious? There was no guidebook, and the dangers would not be marked. But without a few assumptions she could not move, and she had to get moving. She was getting hungry.

She set her jaw, then stamped over to the nearest tree. She smacked it with the palm of her hand. It just stood there, supremely indifferent.

“Just a dumb tree.”

She examined the hole she had emerged from.

It was a raw brown wound in the neat expanse of grass. Patches of sod, held together by a feathery root structure, lay upside-down around it. The hole itself was only half a meter deep; the sides had crumbled to fill the rest.

“Something tried to eat me,” she said. “Something ate all the organic parts of my suit, and all my hair, then excreted the junk right here. Including me.” She noted in passing that she was glad the thing had classified her as junk.

It was a hell of a beast. They knew the outer part of the torus—the ground she was sitting on—was thirty kilometers thick. This thing was large enough to snag
Ringmaster
while the ship orbitted 400 kilometers away. She had spent a long time in its belly and for some reason had proved indigestible. It had burrowed through the ground to this point, and expelled her.

And that just didn’t make sense. If it could eat plastic, why couldn’t it eat her? Were ship’s captains too tough?

It had eaten her whole
ship
, pieces as large as the engine module, others just tiny bits of glass or rumbling, dwindling spacesuited figures with dented helmets …

“Bill!” She was on her feet, every muscle in her body straining. “Bill! I’m
here
. I’m alive! Where are you?”

She slapped her forehead with her hand. If only she could get through this muddy-headed feeling when thoughts were coming so slowly. She had not forgotten about the crew, but it was not until that
moment that she connected them with the new-born Cirocco standing naked and hairless on the warm ground.

“Bill!” she shouted again. She listened, then collapsed with her legs folded under her. She plucked at the grass.

Think it through. Presumably, the creature would have treated him as another piece of debris. But he had been injured.

So had she, now that she thought of it. She examined her thighs and found not even a bruise. It told her nothing. She might have been inside the creature for five years, or only a few months.

Any of the others might arrive and be pushed out of the ground at any time. Somewhere down there, about a meter and a half deep, was some kind of excretory outlet for the creature. If she waited, and if the creature didn’t like the taste of all humans and not just ones named Cirocco, they might all get together again.

She sat down to wait for them.

Half an hour later (or was it only ten minutes?) it didn’t make sense. The creature was
big
. It had eaten
Ringmaster
like an after-dinner mint. It must extend through a great part of the underworld of Themis, and it didn’t make sense to think this one orifice could handle all the traffic. There could be others, and they could be scattered all over the countryside.

A little later she had another thought. They were coming far apart, but they were coming, and she was grateful for that. The thought was simple: she was thirsty, she was hungry, and she was filthy. What she wanted most in the world was water.

The land sloped gently. She was willing to bet there would be a stream down there somewhere.

She stood and poked at the pile of metal pieces with one foot. There was too much to carry, but the junk was all she had for tools. She took one of the smaller rings, then picked up the larger one which had been the bottom of her helmet and was still connected to the dangling electronic components.