Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this selection of uncollected and unpublished stories, newly edited and placed in chronological reading order. From tales charting the earliest days of man's adventure to the stars to stories of Old Earth, four billion years in the future, the range and startling imagination of Baxter is always on display. As humanity rises and falls, ebbs and flows, one thing is always needed - the ability to endure. Contains eleven short stories and novellas.

Release date: September 17, 2015

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 446

Sample

 

1

‘There’s always been something wrong with Titan.’

These were the first words I ever heard Harry Poole speak – though I didn’t know the man at the time – words that cut through my hangover like a drill.

‘It’s been obvious since the first primitive probes got there seventeen hundred years ago.’ He had the voice of an old man, eighty, maybe even ninety, a scratchy texture. ‘A moon with a blanket of air, a moon that cradles a whole menagerie of life under its thick atmosphere. But that atmosphere’s not sustainable.’

‘Well, the mechanism is clear enough. Greenhouse effects from the methane component keep the air from cooling and freezing out.’ This was another man’s voice, gravelly, sombre, the voice of a man who took himself too seriously. A voice that sounded familiar. ‘Sunlight drives methane reactions that dump complex hydrocarbons in the stratosphere—’

‘But, son, where does the methane come from?’ Harry Poole pressed. ‘It’s destroyed by the very reactions that manufacture all those stratospheric hydrocarbons. Should all be gone in a few million years, ten million tops. So what replenishes it?’

At that moment I could not have cared less about the problem of methane on Saturn’s largest moon, even though, I suppose, it was a central facet of my own career. The fog in my head, thicker than Titan’s tholin haze, was lifting slowly, and I became aware of my body, aching in unfamiliar ways, stretched out on some kind of couch.

‘Maybe some geological process.’ This was a woman’s voice, brisk. ‘That or an ecology, a Gaia process that keeps the methane levels up. Those are the obvious options.’

‘Surely, Miriam,’ Harry Poole said. ‘One or the other. That’s been obvious since the methane on Titan was first spotted from Earth. But nobody knows. Oh, there have been a handful of probes over the centuries, but nobody’s taken Titan seriously enough to nail it. Always too many other easy targets for exploration and colonisation – Mars, the ice moons. Nobody’s even walked on Titan!’

Another man, a third, said, ‘But the practical problems – the heat loss in that cold air – it was always too expensive to bother, Harry. And too risky . . .’

‘No. Nobody had the vision to see the potential of the place. That’s the real problem. And now we’re hamstrung by these damn sentience laws.’

‘But you think we need to go explore.’ That gravel voice.

‘We need Titan, son,’ Harry Poole said. ‘It’s the only hope I see of making our wormhole link at Saturn pay for itself. Titan is, ought to be, the key to opening up Saturn and the whole outer System. We need to prove the sentience laws don’t apply there, and move in and start opening it up. That’s what this is all about.’

The woman spoke again. ‘And you think this wretched creature is the key.’

‘Given he’s a sentience curator, and a crooked one at that, yes . . .’

When words like ‘wretched’ or ‘crooked’ are bandied about in my company it’s generally Jovik Emry, my good self, that’s being discussed. I took this as a cue to open my eyes. Some kind of glassy dome stretched over my head, and beyond that a slice of sky-blue. I recognised the Earth as seen from space. And there was something else, a sculpture of electric-blue thread that drifted over a rumpled cloud layer.

‘Oh, look,’ said the woman. ‘It’s alive.’

I stretched, swivelled and sat up. I was stiff and sore, and had a peculiar ache at the back of my neck, just beneath my skull. I looked around at my captors. There were four of them, three men and a woman, all watching me with expressions of amused contempt. Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d woken with a steaming hangover in an unknown place surrounded by strangers. I would recover quickly. I was as young and healthy as I could afford to be: I was over forty, but AS-preserved at my peak of twenty-three.

We sat on couches at the centre of a cluttered circular deck, domed over by a scuffed carapace. I was in a GUTship, then, a standard interplanetary transport, if an elderly one; I had travelled in such vessels many times, to Saturn and back. Through the clear dome I could see more of those electric-blue frames drifting before the face of the Earth. They were tetrahedral, and their faces were briefly visible, like soap films that glistened gold before disappearing. These were the mouths of wormholes, flaws in spacetime, and the golden shivers were glimpses of other worlds.

I knew where I was. ‘This is Earthport.’ My throat was dry as Moondust, but I tried to speak confidently.

‘Well, you’re right about that.’ This was the man who had led the conversation earlier. That ninety-year-old voice, comically, came out of the face of a boy of maybe twenty-five, with blond hair, blue eyes, a smooth AntiSenescence marvel. The other two men looked around sixty, but with AS so prevalent it was hard to tell. The woman was tall, her hair cut short, and she wore a functional jumpsuit; she might have been forty-five. The old-young man spoke again. ‘My name is Harry Poole. Welcome to the Hermit Crab, which is my son’s ship—’

‘Welcome? You’ve drugged me and brought me here—’

One of the sixty-year-olds laughed, the gruff one. ‘Oh, you didn’t need drugging; you did that to yourself.’

‘You evidently know me – and I think I know you.’ I studied him. He was heavy set, dark, not tall, with a face that wasn’t built for smiling. ‘You’re Michael Poole, aren’t you? Poole the wormhole engineer.’

Poole just looked back at me. Then he said to the blond man, ‘Harry, I have a feeling we’re making a huge mistake trying to work with this guy.’

Harry grinned. ‘Give it time, son. You’ve always been an idealist. You’re not used to working with people like this. I am. We’ll get what we want out of him.’

I turned to him. ‘Harry Poole. You’re Michael’s father, aren’t you?’ I laughed at them. ‘A father who AS-restores himself to an age younger than your son. How crass. And, Harry, you really ought to get something done about that voice.’

The third man spoke. ‘I agree with Michael, Harry. We can’t work with this clown.’ He was on the point of being overweight, and had a crumpled, careworn face. I labelled him as a corporate man who had grown old labouring to make somebody else rich – probably Michael Poole and his father.

I smiled easily, unfazed. ‘And you are?’

‘Bill Dzik. And I’ll be working with you if we go through with this planned jaunt to Titan. Can’t say it’s an idea I like.’

This was the first I had heard of a trip to Titan. Well, whatever they wanted of me, I’d had quite enough of the dismal hellhole of the Saturn system, and had no intention of going back now. I had been in worse predicaments before; it was just a question of playing for time and looking for openings. I rubbed my temples. ‘Bill – can I call you Bill? I don’t suppose you could fetch me a coffee?’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ he growled.

‘Tell me why you kidnapped me.’

‘That’s simple,’ Harry said. ‘We want you to take us down to Titan.’

Harry snapped his fingers, and a Virtual image coalesced before us, a bruised orange spinning in the dark: Titan. It hung before Saturn itself, which was a pale-yellow crescent with those tremendous rings spanning space, and more moons suspended like lanterns. And there, glimmering in orbit just above the plane of the rings, was a baby-blue tetrahedral frame, the mouth of Michael Poole’s latest wormhole, a hyper-dimensional road offering access to Saturn and all its wonders – a road, it seemed, rarely travelled.

‘That would be illegal,’ I pointed out.

‘I know. And that’s why we need you.’ And Harry grinned, a cold expression on that absurdly young face.

 

2

‘If it’s an expert on Titan you want,’ I said, ‘keep looking.’

‘You’re a curator,’ Miriam said, contempt thick in her voice. ‘You work for the intra-System oversight panel on sentience law compliance. Titan is in your charge!’

‘Not by choice,’ I murmured. ‘Look – as you evidently targeted me, you must know something of my background. I haven’t had an easy career . . .’ My life at school, supported by my family’s money, had been a saga of drunken jaunts, sexual escapades, petty thieving and vandalism. As a young man I never lasted long at any of the jobs my family found for me, largely because I was usually on the run from some wronged party or other.

Harry said, ‘Some career. In the end you got yourself sentenced to an editing, didn’t you?’

If the authorities had had their way I would have had the contents of my much-abused brain downloaded into an external store, my memories edited, my unhealthy impulses ‘reprogrammed’, and the lot loaded back again – my whole self rebooted. ‘It represented death to me,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have been the same man as I was before. My father took pity on me—’

‘And bought you out of your sentence,’ Bill Dzik said. ‘And got you a job in sentience compliance. A sinecure.’

I looked at Titan’s dismal colours. ‘It is a miserable posting. But it pays a bit, and nobody cares much what you get up to, within reason. I’ve only been out a few times to Saturn itself, and the orbit of Titan; the work’s mostly admin, run from Earth. I’ve held down the job. Well, I really don’t have much choice.’

Michael Poole studied me as if I were a vermin infesting one of his marvellous interplanetary installations. ‘This is the problem I’ve got with agencies like the sentience-oversight curacy. I might even agree with its goals. But it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to achieve, all it does is get in the way of enterprise, and it’s populated by time-wasters like you.’

I found myself taking a profound dislike to the man. Whatever my faults I’m no hypocrite, and I’ve never been able to stomach being preached at. ‘I did nobody any harm,’ I snapped back at him. ‘Not much, anyhow. Not like you with your grand schemes, Poole, reordering the whole System for your own profit.’

Michael would have responded, but Harry held up his hand. ‘Let’s not get into that again. And after all he’s right. Profit, or the lack of it, is the issue here. As for you, Jovik, even in this billion-kilometres-remote “sinecure” you’re still up to your old tricks, aren’t you?’

I said nothing, cautious until I worked out how much he knew.

Harry waved his hand at his Virtual projection. ‘Look – Titan is infested with life. That’s the basic conclusion of the gaggle of probes that, over the centuries, have orbited Titan or penetrated its thick air and crawled over its surface or dug into its icy sand. But life isn’t the point. The whole Solar System is full of life. Life is commonplace. The question is sentience. And sentience holds up progress.’

‘It’s happened to us before,’ Michael Poole said to me. ‘The development consortium I lead, that is. We were establishing a wormhole Interface at a Kuiper object called Baked Alaska, thirteen years back, out on the rim of the System. Our plan was to use the ice as reaction mass to fuel GUTdrive starships. Well, we discovered life there, life of a sort, and it wasn’t long before we identified sentience. The xenobiologists called it a Forest of Ancestors. The project ground to a halt; we had to evacuate the place—’

‘Given the circumstances in which you’ve brought me here,’ I said, ‘I’m not even going to feign interest in your war stories.’

‘All right,’ Harry said. ‘But you can see the issue with Titan. Look, we want to open it up for development. It’s a factory of hydrocarbons and organics. We can make breathable air: nitrogen from the atmosphere, and oxygen extracted from water ice. We can use all that methane and organic chemistry to make plastics or fuel or even food. Titan should be the launch pad for the opening-up of the outer System, indeed the stars. But we’re not going to be allowed to develop Titan if there’s sentience there. And our problem is that, on this world with plenty of biochemistry and primitive life, nobody has established that there isn’t intelligence too.’

I started to see it. ‘So you want to mount a quick and dirty expedition – incidentally violating the planetary-protection aspects of the sentience laws – prove there’s no significant mind down there, and get the clearance to move in the digging machines. Right?’ And I saw how Bill Dzik, Miriam and Michael Poole exchanged unhappy glances. There was dissension in the team over the morality of all this, a crack I might be able to exploit. ‘Why do you need this so badly?’ I asked.

So they told me. It was a saga of interplanetary ambition. But at the root of it, as is always the case, was money – or the lack of it.

 

3

Harry Poole said, ‘You know our business, Jovik. Our wormhole engineering is laying down rapid-transit routes through the System, which will open up a whole family of worlds to colonisation and development. But we have grander ambitions than that.’

I asked, ‘What ambitions? Starships? I read about that.’

‘That and more,’ Michael Poole said. ‘For the last few decades we’ve been working on an experimental ship being built in the orbit of Jupiter . . .’

And he told me about his precious Cauchy project. By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light years across, the GUTship Cauchy would establish a wormhole bridge – not across space – but across fifteen centuries, to the future. So, having already connected the worlds of humanity with his wormhole subway, Michael Poole now hoped to short-circuit past and future themselves. That, at least, seemed to be the idea. I looked at Poole with new respect, and some fear. The man was a genius, or mad.

‘But,’ I said, ‘to fund such dreams you need money.’

Harry said, ‘Jovik, you need to understand that a mega-engineering business like ours is a ferocious devourer of cash. It’s like the days of the pioneering railway builders back in the nineteenth century. We fund each new project with the profit of our previous ventures and with fresh investment – but that investment depends on the success of earlier schemes.’

‘Ah. And now you’re stumbling. Yes? And this is all to do with Saturn.’

Harry sighed. ‘The Saturn transit was a logical development. The trouble is, nobody needs to go there. Saturn pales beside Jupiter! Saturn has ice moons; well, there are plenty in orbit around Jupiter. Saturn’s atmosphere could be mined, but so can Jupiter’s, at half the distance from Earth.’

Miriam said, ‘Saturn also lacks Jupiter’s ferociously energetic external environment, which we’re tapping ourselves in the manufacture of the Cauchy.’

‘Fascinating,’ I lied. ‘You’re an engineer too, then?’

‘A physicist,’ she replied, awkward. She sat next to Michael Poole but apart from him. I wondered if there was anything deeper between them.

‘The point,’ said Harry, ‘is that there’s nothing at Saturn you’d want to go there for – no reason for our expensive wormhole link to be used. Nothing except—’

‘Titan,’ I said.

‘If we can’t go in legally, we need somebody to break us through the security protocols and get us down there.’

‘So you turned to me.’

‘The last resort,’ said Bill Dzik with disgust in his voice.

‘We tried your colleagues,’ Miriam said. ‘They all said no.’

‘Well, that’s typical of that bunch of prigs.’

Harry, always a diplomat, smiled at me. ‘So we’re having to bend a few pettifogging rules, but you have to see the vision, man, you have to see the greater good.’

‘Have I? Actually the question is, what’s in it for me? You know I’ve come close to the editing suites before. Why should I take the risk of helping you now?’

‘Because,’ Harry said, ‘if you don’t you’ll certainly face a reboot.’ So now we came to the dirty stuff, and Harry took over; he was clearly the key operator in this little cabal, with the engineer types uncomfortably out of their depth. ‘We know about your sideline.’

With a sinking feeling I asked, ‘What sideline?’

And he used his Virtual display to show me. There went one of my doctored probes arrowing into Titan’s thick air, a silver needle that stood out against the murky organic backdrop, supposedly on a routine monitoring mission – but in fact with a quite different objective.

There are pockets of liquid water to be found just under Titan’s surface – frozen-over crater lakes, kept warm for a few thousand years by the residual heat of the impacts that created them. My probe now shot straight through the icy carapace of one of those crater lakes, and into the liquid water beneath. Harry fast-forwarded and we watched the probe’s ascent module push its way out of the lake and up into the air, on its way to my colleagues’ base on Enceladus.

‘You’re sampling the subsurface life from the lakes,’ Harry said sternly. ‘And selling the results.’

I shrugged; there was no point denying it. ‘I guess you know the background. The creatures down there are related to Earth life, but very distantly. Different numbers of amino acids, or something – I don’t know. The tiniest samples are gold dust to the biochemists, a whole new toolkit for designer drugs and genetic manipulation . . .’ I had one get-out. ‘You’ll have trouble proving this. By now there won’t be a trace of our probes left on the surface.’ Which was true; one of the many ill-understood aspects of Titan was that probes sent down to its surface quickly failed and disappeared, perhaps as a result of some kind of geological resurfacing.

Harry treated that with the contempt it deserved. ‘We have full records. Samples of the material you stole from Titan. Even a sworn statement by one of your partners.’

I flared at that. ‘Who?’ But, of course, it didn’t matter.

Harry said sweetly, ‘The point is the sheer illegality – and committed by you, a curator, whose job is precisely to guard against such things. If this gets to your bosses, it’s back to the editing suite for you, my friend, and this time even Papa won’t be able to bail you out.’

‘So that’s it. Blackmail.’ I did my best to inject some moralistic contempt into my voice. And it worked; Michael, Miriam, Bill wouldn’t meet my eyes.

But it didn’t wash with Harry. ‘Not the word I’d use. But that’s pretty much it, yes. So what’s it to be? Are you with us? Will you lead us to Titan?’

I wasn’t about to give in yet. I got to my feet. ‘At least let me think about it. You haven’t even offered me that coffee.’

Michael glanced at Harry, who pointed at a dispenser on a stand near my couch. ‘Use that one.’

There were other dispensers in the cabin – why that particular one? I filed away the question and walked over to the dispenser. At a command it produced a mug of what smelled like coffee. I sipped it gratefully and took a step across the floor towards the transparent dome.

‘Hold it,’ Michael snapped.

‘I just want to take in the view.’

Miriam said, ‘OK, but don’t touch anything. Follow that yellow path.’

I grinned at her. ‘Don’t touch anything? What am I, contagious?’ I wasn’t sure what was going on, but probing away at these little mysteries had to help. ‘Please. Walk with me. Show me what you intend to do here.’

Miriam hesitated for a heartbeat. Then, with an expression of deep distaste, she got to her feet. She was taller than I was, and lithe, strong-looking.

We walked together across the lifedome, a half-sphere a hundred metres wide. Couches, control panels and data entry and retrieval ports were clustered around the geometric centre of the dome; the rest of the transparent floor area was divided up by shoulder-high partitions into lab areas, a galley, a gym, a sleeping area and shower. The layout looked obsessively plain and functional to me. This was the vessel of a man who lived for work, and only that; if this was Michael Poole’s ship, it was a bleak portrait of him.

We reached the curving hull. Glancing down I could see the ship’s spine, a complex column a couple of kilometres long leading to the lode of asteroid ice used for reaction mass by the GUTdrive module within. And all around us wormhole Interfaces drifted like snowflakes, while intra-System traffic passed endlessly through the great gateways.

‘All this is a manifestation of your lover’s vision,’ I said to Miriam, who stood by me.

‘Michael’s not my lover,’ she shot back, irritated. The electric-blue light of the exotic-matter frames shone on her cheekbones.

‘I don’t even know your full name,’ I said.

‘Berg,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Miriam Berg.’

‘Believe it or not, I’m not a criminal. I’m no hero, and I don’t pretend to be. I just want to get through my life, and have a little fun on the way. I shouldn’t be here, and nor should you.’ Deliberately I reached for her shoulder. A bit of physical contact might break through that reserve.

But my fingers passed through her flesh, breaking up into a mist of pixels until they were clear of her flesh, and then reformed. I felt a distant ache in my head.

I stared at Miriam Berg. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said gravely.

 

I sat on my couch once more – my couch, a Virtual projection like me, the only one in the dome I wouldn’t have fallen through, and sipped a coffee from my Virtual dispenser, the only one that I could touch.

It was, predictably, Harry Poole’s scheme. ‘Just in case the arm-twisting over the sample-stealing from Titan wasn’t enough.’

‘I’m a Virtual copy,’ I said.

‘Strictly speaking, an identity backup . . .’

I had heard of identity backups, but could never afford one myself, nor indeed fancied it much. Before undertaking some hazardous jaunt you could download a copy of yourself into a secure memory store. If you were severely injured or killed, the backup could be loaded into a restored body, or a vat-grown cloned copy, or even allowed to live on in some Virtual environment. You would lose the memories you had acquired after the backup was made, but that was better than non-existence . . . That was the theory. In my opinion it was an indulgence of the rich; you saw backup Virtuals appearing like ghosts at the funerals of their originals, distastefully lapping up the sentiment.

And besides, the backup could never be you, the you who had died; only a copy could survive. That was the idea that started to terrify me now. I am no fool, and imaginative to a fault.

Harry watched me taking this in.

I could barely ask the question: ‘What about me? The original. Did I die?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘The real you is in the hold, suspended. We took the backup after you were already unconscious.’

So that explained the ache at the back of my neck: that was where they had jacked into my nervous system. I got up and paced around. ‘And if I refuse to help? You’re a pack of crooks and hypocrites, but I can’t believe you’re deliberate killers.’

Michael would have answered, but Harry held up his hand, unperturbed. ‘Look, it needn’t be that way. If you agree to work with us, you, the Virtual you, will be loaded back into the prime version. You’ll have full memories of the whole episode.’

‘But I won’t be me.’ I felt rage building. ‘I mean, the copy sitting here. I won’t exist any more – any more than I existed a couple of hours ago, when you activated me.’ That was another strange and terrifying thought. ‘I will have to die! And that’s even if I cooperate. Great deal you’re offering. Well, into Lethe with you. If you’re going to kill me anyway I’ll find a way to hurt you. I’ll get into your systems like a virus. You can’t control me.’

‘But I can.’ Harry clicked his fingers.

And in an instant everything changed. The four of them had gathered by Harry’s couch, the furthest from me. I had been standing; now I was sitting. And beyond the curved wall of the transparent dome, I saw that we had drifted into Earth’s night.

‘How long?’ I whispered.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Harry said carelessly. ‘You have an off switch. Of course I can control you. So which is it to be? Permanent extinction for all your copies, or survival as a trace memory in your host?’ His grin hardened, and his young-old face was cold.

 

So the Hermit Crab wheeled in space, seeking out the wormhole Interface that led to Saturn. And I, or rather he who had briefly believed he was me, submitted to a downloading back into his primary, myself. How ironic that this was a violation of the very sentience protection laws it was my duty to uphold.

He, the identity copy, died to save my life. I salute him.

 

4

Released from my cell of suspended animation, embittered, angry, I chose to be alone.

I walked to the very rim of the lifedome, where the transparent carapace met the solid floor. Looking down I could see the flaring of superheated, ionised steam pouring from the GUTdrive nozzles. The engine, as you would expect, was one of Poole’s own designs. ‘GUT’ stands for ‘Grand Unified Theory’, which describes the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. This is creation physics. Thus men like Michael Poole use the energies which once drove the expansion of the universe itself for the triviality of pushing forward their steam rockets.

Soon the Hermit Crab drove us into the mouth of the wormhole that led to the Saturn system.

We flew lifedome first at the wormhole Interface, so that it was as if the electric-blue tetrahedral frame came down on us from the zenith. Those electric-blue struts were beams of exotic matter, a manifestation of a kind of antigravity field that kept this throat in space and time from collapsing. Every so often you would see the glimmer of a triangular face, a sheen of golden light filtering through from Saturn’s dim halls. It was quite beautiful, a sculpture of light.

The frame bore down, widening in my view, and fell around us, obscuring the view of Earth and Earthport.

Now I was looking up into a kind of tunnel, picked out by flaring sheets of light. This was a flaw in spacetime itself; the flashing I saw was the resolution of that tremendous strain into exotic particles and radiations. As the ship thrust deeper into the wormhole, fragments of blue-white light swam from a vanishing point directly above my head and swarmed down the spacetime walls. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity. The lifedome creaked like a tin shack, and I thought I could hear that elderly GUTdrive screaming with the strain. I gripped a rail and tried not to cower.

The passage was at least mercifully short. Amid a shower of exotic particles we ascended out of another electric-blue Interface – and I found myself back in the Saturn system, for the first time in years.

I could see immediately that we were close to the orbit of Titan about its primary, for the planet itself, suspended in the scuffed sky of the lifedome, was about the size I remembered it: a flattened globe a good bit larger than the Moon seen from Earth. Other moons hung around the sky, points of light. The sun was off to the right, with its close cluster of inner planets, so Saturn was half-full. Saturn’s only attractive feature, the rings, were invisible, for Titan’s orbit is in the same equatorial plane as the ring system and the rings are edge-on. But the shadow of the rings cast by the sun lay across the planet’s face, sharp and unexpected.

There was nothing romantic in the view, nothing beautiful about it, not to me. The light was flat and pale. Saturn is about ten times as far from the sun as Earth is, and the sun is reduced to an eerie pinpoint, its radiance only a hundredth that at Earth: Saturn is misty and murky, an autumnal place. And you never forgot you were far from home when a human hand, held out at arm’s length towards the sun, could have covered all of the orbit of Earth.

The Crab swung about and Titan itself was revealed, a globe choked by murky brown cloud from pole to pole, even more dismal and uninviting than its primary. Evidently Michael Poole had placed his wormhole Interface close to the moon in anticipation that Titan would someday serve his purposes.

Titan was looming larger, swelling visibly. Our destination was obvious.

 

Harry Poole took charge. He had us put on heavy, thick-layered exosuits of a kind I’d never seen before. We sat on our couches like fat pupae; my suit was so thick my legs wouldn’t bend properly.

‘Here’s the deal,’ Harry said, evidently for my benefit. ‘The Crab came out of the wormhole barrelling straight for Titan. That way we hope to get you down there before any of the automated surveillance systems up here can spot us, or do anything about it. In a while the Crab will brake into orbit around Titan. But before then you four in the gondola will be thrown straight into an atmospheric entry.’ He snapped his fingers, and a hatch opened up in the floor beneath us to reveal the interior of another craft, mated to the base of the lifedome. This was evidently the ‘gondola’, some kind of landing shuttle. It was like a cave, brightly lit and with its walls crusted with data displays.

I said, ‘“Thrown straight in,” Harry? And what about you?’

He smiled with that young-old face. ‘I will be waiting for