“Your turn, ladies,” Joe says to Jacobi and Ishida.
“Ma’am?” Jacobi asks Borden.
Given all Borden’s learned and seen, and reflecting on the implications of her orders, she can’t trust herself, either, or her past views on reality. So we’re all square. Every one of us is nuts.
“Just give us some time,” Borden says to Jacobi.
I close my eyes.
That’s a big mistake.
AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS
I’m usually smarter when I’m not thinking. My subconscious soup simmers all the time, even without the spice of Ice Moon Tea.
Now that I’m out of it, my inner Bug is eager to raise my level of education before we arrive in Saturn space. Proximity to Titan being important. Maybe crucial. I see and feel the broken bits slowly come together—the history of a massive undertaking, the best times of that old moon become clear, but out of sequence—
I take what I can get. And here it is, for what it’s worth:
Back then, Saturn was a brilliant yellow-green ball, slightly bulging around the equator, while chains of small storms drew pastel whorls across her tightly banded surface. No rings, but at least fifty moons, and twelve were big. So how did the bugs see that, know that?
Hush. Close focus in time, more detaiclass="underline"
Our bug ancestors began their push by erecting a huge tower on the seabed, beneath a great wide hollow in the overarching ice shell. The builders were philosophers or thinkers. If you thought it, proposed it, you did it—no delegating back then. Strong minds implied strong backs.
Almost all of the “thoughts” and opinions appear to have come from the smaller, spidery bugs that rode and guided the bigger ones. They discovered through long, careful calculation (what did they count on? They had eleven sets of legs and I can’t begin to figure the bits around the eyes and mouth—) that the fluctuating tides and currents and even heat came from a huge body some distance away. They didn’t then know what a planet is. They’d never seen the stars. But they were intent on solving the problem of where the tides and frictional heat came from. The bugs were digging their way up through the icy crust to find out.
Over a couple of bug lifetimes, the tower rose from the ruined site of their oldest city—which had collapsed long ago in a cataclysmic quake or volcanic eruption. Volcanism on the old ice moon meant eruptions of slushy liquid water filled with gases like ammonia or methane or even cyanide. Up from the rocky core welled regular flows of compressed mixes of water and all these gases, highly saline flows that dissolved buildings and killed hundreds of thousands of fellow bugs….
But that was okay, apparently; the bug thinkers knew that the interior heat and mix of poisons helped explain their origins, how life began here in the first place. Death became a kind of deity to the thinking bugs, as much as they had a god—death and, for an increasing crowd of rarefied intellectuals, whatever caused the tides and friction. Whatever it was that kept them alive. Their god was something they thought they could find. I’m okay with that. I wish it were true for me.
The crustacean intellectuals, crawling hordes of engineers and architects turned builders, carved great chunks of ice and rock and stacked them precisely to rise almost fifty kilometers from where the old city had been, a sacred site for a sacred project. Nearly all of the crustacean cultures and subcultures were down with this, cooperative and cooperating. They seemed to have been more integrated and less argumentative than we are. Maybe more dangerously curious. What would they find as they punched upward with massive drills, manufactured with tremendous effort out of chunks of ancient nickel-iron in the ice moon’s deep core? This is some time before the bugs started creating their crystalline records.
In this bit of history/memory, my most constant point of view is that of a bug who’s going to be the third in line to poke through the hole they dig, rise from the liquid water that fills the hole—capped with a rapidly refreezing crust.
I REFUSE TO be completely subservient. Some of my own memories are rising now. As a kid, I watched documentaries on YouTube about Arctic seals biting through the thin ice to open breathing holes and places to pop up and look around. My inner Bug is nothing like receptive to these memories, but as judge of all that’s emerging from our relationship, I decide it’s a perfect metaphor.
Our bugs are going to wear the crustacean equivalent of pressure suits, big sealed tanks with portholes sized to accommodate their many eyes. The bigger bug will of course get the larger suit, but connections between the suits will continue the interchange both consider essential to life. Designing and making these connections has jump-started new segments of bug industry and communication….
Oh my goodness. The bigger bug is not an “it.” The bigger bug is female. They’re quite good friends, have known each other since they were krill, raised together in crèche, assigned to each other by a master midwife/matchmaker. Now they’re partners. Husband and wife. Not sure what Jacobi or Ishida or even Borden would think of this.
Back to the history lesson. The drills have finished and been withdrawn. A kind of methane-acetylene bomb with a charge of pure oxygen is set off at the center of the bore-hole. The ice flies up into the space beyond. Liquid water floods the open hole, which becomes a giant crack that spreads about half a klick to either side, causing alarming vibrations in the tower and even partial collapse, and sending cascades of ice from the bottom of the ice shell, which kills dozens of bug couples in the viewing stands.
But we’re not distracted. We’re focused in a way that only a bug can be!
And then…
First bug couple is up and out. The larger support suit’s crawling legs and tracks carry it a dozen meters across the darkness beyond, across the rugged and unknown top of their world. Jesus, are they excited—and terrified. Fear is amazingly similar for these bugs, very like fear as I experience it.
Fear and excitement.
Second bug couple is up. No instant death awaits, which some of the more conservative engineers had predicted.
And then…
We compare notes through constant clicking chatter, sonic rather than radio. We don’t know anything about electromagnetism or radio waves. A great civilization, but physics is not our specialty. We do very well with chemistry, better than humans, maybe. As if being blind to the sort of things that enchanted Maxwell and Tesla and Marconi and Einstein gives us extra strength and sensitivity in other disciplines.
The sky is black. We don’t call it the sky—we call it something like roof. (My tongue tries to shape the word—but they don’t have tongues or teeth or lips… so I return to being a bug and don’t try that again.)
Then our lead couple, our lead explorers, posit that perhaps a cloud of vapor has risen over the excavations—likely from the blast that opened the way. Makes sense, so we settle down and go dormant for an hour or so. We don’t even send signals back through the pool down to our waiting comrades. Besides, the pool has frozen over again. We might not even be able to return. We’ve brought along a small drill just to communicate, but that may not be enough.
Hours pass. Finally, we appoint our leader couple as the pair who should rise and orient the suits, big and small, so that the male can see what roof looks like. Maybe it’s another high shell of ice—a favorite hypothesis among our best philosophers down below. One shell after another, and only our own inhabitable, so why bother digging out?