That Tiny Life

Finally, data transmission from Corporate: a video file projects recent satellite footage of Saturn as a hologram above the galley table between Barry and me. The light of the little ringed planet casts a tan hue upwards onto the galley’s overhead shielding and over the metal table where the two of us are seated, in the centre of TitanMineZero’s Habitat Module waiting out the Megastorm.

The hologram starts with rotation; the satellite’s long-range imager pulls away from Saturn and shifts focus to one of Saturn’s moons — Titan is a hazy brown marble. Then the visual constricts to the moon’s northern hemisphere and zooms in on a swirl of orange cloud where I approximate our outpost — and current location — to be. The glow from the holoprojection brightens the galley we’ve barricaded ourselves inside: four hundred square feet, absolute shielding. All hatches to the garden, equipment, and living modules double-sealed in case of a breach in thermal containment (it’s cold out there, and the thunder, abated now, was so frequent it shook us like a train passing my living complex back home).

I laugh, I can’t help it. We’re both startled by the transmission popping into life, but holy 他妈的, that splash of colour above the table is a relief — it means telecommunications is chatting with the satellite again, and that Barry and I are back in touch with Earth. I know we’re a couple billion kilometres from the home planet, that we’re planted on Titan under the atmospheric mess flickering in the hologram, but we’re no longer alone. I mean, I no longer feel alone.

And neither does Barry. He gives me a look through the moon that holds position over the table. Fingers crossed, his look says, and he touches a line of text that blinks in the air under the satellite footage of Titan. An audio file begins a voice-over of the looped video:

Earth to Titan CorporateHabitatZero:

Good news is we were able to run your stats and Habitat is cleared for safety — no leaks — so go ahead and unseal all junctions. More good news: the Megastorm broke — check the satellite images and put together a report.

Now for the bad news — TitanMineZero is only intermittently responding to our ping and we need you to fix the connection or override manually and route through a second dish. Also a problem: a mudslide washed out the collection barrels and TitanMineZero’s entire output for your term. There’s no way you can make your HydrocarbonExtractionTarget, so there won’t be any bonuses. We’re sorry, we know you had this in the bag. Expect repairs from here forward, supervise clearing the landing pad, wait for materials to ship from the Belt Mines to rebuild or repair barrels, and set up for the next team’s arrival in thirteen months.

Personal note: Nina and Barry — glad you two are alive. Stories to send home, hey? Speaking of which, it’s been a while since we were able to forward the mail, so attached is a backlog of messages from family.

Barry waves his hand through the holo and the video loop pauses.

“Are they for real?” I wave the message back on. The Megastorm broke, actually finished and isn’t a lull in the winds — that’s a relief, but we need those bonuses. That cash goes to family on Earth. The extra chunk of pay is the reason we signed on — is the excuse I fed myself for leaving, anyway.

Barry enters the shield codes and presses his palm to the wall scanner. The overhead metal dome parts down the centre and retracts as two slabs, leaving the exterior window exposed. Clouds. Red-black and vicious, but tamer than when we sealed ourselves in here two months ago.

“Didn’t you hear what I heard?” I ask. TitanMineZero is the biggest hydrocarbon extraction program Earth has, bigger than the various asteroid Belt Mines and way more efficient, since the automation is self-propelling, self-building, and self-evolving — when I was a kid, Corporate launched a rocket that dropped a couple million build-bots on Titan and let the place grow. Basically, Barry and I are a two-person checkpoint to an absurdly automated mine. They can afford our bonuses.

Barry waves the holo off again, and without the light from the projection we both notice personal files pop green on our private tablets.

“Backlog of mail.” He pushes my tablet across the table toward me.

“There’ll be an even nastier backlog of shit when we tell our families there’s no payout.” I glance at my files. There’s a video from my older brother, Merven. I haven’t heard from him in a few years, not since I stopped replying to the messages from him, my sister Rinella, and Gran.

“They have their own stuff going on. They’ll be glad we survived.” Barry casts his files to the holoscreen. Viable exoplanets replace the satellite footage above the galley table; he waves past that to schematics of breakthrough photon trajectory manipulation out of Beijing, and past the floating text and diagrams to a looped video of his sister’s new kid — name and weight in hanzi.

“A nephew. Congrats.” Olive skin, black eyes, and spiky hair. Fat beyond belief. Happy.

“Can’t believe they’re having babies while we’re gone,” I say, at the same time thinking, what else would they do? That’s why we’re here and they’re there. So we have something better to return to.

Barry circles the holo, watching his nephew stuff a hand in his toothless mouth. “Blows the mind,” Barry says. Or something like that — I don’t hear him properly because I’ve tuned out, agitated by my communiqué.

The video Merven sent — my brother looks old. Middle-aged, I mean, with thin hair, and his cheeks have drooped below his jawbone like they’ve begun to melt in the heat. The last file I saw was at least three years back, which isn’t a lot of time, but apparently enough. He’s wearing his junk-hauler’s shirt under a yellow raincoat with reflective stripes down the sleeves — with the money I’ve sent back I thought he would have given up junk hauling. Merven stands in a hallway I don’t recognize, and he doesn’t speak right away. He stares into the camera while people go by in the background, a nurse it looks like, or some other professional who wears one of those mono-coloured medical uniforms. There’s a doctor in a lab coat — so a hallway in a hospital, then. Merven turns his head and says something to someone standing off-camera, and then faces me.

“Gran died,” he says. “She tripped stepping off the subway and hit her head on the platform. She was alone. Across town. Rinella’s in the room now, with one of the dogs. Nina, I don’t know if you’ll watch this. I understand it’s gotta be hard, but if you could write back —”

He pauses and looks off camera again.

“Well,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.” He reaches up and the video freezes, his thumb in the corner of the camera lens when the recording ends.

I replay the message, and then a third and fourth time.

Gran — what was she doing across the city without Rinella or Merven? I can’t picture it. I can’t even picture her unsteady. She always had five or so golden retrievers on leashes while she power-walked the complex. But, like Merven, she would be old now too. She’d been at least seventy-five when I left, so that would put her near her nineties. I can’t think of her that old. What comes to mind instead is the day I told her I’d signed on to the maintenance and observation position at TitanMineZero. Gran tossed a crocheted dishcloth into the sink, her sloppy golden retrievers fanned the kitchen with their tails — three huge, panting beasts. And I told her I was out of there. Vamoose. Twenty-four years old, oblivious. What a prick I was.

“I can’t stand myself,” I say aloud, and then regret it. Barry, less than a couple steps away, flips past a holo of his brother-in-law lifting a net of flapping catfish, and in the cramped space of the galley I know he heard. “ 他妈的 everything, really. Why not.”

“I shouldn’t have taught you to swear.” Barry zooms the holoscreen in on the mouthy barbels of the catfish that poke through the black netting.

“Probably not.”

“Your pronunciation is shit.”

That’s his fault, but I don’t get that far into the joke. Out the window, orange evaporate rises from mud to haze — an ethane/methane atmosphere, −179º C on a beach day, and constantly twilight. Titan allows only one percent of light through to the surface. A little ways off, in the direction of the lake and the mine, three huge rocks sit on the widespread umber mud. They’re new, and the mudslide must have carried them from the hill behind us. Just outside the galley window, the ground looks too bare — the Megastorm erased our footprints as well as the rover tracks that had criss-crossed the sand. A drift of brown silt covers the lower half of the rover bay doors. I guess we’ll be walking the stairs up to the telecommunications tower.

There’s a familiarity to the landscape. That could be because Barry and I have been on Titan in Habitat for almost four years, but I think it’s more. When I was a kid, the dust storms that coated the city streets and the windows of Gran’s apartment were the same shade of ochre. And if you took CityLineTrains from my old apartment complex (the DesertGreen) through the residential high-rises, past warehouses and parkades full of tents and squatters, and carried on to the final stop, you could catch glimpses of something similar. The distant, open desert, right there through the barbed wire, beyond the millet and sorghum fields and the automated combines.

“Final stop” is a misnomer — the trains curved back on themselves in a continuous loop — but Titan is its own similar “end of the line.” Here, Barry and I are as far from Earth as you can work. Earth’s Deep Solar Ferries swing around Saturn, picking up return crews and resources after dropping new teams. We were five years on the Ferry here, almost five years on Titan now, and soon we’ll have five years on the Ferry home.

I replay Merven’s video one more time, hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of who he’s talking to when he looks away from the camera. The best I can guess is that it’s the dogs Gran might have had with her; and then I remember Rinella had twin girls about four years ago, and I realize I don’t have a clue.

The whole message is a blindside, but what can I do for her or them at a mining post a hefty five years’ travel from home? Light a stick of incense and say a word at Barry’s shrine? I suppose that would be a start.

“Take some time, Nina.” Barry flicks his videos off the holo. “However much you need.”

I archive Merven’s file and throw my tablet to the galley table, annoyed that he read me so easily. “I’m good to go.”

The overhead window takes up twenty-five percent of Habitat’s central dome, floor to ceiling. Opposite that, the dome has three main junctions that lead to different wings and allow for microclimates: the garden and protein farm modules; medical and fitness and sleep; rover bay and ExothermWearables and outdoor equipment. I grab the hatch wheel that leads to the garden modules and give it a spin.

“We should get to telecommunications first.”

“I know.” I do know. Titan is swinging around to the back of Saturn, where it’ll stay for about a week. That means no sunlight, and as the telecommunications array sits on the top of the hill behind Habitat, we need what little light we get. I’d hate to navigate the dark stairs with only the head- and hand-lamps on ExothermWearables. But I want to go to the garden module. For the fresh food — yes, we lived off nutrient paste during the storm — but more for the smell. The sulphur tang of the clouds hydrating plants, the plants themselves. The compost and the black soil in the worm bins. You can’t get closer to home — couldn’t be more Earth Ideal.

I’m half kidding. Back on Earth at Gran’s, nothing smelled like nature. High-efficiency shower heads, faucets, urinals, and laundry, and still the city imposed water restrictions — the hallways of DesertGreenComplex were eternally bad with body odour, cheap lemon cleaner, and smog the filters hadn’t scrubbed. The government-subsidized apartment blocks had been designed, like all low-income housing of the mid-twenty-first century, with a strict adherence to sustainable architecture: waste wood converts into heating gas; biomass generation equals a carbon-neutral building; each complex treats its own sullage and blackwater; the roofs have solar panels and (you’ll never believe it) gardens — all perks advertised sixty years before Gran dragged us into the place with her dogs. There were three retrievers back then, I think, but that number altered drastically depending on breeding and whelping seasons — the dogs were her excuse of a livelihood.

“People will always want a dog,” she explained to the neighbours. “It’s like wearing your heart on a leash: safe.”

She’d change the quote depending on who she was pitching to: hope on a leash, security on a leash, kids on a leash, etc. And for stores, she had the pedigrees and bloodlines. Dragging three kids and three golden retrievers into a one-room apartment, you’d think the neighbours would hate her, but by the time we arrived, the complex was well used. Ground-level ponds had transformed into teal, algae-ridden bogs, and the heat-regulating blinds adjusted on a timer instead of the original Intelligent Response to internal/external temp and sunlight. Bio-bins and recycling overflowed the courtyard and streets. Everything was trash — every summer I can recall, the patches of weeds that separated the vehicle and bicycle lanes burned to dirt with droughts and pet piss. Even Gran’s prize-winning golden retrievers turned into garbage cans — their shit twenty percent compacted plastic fragments, dental floss, and Rinella’s handmade beads.

Merven slept in his junker’s truck, claiming that Gran, Rinella and I more than filled the apartment. Add to us the dogs — every doorway had a collapsible baby-gate for when we got sick of the swarms of puppies, but there weren’t a lot of doorways. I slept in the living room on a Murphy bed, and Rinella crashed on the couch. Only Gran had her own room and I resented her the luxury. When they weren’t in use, Gran’s puppy crates took over our balcony, stored in stacks next to the rain barrel and the funnel collector. The kids in the apartment above us used to chuck rocks into our funnel, and when it was my turn to scoop pebbles from the barrel I’d take extra time and peer across the street.

Gran’s apartment looked overtop of the monorail straight at another apartment complex, where occupants sat on their balconies in dust masks and goggles, taking in the exact view I was: other balconies full of barbecues, broken chairs and appliances, bicycles, dying houseplants, and, invariably, water collection barrels. The dark spread of the funnel collectors looked like a bloom of black flowers, all faced skyward and yearning for rain. Look to the ground and you got the monorail train, and under that, the cracked asphalt of the street. Back in the apartment — eau de hot pavement and dog. I thought it was normal. It was only after I’d left for Corporate training and returned home to visit that I realized the apartment’s backhand of piss-paper, dog, and weed might have been part of the reason I’d never made close friends.

Was I an angry kid? Not really. Frustrated, sure, that Gran’s main emotion seemed to be panic. The cost of water, we’d blown next week’s food budget, et cetera. At the table with her breeding charts and puppy adverts, she was as useless as her worries. Patchwork finances and lifestyle Band-Aids — it was all next litter of pups should cover a few months’ rent, or, this dog show will raise our profile — she never tried for an escape from that place.

So early mornings I’d smash the Murphy bed into the frame, stuff a training bra with toilet paper (and get reamed by Merven for that later — Did I want to wipe my ass with my hand? That shit cost money), and do the absolute minimum at school. When school ended I’d meet up with the true dropouts (I wasn’t brave enough to quit attending classes) and steal neon coolers at BlackLightBowling. Evenings saw me stroll home buzzed, open a text, and giggle when I tried to tap the pictures bigger — it was normal that our district accept hand-me-down supplies from the richer ones, but that we were still using outdated, physical books?

Rinella had moved out, although no one could tell. She sat at the table in her embroidered kimono-style wrap and strung cheap jewellery or broke bud with her fingers. Merven would finish his weekly shower and yell at Rinella he couldn’t go to work smelling like pot. Rinella would answer she didn’t realize the junk-hauling business was that fucking fancy. Merven would counter, “Better than dropping night school to make ass-ugly necklaces,” and Gran would beat Merven down with an oven mitt, yell at Rinella to shut up and be useful — clean the pup pen or wash the damn floor.

The oldest dog farted during fights — a round, fruity smell that in the heat made the stench of the apartment rival DesertGreen’s sewage treatment. So I’d rescue both of us and take her for walks in the street where, if I looked up, I could watch the entire scene again through Gran’s eighth-floor window, right next to the night clerk who never raised his blinds and a hundred other compartmentalized families.

On the walks — there’s no comfortable way to say it — I’d take the dog to the top floor of a parkade and tie her leash to a rail so she didn’t get lost. Then I’d bend over the railing, breathe as fast as possible with my head hanging over the spiral abyss of car ramps, and hyperventilate. The trick was, as soon as you felt a tingle — the start of the oxygen high — you swung upwards and choked yourself until you collapsed. Speed Dream to Nirvana — or at least to escape, to grab the blue-black static that chewed, gnawed, boiled the marrow from vision and sound. O2 flashes were the closest I got, if not to God, then to a similar truth: there was more. Something else. Something we stood right at the edge of.

There had to be.

“Hey dreamer, can we go now?” Barry turns the hatch wheel and opens the junction that leads to the ExothermWearables and the rovers. He’s being cute, but I can hear the concern in his voice. We need to get to the telecommunications tower and check the status on the dish — hike all those stairs cut into the hillside — and there’s under three hours of daylight left. I know I’m zoning out.

“Sure,” I say. “Yeah, of course.” I can’t tell if “dreamer” is a dig, an endearment, or a nod to the past, and I don’t want to get into it. I tap up a picture and stats of the rover bay doors.

“Nina.” Barry shines a flashlight over the dark galley. Habitat has full power now, but lighting isn’t essential and we don’t want to push reserves until after we have a solid communications line to TitanMineZero as well as the satellite. You never know.

“At least let me check.” If it’s possible to drive up the hill, I’d like to. The stats from the rover bay, which we can see through the window is dented and blocked with silt, confirm the damage.

“We knew that,” Barry says.

“Yeah.” I don’t like the Wearables. The combination of materials and tech, layers of interwoven heated insulation — it’s hard to trust your life to a suit two inches thick. And the limited vision, despite all the rear-camera viewscreens in the faceplates, slows response time. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic — I wouldn’t have made it to Titan if that was the case — it’s the lumbering around and the sense that every motion seems to take forever.

Barry ducks through the hatch and I follow his dark figure down the corridor. The air changes after a couple metres. It’s not fresher than the galley, but on a separate filtration system than the one we’ve been breathing for two months, so, different. The smell of the suits, the cooler temperature. First junction is repair, maintenance, and ExothermWearable storage, and we head to the closet.

We pre-heat the Wearables. While those are warming, I get the WoolTech on. The leggings, torso, and hood of the under-suits are cobalt — a nice touch on a moon where everything is orange or brown — and the outer layer of the Wearables used to be a similar blue. The exoshells are unisex and older than us. I mean, they were here when we arrived. Model TitanGradeSix, which is warmer than what’s used in the asteroid belt (where there’s no atmosphere for thermal conduction) but has the bonus of being unpressurized (because of Titan’s atmosphere) and less bulky. Previous teams have signed their names to the suits and doodled charms or blessings.

“Can you get my back?” Barry asks. I slide an O2 tank into a sleeve inside his Wearable and secure the layers of WoolTech, Velcro, and ThermalRubber. He taps a test on his armscreen and then turns to zip me. We step over the lip of the airlock. Barry closes the hatch to the airlock behind us, I palm the final seal, and we sit and wait for acclimatization. The room cools.

“Nina, what is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

The first time I met Barry he was in that suit — well, not that exact suit, but a training version. Corporate sent the two of us to Haughton Crater for isolation conditioning — six months in a cargo container on an Arctic island crater without radio contact. It was Earth, barely: the northern tip of Canada. Haughton Crater’s actual crater — from the air you could see it for what it was: a twenty-three-kilometre pit blasted into the frozen dirt by an impact object thirty-nine million years ago. But on the ground we couldn’t see the shape and there was nothing, no life but coin-sized patches of lichen waiting for rain. Arid, dusty-brown, fast-moving clouds. A landscape as close to Titan as Earth could get. It was lonely, and in isolation training and testing, I warmed to him. How could we not want connection in a place like that?

After Haughton Crater we trained together — I guess we’d passed the suitability match — and a year later we launched for Titan. Lifted-off from Earth, coupled with the orbiting Ferry Terminal, and then the two of us were alone on the Deep Solar Ferry burning to Titan.

The ferry’s habitable section seemed small if you compared living space to cargo space, and big if you compared it to Gran’s apartment — we shared the same expanse of windows as back home, only since Barry and I were weightless there was no sense of a floor or ceiling, and that opened things up. Barry could run on the treadmill while I floated above him watching the void. Unless we looked straight up (or down, whatever you’d like to call it) it was like we were in different rooms. Again, there wasn’t much to do. Some tests and monitoring for the scientists — record vision alteration from fluid displacement, blood tests for immune system relaxation, vascular stiffening, and other, lesser-known effects of long-term space travel. All part of the deal.

Which is seeming like a raw deal now, without our bonus. Gran sells — sold — puppies. Barry’s mother still fills her bathtub with eel-tailed catfish and ice and hawks beer-battered fish sticks under a false licence in Singapore. We both send money to family.

The drop in temperature in the airlock passes zero Celsius and across from me Barry’s suit slowly frosts over.

“Oxygen loading as a kid, remember I told you about it?” I have to give him something. “Wake up with the dog licking my face.”

Years of self-throttling, of hitting Cloud Nine. I kept choking, pressing on my own neck to cut off blood flow, to hover at the edge of sensory range before the whole world burned black.

And then the screens — I’m not sure how long I would have gone on choking without them. Probably forever. Thank god that when I was around thirteen, Corporate partnered with the city and billboard screens went up on warehouses and water towers. At first there were only pharmaceutical and education adverts, but after a month of LED pill bottles blinking into Gran’s apartment, we got something else. Fifty-storey high-def images of space, of Earth from space, and of the Deep Solar Ferries. Gran’s floor-to-ceiling windows, shit for privacy, gave us a prime view: the first deep-space cargo ships fired engines and left the construction dock in orbit, destined to Further the Human Race via Titan — Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of the Solar System! Open-pit mining of Saturn’s moons, self-replicating build-bots — Industry that promises to Revolutionize the Human Condition. Below the screens, standing on the tacky asphalt, Merven was hauling some person’s crap from his junk truck for resale.

My neck was sore from throttling, but that screen. Clear as if I were in orbit myself, a view of Earth rolling into the night. Flash of the storms, and so much water it made me thirsty.

“Nina.” Rinella, sitting at the table behind me, stepped the dog into panties — the brood girl was in heat again and Rinella’d snipped a hole in a pair of Gran’s floral underwear and stuck a pad at the rear so she wouldn’t leave blood spots on the laminate.

“You need a scarf or something,” she said.

I lifted my hands to my throat. It felt rough, and I knew it was red.

“I know how this place can feel.” She pulled the dog’s tail through the hole in the panties. “But you if you keep that up, you’re going somewhere worse.”

Merven slammed the door and dumped an armload of vintage necklaces on the table. “How much?” he asked.

“Bullshit, hand them over.” Rinella bunched the panties at the dog’s back and twisted the fabric into an elastic. She could repurpose the beads and Merven knew it, and the two of them started to yell. The dogs retreated to Gran on the couch under the wall of “Best of Show” ribbons. She pushed her reading glasses up her nose and ran her finger across her breeding charts.

That fight I locked myself in Gran’s room and went through her closet. I read the letters she kept in her dresser and flipped through envelopes of photographs and magazine clippings: fields and trees and insane, impossible images like a colossal squid stretched over a rocky beach. Why did she have that stuff? Who had pictures printed?

I didn’t notice the door open, and Gran caught me with the clippings spread on her quilt.

“Nina,” she said. “Personal space.”

I yelled, since everyone was yelling. “Personal space? If you cared about privacy you’d have us out of this hole. What do you do, anyway?” As far as I knew she’d never been outside the city. You couldn’t leave on the trains. I’d tried — I’d taken transit as far as it would go: from DesertGreenComplex it rattled between tall buildings for hours, then through the richer part of the city with hardy palm trees, not just drought-tolerant grasses, then a glimpse of the ocean. Even there the city didn’t stop; roadways disappeared under the waves and if you managed to whip around that section of transit at low tide you could see old park benches and fountains from way back when the oceans were lower. The trip took me eight hours and the train never left the city — it looped around, coiled back on itself, and eventually I got off where I’d started.

Gran sat next to me on the bed and gathered the pictures. Lifted her reading glasses from the strap on her neck. The dog in its rose-patterned panties whined and nosed at the closet — the latest batch of pups sold to the high-end shops that morning.

Thermal equalization finishes and the hatch between the airlock to the moon’s surface opens with a loud crack — all the ice on the interior breaks off the weather-stripping.

“I’ll never get used to that sound.” Barry pushes the door fully open and we step onto Titan. Water ice — I make the distinction because this far from the sun it’s methane that evaporates, rains, and freezes — pebbles, and brown silt. Past those three enormous boulders that sit on the plane toward the lake, the rise of the week-long night — a blacker horizon. Saturn, sliding between us and the sun. If we were able to see through the methane clouds the view would knock us over.

“They put us on prep,” I say. “Prep and repair.”

“Relax,” Barry says. “It means we’re retirees.”

“Means we’re maintenance staff and janitors with no extraction bonus. How’s that better than hawking catfish sticks with your family?” Which is ridiculous, I know that. Our families get money, Corporate still cuts us cheques. The bonus, though, that was compensation — or, at least, it was solace.

It’s hot in the suit, my boots are slippery with sweat, and we have an hour ahead of us hiking the stairs to the telecommunications tower.

“Barry.” I put my hand on the hatch as he swings it closed. “Can the dish wait until tomorrow? Do we have to do this now?”

“Yeah, Nina, we do.”

I know we do. I nod, but doubt he can see the “yes” through the bulk of my Wearable. Get it done.

The telecommunications dishes sit on top of the hill behind Habitat, and from the base of the stairs I count five visible bowls — that’s all of them, but we can’t tell if they’re aimed correctly. The Megastorm could easily have swung anyone off target.

In the company’s four decades of monitoring there hasn’t been a weather pattern close to the Megastorm. Two months in Habitat’s galley. Two months where Barry and I fixated on the atmospheric writhe against the overhead. When the view became an oppressive drum of hail and dirt, we closed the shields, sealed ourselves in, and turned to what Earth watched: satellite transmissions of a massive orange spiral — a whirlpool of cloud that enveloped our entire hemisphere. And then the transmissions stopped, and we went to minimum power usage and sat in the dark.

Nine years off Earth to date: four years at the outpost, five in transit on a route that, according to the math, added up to 3.5 billion kilometres of travel — the Deep Solar Ferry’s trajectory slingshots the ships around asteroids and Jupiter to gain speed and arrive at the outpost on Titan within a lifespan. Extraction goals met or not, we deserve that bonus.

After the screens lit and the entire city — probably the entire planet — watched the first Deep Solar Ferry leave dock, I buckled down: accelerated graduation, trade-school, tech, plumbing, Arctic and sub-arctic geology training to “recognize geomorphological markers that might constitute a valuable second (or third) mine,” orbital conditioning/testing, the Ferry, Titan. All of the education was government-sponsored — scholarship — as long as you signed on to work after. The assignments were highly paid, time-consuming (not a joke, fifteen to twenty years including travel), and dangerous — of course it was poor urbanites who applied.

I told my family I’d joined up after I put my signature down. Merven paced in the craze of puppies, yelled, “Sellout,” “Not your own person,” and so on. How could I, he said, write off fifteen years my life? What was his problem, I countered. What did he think I’d been studying?

“Take a welding job for Corporate instead,” Rinella pleaded. “Welders are only three-month terms. And you’d work at the station in orbit, right? Maybe we’d see you on the screens.”

She was talking about the live feeds of construction of the Deep Solar Ferries. “You can’t tell who’s out there,” I said.

“But we could talk,” Merven said. “Instead of exchange recordings —”

“We don’t even talk now.” I was irritable and defensive. I felt like I was revisiting my childhood being there. That apartment, the smell, the sharp whine of seven newborn pups. Nothing was different, and I was hungover and jumpy from a combination of pills and alcohol. I hadn’t planned on drinking, but when I arrived I’d stepped off the train and looked up. There they were, Gran, Merven, and Rinella lit in the frame of the apartment window, and I couldn’t make myself go inside. What would I tell them? I bought the pills and mickey and walked back and forth staring at the apartment windows until it grew light enough that the old dog spotted me and started barking.

“Fifteen years. That’s a jail term,” Merven said. “A life sentence.” He paced the apartment in his junker’s coveralls and work boots. Gran herded the pups into dog crates and shut herself in her room. Rinella rubbed the old dog’s ears and added, “How could you do this to yourself and not tell us?”

“Post-Scarcity Economy,” I said, echoing Corporate’s bullshit. The government’s lines were embarrassing in the wealth of their promise: Next Leap — Self Sufficiency in the Outer Solar System; Fulfill All Humanity’s Dreams for Space! Sure, the future might sparkle, but until we made it to stable off-world production and a guaranteed minimum income, until we had — God — water imports from the asteroid belt and a reduction in global temperatures, then the paycheques were in long-term outpost grunt work.

“I don’t get you.” I grabbed a leash and clipped it to the old dog. “The pay for welders is nothing. Don’t you want something back?” That silenced them, mostly.

Outside the air was brothy and thick and stank of hot bio-bin. I had to walk slowly to accommodate the old dog’s arthritis. I wandered dank, empty parkades and the sunburnt weeds of DesertGreenComplex’s common grounds.

It was evening when the dog and I got home. Merven had left, and Rinella lounged, vaping on the couch in her robe. The pups slept in their kennels, the big dogs on cushions. I knocked on Gran’s door and sat across from her on the bed. Took her hands. Through the wall of window the sun christened the cityscape — towers and apartments blackened sticks against its fiery pink.

“Gran,” I said. “You know I respect you. But there’s no way —” Her worries were my own by that point, the crummy water, nutrition, quality of life — I refused to be as useless as she’d been.

I stayed with them that week, trying to find common ground before I left. The day prior to my shuttle launch from Earth, Gran set her hidden photographs on the table. I slid the stack closer to where I sat filling the last of my paperwork. She turned to scrub the kitchen counter.

“I found these as a kid,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten.” I pulled a photo from the pile. A young Gran in stained white jeans and a maroon chemise held a naked, diapered infant, the kid’s face and arms blurred with motion — me, I assumed. Merven and Rinella, looking about eleven and eight, flanked her. Both kids went shirtless in denim overalls. The three of them (with me in Gran’s arms) stood in front of a lime-green taxi, expressions flat or tired, the taxi driver caught mid-lift loading plaid suitcases into the trunk. Three shaggy golden dogs (which generation, I couldn’t tell) already filled the car.

“Go.” Gran tossed the dishcloth into the sink and picked up a magazine clipping. Little blue-and-white houses on the blue-and-white ocean — Greece, or some other country that used to exist. “What’s the point of staying?”

She was right. By that time all the high forests had blown away. The oceans choked on plankton, any glaciers vanished. Go, she told me. And she should know — her entire life in an apartment with a whirlwind of puppies and lazy-ass grandkids. I set the picture down. I would reroute the cheques to her, enough currency to black-market some eggs. Beans. Protein that wasn’t a powdered supplement. Savings. Maybe soon she’d be able to —

I handed her the photo. “The modules will be state-of-the-art,” I said. Those robotics improved generationally, and the off-Earth habitats were advertised as luxury. So many resources and discoveries coming in. Pretty soon we’d have opportunities beyond our wildest —

She pushed the clippings aside and grabbed my arm, pulling me into a hug. “Nina.”

The flight to the Saturn system: five years shitting into a vacuum cleaner. Advanced resistive exercise. Monotony punctuated by shock: seeing the return Ferry through the window, passing back the way we came, taking a previous outpost pair with them. Barry and I cheered — raised apple juice in sippy bags over the radio. “乾杯 — Gān bēi!” A toast to Earth’s expats. And the back-glance of Jupiter: foreign swirls of gas, soft-edged in the dark.

Then a few more years of boredom before rolling into the Saturn system — its gallery of cratered moons. Barry next to me in the observatory. The walls behind us covered with clips and paper and Velcro.

A gap in the bright rings below, Saturn’s silent roll to our left. A moon blazed with light — I gasped, suddenly dizzy, directionless. We were falling, not floating, and falling endlessly — there was nothing to hit. I grabbed for a wall.

Barry let go and spun weightless. “Afraid of a collision?”

“Tell me this tub knows where it’s headed.”

Out the portal, the rings looped shadows over the pastel giant. Barry unclipped an ancestral placard from its shrine and hung it in the air in front of the window. He lit a stick of incense and set it to float alongside.

“There,” he said. “Let them have a view.”

What a view: those rings — at first a solid and uniform white, but as we grew closer we saw ridges and shadows. Closer still, aggregates of icy particles — a compilation that continually formed and dispersed.

Barry pointed to the orange-and-brown haze that was Titan, our outpost-to-be. “That’ll be us, Nina.” The moon minuscule next to the planet, next to the teal shadows stretched across the giant’s tan and green gases.

I groped for the wall again. Barry’s placard floating in front of Saturn didn’t help, it just bared the universe: a struggle to grasp — to retain perspective — and an overwhelming veneration that science couldn’t hold at bay. The fire on the incense burned spherical and purple then snuffed itself — filled the Ferry with faux jasmine.

Five years Barry and I had floated in the Deep Solar Ferry. We took down pictures and personals — the photos at the shrine, drawings, holiday decor, Sudoku — before packing ourselves into the lander. Point the cameras toward the ground and launch. Control the burn during descent, parachutes, then Titan.

We first saw the moon’s surface through the fish-eye cam in our lander. Orange cloud rushed the windows, thinned, and gave way to a continent of ochre ridges and flats. The craft burned closer, eastern plains filled the screen, dunes to the south slipped from view, and we were right on top of the site: a monumental, maze-like system of pipes drew oil from the lake, automation continuously scratched methane and water ice from the regolith, and behind the mine the shiny speck of Habitat’s dome and a meandering staircase cut into the hill. At the top of the stairs, circles that we realized were huge telecommunications dishes — it all said civilization, humanity, Earth Was Here.

Faster, closer, the jolt of landing — the cam full of brown ice pebbles and mud — and holy 他妈的, the weight of our bodies, the crush of the gravity of even that small moon after years of zero-g, of having to lift your tongue to talk.

On the surface, Titan seemed so much like Earth: atmosphere, ground — even if the air was unbreathable and the moon only a brown, muddy basin, Titan had creeks, rivers, steam. The rain was methane and the lakes liquid hydrocarbons, but the fact it had any form of precipitation at all brought back the memory of home, true home: the city hunkered under deep purple cloud, a white-blue flash of lightning, the whimper of Gran’s dogs, and the scurry of neighbours adjusting the angle of funnel collectors and setting any canister that could catch water on their balconies.

Inside Habitat, Barry and I hauled our atrophied asses through procedure — acclimatized to humidity and changes in air and temperature from the Deep Solar Ferry — and collapsed in the galley. To be sitting again, feeling our own weight, while the clouds darkened above us in the overhead dome. That above was a direction, and the smell from the garden module: wet dirt.

The previous team had left us a seasoned cast-iron pan we could barely lift. We managed, instead of cooking, to rehydrate a package of nutrient gruel and drink it from mugs at the galley table. Barry hooked his portable to Habitat’s telecommunications system and tapped messages to Corporate and to home: Made it.

Sending the message woke the Habitat console, and brought to life the holoscreen. Images of what the last team had been researching appeared over the table.

“Enceladus,” I said. Titan’s sister moon, her white pole tinted lilac and cracked with turquoise. Next, a shot with the moon blackened, and the ice jets’ fine mist against the black. “Water vapour, salt crystals, ice particles.” Overlaying the moon, a network of lines showed blueprints for a mining expansion. Ice, for water and oxygen.

“Looks like Titan will gain neighbours — go Corporate.” There was energy to Barry’s voice. I don’t know how he summoned so much excitement for Corporate. More ships, faster ships, asteroid mines, now Enceladus, and off in the future at the edge of nullity, the ludicrous fantasy of exoplanet colonies — he was more of a dreamer than I was that way. I was too tired, too sore to care, and I wanted home. I slid my chair under the galley overhead and tilted back under the deep brown haze. Titan sat midway through its day cycle (fifteen point nine Earth days), careening behind Saturn into dark.

“Open a pic of Earth,” I said.

Barry brought up an image — a dot, a speck at the edge of Saturn’s rings.

“Something closer.”

He looked at me, took his legs off the table, and pulled up a photo from the Ferry trip. Two hundred and fifty miles above Europe, a satellite hung over scattered white clouds, solar panels glinting copper, spread like some mechanical dragon. Next pic: Eastern North America pale with winter storms. Then Southeast Asia at night, lit electrically, playing at its own night sky. More photos — a pebbled mosaic of land, atmosphere, oceans.

Barry set his mug in the air and we were both shocked when it smashed to the ground.

Next months, us versus gravity. Next years — 

Transmissions: Merven posed with a hand on the cab of his new junk truck. The family cheered “Hellooooo Nina!” from an apartment with forty percent more square footage. Gran did a hand-held tour of her garden — container-grown peanuts on the shiny glass balcony. Rinella, officially back home in the second bedroom (“A second bedroom, can you believe it?”), held twins on her lap. And the puppies — that wriggle of yellow that came and went while Gran, or Merven with his sweat-stained shirts and greying hair, filmed their greetings.

The more videos they sent, the less I found to say. How many times could I describe a moon with constant cloud cover? Barry and I — we visited each other at night. During the day, we bled time with cards and Sudoku, gardening, exercises, maintenance checks in ExothermWearables, and updating mine reports. Slowly, Merven’s “News Reels” started to sound more like jabs — a close-up of a picture on the wall: me, surrounded by sketches of the retired or deceased brood dogs, pressed flowers, and incense sticks.

It’s me, not them, I reminded myself, and scattered food to the crickets. Untangled fine red worms from soil and separated them to new bins in the garden module. Inflated cryoballoons and monitored weather patterns in the south. But I watched fewer videos, then quit entirely, and eventually the transmissions stopped coming. We’d always been moving on, I told myself, gaining distance over time until we faded from each other’s view. If we’d even been looking toward each other to start.

Barry and I reach the lookout and telecommunications tower on the summit of the hill. The main dish for the mine hangs at an odd angle, and must have been knocked off target by the storm. That it hasn’t righted itself will be an automation issue, and as soon as we’ve caught our breath from the hike we’ll check that the system has begun self-repair. Barry leans against the wall that rings the lookout.

From our vantage point, Habitat’s domed exterior shines orange and silver in the haze. The greenhouses, connected to the central galley by junctions and corridors, spread from it like the start of something — a web of mould, or the blind taproots of the soilless plants in aeroponics. Past the modules, but only about half a kilometre south, there’s a new river where the hydrocarbon storage barrels should be. Sometime over the last couple months, while Barry and I hunkered under Habitat’s shielding, the Megastorm peeled the land. Mud slid by us like it was nothing — like we were nothing — and took everything we’d scraped together. That river, it could have taken us, too. Such a close call.

But if I’m honest, what isn’t? Suddenly I’m worried about sinkholes, about a trip and a chaotic skid down the hill, a cracked face-plate in our Wearables, and all the other unpredictable 拉屎. How can I take a step without risking everything — myself, Barry, family? Those jobs — the welder jobs that Rinella pushed me to get — I wish I’d taken one now.

“Remember losing sight of Earth?” I ask.

Barry grabs my hands. “Nina.” Both our Wearables are coated in red soot, none of the blessings or charms visible. “Whatever you’re kicking yourself over —”

“Okay.” I raise a hand. “Yield.”

But I can’t. I can’t let it go, not truly. I still see Gran, or, I remember her, and I can’t stop.

“I have to sit.” Gran at our Earth launch, her light cotton dress flattened against her knees by the wind, the three dogs on the leash lying like lions on the dirt patch beyond the orange plastic barrier fence. Barry and I — as we carted to the shuttle that sunny morning I stood, punched a fist into the blue air and held it, trying to catch her eye.

It’s hard to breathe. Barry kneels in front of me on a patch of brown rocks, smooth like river stone or cobbles, half-embedded in the wet sand. Not sand, really; organic soot, hydrocarbon polymers that clump and rain to the surface year after year.

“You gonna tell me what was in your transmission?” he asks.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, knowing he’s worried. And, seated in the mud with my head between my knees, I will be. Of course I will. But —

Gran throwing that dishcloth in the sink, her expression as I listed my reasons, wrote her off as useless — convinced myself I’d made it. The apartment. Merven and Rinella. Those luminous, sunlit dogs. That tiny life.