Titan (GAIA) Read online

  EXPLORE THE INCREDIBLE WORLDS

  OF JOHN VARLEY …

  “John Varley has had extraordinary success in giving readers the experience of living in the future.”

  —Robert Silverberg, The Washington Post

  THE GAEAN TRILOGY

  “A seething, monumental trilogy … Grand-scale entertainment—violent, witty, irreverent, tirelessly inventive … This’ll have readers guessing and gasping right up to the end.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  TITAN

  “Big, brassy, and beautiful. I read the last page and muttered, ‘Wow.’ ”

  —Michael Bishop

  “Fast-paced and involving!”

  —The Washington Post

  WIZARD

  “An extraordinary feat of storytelling.”

  —Fantasy Review

  “Superb.”

  —UPI

  DEMON

  “Demon destroyed my preconceived ideas about science fiction … An epic climax.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Magnificent … I can’t tell you all the adventure and glory and horror and laughter and sheer joy there is in reading this book.”

  —Fantasy Review

  DISCOVER THE OTHER WORKS

  OF JOHN VARLEY …

  STEEL BEACH

  “I’ve been saying for years that John Varley is the best writer in America. This book proves it.”

  —Tom Clancy

  Books by John Varley

  The Ophiuchi Hotline

  The Persistence of Vision

  Picnic on Nearside

  (formerly titled The Barbie Murders)

  Millennium

  Blue Champagne

  Steel Beach

  The Golden Globe

  Red Thunder

  Mammoth

  Red Lightning

  Rolling Thunder

  Slow Apocalypse

  The Gaean Trilogy

  Titan

  Wizard

  Demon

  The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction

  JOHN

  VARLEY

  TITAN

  ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) * Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England * Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) * Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) * Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India * Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) * Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa * Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  TITAN

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley/Putnam edition published March 1979

  Berkley edition / March 1980

  Twelfth printing / June 1986

  Ace mass-market edition / April 1987

  Copyright © 1979 by John Varley.

  Cover photo by Getty Images.

  Cover design by Annette Fiore.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62327-5

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For

  John E. Varley

  and for

  Francine and Kerry

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter One

  “Rocky, would you take a look at this?”

  “That’s Cap’n Jones to you. Show me in the morning.”

  “It’s sort of important.”

  Cirocco was at her wash basin, her face covered in soap. She groped for a towel and wiped the greenish goop away. It was the only kind of soap the recyclers would eat.

  She squinted at the two pictures Gaby handed her.

  “What is it?”

  “Just the twelfth satellite of Saturn.” Gaby was not entirely successful at hiding her excitement.

  “No fooling?” Cirocco frowned from one picture to the other. “Just a lot of little black dots to me.”

  “Well, yeah. You can’t see anything without the comparometer. That’s it right there.” She indicated an area with her little finger.

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  Cirocco rummaged through her locker and found a pea-green shipsuit that smelled as good as any of them. Most of the handy velcro patches were peeling.

  Her room was at the bottom of the carousel, midway between ladders three and four. She followed Gaby around the curving floor, then pursued her up the ladder.

  Each rung was a little easier than the last until, at the hub, they were weightless. They pushed off from the slowly rotating ring and drifted down the central corridor to the science module: SCIMOD in NASA-ese. It was kept dark to make the instruments easier to read, and was as colorful as the inside of a jukebox. Cirocco liked it. Green lights blinked and banks of television screens hissed white noise through confetti clouds of snow. Eugene Springfield and the Polo sisters floated around the central holo tank. Their faces were bathed in the red glow.

  Gaby handed the plates to the computer, punched up an image-intensifying program, and indicated the screen Cirocco should watch. The pictures were sharpened, combined, then rapidly alternated. Two miniscule dots blinked, not far from each other.

  “There it is,” Gaby said proudly. “Small proper motion, but the plates are on
ly twenty-three hours apart.”

  Gene called to them.

  “Orbital elements are coming in,” he said.

  Gaby and Cirocco joined him. Cirocco glanced down and saw his arm go possessively around Gaby’s waist, looked quickly away, noting that the Polo sisters had seen it and were just as careful not to notice. They had all learned to stay out of each other’s affairs.

  Saturn sat in the middle of the tank, fat and brassy. Eight blue circles were drawn around it, each larger than the last, each in the equatorial plane of the rings. There was a sphere on each circle, like a single pearl on a string, and beside the pearls were names and numbers: Mnemosyne, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Hyperion. Far beyond those orbits was a tenth one, visibly tilted. That was Iapetus. Phoebe, the most distant, could not be shown on the scale they were using.

  Now another circle was drawn in. It was an eccentric ellipse, almost tangent to the orbits of Rhea and Hyperion, cutting right across the circle that represented Titan. Cirocco studied it, then straightened. Looking up, she saw deep lines etched on Gaby’s forehead as her fingers flew over the keyboard. With each program she called up, the numbers on her screen changed.

  “It had a very close call with Rhea about three million years ago,” she noted. “It’s safely above Titan’s orbit, though perturbations must be a factor. It’s far from stabilized.”

  “Meaning what?” Cirocco asked.

  “Captured asteroid?” Gaby suggested, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.

  “The proximity to the equatorial plane would make that unlikely,” one of the Polo sisters said. April or August? Cirocco wondered. After eighteen months together she still couldn’t tell them apart.

  “I was afraid you’d see that.” Gaby chewed a knuckle. “Yet if it was formed with the others, it ought to be less eccentric.”

  The Polo shrugged. “There are ways to explain it. A catastrophic event in the recent past. It would be easy to move it.”

  Cirocco frowned. “Just how big is it, then?”

  The Polo—August, she was almost sure it was August—looked at her with that calm, strangely unsettling face. “I should say about two or three kilometers. Possibly less.”

  “Is that all?”

  Gene grinned. “You give me the numbers, I’ll land on it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Is that all’?” Gaby said. “It couldn’t have been very much bigger, not to have been sighted by the Lunar scopes. We would have known about it thirty years ago.”

  “All right. But you interrupted my bath for a damn pebble. It hardly seems worth it.”

  Gaby looked smug. “Maybe not to you, but if it was a tenth that size, I’d still get to name it. Discovering a comet or an asteroid is one thing, but only a couple people each century get to name a moon.”

  Cirocco released her toehold on the holo tank strut and twisted toward the corridor entrance. Just before she left she glanced back at the two tiny dots still flashing on the screen overhead.

  Bill’s tongue had started at Cirocco’s toes and was now exploring her left ear. She liked that. It had been a memorable journey. Cirocco had loved every centimeter of it; some of the stops along the way had been outrageous. Now he was worrying her earlobe with his lips and teeth, tugging gently to turn her around. She let it happen.

  He nudged her shoulder with his chin and nose to get her turning faster. She began to rotate. She felt like a big, soft asteroid. The analogy pleased her. Extending it, she watched the terminator line crawl around her to bring the hills and valleys of her front into sunlight.

  Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.

  New games were possible in free-fall, like the one they had been playing, “no hands.” They could use feet, mouths, knees, or shoulders to position each other. One had to be gentle and careful, but with slow bites and nips anything could be done, and in such an interesting way.

  All of them came to the hydroponics room from time to time. Ringmaster had seven private rooms, and they were as necessary as oxygen. But even Cirocco’s cabin was crowded when two people were in it, and it was at the bottom of the carousel. It took one act of love in free-fall to make a bed seem as limiting as the back seat of a Chevrolet.

  “Why don’t you turn this way a little?” Bill asked.

  “Can you give me a good reason?”

  He showed her one, and she gave him a little more than he had asked for. Then she found herself with a little more than she had asked for, but as usual, he knew what he was doing. She locked her legs around his hips and let him do the moving.

  Bill was forty, the oldest of the crew, and had a face dominated by a lumpy nose and jowls that could have graced a bassett hound. He was balding and his teeth were not pretty. But his body was lean and hard, ten years younger than his face. His hands were neat and clean, precise in their movements. He was good with machinery, but not the greasy, noisy kind. His tool kit would fit in his shirt pocket, tools so tiny that Cirocco wouldn’t dare handle them.

  His delicate touch paid off when he made love. It was matched by his gentle disposition, Cirocco wondered why it had taken her so long to find him.

  There were three men aboard Ringmaster, and Cirocco had made love to them all. So had Gaby Plauget. It was impossible to keep secrets when seven people lived in such a confined space. She knew for a fact, for instance, that what the Polo sisters did behind the closed doors of their adjoining rooms was still illegal in Alabama.

  They had all bounced around a lot, especially in the early months of the voyage. Gene was the only married crew member, and he had taken care to announce quite early that he and his wife had an arrangement about such matters. Still, he had slept alone for a long time because the Polos had each other, Gaby didn’t seem to care about sex at all, and Cirocco had been irresistibly drawn to Calvin Greene.

  Her persistence was such that Calvin eventually went to bed with her, not just once, but three times. It didn’t get any better, so before he could sense her disappointment she had cooled the relationship and let him pursue Gaby, the woman he had been drawn to from the first. Calvin was a general surgeon trained by NASA to be competent as ship’s biologist and ecologist as well. He was black, but attached little importance to it, having been born and raised in O’Neil One. He was also the only crew member who was taller than Cirocco. She didn’t think that had much to do with his appeal; she had learned early to be indifferent to a man’s height, since she was taller than most of them. She thought it was more in his eyes, which were soft and brown and liquid. And his smile.

  Those eyes and that smile had done nothing for Gaby, just as Cirocco’s charms had not interested Gene, her second choice.

  “What are you smiling about?” Bill asked.

  “Don’t you think you’re giving me enough reason?” she countered, a little breathlessly. But the truth was she had been thinking of how amusing the four of them must have looked to Bill, who had stayed out of the shuffle of bodies. That seemed to be his style, to sit back and let people sort themselves out, then move in when it began to be depressing.

  Calvin had certainly been depressed. So had Cirocco. Whether from preoccupation with Gaby or just inexperience, Calvin had not been much of a lover. Cirocco thought it was a little of both. He was quiet, shy, and bookish. His records showed he had spent most of his life in school, carrying an academic load that left little room for fun.

  Gaby just didn’t care. The Science Module of Ringmaster was the finest toy a girl ever had. She loved her work so much she had joined the astronaut corps and graduated at the top of her class so she could watch the stars without an annoying atmosphere, even though she hated to travel. When she was working she noticed nothing else, did not think it odd that Calvin spent almost as much time in SCIMOD as she did, waiting for the chance to hand her a photographic plate or a lens cloth or the keys to his heart.

  Gene didn’t seem to
care, either. Cirocco sent out signals that could have drawn her five to life if the FCC had known about them, but Gene wasn’t receiving. He just grinned with that boyish, tousle-haired Aryan ideal face and talked about flying. He was to be the pilot of the Satellite Excursion Module when the ship reached Saturn. Cirocco liked flying, too, but there came a time when a woman wanted to do something else.

  But eventually Calvin and Cirocco got what they had wanted. Soon after, neither wanted it anymore.

  Cirocco didn’t know what the problem was with Calvin and Gaby; neither of them talked about it, but it was obvious that it worked only passably at best. Calvin continued to see her, but she saw Gene, too.

  Gene had apparently been waiting for Cirocco to stop chasing him. As soon as she did, he began to sidle up and breathe heavily in her ear. She didn’t like that much, and the rest of his technique was no better. When he was through making love, it almost seemed he expected to be thanked. Cirocco had never been easily impressed; Gene would have been astonished to learn where he fell on her scale of one to ten.

  Bill had happened almost by accident—though she had since learned that few accidents happened around Bill. One thing led to another, and now they were about to provide a pornographic demonstration of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the one that used to refer to “action and reaction.”

  Cirocco had done some calculations on the matter, and had found that the force of ejaculation was not nearly enough to account for the orgasmic acceleration she always observed at that moment. The cause was certainly spasms of the large muscles of the leg, but the effect was beautiful and a little frightening, as though they had become big, fleshy balloons losing air, forced away from each other at the moment of closest approach. They would careen and carom, and finally come to rest together again.