John Varley - Titan

"Rocky, would you take a look at this?"

"That's Capn 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 %er.

"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 colourful as the inside of a juke- box. Cirocco liked it. Green lights blinked and banks of television screens hissed white noise through confetti clouds of snow. Ugene 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 only 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 pro- gram 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 un- likely," 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 car. 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 *as 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 scat 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.