Titan (n-2) by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space
ISBN: 0002254247
Publisher: Voyager
Published: 1997-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Day 504

When Siobhan finally died, Mott realized that she had no framework for coping. She had no prayers to say, no hymns to sing, no rational or social structure which could accommodate death.

But then, the rest of the crew didn’t know how to handle this either.

Bill Angel argued for breaking down Siobhan’s body and using it as nutrient in the farm. “She always wanted to be a farmer in the sky,” he said, his face hard. “Now she can be. Just dumping her body overboard means losing raw material, a loss we can’t afford.” He stared at Mott, as if challenging her. “We’re on the edge here. Life must go on. Our lives.”

He’d actually had some endorsement for that, from the surgeons on the ground. Although they would have wanted Siobhan’s flesh and bones treated before being ground up for consumption by the plants.

Benacerraf opposed it, and Mott and Rosenberg backed her up.

At last they came up with a solution they could all accept.

Benacerraf clambered into her EMU, her EVA suit, and hauled Siobhan’s body out of the airlock and into the orbiter cargo bay. The body was wrapped in a Stars and Stripes — a flag that should have fluttered over the ice of Titan — and bound up with duct tape and Beta cloth.

Benacerraf braced herself in the payload bay and just thrust that body away from her, letting it drift away.

Benacerraf, floating in the payload bay, said some words, her voice a crackle, distorted by static.

“I want to read to you what Isaac Newton wrote to John Locke, on looking into the sun. I think it’s kind of appropriate…”

In a few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look on no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark. But by keeping in the dark and employing my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again and by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, though not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon the phenomenon…

“I think that sums it up,” Benacerraf said gently, her voice scratchy on the radio loop. “Siobhan looked, too long, into the face of the sun. We won’t forget her.”

Mott sat at the window of the flight deck and watched the body ascend past the shadow of the high-gain antenna. In the ferocious glare of trans-Venusian sunlight, it exploded with brilliance.

At last it was lost in the sky.

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