some form of electromagnetism. Call it mental radio. It communicated with her that same way.
“I think I understand you now.”
“Don’t understand-run!”
Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and hurried her along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn’t see a thing. It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground was uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her unseen companion yanked her up again.
“Why are you so slow?”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“Believe me, you are.”
“Why are we running?”
“We are being pursued.” They turned suddenly, into a side passage, and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens wailed. Things collapsed. Mobs surged.
“Well, you’ve certainly got the motion thing down pat.”
Impatiently. “It’s only a metaphor. You don’t think this is a real city, do you? Why are you so dim? Why are you so difficult to communicate with? Why are you so slow?”
“I didn’t know I was.”
Vast irony. “Believe me, you are.”
“What can I do?”
“Run!”
Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie confused it with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. “How long was I out?” she asked.
“You were out?”
“No more than a minute or two,” Alan said. “It’s not important. Check out the visual the robofish just gave us.”
Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.
Lizzie gasped. “Oh! Oh, my.”
It was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that the great European cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably organic. The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent, with openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then followed the rising heat upward. Occasional channels led outward and then looped back into the main body again. It loomed higher than seemed possible (but it was underwater, of course, and on a low-gravity world at that), a complexly layered congeries of tubes like church-organ pipes, or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.
It had the elegance of design that only a living organism can have.
“Okay,” Lizzie said. “Consuelo. You’ve got to admit that-”
“I’ll go as far as ‘complex prebiotic chemistry.’ Anything more than that is going to have to wait for more definite readings.” Cautious as her words were, Consuelo’s voice rang with triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily die then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.
Alan, almost equally elated, said, “Watch what happens when we intensify the image.”
The structure shifted from gray to a muted rainbow of pastels, rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into winter-ice blue. It was breathtaking.
“Wow.” For an instant, even her own death seemed unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.
So thinking, she cycled back again into sleep. And fell down into the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.
It was hellish. The city was gone, replaced by a matrix of noise: hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She started forward and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back, she stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby, and gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that gave off a metal shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie decided it was wisest to stay put.
A familiar presence, permeated with despair. “Why did you do this to me?”
“What have I done?”
“I used to be everything.”
Something nearby began pounding like a pile-driver. It was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard over its din. “You’re still something!”
Quietly. “I’m nothing.”
“That’s… not true! You’re… here! You exist! That’s… something!”
A world-encompassing sadness. “False comfort. What a pointless thing to offer.” She was conscious again.
Consuelo was saying something. “… isn’t going to like it.”
“The spiritual wellness professionals back home all agree that this is the best possible course of action for her.”
“Oh, please!”
Alan had to be the most anal-retentive person Lizzie knew. Consuelo was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to be running pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this. “Um… guys?” Lizzie said. “I’m awake.”
There was a moment’s silence, not unlike those her parents had shared when she was little and she’d wandered into one of their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly, “Hey, it’s good to have you back,” and Alan said, “NAFTASA wants you to speak with someone. Hold on. I’ve got a recording of her first transmission cued up and ready for you.”
A woman’s voice came online. “This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum. Elizabeth, I’d like to talk with you about how you’re feeling. I appreciate that the time delay between Earth and Titan is going to make our conversation a little awkward at first, but I’m confident that the two of us can work through it.”
“What kind of crap is this?” Lizzie said angrily. “Who is this woman?”
“NAFTASA thought it would help if you-”
“She’s a grief counselor, isn’t she?”
“Technically, she’s a transition therapist.” Alan said.
“Look, I don’t buy into any of that touchy-feely Newage”-she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme with sewage-“stuff. Anyway, what’s the hurry? You guys haven’t given up on me, have you?”
“Uh…”
“You’ve been asleep for hours,” Consuelo said. “We’ve done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we should share it with you.”
She squirted the info to Lizzie’s suit, and Lizzie scrolled it up on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the evaporation lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that was enough to create a massive updraft from the lake’s center. An overlay of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local microcurrents of air coming together to form a spiraling shaft that rose over two kilometers above the surface before breaking and spilling westward.
A new overlay put a small blinking light 800 meters above the lake surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows showed her projected drift.
According to this, she would go around and around in a circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her ballooning rig wasn’t designed to go high enough for the winds to blow her back over the land. Her suit wasn’t designed to float. Even if she managed to bring herself down for a gentle landing, once she hit the lake she was going to sink like a stone. She wouldn’t drown. But she wouldn’t make it to shore either.
Which meant that she was going to die.
Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie’s eyes. She tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her death itself. “Damn it, don’t let me die like this! Not from my own incompetence, for pity’s sake!”
“Nobody’s said anything about incompetence,” Alan began soothingly.
