Flashback. San Antonio, Texas, in flames from end to end, lighting up an orange roof of smoke and cloud that had become the sky. Streets littered with bodies, debris, and abandoned vehicles, figures fleeing aimlessly amid falling buildings and the ceaseless roaring and crashing of incoming bolides. Tank cars exploding in the railroad sidings. A blood-drenched woman wandering demented, calling a man's name . . .
It was in the quiet moments, when there were no external distractions, that Keene's mind would return with a morbid compulsion that he was unable to restrain, to the events of those last weeks on Earth. Just eleven hundred and sixty-two had been brought back to Kronia from shuttles and lifters that had made it up from the surface, or been left stranded in space aboard orbiting structures or vehicles incapable of reaching Saturn. Another sixty-six had been brought from the Mars bases. The number might have been greater if two of the Kronian rescue vessels sent to do what they could hadn't been destroyed in collisions with the debris orbiting Earth, causing the agonizing decision to be made not to send any more missions until conditions eased.
At the time, a mental defense reaction had numbed Keene to the things going on around him and the knowledge that they were happening everywhere. His mind had refused to take in what it meant. Now, as if effecting some kind of catharsis, it seemed to need to purge itself by finally allowing consciousness to experience the burden of horror that it had accumulated and suppressed. It was happening as he lay weightless in his seat restraint aboard the medium-haul transorbital taking him back to Titan two days after the strike hit Rhea, when his scheduled stay on LORIN 5 was over.
He relived again the days of Athena's approach after emerging from its tight turn around the Sun, when its thirty-million-mile-long, outward-directed tail had engulfed Earth, darkening the atmosphere with caustic fumes and incendiary vapors, and bringing worldwide rains of fiery hail. Then had come the meteorite bombardment, pulverizing entire regions, while mounting tides inundated the coasts, and hurricanes stirred stratosphere-high palls of dust and smoke into perpetual night. Had he experienced the rest firsthand, he wouldn't have been here now to reflect on the enormity of it; and whether or not there were any still alive back there who had lived through the final days was unknown. As Athena and Earth, with titanic electrical discharges arcing between them, closed and gyrated about each other inside the Moon's orbit before separating, he had watched the false-color computer reconstructions of the events unfolding beneath the shroud veiling the stricken world.
But the veils that had screened it from his mind were opening. Only now was he beginning, fully, to grasp the meaning of death tolls counted in billions; of entire civilizations, their works, and their cities disappearing beneath walls of water miles high as the Earth's axis shifted and oceans surged across continents; of seas boiling, crustal blocks tilting, rifts opening, lava sheets spreading for hundreds of miles to reenact in hours and days tectonic processes previously thought to require millions of years.
Keene was not the only one to be affected in this way. He could pick out another evacuee, even one that he hadn't met before, maybe sitting on the far side of the cafeteria in an industrial complex on Titan, or passing by in one of the habitats on Dione. They all had the same gaunt look that comes with unsettled digestion and troubled sleep. And they seldom laughed.
It was different for the dozen or so others around him in the transorbital's main cabin, all of them Kronian-born, or at least raised, talking among themselves, reading, following whatever was playing on their vi-spex, or simply immersed in their own contemplations. For Kronians, the impact of what had happened lay more at an intellectual level. Their reality had always been the insides of domes or subterranean galleries, stars seen through armored glass or a helmet visor. Open skies and the rustling of trees, or the rush of surf on beaches was not the stuff of immediate experience. The world that was no more, while perhaps one that they might have briefly sampled, was not a world they had known.
A voice from the chatter around him percolated through his broodings. "Lan's very quiet. Are you okay there, Lan?" It was Bryd, a trainee life-support tech, who was going down to Titan for a few days' break.
The line of Keene's mouth softened slightly. "Just tired, Bryd," he grunted.
Myel, the Kronian girl next to Bryd, had been cook and dietician up in LORIN 5, as well as pharmacist and medical assistant. She was also learning three languages. Preserving as much as possible of Earth's cultures was something that everyone took a part in. "Will you be going straight back to the program you're with at Essen?" she asked Keene. Essen was a fusion-driven materials extraction and processing complex located on Titan. Keene was involved in the development of advanced energy technologies at an electrical research facility called the Tesla Center, that was attached to it. Given his background, that was the most valuable contribution he could make toward the colony's ongoing viability. Contributing mattered a lot in Kronia.
"For now, anyway," Keene answered. "There's no end of things that need to be done."
"You have a family on Dione, though, don't you?" Myel said.
"Not exactly family. A friend who was my business partner back on Earth. Her name's Vicki. She has a son—he's eighteen now. Her husband was in the Navy back on Earth. He died in an accident. That was a long time before Athena . . . happened."
The third member of the group sitting with Keene was called Esh. Like the other two, he was young with an intense intelligence, and imbued with the personal dedication to Kronia and its values that the society that had taken root here instilled. They were similarly clad in plain workaday tunics, Bryd and Myel's olive green; Esh's, navy. Personal adornment was a rare luxury these days.
"I have a son back on Dione too," Myel said.
"What's his name?" Keene asked her.
"Carlen. He's three. Blond hair and brown eyes like Obert—that's his father. And all mischief. He's going to be an engineer too. I can tell. He takes things apart already—but he's still such a long way from being able to put them back together." Keene smiled faintly. By now, he was used to encountering what he would once have considered unusually young parenthood. Myel went on, "He's been in a preschool dorm in between staying with his grandmother. But now Obert's getting some leave too. I can't wait to see them again."
"So is Obert away a lot too?" Keene asked.
"He's with the Swiss Cheese Project—one of the people who make sure the lighting spectra are right." Mimas, the second inner major moon after Janus, was being hollowed into internally heated and illuminated crop-growing spaces that it was said would eventually measure a mile across. Nobody quite knew how far the project would be taken, but if just a hundredth of the 300-mile-diameter volume were to be excavated, the total surface area of the resulting spaces would be over twenty percent that of the former U.S.A.
"Kronia needs him too," Keene answered. "Nuclear engineers are no use without food."
"How could we grow food without energy?" Myel said.
Good manners had been observed without conceding false modesty, which would be considered foolish on Kronia—like throwing away money. It had also been proper for Keene to ask Carlen's name. Establishing names was important. Having an identity meant that a person mattered. Being dismissed as of no consequence was the ultimate Kronian snub.
A thruster fired briefly somewhere, and Keene felt the mild nudge of the transorbital correcting course.
"Weren't you a propulsion specialist back on Earth?" Esh asked Keene after a short lull.
"Yes. But there were always obstacles. The technology and knowledge for advanced systems had been available for a long time. But everything had gotten to be a political battle there."
Esh nodded—although no one who was Kronian-born, particularly of his age, could have understood the historical antagonisms that came with Terran politics and economics. "How does propulsion engineering fit in with power generation?" he asked curiously. "I'd have thought it was more the opposite—using it, not making it."
Keene hesitated, but the other two seemed interested as well. With its anticipated growth and the necessity now for total self-sufficiency, larger and more efficient power sources were one of Kronia's most important needs. Keene's experience with controlling hot propulsion plasmas qualified him for developing better ways of turning raw, violent heat into usable electricity.
"Are you familiar with MHD?" he asked them.
Bryd frowned. "Mag— magneto-something, isn't it . . . ?" He looked at Myel. She shrugged and passed.
"Hydro . . ." Esh supplied.
Keene grinned and rescued them. "Magnetohydrodynamics. It's a way of converting heat to power—well-suited to nuclear. What you do is blast the plasma from a fusion reactor—which consists of hot, fast-moving, electrically charged ions—through a system of conductors to induce a current directly. It does away with the train of machinery that early generating plants had: some kind of furnace, heating a boiler that sent steam to a turbine—all just to turn the generator at the end. A lot simpler; very efficient."
"So didn't they use it on Earth?" Myel said, sounding surprised.
"Oh, it was kicked around for decades," Keene replied. "But the trick is in getting hot enough plasmas, and there were endless political problems with anything nuclear." He made a throwing-away gesture. "But the spacecraft nucleonics that I was working on adapts perfectly for the job. You propel the ship and generate all your power with the same system. It's neat. And you can turn the idea around the other way too. That's what we're working on at Tesla." He nodded at Esh, finally answering his question.
"How do you mean, the other way around?" Esh asked.
"A space vessel capable of functioning as a self-contained generating station when on the ground," Keene said. "Ideal for setting up new exploration bases around the Solar System. No need to transport separate, bulky equipment. And it would be able to deliver immediately."
"Vital work, indeed," Esh observed after thinking it through. "Kronia needs people like you, Dr. Keene. We're glad you made it here."
"The privilege is mine," Keene told them.
There had been more to Esh's remark than simple politeness. Kronia had been founded by gifted but disaffected individuals in search of meaning and purpose. They rejected the doctrine that human existence was no more than a pointless accident as had come to be generally believed on Earth, and sought something better than the abandonment to materialism and personal alienation that they saw as having been largely the result of it. As the colony grew and assumed its own ways and form, notions based on Earth's traditional monetary concepts proved not especially suitable as an indicator of the values of things and a measure of personal worth in the unique circumstances that prevailed there.
In a hostile environment far removed from any naturally renewing source of the necessities of life, the knowledge, skills, and dedication that an individual contributed to ensuring the viability of the colony as a whole meant more than acquiring such tokens as money and possessions, which in themselves were useless to anyone else. Hence, a system established itself in which self-esteem stemmed from the acceptance of duty and obligation and the proficiency shown in discharging them, instead of demands for "rights"—or the laying of obligations on others. Personal reward came from what amounted to the recognition of one's value in those terms.
The principle had even acquired a name: appretiare, from the Latin "to price"—the root of "appreciation." Respecting the real contributions of others—which eventually extended itself to things like motives, and hence judging integrity—became the Kronian "currency" for paying dues. And in its own strange way, which even the psychologists were unable to explain precisely, it worked. In traditional human societies, whether status was won by amassing luxuries, collecting the skulls of vanquished opponents, or having killed the biggest lion, what gave satisfaction at the end of it all was to rank highly on whatever form of totem pole earned the esteem of others. What the Kronians appeared to have done was dispense with intermediates and deal directly in the values that ultimately mattered. In addition, as it transpired, their system eliminated the opportunities for all kinds of misrepresentation and fakery in the process.
Hence, Esh was not just paying a simple compliment but, in acknowledging Keene's status as indispensable, paying the highest tribute that could be given. Like the intricate social etiquette of ancient Japan, the conventions of appretiare discerned subtleties of shade and meaning that Keene was still working to master. Kronians raised in the system from birth understood the rules intuitively.
Myel seemed about to say something further, when the call beep sounded from Keene's compad. He took it from his jacket and answered. "Landen Keene here."
"Ludwig Grasse. Am I calling at a convenient time?"
"Yes, it's fine."
Grasse was a former Austrian government official connected with banking, one of an influential group who had gotten off Earth in the final days aboard a European Consortium shuttle commandeered at a launch site in Algeria. They had made it to an orbiting transfer platform for lunar shipments and survived there for almost two months before being picked up by one of the rescue vessels sent from Kronia. Grasse and Keene had met intermittently at reunions of Terran survivors and at several social gatherings. Several days previously he had contacted Keene aboard LORIN 5 to arrange a meeting when Keene returned to Titan. All he had said about the subject was that it involved certain matters that Grasse and others had concerns about, which he would like to hear Keene's opinions on.
Grasse went on, "Is it possible we could bring the time forward a little? I will be leaving later this evening, and there's someone else I need to see also departing. Could we make it for before six o'clock?" Since no common system of timing and dating could fit all the cycles experienced by the various habitats and installations scattered across Kronia, a 24-hour Terran model had long ago been adopted as a universal standard, which the local domains endeavored to adapt to as painlessly as possible.
"We're on distant approach now, due in at Styx in about an hour," Keene replied. "I'm due to meet somebody who might be joining our project, so I have to go straight to the Tesla Center first. Suppose we said about five? How would that suit?"
"That would be satisfactory," Grasse replied.
A little over an hour later, the transorbital detached from holding orbit and sank into the upper-atmosphere clouds of nitrogenous compounds that gave Titan its reddish brown color. It emerged at twenty thousand feet, above a desolate surface of ice, rock, and swamps of liquid methane cloaked in permanent night.