The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick Read Free Book Online Page A

minute sample of the ammonia-water, fed it through a deftly constructed internal laboratory, and excreted the waste products behind it. “We’re at twenty meters now,” Consuelo said. “Time to collect a second sample.”
    The turbot was equipped to run hundreds of on-the-spot analyses. But it had only enough space for twenty permanent samples to be carried back home. The first sample had been nibbled from the surface slush. Now it twisted, and gulped down five drams of sea fluid in all its glorious impurity. To Lizzie, this was science on the hoof. Not very dramatic, admittedly, but intensely exciting.
    She yawned again.
    “O’Brien?” Alan said. “How long has it been since you last slept?”
    “Huh? Oh…twenty hours? Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”
    “Go to sleep. That’s an order.”
    “But-”
    “Now.”
    Fortunately, the suit was comfortable enough to sleep in. It had been designed so she could.
    First she drew in her arms from the suit’s sleeves. Then she brought in her legs, tucked them up under her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. “’Night, guys,” she said.
    “
Buenas noches, querida,
” Consuelo said, “
que tengas lindos sueños.
”
    “Sleep tight, space explorer.”
    The darkness when she closed her eyes was so absolute it crawled. Black, black, black. Phantom lights moved within the darkness, formed lines, shifted away when she tried to see them. They were as fugitive as fish, luminescent, fainter than faint, there and with a flick of her attention fled.
    A school of little thoughts flashed through her mind, silver-scaled and gone.
    Low, deep, slower than sound, something tolled. The bell from a drowned clock tower patiently stroking midnight. She was beginning to get her bearings. Down
there
was where the ground must be. Flowers grew there unseen. Up above was where the sky would be, if there were a sky. Flowers floated there as well.
    Deep within the submerged city, she found herself overcome by an enormous and placid sense of self. A swarm of unfamiliar sensations washed through her mind, and then…
    “Are you me?” a gentle voice asked.
    “No,” she said carefully. “I don’t think so.”
    Vast astonishment. “You think you are not me?”
    “Yes. I think so, anyway.”
    “Why?”
    There didn’t seem to be any proper response to that, so she went back to the beginning of the conversation and ran through it again, trying to bring it to another conclusion. Only to bump against that “Why?” once again.
    “I don’t know why,” she said.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She looped through that same dream over and over again all the while that she slept.
    When she awoke, it was raining again. This time, it was a drizzle of pure methane from the lower cloud deck at fifteen kilometers. These clouds were (the theory went) methane condensate from the wet air swept up from the sea. They fell on the mountains and washed them clean of tholin. It was the methane that eroded and shaped the ice, carving gullies and caves.
    Titan had more kinds of rain than anywhere else in the solar system.
    The sea had crept closer while Lizzie slept. It now curled up to the horizon on either side like an enormous dark smile. Almost time now for her to begin her descent. While she checked her harness settings, she flicked on telemetry to see what the others were up to.
    The robot turbot was still spiraling its way downward, through the lightless sea, seeking its distant floor. Consuelo was trudging through the tholin again, retracing her five-kilometer trek from the lander
Harry Stubbs
, and Alan was answering another set of webposts.
    “
Modelos de la evolutión de Titanes indican que la luna formó de una nube circumplanetaria rica en amoníaco y metano, la cual al condensarse dio forma a Saturno así como a otros satélites. Bajo estas condiciones en—
”
    “Uh…guys?”
    Alan stopped. “Damn it, O’Brien, now I’ve got to start all over again.”
    “Welcome back to