Xeelee: Endurance by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

films are the primary producers – an equivalent of the plankton in our oceans, for instance. But where do they get their energy from? And how do they survive the annual drying-out of their lakes?’
    ‘Good questions,’ I said. ‘I wish I cared.’
    She stowed her sample bottles in her pack. ‘I think you care more than you’re prepared to admit. Nobody as intelligent as you is without curiosity. It goes with the territory. Anyhow we should get back to the gondola.’
    I hesitated. I hated to prove her right, that there was indeed a grain of curiosity lodged in my soul. But I pointed at the enigmatic black form lying further along the beach. ‘Maybe we should take a look at that first.’
    She glanced at it, and at me, and headed that way without another word.
     
    It turned out, as I had suspected, that the crumpled form was a bird. I recalled one hitting our gondola during their assault and falling away; perhaps this was that very casualty.
    It was essentially a block of ice, about the size of my head, wrapped up in a torn sheet of black film. With great care Miriam used her manipulator arm to pick apart the film, as if she was unwrapping a Christmas present. The ice mass wasn’t a simple lump but a mesh of spindly struts and bars surrounding a hollow core. It had been badly damaged by the fall. Miriam took samples of this and of the film.
    ‘That ice lump looks light for its size,’ I said. ‘Like the bones of a bird.’
    ‘Which makes sense if it’s a flying creature.’ Miriam was growing excited. ‘Jovik, look at this. The filmy stuff of the wings looks identical to the samples I took from the surface of the lake. It has to be silane. But the ice structure is different.’ She broke a bit of it open, and turned on a suit lamp so we could see a mass of very thin icicles, like fibres. It was almost sponge-like. Inside the fine ice straws were threads of what looked like discoloured water. ‘Rich in organics,’ Miriam said, glancing at a data panel on her manipulator arm. ‘I mean, our sort of organics, CHON life, carbon-water – amino acids, a kind of DNA . There are puzzles here. Not least the fact that we find it here , by this lake. CHON life has been sampled on Titan before. But it’s thought carbon-water life can only subsist here in impact-melt crater lakes, and we’re a long way from anything like that . . .’
    Her passion grew, a trait I have always found attractive.
    ‘I think this is a bird, one of those we saw flying at us. But it seems to be a composite creature, a symbiosis of these silicon-based wings and the ice lump – silane life cooperating with CHON life! Just remarkable. You wonder how it came about in the first place . . . but I guess there are examples of survival strategies just as intricate in our own biosphere. Give evolution enough time and anything is possible. I wonder what it is they both want , though, what the two sides in this symbiosis get out of the relationship . . .
    ‘It’s a genuine discovery, Jovik. Nobody’s seen this before – life from two entirely different domains working together. And I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for you.’ She held out the ice lump to me. ‘They’ll probably name it after you.’
    Her enthusiasm was fetching, but not that much. ‘Sure. But my concern right now is how much power we have left in these suit heaters. Let’s get back to the gondola.’
    So she stowed away the remaining fragments of the Titan bird, Jovik Emry’s contribution to Solar System science, and we retraced our path back to the gondola.

 
    9
    The days are very long on Titan, and by the time we got back to the gondola nothing seemed to have changed about the landscape or the sky – not a diffuse shadow had shifted. We found Poole and Dzik, surrounded by alien mystery, happily fixing big balloon wheels to axles slung beneath the crumpled hull. Boys will be boys.
    When they were done, we all climbed back aboard. Poole had reset some of the