2312

Swan and the rings of Saturn

Inspector Genette and his team had business to conduct in the Saturn system and would not be returning downsystem for a while, so Swan was free to join Wahram as he had requested. His manner had been very odd, his gaze fixed on her, x-raying right through her—toad vision, yes. It reminded her of the look he had given her when she told him she had eaten the Enceladan alien suite; out of the fog of that whole incident, the look on his face was what she recalled—his surprise that anyone could be such a fool. Well, he had better get used to it. She was not normal; not even human, but some kind of symbiote. Ever since eating the aliens she had never felt the same—assuming there had ever been any same to begin with. Maybe it had always been true that colors burst in her head, that her sense of spaciousness was sharp to the point of pain or joy, her sense of significance likewise. Possibly the Enceladan bugs made no more difference than any of the other bugs in her gut. She was not sure what she was.

The look on Wahram’s face seemed to suggest he felt much the same.

The visit with Wahram’s crèche on Iapetus was just a matter of dropping in on one of the ordinary meals in their communal kitchen. “These are some of my friends and family,” Wahram said when introducing Swan to the small group at a long table. Swan nodded as they chorused hello, and then Wahram walked her around the room and introduced her to people. “This is my wife Joyce; this is Robin. This is my husband Dana.”

Dana nodded once, in a way that reminded Swan of Wahram, and said, “Wahram is funny. I seem to recall that I was the wife when it came to us.”

“Oh no,” Wahram said. “I was the wife, I assure you.”

Dana smiled with a little squint of suppressed disagreement. “Maybe we both were. It was a long time ago. In any case, Miss Swan, welcome to Iapetus. We’re happy to be hosting such a famous designer. I hope you’ve enjoyed Saturn so far?”

“Yes, it’s been interesting,” Swan said. “And now Wahram is going to take me down into the rings.”

She followed them to the central dining table, and Wahram introduced her to some more people, whose names she forgot, and they waved or nodded without attempting to say more. After a while they chatted with her a bit, then went back to their conversations and left Wahram and his guest alone. Wahram’s cheeks sported little spots of red, but he seemed pleased too and was easy with his crèchemates as they drifted by on their way out. Maybe on Saturn, Swan thought, this was a rousing party.

Soon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the inner shepherd moon of the F ring. The gravitational sweeps of Prometheus and Pandora, F’s outer shepherd moon, changed in relation to each other in ways that ended up braiding the F ring’s billions of ice chunks into complex streamers, very unlike the smooth sheets of the bigger rings. In effect the F ring was being swirled in the tides created by its two shepherd moons, making for some waves. And where there were waves, there were surfers.

Prometheus proved to be a potato moon, 120 kilometers long. Its biggest crater dimpled the end closest to the F ring and had been domed, and a station set just inside the rim.

Inside the dome a group of ring surfers greeted them and described the local wave, of which they were very proud. Prometheus reached its apoapse, meaning its farthest point away from Saturn, every 14.7 hours; each time it did so, it almost brushed the slowly tumbling wall of ice chunks that composed the inner border of the F ring. Prometheus was moving faster in its orbit than the ice chunks were in theirs, so it tugged a streamer of chunks out behind it as it passed, in a gravitational effect called Keplerian shear. The curving strand of tugged ice always appeared at a regular distance behind Prometheus, as predictable as the wake behind a boat. The wave at each apoapse appeared 3.2 degrees farther along than the previous one, so it was possible to calculate both when and where to drop in and catch it.

“One wave every fifteen hours?” Swan asked.

That was enough, the locals assured her, grinning crazily. She wouldn’t need more. The rides went on for hours.

“Hours?” Swan said.

More crazy grins. Swan turned to Wahram, and as usual could not read his stone face.

“You’re going out too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

“No.”

She laughed. “Good. Let’s do it.”

The rings could be modeled mathematically as a fluid, and from any distance they looked like a fluid, grooved by tight concentric waves. Up close one could see that the F ring, like the others, was made of ice chunks and ice dust, layered in ribbons that thickened and thinned in masses of individual bodies, all flying at almost the same speed. Gravity: here one saw its effects in a pure state, unobstructed by wind or solar radiation or anything else—just the sling of spinning Saturn and a few small competing tugs, all creating this particular pattern.

Prometheus was a perfect put-in spot for the surfers, and the ones going out with Swan and Wahram informed them they were both going to be launched into the wave with experienced veterans going before and after, to keep tabs and give help if needed. They offered tips for how to catch the wave, but Swan nodded agreeably and forgot their advice: surfing was surfing. You needed to catch the break at its own particular speed, and off you went.

Then they were all suited up and jetting out a lock. The white jumbled wall of the F ring was right there next to them; streamers of denser clusters of rubble were braided and kinked, but the entire mass was extremely flat—no more than about ten meters north to south relative to Saturn. Those ten meters were not the height of their wave but its width—which meant one could pop out of the ice at any point and be spotted and picked up if one was having any kind of trouble. Most of the waves Swan had ridden before were not like that, and she found it reassuring.

They jetted closer and closer to the white wall, until Swan could see discrete ice chunks very clearly, ranging in size from sand grains to suitcases, with the occasional chunk of ice furniture—desk, coffin—tumbling in the midst of things. Once she saw a temporary agglomeration about the size of a small house, but it was coming apart even as she spotted it. And now a white curl of banner was detaching from the wall and flowing down toward Saturn, which though bulking hugely below them was of no interest at all.

Swan tested her jets as she flew toward the wave, pressing with fingertips like a clarinet player, jinking forward in a little sashay of her own device. Suit jets were about the same everywhere. She focused on the approaching wave, which was lifting up and over her like Hiroshige’s wave; this one was ten kilometers high, and rising fast. She needed to turn and accelerate in the direction it was going, but not so quickly that she stayed ahead of it. This was the tricky part—

Then she was in the white stuff and being struck by the bits. She jetted a bit to keep her head out of stuff, as if bodysurfing out of a spume of broken salt water, but it was chunky stuff and she felt herself being thrust forward by little hits from little bits, rather than a mass of water. Then she was at speed with the wave, her head emerging from it so she could look around—very like bodysurfing, and she had to laugh, she had to shout: she was flying in a wave of ice ten kilometers high. She hooted at the sight, she couldn’t help it. The common band was raucous with the other surfers’ yelling.

The wave was really more a slice of a wave, only as wide as a room, and it sometimes felt only a bit thicker than she was—a two-dimensional wave, so to speak, so that it seemed one could get hit sideways, or jet at a slight tangent, and accidentally shoot out the side of it. So it would not do to submerge completely back into the white stuff, dolphin style. Maybe some of the other riders were doing it, but she felt she could get lost in there. Besides, she wanted to see!

She could feel the wave lifting her and casting her along. It was not only being struck by ice chunks, but also being tugged by gravity. The feel of the ice was like getting lightly pummeled by pebbles, which together were knocking her forward. Possibly one could ride a big surfboard on the push of this mass, direct the ride with one’s feet; indeed she saw down the wave someone standing on a thing like a coracle, riding in that very manner. But most of the others were bodysurfing like she was, perhaps because you needed a suit’s jets to make the best moves. In any case she had always preferred bodysurfing to surfing on boards. To be the object of flight, to cast yourself out into the spaces you breathed, and although motionless be flying at speed, slung forward—

The wave pitched and she was knocked forward faster than ever. Most of the chunks were between tennis balls and basketballs in size, and if she emerged on her jets until only her feet were in the mass, she could hop on bigger chunks and propel herself with little jumps forward and out. The wave was still surging up, but it was like the wake of a boat, in that there was no bottom to catch the submerged half of the wave and cause the upper part to curl and break. So from now on it would lose energy, and eventually dissipate without ever breaking. Too bad in a way, but now it was time to dance!

She jumped onto larger pieces when opportunities presented themselves, and with one jump after another got just where she wanted to be, on the border between the white flock of ice and the empty black space it was rushing into; and then she was dancing on white boulders, glissading on a kind of moving scree, as if running down a mountainside that had gone liquid. She laughed briefly as she got the hang of it. There was still a lot of hooting and hollering on the common band. The figure nearest her was possibly Wahram, hopping along with remarkable agility, like the dancing hippos in Fantasia. She laughed to see it. She could feel Prometheus tugging her along; this must be what a pelican felt like, surfing the air pushed up by a water wave. A gravity wave, throwing her through the universe. The howls of the other surfers sounded like wolves.

Back under the dome on Prometheus, out of their suits, Swan gave Wahram a sweaty hug. “Thank you for that!” she said. “I needed that! It reminded me that… it reminded me… Well. It was good.”

Wahram was red-faced, puffing with exertion. He nodded once, his mouth pursed in a solemn little knot.

“Well what did you think?” she cried. “Did you enjoy it?”

“It was interesting,” he said.