Titan

But eventually Calvin and Cirocco got what they had wanted. Soon after, neither wanted it anymore.

Cirocco didn't know what the problem was with Calvin and Gaby; neither of them talked about it, but it was obvious that it worked only passably at best. Calvin continued to see her, but she saw Gene, too.

Gene had apparently been waiting for Cirocco to stop chasing him. As soon as she did, he began to sidle up and breathe heavily in her ear. She didn't like that much, and the rest of his technique was no better. When he was through making cove, it al- most seemed he expected to he thanked. Cirocco had never been easily impressed; Gene would have been astonished to learn where he fell on her scale of one to ten.

Bill had happened almost by accident-though she had since learned that few accidents happened around Bill. One thing led to another, and now they were about provide a pornographic demonstration of Newton's Third Law of Motion, the one that used to refer to , action and reaction."

Cirocco had done some calculations on the matter, and had found that the force of ejaculation was not nearly enough to account for the orgasmic acceleration she always observed at that moment. The cause was certainly spasms of the large muscles of the leg, but the effect was beautiful and a little frightening, as though they had become big, fleshy balloons losing air, forced away from each other at the moment of closest approach. They would careen and carom, and finally come to rest together again.

Bill felt it building, too. He gri

PUBIREL DISPATCH #0056 5112125

DSV RINGMASTER (NASA 447D, LS/1, HOUSTON-COPER- NICUS GCR BASELINE)

IONES, CIROCCO, MISCOM

FOR PARAPHRASING AND IMMEDIATE RELEASE BEGINS:

Gaby has settled on Themis as the name for the new moon. Calvin agrees with her, though they arrived at the name from different directions.

Gaby mentions the alleged sighting of (what would have been) a tenth moon of Saturn by William Henry Picketing---discoverer of Phoebe, Saturn's outermost moon-in 1905. He named it Themis, and no one ever saw it again.

Calvin points out that five of the Saturnian moons are already named after the Titans of Creek myth (which is a special interest of his; see PUBIREL DISPATCH #0009,113124) and a sixth is called Titan. Themis was a Titan, so Calvin's mind is appeased. Themis has things in common with the moon Pickering thought he saw, but Gaby is not convinced he actually sighted it. (If he did, she would not be listed as its discoverer. But to be fair, it seems too small and dim to be seen in even the best Lunar scopes.)

Gaby is formulating a cataclysmic theory of Themis 'formation, the result of a collision between Rhea and a wandering asteroid. Themis might be the remnant of that asteroid, or a chunk knocked off of Rhea itself.

So Themis is proving an interesting challenge for

"--that wonderful gang of idiots you all know so well by now, the crew of the DSV Ringmaster." Cirocco leaned back from the typer touchplate, stretched her arms over her head, and cracked her knuckles. "Tripe," she muttered. "Also bullshit."

The green letters glowed on the screen in front of her, still with no period at the bottom.

It was a part of her job she always delayed as long as possible, but the NASA flacks could no longer be ignored. Themis was an uninteresting chunk of rock, by all indications, but the publicity department was desperate for something to hang a story on. They also wanted human interest, "personality journalism," as they called it. Cirocco tried her best, but could not bring herself to go into the kind of detail the release writers wanted. Which hardly mattered anyway, since what she had just written would be edited, re-written, discussed in conference, and generally

jazzed up to "humanize" the astronauts.

Cirocco sympathized with their goal. Few people gave a damn about the space program. They felt the money could he better spent on Earth, on Luna, and at the LS colonies. Why pour money down the rat-hole of exploration when there was so much benefit to be derived from things that were established on a businesslike basis, like Earth-orbital manufacturing? Exploration was terribly expensive, and there was nothing at Saturn but a lot of rock and vacuum.

She was trying to think of some fresh, new way to justify her presence on the first exploratory mission in eleven years when a face appeared on her screen. It might have been April, and it might have been August.

"Captain, I'm sorry to disturb you."

"That's okay. I wasn't busy."

"We have something up here you should see."

"Be right up."

She thought it was August. Cirocco had worked on keeping them straight since twins generally resent being mistaken for each other. She had gradually realized that April and August didn't care.

But April and August were not ordinary twins.

Their full names were April 15/02 Polo and August 3/02 Polo. That was what was written on their respective test tubes, and that is what the scientists who had been their midwives had put on the birth certificates. W'hich had always struck Cirocco as two excellent reasons why scientists should not be allowed to fool around with experiments that lived and breathed and cried.

Their mother, Susan Polo, had been dead for five years at the time of their births, and. could not protect them. Nobody else seemed ready to give them any mothering, so they had only each other and their three clone-sisters for love. August had told Cirocco once that the five of them had only one close friend while growing up, and that had been a Rhesus monkey with a souped-up brain. He had been dissected when the girls were seven.

"I don't want to make it sound too brutal," August had said on that occasion, a night when some glasses of Bill's soybean wine had been consumed. "Those scientists were not monsters. A lot of them behaved like kindly aunts and uncles. We had just about anything we wanted. I'm sure a lot of them loved us." She had taken another drink. "After all," she said, "we cost a lot of money."

What the scientists got for their money was five quiet, rather spooky geniuses, which is just what they ordered. Cirocco doubted they had bargained for the incestuous homosexuality, but felt they should have expected it, just as surely as the high I.Q. They were all clones of their mother-the daughter of a third-generation Japanese-American and a Filipino. Susan Polo won the Nobel prize in physics and died young.

Cirocco looked at August as the woman studied a photo on the chart table. She was exactly like her famous mother as a young woman: small, with jet-black hair and a trim figure, and dark, expressionless eyes. Cirocco had never thought Oriental faces were as similar as many Caucasians found them to be, but April and August's faces gave nothing away. Their skin was the color of coffee with lots of cream, but in the red light of the Science Module August looked almost black.

She glanced at, Cirocco, showing more excitement than usual for her. Cirocco held her eye for a moment, then looked down. Against a field of pinpoint stars, six tiny lights were arranged in a perfect hexagon..

Cirocco looked at it for a long time.

"It's the damdest thing 1 ever saw on a starplate," she conceded. "What is it?,,

Gaby was strapped to a chair on the other side of the compartment, sucking coffee from a plastic bulb.

"It's the latest exposure of Themis," she said. "I took it over the last hour with my most sensitive equipment and a computer program to justify the rotation."

"I guess that answers my question," Cirocco said. "But what isit?"

Gaby waited a long time before replying, taking another sip.

"It is possible," she said, sounding detached and dreamy, "for several bodies to orbit around a common center of gravity. Theoretically. No one's ever seen it. The configuration is called a rosette."

Cirocco waited patiently. When no one said anything, she snorted.

"in the middle of Saturn's satellite system? For about five minutes, maybe. The other moons would perturb them."

"There's that," Gaby agreed.

"And how would it happen in the first place? The chances against it are tremendous."

"There's that, too."

April and Calvin had entered the room. Now Calvin looked up.

"Isn't anyone going to say it? This isn't a natural arrangement.

Somebody made this."

Gaby rubbed her forehead.

"You haven't heard it all. 1 bounced radar signals off it. They came back telling me Themis was over 1300 kilometers in diameter. Density figures all cockeyed, too, making it less dense than water by quite a bit. 1 thought 1 was getting screwed-up readings because 1 was working at the limits of my equipment. Then 1 got the picture."

"Six bodies or one?" Cirocco asked.

"I can't tell for sure. But everything points to one." "Describe it. What you think you know."

Gaby consulted her printout sheets, but obviously did not need them. The figures were clear in her mind.

"Themis is 1300 klicks across. That makes it Saturn's third

largest moon, about the size of Rhea. It must be flat black all over, except those six points. This is by far the lowest albedo of any body in the solar system, if that interests you. It's also the least dense. There's a strong possibility it's hollow, and a good chance it's not spherical. Possibly disc-shaped, or toroidal, like a donut. Either way, it seems to turn like a plate rolling along its edge, once every hour. That's enough spin so nothing could stay on its surface; the centripetal force would overpower the force of gravity."

"But if it's hollow, and you were on the inside .

Cirocco kept her eyes on Gaby.

"Inside, if it's hollow, it would be equivalent to a force of one- quarter gee. "

Cirocco looked her next question, and Gaby couldn't meet her eyes.

"We're getting closer every day. The seeing can only get better. But I can't promise you when I could he sure about any of this."

Cirocco headed for the door. "I'll have to send what you have."

"But no theories, okay?" Gaby shouted after her. It was the first time Cirocco had seen her less than happy with what she'd seen through a telescope. "At least don't attribute them to me."

"No theories," Cirocco acknowledged. "The facts ought to be plenty."