Saturn

Ben Bova

Saturn

There are some questions in Astronomy to which we are attracted … on account of their peculiarity … [rather] than from any direct advantage which their solution would afford to mankind… I am not aware that any practical use has been made of Saturn’s Rings… But when we contemplate the Rings from a purely scientific point of view, they become the most remarkable bodies in the heavens… When we have actually seen that great arch swing over the equator of the planet without any visible co

As the new century begins … we may be ready to settle down before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for everyone into the indefinite future… For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption would require [the resources of] four more planet Earths.

Once more to dearest Barbara, and to Dr. Jerry Pournelle, a colleague and friend who originated the term “shepherd satellites” but never received the credit for it that he deserves.

BOOK I

For the same reason I have resolved not to put anything around Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed — that is, two small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west, in which no alteration has ever yet been seen to take place and in which none is to be expected in the future, barring some very strange event remote from every other motion known to or even imagined by us. But as to the supposition … that Saturn is sometimes oblong and sometimes accompanied by two stars on its flanks, Your Excellency may rest assured that this results either from the imperfection of the telescope or the eye of the observer… I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it. And reason, based upon our experiences of all other stellar motions, renders us certain that none will ever be seen, for if these stars had any motions similar to those of other stars, they would long since have been separated from or conjoined with the body of Saturn, even if that movement were a thousand times slower than that of any other star which goes wandering through the heavens.

SELENE: ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

Pancho Lane frowned at her sister. “His name isn’t even Malcolm Eberly. He changed it.”

Susan smiled knowingly.

“Oh, what diff’s that make?”

“He was born Max Erlenmeyer, in Omaha, Nebraska,” Pancho said sternly. “He was arrested in Linz, Austria, for fraud in ’eighty-four, tried to flee the country and—”

“I don’t care about that! It’s ancient! He’s changed. He’s not the same man he was then.”

“You’re not going.”

“Yes I am,” Susan insisted, the begi

“I’m your legal guardian, Susie.”

“Poosh! What’s that got to do with spit? I’m almost fifty years old, f’real.”

Susan Lane did not look much more than twenty. She had died when she’d been a teenager, killed by a lethal injection that Pancho herself had shot into her emaciated arm. Once clinically dead she had been frozen in liquid nitrogen to await the day when medical science could cure the carcinoma that was raging through her young body. Pancho had brought her cryonic sarcophagus to the Moon when she began working as an astronaut for Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Eventually Pancho became a member of Astro’s board of directors, and finally its chairman. Still Susan waited, entombed in her bath of liquid nitrogen, waiting until Pancho was certain that she could be reborn to a new life.

It took more than twenty years. And once Susan was revived and cured of the cancer that had been killing her, her mind was almost a total blank. Pancho had expected that; cryonics reborns usually lost most of the neural co

So Pancho fed and bathed and toilet trained her sister, an infant in a teenager’s body. Taught her to walk, to speak again. And brought the best neurophysiologists to Selene to treat her sister’s brain with injections of memory enzymes and RNA. She even considered nanotherapy but decided against it; nanotechnology was allowed in Selene, but only under stringent controls, and the experts admitted that they didn’t think nanomachines could help Susan to recover her lost memories.

Those years were difficult, but gradually a young adult emerged, a woman who looked like the Susie that Pancho remembered, but whose personality, whose attitudes, whose mind were disturbingly different. Susan remembered nothing of her earlier life, but thanks to the neuroboosters she had received her memory now was almost eidetic: if she saw or heard something once, she never forgot it. She could recall details with a precision that made Pancho’s head swim.

Now the sisters sat glaring at each other: Pancho on the plush burgundy pseudoleather couch in the corner of her sumptuous office, Susan sitting tensely on the edge of the low slingchair on the other side of the curving lunar glass coffee table, her elbows on her knees.

They looked enough alike to be immediately recognized as sisters. Both were tall and rangy, long lean legs and arms, slim athletic bodies. Pancho’s skin was little darker than a well-ta

Susan broke the lengthening silence. “Panch, you can’t stop me. I’m going.”

“But… all the way out to Saturn? With a flock of political exiles?”

“They’re not exiles!”

“C’m on, Soose, half the governments back Earthside are cleaning out their detention camps.”

Susan’s back stiffened. “Those fundamentalist regimes you’re always complaining about are encouraging their nonbelievers and dissidents to sign on for the Saturn expedition. Encouraging, not deporting.”

“They’re getting rid of their troublemakers,” Pancho said.

“Not troublemakers! Free thinkers. Idealists. Men and women who’re ticked with the way things are on Earth and willing to warp off, zip out, and start new lives.”

“Misfits and malcontents,” Pancho muttered. “Square pegs in round holes.”

“The habitat will be populated by the best and brightest people of Earth,” Susan retorted.

“Yeah, you wish.”

“I know. And I’m going to be one of them.”

“Cripes almighty, Soose, Saturn’s ten times farther from the Sun than we are.”