Benacerraf got to look forward to the times when she could make the choice after Rosenberg’s split. That way she was guaranteed to finish up with a few fractions of an ounce more than he did. She woke up remembering it was her turn, with a lighter mood.
She understood what was happening here. They were both in such foul and increasing discomfort that they needed someone to blame. The real candidates were too impersonal and remote to be hated, satisfyingly: Titan’s ghastly conditions, the lousy equipment, the treachery of NASA and its political masters in abandoning them here, the Chinese and their hammer rock.
There was nobody else to blame. Only each other.
Understanding it, though, didn’t make it any easier to contain.
After the meal, they went to work on each other’s wounds.
Benacerraf had developed hemorrhoids, a consequence of the sweat and moisture trapped inside her suit. Rosenberg had brought a cream she could apply. Her back, shoulders and stomach were sore continually now, from their battering by the sled harness. It felt as if her pelvis was starting to protrude through the raw patches over her hips, as her body fat fell away. Her lips were still a problem; the scabs and crevices stubbornly refused to heal, and she still swallowed salty blood with every mouthful of food.
And she had indeed developed crotch rot; her inner thighs and the area around her pubic hair were rubbed raw by the inner layers of her suit, even though she treated the area with Canesten powder.
Rosenberg had a dose of crotch rot too. With the innocence of a child, he showed her his genitals. His scrotum was a shrunken bag, red raw from the rot. And somehow his penis had gotten nipped by the frost. It had swollen up to a shapeless mass, and the end was blistered. He shrugged. “What you pay for being circumcised. One less layer of insulation. Add that to the list, Paula. No Jews on Titan, without boxer shorts.”
He took a look at Benacerraf’s right foot. For days she had been favoring the foot as she marched, but that had just generated more problems. Now she had an abscess, swollen up on her Achilles tendon, where her heel was pressured by the rim of her boot. Rosenberg had been giving her antibiotics from their precious, dwindling supply, but they seemed to be doing little but give her the squirts.
Today, Rosenberg said he would have to operate.
He gave her two deep injections of Xylocaine. For a couple of minutes he covered up her foot, protecting it from the cold while the anaesthetic took hold. Then he took a scalpel blade — one he’d sterilized back in Discovery — and plunged it deep into the swelling. He made diagonally crossed incisions with brisk, confident strokes.
Yellow pus poured out of the wounds, and he collected it in an empty ration bag.
When he was done he cleaned the wound, coated it with antiseptic, and bound it up with bandage.
Benacerraf turned and began to pull on her sock.
When she sealed herself up again that night, Benacerraf found herself immersed in a deep animal stink. She knew that inside her high-tech suit she was becoming progressively more foul and filthy. She was an animal, stranded far from home and encased in this technological bubble, gradually fouling her own mobile nest.
The hell with it. For now, the dirt was another layer between her and the cold.
She turned her face to the tent wall. She pictured the way Rosenberg picked icicles of snot out of his nose-hairs. Warmed by irritation, she sought sleep.
At last the giant ice ridges began to diminish.
She came to a place where the waves, somehow sheltered from the wind, were smaller — no more than six or seven feet high, reduced almost to a human scale. Benacerraf decided to change her tactics, to attempt a frontal assault.
She waited to make sure Rosenberg was in view; then she donned her skis again and set out directly east, cutting across the first wave, a characteristic frozen wave-shape.
Hauling her sled behind her, she made it to the narrow ridge at the top of the wave. Her sled was suspended halfway up the slope, and the harness hauled back at her, rubbing the chafed parts of her skin. The ridge of the next wave was only about four feet away, and she reached out towards it, hoping to bridge across the gap with her feet. But the sled fouled on a ridge of the ice, and jammed; she was hauled backwards, and almost lost her balance.
Irritated, she leaned forward and lunged, trying to clear the sled. It bounced into the air and came free suddenly; unbalanced again she tumbled forward, scrambling with her skis to avoid falling down on the steep far side of the second wave.
So she proceeded.
The waves gradually declined in size, until she found herself skiing almost unimpeded over a plain of ridged ice, scattered with gumbo and pockets of gritty granules.
Gradually, they penetrated the heart of Cronos.
On the ninth day she started to find the going harder. After a while she realized the ground was sloping up beneath her. She pushed on through the uniform haze, ignoring the pain in her knees and feet.
The slope became dramatically steeper.
The ground was pushed up into a wall as far as she could see, from north to south, like one giant wave, its termini disappearing into the misty horizon. The ice was uneven, scoured by ankle-snappers: narrow, gumbo-streaked gulleys which plunged down the steepening contours.
She walked a zig-zag path, at an angle to the line of steepest slope, and that got easier on her feet, because the skis, sideways on, laid over all but the widest of the gulleys. But the gulleys snagged repeatedly at the runners of her sled, jerking her backwards.
Beyond the miniature horizon created by the crest of the wall, a mountain was rising, its grey-white flanks streaked by gumbo, like a model of Othrys.
The crest of the ridge came up suddenly. The ground levelled out and she found herself on a narrow, eroded shelf, maybe fifty yards across, puddled with gumbo. With a final effort she hauled her sled up and over the edge. She unbuckled her harness, and dropped it gratefully to the ice.
She looked back the way she had come. Her runners and skis had left no visible trail on the bone-hard ice. She could see how this great wall swept up out of the plain in a smooth concave sweep. Much further down the slope she could see Rosenberg; he was a dark, toiling speck, dwarfed by the bulk of the sled he hauled.
She turned and walked forward to the far edge of the wall. The ice here was smooth and relatively free of gulleys and crevasses, and she slid easily on her skis.
She reached the edge of the wall. She stepped carefully, avoiding the edge and any brittleness there.
The wall stretched to left and right, foreshortening and dimming out in the horizon mist. Its inward curve was just visible. That mountain peak, a neat cone, lay dead ahead of her, its base lost in the murky haze of distance.
She was clearly standing on the rim of a crater, a great walled plain which curved around that central peak. It looked too symmetrical to be natural, like a huge artifact.
She looked down into the crater plain. The wall here was steeper than on the other side; the crater was clearly a wound dug deep into the countryside. In a belt at the foot of the wall the ice surface was shattered into giant chunks which would make travelling difficult. But beyond that chaotic country, the land smoothed out, and was coated by a thickening layer of purple gumbo.
The sky was a dome of unbroken, twilight orange, empty of cloud save for a high, light scattering of nitrogen-ice cirrus.
Rosenberg came up to her. Like Benacerraf he’d discarded his harness; as he stood alongside her he leaned forward, letting the mass of his pack settle over his center of gravity, and his arms dangled, limp. His breathing was as noisy as ever.