Rosenberg kneeled up and stared after the departing platform. It was like a kite, roughly diamond-shaped, the size of a 747. It glided, one pointed corner first, through the thick air. That papery flesh stretched over a frame-like skeleton. The anatomy seemed sketchy. There looked to be a spine along the axis, bulging in places; maybe there were organs — a digestive tract — in there.

It was like the pterodactyls of antique Earth. Or a Wright brothers fever dream, he thought.

This was Titan, Rosenberg reminded himself; the living things here could only be built from the raw materials to hand. And so, the bones of the kite-thing were probably made of water ice.

All along the leading edges of the diamond wings there were gaping cavities, like jet inlets. Maybe they were mouths; perhaps the creature fed on smaller airborne life forms, cruising like a shark. Like the jellyfish he was riding, the kite seemed passive, inert, as if saving its energy; he could see no sign of motion, anywhere across the kite’s huge frame. And that immense mass of skin showed another similarity with the jellyfish: a lot of exposed surface area for the kite’s mass.

He couldn’t see any legs, any means of landing.

Perhaps it never landed at all; perhaps it spent its life in the air, feeding on the airborne particles, even breeding there.

The pterodactyl receded, slowly, its sharp rectangular profile diminishing.

Rosenberg kneeled against the wall. The urine, cooling, lapped against his feet.

And now a dark form cruised over the surface of the ocean, far below him.

It was shaped something like a terrestrial ray, but it was immense. Those hundred-foot Titan waves broke like ripples in a bathtub over its oily, corrugated back; it had to be a mile across at least. Rosenberg could see vent-like mouths all along the ray-thing’s leading edges, and its back. It was turned to face the waves, but it didn’t appear to be moving; he could see no sign of a wake, no frothing or disturbance from any kind of impellers. He was reminded of a big basking shark, cruising through beds of krill and plankton, its huge jaw gaping. But this basker did not trouble to seek out its feed; it just sat in the prevailing current, waiting for plankton-analogue or whatever other organic goodies were suspended in the ammonia ocean to drift into its multiple mouths.

So, Titan life. There were common characteristics, he thought dully. Huge size. Large surface area. Passivity.

The jellyfish continued to rise. Now he was far above the surface of the ocean, and he had risen above the lip of the Cronos cliffs. The land on the plateau was a plain of grey-green ice, pocked with craters. Most of the craters were just sketches, palimpsests, their walls diminished by relaxation. The old craters were empty of their ethane lakes now, although he thought he could make out a purplish, filmy crust in the crater basins.

The world was split in two: an ocean hemisphere to his right, the flat grey-green ice of Cronos to his left. The horizon was blurred by mist and vapor, but curved sharply; the world was small and compact, a ball suspended in space, visibly smaller than the Earth.

He thought he caught glimpses of more baskers. Their delta shapes were arrayed across the surface of the ocean, like huge factory ships slowly processing the plankton-analogue.

Tiring, his lungs aching, he sat with his back resting against the pliant wall, his legs outstretched.

His thinking was feverish, getting fragmented, as if he was lacking sleep.

In fact he started to feel bored.

Now, that was just ridiculous. Here he was, somehow restored from death by Vitamin A poisoning, preserved across — oh, God — preserved across billions of years, maybe, and revived in an ammono-life ecosphere…

But he had nothing to do but sit here and sightsee. He wanted to get out there and do something. He wanted to take samples, run them through his lab in the hab module.

And he craved mundane things: to take a shower, read a book.

He wanted someone to talk to.

The sky, stained bottle-green by methane, was getting perceptibly darker. He must be rising out of the troposphere, the thick bottom layer of the air.

He looked up at the sun. Its bloated disc seemed a little clearer, though it was still surrounded by a faint halo.

He wondered if it was possible to see Earth from here. If Earth still existed, it must be lifeless: no more than a cinder, skimming the surface of the sun’s swollen photosphere.

No help for me there, he thought.

His chest was dragging at the air.

He tried to suppress panic, to keep his breathing even and steady.

Something was wrong.

He was going to suffocate in here, in this bubble suspended over the bizarre surface of a transformed Titan, here at the end of time. He would drown in his own exhalations, awash in urine—

A pillar thrust out of the surface of the jellyfish, ten feet from the wall of the bubble.

Rosenberg screamed. He scuttled backwards, over the yielding surface, getting as far as he could from the pillar.

To his shame, more urine dribbled out of his shrivelled penis and leaked over his legs.

The pillar was six or seven feet tall, maybe two wide. It was made of glistening crimson flesh. Its surface was like the jellyfish carapace: the same purple-black coloration, that complex ridging pattern. But the ridging was on a smaller scale, the gouges and bars separated by a couple of inches. It was topped by a cluster of large, complex-looking cell groups. Perhaps they were some form of sensor; perhaps he was being inspected.

Maybe it was here to give him more air, to feed and water him.

The pillar was utterly still.

The way it had moved was eerie. It had been reptilian: a burst of motion, followed by stone-like stillness. Perhaps it was that quality which made him feel so nervous and suspicious.

What did it want?

Take me to your leader.His ragged thoughts ran on in uncoordinated hypotheses, as his fear bubbled in his hind brain.

He coughed, and the pain in his lungs sharpened; black spots swam in his vision, clustering at the edge of his field of view.

He crawled forward, through the puddle of urine, to the wall facing the pillar. He slapped the bubble’s surface with the flat of his hand. “Can’t you see I’m dying in here? Why don’t you do something about it? Hey…!”

The pain in his lungs started to spread outward, up through his throat and out across his chest.

He slumped, resting his face and chest against the yielding wall. He slid down, onto his back. He could feel the cooling piss lap against his feet and lower legs.

“You weren’t expecting me to be conscious. You don’t know how to handle this, do you?”

Black flecks gathered at the periphery of his vision. Through the filmy upper surface of the bubble, the sky deepened to a rich emerald green. He was lying here in his own urine, gasping for air like a beached fish. What an end for mankind, he thought; what an epilogue.

There seemed to be something descending from the sky towards him: a broad, purple-black disc, a glimmering bubble, softly distorted…

He could see through it. It was a reflection, of his rising jellyfish, in some kind of translucent sheet above him.

They’ve roofed over the world, he thought.

He thought he saw more of those pillars, thrusting out of the carapace around him like fingers.

He tried to grip the plastic surface under him, struggling to stay conscious, to make this interval last as long as he could, before another unimaginable period of non-existence overwhelmed him.

But the cold green darkness was washing over him. He cried out as it pushed into his eyes, his brain; but he could no longer hear his own voice.