She lifted up her face to the distorted sun.

She thought of home: of Houston’s sticky heat, the corroding sea air of the Cape, the fresh green of Seattle. It was impossible to believe that all of that wasn’t still up there somewhere: that huge, sunlit Earth, infinite and eternal, full of problems and dreams, the disregarded backdrop to her own life.

How could it all be gone?

“Come on,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s follow this brook downstream,” he said.

She shrugged. She didn’t have any better plans.

As they walked, he told her about the first time he’d woken, the glimpse he’d got of ammonia life.

They walked for a couple of miles, away from the cliffs. The ground started to slope downwards, as if they were walking down a long beach, and the stream became broader, its eroded banks more ragged.

At last, the covering of topsoil wore thin, and bare ice bedrock pushed through the surface like bone, pale red-grey in the light of the sun. Only a handful of plants grew here, clumps of the grass-analogue struggling to survive in the scrapings of topsoil. The exposed ice was sharply cold under Benacerraf’s feet.

They topped a shallow crest.

Before them an ocean stretched to the horizon, blood-red and murky, huge waves moving sluggishly across it. The liquid lapped at the edge of the shore, and flecks of ice crusted its surface.

Rosenberg grunted. “We’re on Titan for sure. Look at the size of those damn waves. And no tides to speak of.”

“What do you think the fluid is? Ammonia?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Of course not. The temperature’s wrong. It’s water. What else?”

She wrapped her arm around his. “You’re going to have to give me a little time, Rosenberg. I’m not so smart as you.”

“Then you’re lucky.”

“Come on. Let’s go find somewhere we can sleep.”

Maybe a mile inland from the water’s edge, they found a thicket of trees, with a thick blanket of topsoil and fat white flowers beneath. When they crawled under the layers of low branches, Benacerraf had a feeling of shelter; the shade shut out the unchanging, ruddy sky.

They ate and drank a little more. They tried to build a fire, Benacerraf rubbing sticks back and forth earnestly, but without any success. Maybe the wood needed to dry out.

They huddled together to sleep. They lay on the ground, back to back, then face to face. They couldn’t get comfortable, and Benacerraf was cold, even with her face tucked down into her suit.

She had an idea.

They stripped off their suits, and pressed their four halves together, pinching the magical seams. It took a little experimentation, but eventually they had made a kind of shapeless sleeping bag large enough to take the two of them.

They crawled into it, face to face. Rosenberg’s flesh, where it touched her at knees and hips, was hot. Soon the bag started to grow warmer.

Benacerraf felt something pressing against her stomach.

“Rosenberg…”

“I’m sorry,” he said miserably. “A primate reflex, here at the end of time. I can’t help it.”

“You’re so pompous, Rosenberg.”

She touched his face. It was wet.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

“Do you want a list? I want to go home. I don’t want to be stuck out here, like this, in the open air, trying to sleep in the daylight.”

“Have you lost your curiosity, Rosenberg?”

“No. But I hate not knowing what tomorrow will be like.”

“Rosenberg—”

“What?”

She reached out and ran her hand over his chest. Rosenberg’s body, shorn of hair, was soft, almost girlish.

She climbed on top of him, keeping the suit bag huddled over her. She bent down and kissed him gently on the mouth. “Let’s get warm, Rosenberg.”

“Yeah.”

He took hold of her hips, and pulled her down towards him.

There was a scratching sound, from a few yards away. Maybe it was a cat, she thought sleepily.

She had one arm stuck under Rosenberg. He had his thin back to her, and was snoring softly. Carefully she pulled the arm out from under him; it tingled as the blood supply was restored to it.

She rolled on her back. That huge, swollen sun still hung above her; maybe it had dipped down from the zenith a little way.

Morning on Titan:no birds were singing, no traffic noise, no radios or TVs blaring, no softscreen billboards shining.

Shit, she thought. It’s real. I’m still here. I’m stranded billions of years into the future. Earth is gone, and I’m on Titan, transformed by person or persons unknown.

Yesterday had been — unreal. Overwhelming. But waking up today, with a pain in her back and a gritty taste in her mouth, the reality of her situation seemed mundane. Even irritating.

And there wasn’t a cup of coffee on the whole fucking moon.

Away from Rosenberg’s warmth she could feel the hard coldness of the ground under her, and the chill air seeped into the improvised sleeping bag at her neck.

She had the feeling that Rosenberg was awake, but was lying there with his eyes closed, hoping the day would go away, or maybe that she would take some kind of responsibility for it all. She could understand that. Hell, how were they supposed to cope with this? Surely they both had some kind of post-traumatic stress to work through. And—

…What cat?

She rolled over and pushed up to her knees, resisted by the cramped, linked suits.

The creature was six feet away from them. It was the size and shape of a dinner table, and it picked its way across the ground on eight spindly, insectile legs, each maybe four feet long. The legs terminated in points, and didn’t leave footmarks. The main body, the table-top, was a corrugated, purple-black carapace; there were clusters of what looked like blackberries all around the table rim. The whole table-shape was swathed in a translucent golden-brown blanket, evidently the same material as Benacerraf’s suit.

Arms — six or seven of them — reached down from the underside of the table-top, and poked at the ground. The arms were skeletal bars of a glassy, semi-transparent crimson-grey substance, and Benacerraf couldn’t see how they moved; there was no evidence of anything like muscles or cables. The arms terminated in spiky claws with opposable thumb-like extensions. The claws dug gently at the surface, delicately picking up fragments and lifting them up to some kind of stowage under the table-top.

Rosenberg woke up with a start, his eyes puffy with sleep.

“What the—”

“Shut up,” Benacerraf hissed. “Look.”

He rolled onto his belly, his bony hip bumping against hers.

“Holy shit,” he said.

The creature, or artifact, was all but still. Only its arm-extensions worked, methodically picking over the soil. Occasionally a leg would rise, folding up delicately, and set down again. The motions were slow, deliberate, almost reptilian.

She had no sense of threat. The thing was so slow it was impossible to imagine that it could outrun humans, if it came to a chase. And besides, those limbs looked pretty fragile. Maybe they were made of water ice.

There were some heavy chunks of wood-analogue left over from the abortive fire from yesterday, within Benacerraf’s reach. If she had to she could reach out and find a club. It wouldn’t be hard to shatter those icicle legs.

The creature was standing over the patch of ground she had used as an improvised john yesterday, and it was taking salami slices off half-frozen lumps of feces.

“U.S. Cummings, I presume,” said Rosenberg.

“What?”

“Science fiction. Philip Dick. Never mind.”

“Rosenberg, I think it’s picking up one of my turds.”

“I don’t think you need to whisper,” Rosenberg said — but he was whispering too. The two of them were propped up on their elbows, inside their sleeping bag, like two kids watching TV in bed. “It must be aware we’re here. But I’m sure it’s not going to bother us.”