The Salt in the Rings

The projector died halfway through Saturn, so the rings just hung there on the dome, frozen and crooked, while the storm threw snow at the windows.

"It's stuck," said Soren.

"Everything's stuck," said the docent, a tired man named Greg who kept checking his phone for the plows. "You two have parents coming?"

"Eventually," said Maya. She was lying on the floor looking straight up at the broken picture. "Greg. What's the fuzzy one."

"Which fuzzy one."

"The outside ring. It's not sharp like the others. It's like fog."

Greg glanced up. "That's the E ring. Faint. Made of tiny ice grains. Don't ask me how it stays out there, that's the next slide and the next slide isn't coming."

He went back to his phone.

Maya tugged Soren's sleeve until he lay down next to her. "Look at the fog ring. Now look where it's brightest."

Soren looked. The faint ring wasn't even all the way around. It had a thick part, a bright smear, like someone had pressed their thumb into one spot.

"It's lumpy," he said.

"Rings shouldn't be lumpy. The sharp ones aren't lumpy. They're smooth all the way around." She pointed. "Something's feeding it right there. Like a hose."

Soren sat up and got his notebook out of his bag. He drew the lopsided ring and put an arrow at the bright part. Then he held the drawing at arm's length and squinted.

"A ring that thin should disappear," he said. "Little ice grains out in sunlight. They'd get pushed around, knocked apart, fall away. There shouldn't be a ring at all in a few thousand years. That's nothing. That's a blink."

"So why's it still there."

"Somebody keeps refilling it."

They both looked at the bright smear.

"Greg," said Maya. "What's sitting in the bright part."

Greg didn't look up. "Moons. Saturn's got a pile of them. There's a little one right about there, Enceladus, white as a snowball. Brightest thing in the system, reflects almost all its light. Frozen solid."

"Frozen solid," Soren repeated.

"Cleanest ice you ever saw."

Maya rolled onto her stomach. "Greg. If it's frozen solid, where's the new ice coming from. The ring's leaking and something's topping it off and you said the only thing there is a frozen snowball."

Greg finally looked up from his phone. "It's a moon. Moons don't leak."

"This ring does," said Soren. He was still holding his drawing up. "You said it yourself. Thin ring, sunlight, it should be gone. But it's here, and it's fattest exactly where the snowball is. The snowball is the hose."

"A frozen moon can't be a hose. There's nothing to hose."

Maya had gone quiet. Then she said, "Unless it's not frozen all the way down."

Greg laughed, not meanly, just tired. "It's a tiny moon way out past everything. Way too small and way too far from the sun to be anything but solid rock and ice."

"That's the part that doesn't fit," Maya said, sitting up fast. "Small things lose their heat. Right? A cup of coffee goes cold faster than a whole bathtub. Small means cold. So it should be the most frozen thing out there."

"It is," said Greg. "On the outside. White as anything."

"On the outside," said Soren slowly. He looked at Maya. "What if the outside is white because the inside isn't."

The room got quiet except for the snow.

"Say that again," said Maya.

"Fresh snow," Soren said. "Why is it the brightest thing in the whole system. Old ice gets dirty. Space is full of dust. Anything sitting out there for a billion years should be grimy. But it's clean. Clean means new. Something's covering it in new snow, over and over, faster than the dust can dirty it."

"New snow," said Maya. "From where. There's no sky out there. There's no weather."

They both stared at the frozen picture above them, the snowball moon they couldn't actually see, just the bright bruise in the ring where it lived.

"It's snowing out," Maya said. "On the moon. It's snowing up."

"You can't snow up," said Greg.

"You can if it's coming out of the ground," said Soren. His pencil had stopped. "That's the only thing that works. The ring leaks, something refills it. The moon stays white, something resurfaces it. Same something. Stuff is coming up out of the moon, going up, some of it lands back down as fresh snow, and some of it flies away and that's the ring. One hose. Both problems."

"And to come up out of the ground," Maya said, very fast now, "it has to be liquid. You can't spray rock. You spray water. There's water under there. Liquid. Under all that ice."

"It's frozen solid," Greg said again, but quieter, like he was the one trying to keep up now.

"It's frozen on the lid," said Maya. "The lid's just the lid."

Soren was writing fast. "Liquid water means it's warm down there. Warm at the bottom. Way out where there's barely any sun. Something's heating it from inside." He stopped. "Warm water. In the dark. With a rocky bottom."

"What lives in warm water in the dark with a rocky bottom," Maya said, and it wasn't really a question, because they both already knew about the bottom of the ocean, the vents down where no light ever goes, the whole crowd of things living there with no sun at all.

Neither of them said the word. The word was too big for the gift shop.

Greg had come around the counter without anyone noticing. He was looking up at the broken slide, at the lopsided foggy ring, the way you look at something you've walked past a thousand times.

"Huh," he said. "I always told people it was just a snowball."

"It's a snowball with the lights on inside," Maya said.

The plow's yellow beacon finally swung across the windows, throwing the shadows of the snowflakes up onto the dome, up across the frozen rings, hundreds of little white specks drifting upward over the picture of the moon that was doing the exact same thing, four hundred million miles away, right that second, in the dark, without anybody watching.

Soren held his notebook up against the dome and traced one falling flake as it rose.