The Moon That Is Leaking

The library heater made a noise like a person sighing, and outside the snow came down so thick that the parking lot lights looked like they were underwater.

Maya had her boots up on the chair across from her. On the wall screen, silent because someone had lost the remote, a spacecraft drifted past a small white moon.

"That one," Maya said. "Look at the bottom of it."

Soren looked. The moon was pale and cracked at the south pole, like the shell of a boiled egg somebody had tapped with a spoon. And out of the cracks came thin bright plumes, feathering up into black space.

"That's Enceladus," Soren said. He had read the placard by the display case on the way in, the one with the model of Saturn nobody ever stopped for. "It's tiny. Smaller than our whole state, I think."

"Then what's coming off it?"

"Water."

Maya took her boots off the chair.

"Say that again."

"Water. Ice and vapor. It sprays out of those cracks at the bottom." Soren leaned toward the screen. "There was a card. The plumes go up hundreds of miles."

Maya watched the little moon turn. The captions were off, so it was just the thing itself, spraying and spraying into nothing.

"Okay," she said. "But it can't be. A moon that small should be frozen solid all the way through. Frozen things don't have fountains."

"That's the part I don't get either."

"Where does the water come from?"

"Under the ice."

Maya turned to look at him.

"Under it," Soren said again, slower, like he was checking it as he said it. "The card said there's an ocean. A whole ocean of liquid water, under the frozen shell. The whole moon. Wrapped around the inside like the water in a shaken snow globe."

The heater sighed again. On the screen the plumes kept coming, silent, tireless.

"That's not possible," Maya said, but she said it the way she said things she already believed. "It's a billion miles from the sun. There's nothing to keep it warm."

"Saturn squeezes it."

"Saturn what?"

Soren pulled the notebook out of his coat pocket and set it on the table without opening it, just holding the pen. "The moon goes around Saturn in a stretched circle. So Saturn's pull on it changes, closer and farther, closer and farther. The whole moon gets flexed. Squeezed and let go. Over and over."

"And squeezing makes heat." Maya bent a paperclip from the table back and forth, back and forth, fast. She pressed it to her lip. "Feel that. It's warm. From bending."

Soren took it. It was warm.

"So the moon is a paperclip," he said. "That Saturn never stops bending."

"And the bending keeps an ocean liquid." Maya was quiet for a second. "Under miles of ice. In the dark. Forever."

They both looked at the screen. The camera was drifting now, and something new came into the frame, faint, a wide misty band circling Saturn, farther out than the bright hard rings.

"What's that ring," Maya said. "The soft one. The one that looks like breath on a window." "The plumes," he said while he wrote. "The water it's spraying out. It doesn't fall back. It's so small it can't hold onto it. So it just. Goes."

Maya sat forward.

"It's leaking into space."

"And the leak," Soren said, and his pen stopped, "is the ring."

Maya stood up. She actually stood up, in the empty reading room, in front of the silent screen.

"That misty ring is made out of the ocean," she said. "That's ocean water. That's a whole ocean's worth of one moon, sprayed out so long it drew a circle around the entire planet."

"That's what the card said." Soren's voice had gone careful. "The outer ring is made of Enceladus."

They stood there. Outside, the snow kept coming, and every flake of it had been a drop of something once, lake or river or the breath of a person on a cold morning, gone up and come back down.

"Soren." Maya's hand was flat on the table. "An ocean. Salt water. Warm from the bottom. In the dark."

"I know."

"That's every place on Earth where things live where the sun never reaches. The bottom of our ocean. The vents." She was talking faster now. "Warm water, and rock, and dark, and salt. That's the recipe. That's where life doesn't need the sun."

"They found the same stuff in the plume," Soren said. "That's the part I keep coming back to. When the spacecraft flew through the spray, it tasted it. Salt. And the kind of chemistry that, down here, only happens where things are alive or where things could be."

"Could be," Maya repeated.

"Nobody knows. That's the honest part. Nobody knows yet."

And that was the thing that got her, Soren could see it. Not an answer. The not-knowing. The little moon spraying its whole hidden ocean into space, tirelessly, for maybe a billion years, writing the question in a ring around Saturn where anyone with a spacecraft could fly through it and taste whether something down there was breathing.

"So it's just," Maya said, "sending it out. On purpose almost. Here. Here's my ocean. Come check."

"Not on purpose."

"I know not on purpose." She was smiling now, the way she smiled at a thing that would not sit still and let itself be finished. "But you don't have to land on it. You don't have to dig through the ice. It hands you a sample. It throws its own ocean at you."

Soren wrote one more line and turned the notebook so she could see it. It said: the ring is a message no one wrote.

Maya read it twice.

Then she looked back up at the screen, where the small cracked moon was going out of frame at last, still spraying, and the soft ring hung behind it, wide and pale and made entirely of water that had come from somewhere warm.

The documentary looped back to the beginning. Saturn swung into view again, and Maya sat back down without taking her eyes off it, waiting for the little moon to come around a second time.