Everywhere the probes looked, they found life. Some of this was Earthlike, anaerobic methane-loving bugs sluggishly building pillows and mounds in the cold brine of the crater lakes. A more exotic sort of carbon-based life-form, using ammonia rather than water, could be found swimming in the stuff bubbling out of the cryovolcanoes. Most exotic of all was a community of slimelike organisms that used silicon compounds as their basic building blocks, not carbon; they lived in the piercing cold of the black, mirror-flat ethane lakes.
The crater-lake bugs were cousins of Earth’s great families of life. The ammonia fish seemed to be indigenous to Titan. The cold-loving ethane slime might have come from the moons of Neptune, or beyond. The solar system was full of life — life that blew everywhere, in rocks and lumps of ice detached by impacts. Even so Titan was extraordinary, a junction for life-forms from across the solar system, and maybe even from without.
But Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016 had not come to Titan for science. As it passed through its closest approach to the moon and its carnival of life, its robot cousins did not even know it was there.
The Deep Space Monitor’s complex heart was a space probe built to a century-old design philosophy, with an angular frame from which sprouted booms holding sensor pods and radiothermal-isotope power units. But this inner core was surrounded by a rigid shell of “metamaterial,” a mesh of nanotechnological washers and wires that shepherded rays of sunlight away from the probe and sent them on their way along paths they would have taken had the probe not been present at all.