A school of little thoughts flashed through her mind, silver-scaled and gone.
Low, deep, slower than sound, something tolled. The bell from a drowned clock tower patiently stroking midnight. She was beginning to get her bearings. Down _there_ was where the ground must be. Flowers grew there unseen. Up above was where the sky would be, if there were a sky. Flowers floated there as well.
Deep within the submerged city, she found herself overcome by an enormous and placid sense of self. A swarm of unfamiliar sensations washed through her mind, and then...
"Are you me?" a gentle voice asked.
"No," she said carefully. "I don't think so."
Vast astonishment. "You think you are not me?"
"Yes. I think so, anyway."
"Why?"
There didn't seem to be any proper response to that, so she went back to the beginning of the conversation and ran through it again, trying to bring it to another conclusion. Only to bump against that "Why?" once again.
"I don't know why," she said.
"Why not?"
"I don't know."
She looped through that same dream over and over again all the while that she slept.
* * *When she awoke, it was raining again. This time, it was a drizzle of pure methane from the lower cloud deck at fifteen kilometers. These clouds were (the theory went) methane condensate from the wet air swept up from the sea. They fell on the mountains and washed them clean of tholin. It was the methane that eroded and shaped the ice, carving gullies and caves.
Titan had more kinds of rain than anywhere else in the Solar System.
The sea had crept closer while Lizzie slept. It now curled up to the horizon on either side like an enormous