Titan

Cassini was travelling at three miles per second: more than four Titan diameters every hour. And as Cassini climbed out of the heart of the Saturn system, Titan itself lay dead ahead, a featureless, orange-brown ball, dimly lit by the remote sun.

As Titan approached, a human passenger on Cassini might have been exhilarated, or terrified, by the probe’s plummeting towards the moon.

Cassini was a survivor. It had endured a two-billion-mile cruise through some of the most hazardous sites in the Solar System to get here. It had even survived Earthbound attempts to cut its funding, to abandon it to its fate, here among the moons of Saturn.

Cassini had already completed sixty orbits of Saturn. The orbits, pumped and shaped in three dimensions by Titan flybys, had periods ranging from a hundred days to ten, Saturn closest approaches ranging from three Saturn radii to seven, orbital inclinations ranging up to sixty degrees above Saturn’s equator.

There were more than thirty close Titan flybys during the tour. Cassini had even grazed Titan’s atmosphere, scooping particles of the thin, high layers of air into its mass spectrometer. The flybys had brought Cassini as close as six hundred miles from Titan’s cloud tops, passing at a speed of twelve thousand miles per hour.

Mission planners on the ground had eked out the spacecraft’s remaining propellant supplies and power in order to keep Cassini functioning effectively as long as possible. Perhaps, the planners dreamed, Cassini could survive through a single complete Saturn year, while Earth travelled around the sun thirty times. It could even slingshot off Titan to head for another planet, or an asteroid.

But now Cassini had a new mission: an assignment which, ultimately, it could not survive.

Humans were coming to Saturn. And Cassini would have to serve them.

It was January 18, 2008.

Communications from the surface of Titan would not be easy, for human colonists there.

As Titan kept the same face to Saturn at all times, a colony would be out of line of sight of Earth for half of each sixteen-day orbital period. That compounded the problems of Saturn’s billion-mile remoteness from Earth, and the difficulties of superior conjunctions: those periods, occurring once a year, when the geometry of the orbits of Saturn and Earth was such that the sun got between the Earth and Titan.

What the colony would need was a relay satellite in orbit around Titan. The human mission could have brought along its own relay satellite, and left it in orbit after its crew descended to the surface.

It would prove cheaper to use Cassini.

Cassini was to be placed in Clarke orbit around Titan, a synchronous sixteen-day orbit, so that it hovered above the ground station continuously. That way the satellite would be in line-of-sight with Earth almost all the time, save for those brief periods when it was eclipsed by Titan, or Titan passed behind Saturn, or when a superior conjunction made communication impossible in any case.

Cassini had on board an electronics package called the Probe Support Equipment, which had been designed to enable it to pick up data from the Huygens probe during its descent to Titan’s surface, and later downlink the data to Earth. And now this old piece of hardware and computer software, used only once, could be used to communicate with a surface human colony.

But to be captured by Titan, Cassini was going to have to shed most of its twelve-thousand-mile-per-hour approach velocity.

There was no way Cassini’s rocket propellant — tanks of hydrazine and nitrogen tet — could deliver such a velocity change. Even at the start of its tour, the total the propellants could have delivered had been about five thousand miles per hour; now, they were much depleted.

So Cassini — ageing, space-soaked and battered, short on energy and fuel — was going to be dipped into Titan’s atmosphere, and aerobraked.

For Cassini, which had never been designed for such a mission, there were some drawbacks.

Principally, it had no heatshield. And it had no aerodynamic surfaces for control. Cassini had the typical angular, non-streamlined look of a craft designed for the vacuum of space. Now, it would have to function as a mixture of entry capsule and aircraft.

As Titan neared, it began to open outward, turning from a socked-in ball to a wall of cloud, its scale overwhelming the hardy probe. Cassini was not heading for the heart of Titan’s face, but was passing the moon tangentially: aimed, roughly, at the edge of the atmosphere.

Cassini’s temperature rose rapidly as it encountered the first wisps of Titan air, nitrogen and methane and hydrogen.

Cassini plunged into the atmosphere of Titan with its lower equipment module, and its cluster of engine nozzles, leading; the umbrella-shaped high-gain antenna followed behind, acting as a kind of keel to keep the spacecraft stable.

Cassini was travelling at many multiples of the speed of sound. The temperature of the spacecraft’s structure rose rapidly, and a thin bow shock of plasma, glowing grey-white, formed ahead of the craft’s squat, angular prow.

The onboard processors monitored the spacecraft’s status. Internal thermometers noted the temperature rise within the body of the craft, and accelerometers recorded the reduction in velocity. If the velocity drop was too great, or the spacecraft began to overheat, the processors would fire the main engines. That would boost the spacecraft rapidly back out of the atmosphere, to the relative safety of space.

But Cassini would leave the atmosphere with most of its velocity intact. On this first entry Cassini would not even shed enough speed to be captured as a satellite of Titan; for now it remained in orbit around Saturn, although on a lower-energy trajectory, and must return to Titan for more aerobraking. Eventually, after several passes, the craft would shed enough energy to enter an elliptical orbit around Titan. And at last, using a combination of aerobraking and engine burns, Cassini would circularize its orbit and take up its position over Titan’s equator.

Later, the craft could be moved to station-keep over the eventual human colony’s position.

Many engineers on Earth gave low odds for Cassini to survive so many Titan passes. But in any event that was for the future, many months away.

For now, Cassini blazed in the thin, high air of Titan, a man-made meteorite, dragging a straight yellow line across the orange face of Titan’s cloudscape.

Even during this first atmospheric pass Cassini suffered some damage. Many of the covers of its sensors were corroded; its ability to function as a science platform was already degraded.

But much of its yellowed paint and pitted, blackened insulation blankets had been stripped away, the underlying metal surface exposed, gleaming. That was going to give the mission controllers, in the future, some heating problems. But the spacecraft itself looked young again, its scoured-clean surfaces shining.

Cassini,in fact, looked as if it had just come out of the clean room at JPL.

The human spacecraft Discovery, laden with fuel tanks and habitation modules and antennae, sailed away from Earth, towards the sun.

Discovery was an airliner shape suspended in black infinity, the radiators of its payload bay doors gleaming in the harsh, flat sunlight. The orbiter looked much as it had done in Earth orbit, save for the wings — reshaped for Titan’s atmosphere — and the removal of the tailplane.

Beyond the leading edges of the wings supplementary tanks protruded, massive, blunt-nosed cylinders swathed with reflective insulation blankets. The tanks carried the fuel for the final big OMS burn that would place Discovery into orbit around Titan.

In the payload bay was lodged a lumpy Space Station habitation module, with its front end docked to the orbiter’s big crew compartment, its rear fixed to a docking node. Designed for low Earth orbit, where it would have been protected by the Earth’s magneto-sphere, the hab module had been crudely toughened up with layers of aluminum to provide radiation shelter for the crew. The water tanks were clustered around the walls, too, making the interior of the hab module the nearest thing the crew had to a storm shelter in case of a violent radiation event, like a solar flare.

The docking node, too, was scavenged from the Space Station program; it was a squat, compact cylinder, every face sprouting docking nodes and airlocks.

Two Apollo Command Modules were stuck on the side of the docking node like suckling aluminum piglets.

Behind the node was the CELSS farm: it was an adapted Spacelab module, filled with the racks and lamps of the crew’s little hydroponic homestead.

And behind the farm, heavily shielded, was the cluster of fission generators. They were heavy, reconditioned Soviet-built antiques, of a design called Topaz. Each Topaz was a clutter of pipes and tubing and control rods set atop a big radiator cooling cone of corrugated aluminum, that looked like a hollowed-out Mercury spacecraft. The whole thing was perhaps five yards tall. The Topaz, intended to power ion rocket deep-space probes, was the only fission reactor design that had flown in space.

The launch of the reactors, aboard Endeavour, had been one of the most controversial aspects of the mission.

All the modules in the payload bay were swathed with gold-colored sun-shielding insulation blankets; they looked like presents wrapped up for Christmas. And the orbiter’s big, filmy high-gain antenna had been oriented to provide some shade from the approaching sun: the double-hide maneuver, the mission planners called it. But after three months’ exposure to the strengthening sunlight, parts of the blankets had already baked and turned black.

In the sunlight, the payload bay was brilliantly bright, and the sky beyond was black and empty of everything except the fiery disc of the sun itself.

Discovery coasted, unpowered, on its long trajectory towards the sun. Discovery had left Earth behind, and entered a realm governed only by the simplest of laws, gravity and Newton’s laws, utterly predictable.

Shadows shifted steadily across the cluttered payload bay as the orbiter went through its slow thermal roll.

Life in Microgravity:

Benacerraf had a lot of trouble sleeping.

When her little alarm watch sounded she was already awake, her eyes crusty and sore. She wriggled out of her sleeping bag; it was a little tight at the neck and she had to squirm.

Wearing just her underwear, she emerged from her private compartment into the bulk of the hab module.

Nobody was around. That suited Benacerraf; she liked to have a little time alone, to start the day. Right now, though, according to the schedule, somebody should be using the centrifuge; but she couldn’t feel the characteristic rhythmic judder of that big, heavy arm going through its six-revs-a-minute cycle. She made a mental note; somebody was goofing off.

The hab module looked clean, intact, its systems humming and whirring. The module was cylindrical, sized to fit into a Shuttle orbiter cargo bay. But inside, the module had a straightforward square cross-section, with flat walls, ceiling and floor, and rounded edges. The color scheme was a cool Earthlike blue, and the lighting was designed to provide plenty of up-down clues. Benacerraf, prone to dizziness and vertigo, appreciated that aspect of the design.

The gaps between the flat walls and the curved hull housed racks — ORUs, orbital replacement units — which could be folded out and replaced. The design rule was that life support and emergency systems and supplies were housed in the ceiling and floor, and systems the crew would use routinely were located in the walls. And strung out along the length of the hab module were the crew quarters, a health care bay, a galley area, and wardroom and hygiene facilities.

Briskly, she used the waste management facility. This was a little booth containing a Shuttle-technology commode, with pin-down bars over her thighs, and a unisex urination cup, color-coded for her use. When she closed the switch, fans started up with a rattling whine. Her urine was drawn away by a current of air, for storage and reclamation.

Benacerraf was proud of the work that had been done on the hab module, under her supervision, at Boeing’s Station assembly facility at Huntsville. They had stripped out the equipment racks, floors and utility systems; they’d taken the thing right down to its structural subassemblies and started again. They even stripped all the paint off, until it looked like it had just come out of the horizontal boring mill. They ran structural tests to check decade-old welds, and pressure and leak tests, and fixed a thousand strain gauges to measure stresses.

Then there was a whole series of modifications. They had adapted a hab module — intended as part of a frequent-resupply low Earth orbit station — to serve as the core of a many-year deep space mission. They had reconfigured the systems to take power from a couple of reconditioned Topaz fission reactors, for instance. And they had restructured the module to put shielding material around the hull, like water tanks. It was a lot of work; the engineers had to redesign and rebuild on the fly.

But for Benacerraf it had been a kind of relief, after a decade of frustration. So much fine work had been done on the Station components, only for them to be left standing around in assembly facilities. She had been involved right back when they put together the external structure of the first lab module, back in 1995. Three thousand one hundred inches of weld, all of exceptional quality. You couldn’t buy quality like that. You had to earn it. It was good to see this fine work put to use.

When she was done she made her way to the personal hygiene station, where she washed her hands, face, armpits and crotch with a sponge. The sponge, and the excess water she shook off, she stored so that her hygiene water could be reclaimed.

At the little galley, she prepared a quick breakfast: precooked apple sauce, rehydratable granola, beef jerky and breakfast roll; and to drink, chocolate instant breakfast and an orange-grapefruit squash. She had to put the granola bag into a little tray, which slid into a slot in the galley wall to inject the bag with water. She piled the food up on a tray, sticking it down with Velcro pads.

She ate in a kind of Japanese style, with the food close to her face, and she spooned it into her mouth in smooth, graceful arcs. She worked with care. If she jerked the spoon, the glob of food would just fly off, and end up on her face, in her hair, on the walls. And when she sipped her drink, she took care to blow the excess liquid back into the container, or it would come slithering out of the straw and go floating around the module.

She didn’t feel hungry, but she made herself finish the food.

Suppressed appetite was some artifact of microgravity, an illusion. She tried to add salt and pepper to give a little flavor to the meal. But the diluted salt tended to clog the nozzle of its dispenser. Once Angel, frustrated, had squeezed the dispenser so hard it burst, and they spent two days picking salt off the walls of the hab module. And the pepper, in traditional particle form, just floated off around the hab module rather than settle on the food. The crew had anticipated this and had brought along a lot of spices and condiments, like horseradish and soy sauce and Tabasco sauce. But already these were becoming depleted, and they were trying to ration themselves…

She let herself drift in the air as she ate, her eyes unfocused. She felt herself relax into what the surgeons called the “neutral G” position, with her legs pulled up a little, her shoulders bent into a crouch, and her elbows bent. She was floating like a foetus, in the warm blue womb-like interior of this hab module.

Right now they were still living off Shuttle-class consumables, but they would be replaced by produce from the CELSS farm as soon as was practicable. Already, their waste was being stored, and would be cycled through the hydroponic farm, so as to close the matter loops of their life support system.

But they would still have to supplement their diet with stored food — this disgusting beef jerky, for instance — to acquire amino acids and other substances not available from the farm’s vegetables.

When she was done, she rinsed off her tray in the housekeeping and laundry area. The water she used was sucked away by a vacuum pump, for further recycling.

It was Benacerraf’s day for fresh clothes. She went to her personal locker in the wardroom area. She pulled out her underwear drawer. The clothing did the usual zero-G jack-in-the-box trick, bursting out of the drawer and into the air around her face. It took her a couple of minutes to stuff it all back in the drawer and strap it down, picking out items to wear today. Then she opened her main clothing drawer and picked out a T-shirt and trousers.

She went back to her quarters.

She stripped naked and examined herself briefly, with the help of the little mirror of polished aluminum on the wall. Her face had become puffy, especially around the eyes. The girth of her waist and chest had increased. The blood was pooling in her chest, where it restricted the capacity of her lungs; and in her back, where it was absorbed by the spongy discs between her vertebrae, making them thicker and pushing the vertebrae apart. As a result she was an inch or two taller than she had been on Earth.

She inspected her legs with some interest. Legs were pretty much useless in space, serving only to bump into obstacles. And after eighty days, her legs — skinny, pale chicken legs, drained of fluid — were covered with bruises and cuts, in various stages of healing. But she was getting better. Actually she rarely moved faster than a couple of feet per second; she found it was more productive, in microgravity, to aim for precision rather than speed.

She got dressed.

The clothes were dull: T-shirts, jackets and trousers made of golden-brown Beta-cloth — selected because it was fireproof — with 1970s-style turtle necks and elasticated cuffs. The others griped about the dull, scratchy clothes, but Benacerraf didn’t mind. These designs actually went back to Skylab; the clothes were tough, would stand repeated washing, and they were available, just lying around in a store at JSC.

Getting dressed was always an unexpected struggle. The clothing tended to wriggle away from her. She had to work her stomach muscles to drag her feet up close to her chest to pull on a sock or a shoe, and when she’d finished it always felt as if she had given those muscles a tough workout.

The gold-brown outfits were fitted with pockets all over, along both sleeves and legs; and in them she stowed everything she was likely to need during the day — flashlight, pad, pencils, Swiss Army knife, scissors. She popped the pockets shut methodically; if she didn’t, the smaller items were likely just to drift out.

She emerged from her quarters and stuffed her used clothes into the laundry bag.

Her most important daily task was to check the status of the life support systems. So she made her way to the control panel.

Every year, a healthy human would consume three times her body mass in food, four times in oxygen, and eight times in drinking water; and would, besides, excrete the same mass in urine, feces, carbon dioxide and water from respiration and perspiration. The only way Discovery could sustain a six-year mission to Titan was by closing as many of its mass loops as possible, to support the slow-burning human metabolisms it shielded, to clean up and feed back waste products.

In a way, Discovery constituted the ultimate life support technology testbed.

Benacerraf started with the water management system. Their urine, pretreated with acid, had its water distilled out, reducing the urine to a gooey solid. The water was treated with ozone and charcoal filters before being used again, and anyway went into the hygiene supply first, rather than coming straight back to the drinking water. The still had to be rotated to enable phase separation in microgravity, and the rotation tended to disrupt any experiments requiring stability the crew attempted. And every so often the evaporator had to be evacuated and cleaned out, and the fluids pump replaced. A delightful job. Right now, however, the still seemed to be functioning well.

Waste water from other sources — hygiene, the laundry and the air condensate — was cleaned up by a series of filters and packed columns of activated charcoal and resin beds. The filter beds had to be replaced periodically. Then there was a biocide injection system, and a series of automated systems that monitored the quality of the water — for acidity, ammonia, organic carbon content, electrical conductivity, microbial concentration, color, odor, foaming, and heavy metal concentrations — before it was returned to its stainless steel tanks…

She looked over the air management system. The steps here had to mimic some of the processes of life on Earth: carbon dioxide had to be removed and reduced from stale air; oxygen had to be generated, and trace contaminants monitored and removed.

The carbon dioxide was removed by passing the air over filter beds containing solid amines, steam-heated, A Sabatier reactor combined the extracted carbon dioxide with hydrogen, to produce methane and water. The Sabatier was a nice reliable design which needed hardly any maintenance. Oxygen was produced from the water by electrolysis, a process she remembered from her own high school days, where an electric cell broke up the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen fed back into the air supply, and the hydrogen was passed back to the Sabatier reactor. The electrolysis technology was so simple and mature that there was hardly anything which could go wrong with it.

Carbon dioxide in; oxygen out. It was a neat, robust system.

The trace contaminant control was built into the ventilation. A lot of crap could build up quickly in the closed cycles of the hab module. So there were particulate beds to separate dusts and aerosols, activated charcoal to keep out heavier contaminants, chemi-sorbant beds to remove nitrogen, sulphur compounds, halogens and metal hybrids, and catalytic burners to oxidize anything that couldn’t be absorbed.

She checked through a few more ancillary systems: composition and pressure control, the heat exchanger slurper that controlled temperature and humidity… The whole system was monitored and controlled in real time by a complex of sensors, including a mass spectrometer and infra-red detectors.

She checked the SCWO reactor, the supercritical wet oxidation system. The SCWO was a remarkable piece of gear. Inside, slurry was heated to four hundred and eighty degrees Centigrade and two hundred and forty atmospheres, conditions where water went supercritical. It was like liquid steam. If you jetted in oxygen, you could get an open flame, under water. The SCWO would burn anything, any waste they threw into it: crap, urine, food scraps, garbage, mixed up with organic wastes and water. Out came steam, carbon dioxide, and a whole bunch of nitrates — compounds of nitrogen they could use in the farm.

It looked to Benacerraf as if the temperature control inside the reactor had been a little variable. That was a worry; not everything that happened inside that reactor was well understood. The SCWO was a relatively new technology — the reactor and its backup fitted in Discovery were actually upgrades of breadboard prototypes. There were safety concerns around the high temperatures and pressures in the reactor, and corrosion of the pressure chamber. That corrosion could leak metals into the liquid effluent, which could then end up in the food chain.

In a way she was relieved to find something wrong. It proved the monitoring systems were working, and that she was maintaining her own attention as she worked through this daily inspection routine. Bill Angel was on SCWO duty this week. Good; Bill was mechanically adept, and might be able to do something with the malfunctioning reactor. She made a note, and moved on to the next system…

Thus, with this string of clanking and banging mechanical gadgets of varying sophistication and reliability, with a stream of endless small details, the crew of Discovery sustained the stuff of their existence.

Her last chore, before starting the day proper, was to check the vent grilles, the dark screens that led to the air conditioning system. Not being able to put things down and find them again was the single biggest handicap, as far as she was concerned, about living in microgravity. If you let some small item drift off, you really had no clue as to which direction it might have taken, and you just had to be patient and wait the couple of hours it usually took for items to fetch up against the grille.

Today she found a syringe, a one-inch bolt, a couple of small bags, a rule, and several scraps of paper. She had a system for this; she saved the stuff that looked useful in one pocket, and the detritus in another.

She tried to get a little science done.

There was a telescope mount, equipped with lightweight cameras for observing the sun at a variety of wavelengths: hydrogen alpha emissions from the sun’s surface, ultraviolet and X-ray photography of ionized atoms, solar corona and flare imaging systems. No human crew had ever before ventured so close to the sun, or would again for a hell of a long time.

But the science was hardly high quality. The equipment in the telescope mount had been improvised from left-over spare parts from unmanned missions, like Soho and Ulysses. And besides, Discovery wasn’t a good science platform. The camera tracking gear had to compensate for the spacecraft’s slow barbecue-mode rotation. And Discovery was just too unstable, with five humans, hundred-and-fifty-pound water sacks, lurching massively around its interior. It was G-jitter, in the jargon, sometimes amounting to five or ten percent of G. Even a cough would exert fifteen or twenty pounds of force, and a squirt on a water spigot would jar the cluster enough to jolt the cross-hairs of a camera from the center of the sun. And of course the use of the centrifuge shook the whole cluster around so much it made any kind of sensible experiment more or less impossible.

Meanwhile the crew themselves were the subject of endless experimental studies; the bodies of the crew of Discovery would, she knew, write the textbook for the next few decades on the long-term effects of space travel on human physiology. But the studies were distorted by the fact that the crew were doing their utmost, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to combat the effects of micro-gravity, radiation and the other hazards of the flight. If the studies had been true science, she reflected, you’d have some kind of control: one crew member who didn’t take any exercise or other precautions at all, for instance.

There were rumors that the Chinese, in the course of their expanding space program, were doing just that. But for Americans, of course, that was just unacceptable.

The voyage of Discovery was becoming, she thought, a clinching argument against humans in space, for science purposes.

Anyhow, the truth was that the science stuff had essentially been tacked on to give them all something meaningful to do, while their twenty-six-hundred-day mission wound through its dull course. Nobody on Earth was waiting with bated breath for Discovery’s dazzling streams of data.

Exercise time.

She pulled herself through a hatch into the docking node at the aft end of the hab module. Then, another hatch above her head led into the centrifuge cabin. This was a cylinder, only just big enough to hold a single human standing upright, its walls cluttered with equipment and punctured by small round portholes. It was fixed to a robot arm, derived from the Shuttle’s old remote manipulator system.

When she had sealed up the hatch behind her and given the cabin’s rudimentary systems a check-out, the cabin detached from the docking node and the arm swung it out and away from the body of the orbiter.

The arm began to pull the cabin through a circle, twenty-five yards in diameter. The cabin creaked, a little ominously, as the arm picked up speed, and she could feel the metallic swaying of the stiff arm as it spun up.

When it got up to speed the cabin would swing around, like a bucket on a rope, at the best part of six revolutions a minute. That would give her an illusion of gravity, generated by centripetal acceleration, of the best part of a G.

She peered out the windows.

Benacerraf was orbiting in a plane a few feet above the orbiter’s payload bay, with its shining insulation blankets, its complex shadows, the empty blackness of space beyond.

As the centrifuge picked up speed, the Universe started to wheel around her, so she closed up the windows, pulling down compact little aluminum blinds. Enclosed, she could feel her feet pressing more firmly against the floor. There were hand-rails here, painted green, and she hung onto them now.

Experimentally, she moved her head, this way and that. Immediately, waves of nausea and giddiness swept over her.

The trouble was, this wasn’t true gravity, but centripetal acceleration induced by the spin. There was also Coriolis force, the sideways push that produced weather patterns on the rotating Earth. It was fine as long as she didn’t move. But if she moved her head in the direction of the spin, Coriolis pushed back with a force of a fifth of a G. And if she moved it in the opposite direction, her head felt lighter by the same amount. If she were to try to climb up, the Coriolis would push her sideways. And so on.

There were other problems, too. There was a variation, like a tide, of the size of the force along the length of her body; her head was a good deal closer to the axis of spin than her feet. The centrifuge’s arm couldn’t have been much shorter than it was, or that difference would rise above a few percent, and cause damaging hydrostatic pressure differences in her tissues.

There were two fold-up exercise devices in here, a cycle ergometer and a treadmill, both folded away against the wall. Moving carefully, she reached down now and pulled out the bike.

The fake gravity was still so low that she had some trouble starting; her pedal motions tended to lift her off her seat. She had brought a pillow which she braced now against the ceiling of the cabin, and wedged herself in place with her head. She held tightly to the handlebars. Her feet were in pedal straps, so she could pull down with one pedal while pushing with the other, and that helped keep her in place.

Nobody had run a mission in microgravity much beyond a few hundred days. Nobody knew for sure what the impact of very long term exposure to microgravity would be, or if any of the countermeasures they were taking would work. And nobody had tried to live for years under one-seventh G, as they would have to on Titan. The surgeons didn’t know if that was even survivable. For sure, the crew had to expect a long-term loss of bone mass of maybe a quarter, even after they had reached Titan.

Exercise, which would help combat the other damaging micro-gravity deconditioning processes — muscle atrophy, bone marrow loss, reduction in T-lymphocytes — was no use with the real show-stopper, the cumulative loss of bone calcium. And although the crew would be treated with osteogenic drugs — and there was hopeful talk, which had so far come to nothing, of finding ways to stimulate bone growth with electromagnetic fields — the surgeons on the ground had agreed that the only practical solution was to remove the cause: to restore the crew, periodically, to gravity.

So this centrifuge had been improvised. Every crew member was supposed to work out in here, in conditions of nearly a G, for several hours a day.

She didn’t really object to the exercising, uncomfortable as it was. Unlike some of the others. It got a lot of the stiffness out of her underused muscles, especially her legs. It was as if her body had an agenda of its own, every now and again demanding that she give it some work to do. And she enjoyed the glow of rude health she experienced after a tough work-out.

It made her look better, too — more like herself — because the extra flow of blood to her legs reduced the puffiness around her eyes.

Anyhow, she thought, it was better than rickets.

And she enjoyed the privacy of this snug, enclosed little bay, the isolation from the others.

As she worked, she thought about her crew.

Rosenberg seemed relatively content with his restricted life: pursuing his own research, bitching at the others when some disturbance wrecked one of his careful experiments. But he was drawing inwards, she thought.

So, too, was Nicola Mott, Mott seemed moody, perhaps depressive, ground down already — despite her experience on Station — by the dullness of the interplanetary trajectory, without even the glowing skin of Earth sliding past the windows as a distraction.

But Siobhan Libet, who of all of them was closest to Mott, seemed to be hanging on to her cheerfulness — her sense of wonder — longer than the rest, and she seemed to be doing a good job of keeping Mott back from whatever abyss of depression was threatening her.

Then there was Bill Angel: tough, competent, but restless — a pilot, Benacerraf thought, without any piloting to do, for two thousand days. Of all of them it was Angel who had most rebelled against their daily regime, bitching at the others and Mission Control in Houston. He was a monkey rattling the bars of his cage.

And as for herself, Benacerraf tried to avoid too much introversion, as she had throughout her life. She, like Angel, felt the chafing frustration of being stuck in here with nothing meaningful to do.

Early in the mission, during the euphoria that had followed their hair-raising launch and injection onto this long interplanetary trajectory — and the delight of becoming the first humans to leave cislunar space — they had all been a lot more sociable with each other. They had made a point, for example, of planning meal times to be together.

But that had worn off as soon as the dull daily slog of the mission unfolded.

She’d read of Antarctic scientists who, after a winter snowed into their huts, would throw open the doors as soon as spring came, and just walk off, heading so far into the distance, away from each other, that they might disappear over the horizon.

The crew of Discovery, in their space-going shack, faced a winter that would last six long years. As far as Benacerraf was concerned, anything that they found to help them all endure that and keep from driving each other crazy, like fragments of privacy and broken-up shift patterns, was fine by her.

She pressed her eye to the coelostat eyepiece. The coelostat, an old British invention, was an arrangement of spinning mirrors that compensated for the whirl of the centrifuge, and the barbecue roll of Discovery, to deliver a reasonably steady telescopic view.

She had the coelostat centered on Earth and Moon. The image was slightly blurred, and prone to drift.

Discovery’s trajectory was a complicated double orbit around the sun, in which she would complete two passes past Venus, and then a final close approach to Earth, coming within a few hundred miles of the surface, achieving powerful gravity assists each time.

Only then, after two years, having accumulated the velocity its chemical rockets could not impart, would Discovery leave the inner Solar System behind, and be hurled towards Jupiter — for a further assist — and on to Saturn.

Thus, right now, Discovery was spiralling in towards the sun, on its way to the first rendezvous with Venus. But the energy provided by its injection burn was so low that the ship’s orbit was pretty much tracking that of Earth around the sun, drawing almost imperceptibly away from the home world, in towards the solar fire. So even now, after eighty days, Earth and Moon showed fat, gibbous discs, their faces turned in parallel to the sun. The blue-white of Earth was much brighter, almost overwhelming the faint brown sheen of its smaller companion.

Benacerraf could still study Earth. She was looking at the area from Tibet across Mongolia: northern China and the Gobi desert, one of the bleakest, most barren parts of the planet.

Her perspective was evolving, as Earth receded.

She’d tried to follow, even participate in, the inquisitions that had followed the Endeavour launch. The country had gone into a kind of weary agony when it had been discovered that the X-15 operation had been mounted by a rogue USAF faction, and heads were rolling. There seemed to be a mood of sourness among the public, engendered by the X-15 incident, as if NASA and the USAF were all of a piece. And besides — as Jackie had predicted — the public had rapidly grown bored with the unchanging news from space.

Xavier Maclachlan was growing ever stronger, his lead in the polls consolidating. Jake Hadamard was already fighting a rearguard action to maintain the RLV and other programs he had started, in the wake of the Columbia crash.

It became steadily harder to believe that there would ever be a meaningful attempt at a retrieval.

But it was too late to turn back. Benacerraf had committed herself to traversing this long dark tunnel, leading only to the frigid wastes of Titan. And she suspected she’d always known — in her heart of hearts — it would turn out this way.

But it grew harder to care, as the radio voices grew fainter, buzzing like wasps in a jar. Even Jackie’s irregular, begrudged messages seemed to be losing their power to hurt her.

Earth was irrelevant, now; America was simply the crucible within which this mission had been forged. She was glad to leave it all behind, she was deciding; in many ways she preferred her new life here, cooped up in this handful of dimly lit, sour-smelling compartments, the confines of the ship her only reality, the cool logic of Newton’s laws her only constraint.

After a time, she pushed away the coelostat eyepiece.

She cycled for her regulation four hours.

Discovery was moving at a little more than Earth’s escape velocity, seven miles a second. So, Benacerraf figured, while she had been cycling Discovery had crossed around a hundred thousand miles: nearly half the distance between Earth and Moon. It would be something to radio back to her grandsons.

With a shuddering whir, the centrifuge began to slow. Soon, the cabin had snuggled against the docking node.

The day eroded to its close.

Her sleeping restraint was just a bag fastened against the wall of her quarters, her little rounded-door compartment on the starboard side of the hab module. Sometimes she was cold, because the sleep compartments were ventilated to the point of being draughty. There wasn’t much choice about that, because otherwise, in the absence of convection, she could suffocate in the lingering carbon dioxide of her own breath. But at first she’d found the ventilation stream was blowing up into her face, into her mouth and nose, making her feel chilled to the bone. So, defying the local vertical, she’d turned her sleeping bag around. But now the draft tended to blow up into her sleeping bag, making it billow around her, and dissipating the warmth generated by her body…

Besides, the hab module was full of noise.

She wasn’t disturbed by the whine of the pumps and fans of the air conditioning system. That was a comforting, surrounding susurrus. But as the sun approached, the heat made Discovery expand and contract, popping and banging like a tin roof. And whenever Discovery’s RCS thrusters fired, making some automated tweak to the trajectory, it sounded like machine gun fire.

She’d adapt, she expected. She had, after all, two and a half thousand days to get used to this.

To unwind, she read her book.

It was science fiction, a lightweight paperback. There were whole libraries stored on CD-ROM, of course, but she’d never gotten used to reading online, even on softscreens. She’d brought this book, and a handful of others, along with her in her Personal Preference Kit.

(…Actually the books had had to be tested for their flammability; she’d had to give up a couple of her precious old paperbacks, to let engineers at JSC set fire to them. Oddly, books didn’t burn so well. The engineers called them ablators. Each page had to be on fire before the next inwards reached its scorching point, and so the books would protect themselves, shedding heat by discarding pages, like a spacecraft entering an atmosphere…)

The book was 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke, a yellowing paperback from 1971. She wasn’t a sci-fi buff, but this book had always been a favorite.

It charmed her that this wonderful old book also featured another ship called Discovery, heading for the moons of Saturn. But Clarke’s nuclear-powered Discovery was all of four hundred feet long, and in its pressure hull, a spacious hall thirty-five feet across, a carousel rotated fast enough to simulate lunar gravity. (Too small, she thought wistfully; Poole and Bowman would have been knocked sideways by Coriolis, and spent their lives throwing up.)

The truth was, she thought sadly, 2001 had come and gone, and the book, like the work of Wells and Verne before, had mutated into a period-piece, a description of a lost alternate world. But at least, she thought, she had been spared Hal.

She let go of the book. It drifted off into the air like a yellowing bird, and the residual strength of its cracked spine closed it up, losing her place.

It had been a pretty good day. She’d managed to get through the whole, of it without encountering the others once.

She closed her eyes.

In the end, the launch actually brought Barbara Fahy some favorable publicity. NASA’s PAO presented her as the woman who had lost Columbia, but who had redeemed herself by making the right decisions when rogue USAF officers had tried to shoot down Endeavour. It was a neat feel-good story. Even if not everyone agreed that those USAF assholes had gone rogue.

Hadamard promoted her out of Building 30, to a more senior program management role. But she found her time occupied by PR: TV interviews and newspaper profiles and goodwill tours.

Hadamard even asked her to accompany him to China.

Thus she found herself as part of a NASA-USAF party, headed up by Hadamard, on a goodwill visit to the Xi Chang launch center. Incredibly, Al Hartle came along, the notorious Chinese-basher who everyone suspected was at the heart of the X-15 plot. But Hartle was a close ally of Xavier Maclachlan, and in exercises like this, many constituencies had to be pacified.

They were flown into the sprawling city of Chengdu, at the heart of the green and mountainous Sichuan province, and then driven in a fleet of air-conditioned limousines toward the launch center. There, they would be met by Jiang Ling, the first of China’s dozen or so astronauts, who Fahy had gotten to know a little during her trip to Houston three years earlier.

Looking around the car at her companions — Hadamard’s passive stare, Hartle’s ferocious, paranoid bald-eagle scowl — she suspected that none of them really wanted to be here. This “friendship” tour was an empty gesture.

But the gesture was the whole point.

The White House had more or less forced this trip on NASA and the Air Force. Every poll indicated that Maclachlan was going to storm the election at the end of the year, and after that all bets were off; the outgoing Administration wanted to do whatever it could to cement Sino-American relations while it had the chance, before Maclachlan started building walls around the nation. Fahy applauded the motive; one look at Hartle’s body language today was enough to show her how fragile any kind of China-U.S. accord was likely to be.

But the huge reality of China soon began to overwhelm Fahy, diminishing the internal calculations of the Americans to absurdity.

The heart of Chengdu was impressive, but the city was choked by a huge shanty-town, a constricting girdle of wood and paper snacks. Children sprawled by the roadside. They stared at the cars, their bare bellies swollen, their palms lifted to their pretty, empty faces in the universal sign for “please.”

Out of the conurbation itself the convoy entered the eternal Chinese countryside. Fahy caught high-speed glimpses of peasants, scratching at the soil, as their forebears must have done for centuries. China was crowded: everywhere there were more people than she had expected — impossibly many of them, working in the dried-out paddies or stumbling along the fringe of the highways or squatting by the road.

Fahy was stunned by her glimpses of the immensity of the Chinese landscape, the huge human resources of the nation.

Like most modern Americans, she had never set foot outside the U.S. before, even though she had worked on a mission to another planet. But she was shamed to find how little she had really seen and understood of her own world.

The space center itself was little more than twenty years old. It had been designed as China’s door to geosynchronous orbit, using its Long March fleet. The center was cupped by green-clad hills. The sky was blue, the air fresh and clear; the party were taken around by car and golf-cart buggy.

There were buildings for the horizontal assembly and checkout of Long March boosters, payload preparation bays, and a string of compact-looking launch pads, strung out along a rail line. Fahy endured the usual mind-numbing visits to propellant charging and draining facilities, cryogenic handling systems, pyrotechnics stores, the launch control center.

There was a heroic-pose statue of Jiang Ling. But there was no sign of any memorial to Chen Muqi, the third Chinese to be launched — officially — who had been killed when his oak-resin heatshield failed during reentry.

They were shown a proud display of China’s proposed Moon landing system. The Chinese weren’t planning to build a huge Saturn V-class booster. Their strategy would be based on smaller boosters and Earth orbit rendezvous: assembly of the Moon ship in Earth orbit. There was a little plastic mock-up of structures on the Moon’s surface: a proud lunar lander, hauntingly like the Apollo Lunar Module of four decades earlier, a compact surface shelter half-buried in the regolith, the Chinese flag surrounded by four or five toy astronauts.

Despite setbacks, the Chinese still claimed they believed they could achieve all this by 2019 — the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Al Hartle growled at this, looking chagrined.

Fahy saw no reason to suppose the Chinese couldn’t achieve their target. Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions — and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.

Such losses seemed to be acceptable here.

The party was hurried quickly away from any areas of technical sensitivity; the tour was actually, she thought, as shallow as a tourists’ visit to the Cape.

She grew bored, restless. She disliked spending her time as a mute geopolitical symbol.

Still, the launch site snagged her attention. Surrounded by mountains — by oxygen, by green growing things — it seemed a place of hope and renewal to her, a port to the future: a real contrast to Canaveral, suspended as it was between land and sea and space, subject to endless entropic degradation.

The party was whisked away by air to Shenzhen, a new city that had grown out of a border stop between Canton and Hong Kong. They were loaded into a fleet of fresh limousines, and Fahy found herself sharing a car with Jiang Ling.

The road south from Canton followed the Pearl River delta. There was development everywhere — gas stations, snack stands, car repair shops, stores, flophouses, restaurants, factories. Further away from the road Fahy could make out shanty-town clusters, washing up the hillsides like a grey tide. Some patches of green showed, but there were huge gashes in the red earth where new construction was being prepared. The journey was uncomfortable: hot and dusty, the road pot-holed and trash-strewn and full of expensive-looking cars, businessmen behind tinted windows making deals via image-tattoo phones on the backs of their hands as they drove, one-handed.

Jiang Ling apologized for the road. “There is a new highway to link Shenzhen and Canton.” Her English, learned since her historic flight, was clipped and precise. “But the highway is even more congested, generally at a standstill. There is another to link Shenzhen with Shantou, another of the SEZs here in Guangdong province—”

“SEZ?”

“Special Economic Zone.”

“Oh.” Deng’s old idea. Commercial enclaves; forward outposts of contact with the capitalists.

They reached a checkpoint, like a customs barrier. Tough-looking young soldiers checked papers passed up by the driver. To left and right a fence, of concrete and ditches and barbed wire, extended as far as Fahy could see.

Jiang caught Fahy looking. “A wall, eighty-six kilometres long. Not everyone, you see, can share in the benefits of the SEZ. Even today.”

The car glided on.

Shenzhen was a city of broad boulevards lined with high-rise apartment blocks, office buildings, luxury Western-style joint-venture hotels. The car entered a jungle of neon and softscreen signs announcing bars, discos, karaoke clubs, restaurants, fast-food joints; but in amongst the ads for Microsoft and Disney-Coke and Nike and the other Western giants, Fahy saw — translated for her by Jiang — stern admonitions to buy from the China National Cereals, Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, and the China No. 2 Automobile Plant United.

On the seat back before Fahy a softscreen was tuned into some local channel. At the center a girl sang a brash, upbeat pop song — it sounded dated to Fahy’s inexpert ears — and her face was surrounded by multiple ads, thumbnail images of faces and products, flickering on and off, Cantonese voices shouting their messages like so many quacking ducks. Jiang began to sing along with the jingle. “…The red in the East raises the Sun / China gives forth a Mao Zedong / He works for the happiness of the people / He shall be China’s saving star / The East Is Red!” She laughed, like a child.

Revolutionary songs, Fahy thought, to a boogie beat and wah-wah guitars.

The convoy stopped at the Century Plaza Hotel. Hadamard, Hartle and the others ducked quickly into the lobby through the smoggy air, their heads averted from the Shenzhen cityscape. Jiang and Fahy followed more slowly.

The lobby was cool, glittering, anonymous. There were expensively dressed girls — and some boys — hanging out here, sitting at low tables and smoking, sparkling displays playing over their image-tattooed cheeks.

Jiang caught Fahy’s arm. “The others are planning to play golf later—”

“Where?”

“At Augusta. Or rather, in a VR sensorium in the basement of the hotel… Would you prefer that we slip away, see something of the rest of the city?”

Fahy frowned. “You mean a VR tour?”

Jiang smiled. “Actually I meant — ah — RL. On foot.”

The prospect terrified Fahy. But she didn’t feel she could refuse.

And so they walked out.

Shenzhen hit all her senses at once.

There were five-star hotels, and revolving restaurants, and a stock market. There were huge billboards, maybe half of them animated, all of them acoustic, bellowing out ads. There was construction everywhere, buildings rising like fragile plants from cages of bamboo scaffolding; huge robot piledrivers hammered, and dust and rock fragments billowed out in peals of concussive noise. Cars and bicycles jostled in the crammed streets.

Jiang, hidden behind softscreen one-way glasses and a smog-excluding facemask, kept hold of Fahy’s arm, and guided her away from the worst hassles. But still she saw prostitutes everywhere, painted girls in miniskirts or tight pants lining the curbs. There were child beggars in rags, running after cars, babies flapping like dolls in their arms. There were groups of young men wearing flashy softscreen-rich Western clothing, modish moustaches and elaborate coiffures; some of them wore rumpled, denim Mao jackets.

Over a main artery there was a huge softscreen picture of the Helmsman of the Nation, China’s antique revolutionary-era leader. The image of his mask-like, cracked face repeated a phrase over and over, which Jiang translated: Stick to the Communist Party’s line, one hundred years unwavering…

There were few foreigners, little evidence of ethnic diversity. Everywhere, short, skinny people stared at Fahy, curious and hostile.

Jiang leaned close to Fahy and murmured in her ear. “What do you think?”

Fahy lifted her smog mask. “I feel like I’ve arrived in hell.”

Jiang Ling laughed. “Perhaps you have. There are no cathedrals here. Shenzhen is a new city. There is nothing to do here but eat, buy sex and do business.”

“There are so many people…”

“Of course. The city is a magnet for those from the country. It has always been thus. And besides, the countryside is failing.”

“Failing?”

“The country is suffering a severe water shortage. You must realize this is a global phenomenon. The Earth offers us only a finite amount of fresh water each year. Global warming is depleting the supply. And as the population and water usage grows, we may soon pass a fundamental limit… In China, much agriculture is water-intensive. The rice paddies, tended for a hundred generations, are drying out. So what is there to do? Life in a Shenzhen dorm — ten to a room, stinking metal bunks, locked in to mitigate against theft — may be horrible, and prostitution may be morally foul. But it is better than starvation in a parched field. And then there are the plagues. Tuberculosis is the worst—”

Fahy couldn’t help but flinch at that.

Jiang’s hold on her arm tightened. “Don’t worry. There are monitors at the border fence, and medical patrols within. The TB is excluded from the city; cases are rare.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my own safety,” Fahy said, but she was lying. “There must be solutions to the water problem,” she said. “Dams, river diversions—”

“For many years such schemes have been proposed,” Jiang said. “There is a scheme to dam the Yangtze below the Three Gorges, for example, and another to divert half the Yangtze’s waters to the arid north. But the West has been reluctant to invest in such projects. Environmental concerns are raised, for example.”

“That must be valid.”

“But perhaps also there are ulterior motives: a continuing desire to contain China, to restrict its growth, using environmental factors as a pretext.” Jiang’s face, masked by her colorful softscreen glasses, was unreadable, betraying no resentment; her voice was even.

They walked near the river, the Lohu, and the stink of hydrocarbons from the polluted water made Fahy think of the surface of Titan.

Jiang led her to a park called Splendid China. This was a kitschy theme park with models of Chinese wonders, like the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square and the Potala Palace in Tibet. This was what passed for Shenzhen culture, said Jiang.

They walked past a little model of a Long March, and a toy Lei Feng Number One suspended on a wire.

Jiang laughed at this. “I can buy myself here, as a doorstep god,” she said, “How strange life is!”

They called into a tea shop; they sat in comparative comfort and sipped hot jasmine tea — decaffeinated, Jiang assured her.

An old man went by taking his canary in its cage for its constitutional. He encountered another owner on a small grass space outside a broken-down apartment building; they held up their birds, and stayed silent, while the birds sang to each other. Somewhere, the voice of a sim-Elvis — probably pirated — was crooning a song called, said Jiang, Ah, Chairman Mao, How the People from the Grasslands Long to Behold You.

Fahy studied Jiang, discreetly. The slim girl she had met back in Houston in ’05 was still there, she thought, but now Jiang looked much older: strained, disoriented.

“You look tired, Jiang Ling,” she said.

Jiang smiled. “Three years of touring the world. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to return to my first love.”

“Flying.”

“Yes.” Her face worked. “But I understand I am too valuable in my symbolic role. How I envy you.”

“Me?”

“You worked on the voyage to Titan. You showed vision and perseverance. And now, the fact that you are prepared to continue with your work even after the latest setback—”

“You mean the RLV deferment.” Hadamard had been forced to accept another scaling-down of the Shuttle replacement project, another deferment of hardware delivery and testing. The current funding problems were the result of preliminary maneuvering in Congress as the members tried to position themselves for the new climate to come when, as expected, Maclachlan took the White House later in the year.

The current scenario showed a Titan colony being resupplied by payloads delivered by a series of unmanned boosters — Delta IVs or Protons, probably — while some new manned capability, based on a Shuttle II, was developed, so they could be retrieved. But that possible retrieval date was receding further and further into the future. And if Maclachlan was elected — and did everything he said he would — it was quite possible even the resupply strategy would be allowed to wither altogether.

Fahy refused to believe the dire worst-case predictions mouthed in the NASA centers. Was it really possible that some future Administration would actually choose to abandon Americans, on a remote world, without hope of retrieval or resupply…?

Despite brutal controls, China’s population had grown to one and a half billion — a quarter of all the humans alive. Of those, a billion lived as peasants in the interior. And, it was estimated, as many as a hundred million lived in squalor and poverty in the shanty-town fringes of the glittering cities.

More than a billion people, she thought, living in a cage, imposed by the continuing technological dominance of the West, and the rigid grip of the ageing Party hierarchy.

As long as the cage held, maybe things could persist. But it was all so damn unstable.

China was not what she expected. China was different. China wasn’t just another geopolitical foe, like the Soviets used to be. It seemed to Fahy, sitting here in this tea shop, that China was the huge soul of humanity, its grandeur; and now that soul was waking, and America, with its tin-foil technology and rocket-ships, seemed remote and fragile, a land of fools.

The future was bewildering. Not for the first time she wished she was travelling with Paula Benacerraf, leaving this huge, messy planet for the clean simplicities of spaceflight.

A group of young people moved into the restaurant. Their faces and hands were invisible, as if made of glass. They sat in silence at their table. They wore plain Mao suits and caps. Their exposed flesh must be uniformly coated with image-tattoos which, thanks to some smart arrangement of microcameras, projected images of the background to each piece of flesh, so that their heads and hands looked invisible. They were even wearing softscreen contact lenses over their eyes, and their heads must be shaven of hair and lashes and beards.

Of course the illusion wasn’t perfect; there was a vague sense of shape and form in the diffraction of light through the imaging systems, and whenever a hand or face was moved too quickly the imaging systems would lag, and the illusion would be briefly lost. But perhaps those imperfections, Fahy thought, merely added to the oddly repulsive fascination of the adornments.

She pointed them out to Jiang, who looked surprised.

“You’ve not seen this before? It is a new cult among the young. The Nullists. The cult of non-existence of the self.”

“Good grief… I thought I’d seen everything. What is this, some kind of protest against the net clampdown?”

“You are being parochial, Barbara. Remember, we never enjoyed the brief freedom of the net indulged by the West. No, it is, I think, a consequence of the way we explain ourselves and our world to the young. Science and economics: science, which teaches that we come from nothing and return to nothing; economics, which teaches us that we are all mere units, interchangeable and discardable. Science is already a cult of non-existence, in a sense. The most extreme adherents coat their bodies in image-tattoos, hiding themselves utterly. The Nullists are a strange mixture of scientific and Zen influences.”

“Good grief. It’s the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m sorry. An old Kurt Vonnegut book. I haven’t seen this before.”

“But the world is a small place. I’m sure it will spread to the U.S…”

Fahy thought again of Xavier Maclachlan, of the anti-science mood he seemed determined to tap.

Jiang said, “What does the Nullist phenomenon say about the world we are constructing for the young, Barbara?”

Fahy looked out, at bustling Shenzhen. “Perhaps that it is hell indeed,” she said. She looked up; the Moon was rising, its face — still bearing American footprints — battered and lifeless. “And there is no escape.”

The two of them left the tea shop and walked back towards the hotel.

In the distance, a couple of blocks away, she saw some kind of disturbance. A pack of children were attacking a sack of what looked like food — tangerine fruit, maybe. They attacked the pack like animals, she thought; their hunger was not feigned. Adults were joining in, beating at the children with sticks. She caught a glimpse of running police, the distant crackle of gunfire.

Day 169

Siobhan Libet pulled herself out of the hab module, and she crawled through the flexible access tunnel into the farm.

The CELSS farm — CELSS, for closed environment life support system — was a basic pressurized cylinder sixteen feet long and fourteen across, fitting neatly into Discovery’s payload bay. It had been improvised from a couple of old Spacelab modules. Spacelab was the pressurized workshop provided by the Europeans for flying aboard Shuttle. Now that Spacelab wasn’t going to fly any more, the redundant hardware had been turned to better use.

As she closed the hatch behind her, Libet felt an immediate sense of cosiness, of warmth, of brightness. The pressure was high in here. The glow of the banks of lights was warm on her face, and the air seemed thick and humid and full of the smell of chlorophyll, of growing things; it was, simply, like being inside a compact greenhouse.

The equipment racks and data processing consoles of the old low-Earth-orbit experimenters had been stripped out, and replaced by three racks of plants. The racks were thick, with fat pipes carrying nutrient solution that flowed beneath them. Fluorescent tubes were poised above each of the racks, flooding the place with a cool white light, and bundles of fiber-optic cables brought light to the darker corners of the farm. The racks were immersed in pipes and cabling and sensors, and there was a constant hiss of fans and extractors, a warm gurgling of fluids through the pipes. There was a gap down the center of the racks, just big enough to admit a human to work.

Looking into the farm racks was a little like looking into a huge refrigerator, the green of the growing plants somehow dulled and coarsened by the flat white light of the tubes. As technology, the whole thing always looked strangely primitive to Libet.

But it was working, after a fashion. Plants, green and spindly, strained upwards towards the lights, from the plastic surfaces of the racks. This was a salad machine, in the jargon, the best-studied form of closed life support system; the other choices had been a yoghurt box — algae — and a sushi maker, a fish farm.

There was a locker close to the hatch. When Libet opened it, the usual jack-in-the-box effect shoved out a lightweight coverall, gloves, a hat and a small toolkit. She pulled on the coverall and hat, and donned the gloves. Humming, she prepared to work.

It was actually Bill Angel who noticed the SPE problem first.

Inside the hab module he was working — in conjunction with the ground — through a check of Discovery’s navigation systems; and, as usual, he was royally pissed off.

He was finding life in Discovery a lot more irritating and frustrating than he’d expected. His uppermost beef today was that nothing ever seemed to be stowed in the right place. There was supposed to be a computer tracking system, at JSC, that would keep track of every item on the ship, but that had soon broken down when his asshole crewmates insisted on not putting stuff back where it belonged. As a result he spent half his precious time raking through drawers and lockers, and every time he opened a drawer all the crap would come spilling out all over the place and he’d have to hunt it down and ram it back…

Ah, the hell with it. At least the work he was doing today had some intellectual meat to it.

But he was having problems with the navigation systems.

The point of navigation, and the mid-course burns called trajectory correction maneuvers — TCMs — was to keep the spacecraft on its planned trajectory for the duration of the flight. For six years, Discovery was going to coast, mostly unpowered, all the way to its rendezvous with Saturn. The way Angel thought of TCMs, it was like cheating at pool. It would be much easier to sink a long shot if, after the ball had been struck, you were allowed to nudge the ball a couple of extra times with the cue stick as the ball headed towards the pocket. Well, that was the idea of the TCMs; without those small adjustments the spacecraft would miss Saturn by many millions of miles.

But it all depended on precise navigation.

There were actually three navigation techniques in use on Discovery: doppler, ranging, and optical navigation. The first two could be run from Earth. Doppler was a way to measure the speed the ship was approaching or receding from the Earth, and ranging exploited the finite speed of light to measure the distance from the spacecraft to the Earth. When used together, Discovery’s position and speed could be determined very accurately…

But not accurately enough, over the billion miles Discovery was to travel. The only way was to navigate from the spacecraft itself, by the stars.

There was a kit of hand-held gear, a sextant and low-power optical telescope, and there were camera systems. The most basic systems — and the most heavily used — were the simple light-sensing star trackers that had been installed around Discovery, in the wings and boattail and nose. Without intervention from the crew these could fix on the sun and Earth and maybe a fixed star, like Canopus, allowing Discovery to triangulate its position.

But today something was wrong; the star trackers kept losing their locks.

Angel — ill-tempered, impatient — probed at the problem. The trackers seemed to be picking up a lot of false images, whole constellations of them, that made it impossible for them to recognize their stellar targets. That wasn’t so unusual in itself — the spacecraft was habitually surrounded by floating chunks of debris, flecks of paint or insulation that had broken away, all of which glittered like stars in the intense sunlight — but it was unusual for such a flood of false readings to hit all the trackers, all at once. Maybe something had come loose in the cargo bay, he thought.

Then the word came up from the ground.

“Discovery,Houston…” They didn’t wait out the time delay for his reply. “We’ve been looking at your anomalous tracker readings. We figure that what they’re seeing is Cherenkov radiation. Repeat, Cherenkov…”

Oh.

Angel knew the implications.

When a high-energy subatomic particle hit a star tracker, it could rip through the tracker’s glass window faster than the speed of light in the glass. There would be a kind of optic boom — a blue flash, a burst of Cherenkov radiation, a spark confusing the sensors.

Cherenkov radiation meant that from some source, heavy, fast-moving particles were scouring through Discovery.

Angel acknowledged the message, and asked for a confirmation.

Most of the plants were growing hydroponically, with their roots bathed in a liquid nutrient solution called Salisbury/Bugbee. As a backup, others were growing in an experimental soil substitute based on zeolite granules impregnated with potassium and nitrogen and other nutrients, like little time-release pills, with enough nutrients to last years.

In the hydroponic racks, plant stems protruded through little holes in plastic sheeting, straining up at the artificial lights. Water flowed through the solution and air bubbled up from below, while carbon dioxide was pumped in over the plants and oxygen sucked away by a miniature air conditioning system.

Libet’s main job today was to pull out the plastic irrigation nozzles from a couple of the racks, which had become clogged. She had to disassemble the base of the rack to get to the nozzles. She opened up her toolbag. Pliers, small hammers, screwdrivers and spanners came floating out at her face, chiming gently against each other. She retrieved the tools, picking out the screwdriver she wanted, and went to work on the rack. Soon she had a handful of screws, nuts, washers and other small parts from the rack. She put all this in a pocket, carefully buttoning it up. When she’d started to work in microgravity she had tried leaving such items suspended in mid-air. But that didn’t work in the farm; if you looked away for more than ten seconds or so your nut or washer would go sailing off in the powerful breezes in here.

Anyhow, she retrieved the nozzles; she wiped them out and replaced them. She made a mental note that in a couple of weeks, after the next wheat crop, she would have to clean out the culture media.

If only they were using soil, she mused, then she could take off her gloves and dig in with her fingers; she would need tiny spades and forks, not spanners and screwdrivers. But at least she got to handle the little plants, the green growing things. She breathed on them, enriching their atmosphere with her carbon dioxide.

It had taken a lot of care to select the plants. In typical NASA fashion, plants had been studied in a way traditional farmers would never have recognized, in terms of parameters like edible biomass produced per unit volume, growth period from planting to harvesting, and biologically recoverable calories.

So there was wheat and rice, for calories, starch and protein; white potatoes for carbohydrates, vitamin C and potassium; soybeans for protein and amino acids; peanuts for protein and oil — although the peanuts were difficult to grow and harvest — lettuce for vitamin A and vitamin C.

Wheat was the staple. They got a crop every sixty days. They even had ovens on board (fan-forced — no convection, without gravity) so they could make their own bread. And they were trying out an experimental dwarf spring wheat crop developed in Utah called Apogee, which gave a higher yield.

The warm scent of bread filling the hab module was one of the most pacifying elements of their whole environment.

She turned to her next chore.

Working in microgravity presented its own challenges, as usual. She had to get some kind of foothold, so she jammed her body into the space between the racks using her muscle tension and her legs to hold herself in place. She had a lot of reach — her work envelope, as the mission planners called it, was wider than on Earth, because she could just sway from side to side as she needed to, like seaweed in a current. But her legs, holding her in place, were in tension instead of compression, as they would be on Earth, and she had to take frequent rests to relieve her muscles.

She liked to shut out the noise of the pumps and fans of the nutrient systems and air blowers; she wore earplugs, like today, or sometimes the headset of a walkman. She found that in here she preferred thin, cold, almost abstract music: complex Bach fugues, perhaps, or late Beethoven string quartets. There was something about the voiceless, precise compositions which seemed to complement the lush warmth and visual brightness of the farm.

She was bending the rules by wearing the plugs, though. There was a danger she wouldn’t be able to hear the master alarm, if it sounded; there were visual alarms built in here — flashing red lights fixed to the walls — but, from amongst the racks, they were difficult to see.

But Libet figured the danger was minimal. The worst that could happen was probably a micrometeorite puncture — and then she would feel any loss of pressure as rapidly as it happened — or a radiation pulse, a solar particle event. But even so she was safe; the farm was just about as heavily shielded from radiation as the hab module. Plants had higher radiation dose limits than humans, but exceeding the limits would have just as lethal effects. She would just have to wait out a storm in here, for as long as it took.

As she worked, she thought a lot about Nicola.

Niki’s depression seemed to be deepening. She went through the work assigned her with no enthusiasm, and not much concentration. And she was having trouble sleeping at night, and was reluctant to wake in the morning. She seemed to have no appetite — hell, none of them did — but she was a lot less determined about keeping up her diet and her fluid intake than the rest.

Libet thought she understood. The isolation, the cramped quarters, the growing unreliability and shoddiness of their equipment — and the utter, utter impossibility of being able to get away from the others — all of that was working on them all in some way, and, it seemed to Libet, they were all changing, adapting to the situation.

Bill Angel, for instance, seemed to be shedding a lot of the bluff humor that Libet had recognized in him on Earth. He had grown an undisciplined black beard — he didn’t even look like himself any more — and he spent a lot of time bawling out the mission planners and controllers who, he said, were grinding them all flat with their instructions and demands and routines — or Paula Benacerraf over some chore he’d been assigned that he wasn’t happy with, like the work on the balky SCWO waste-reduction reactor which still wasn’t functioning as it should…

All this bull just washed over Libet. Angel was a pilot with nothing to do, just spinning his wheels. He was just finding ways to cope with his situation. Likewise Rosenberg, with his endless, obscure chains of experiments. Ways to cope.

But with Nicola it was different. Nicola didn’t seem to be finding the inner resources to handle this. She didn’t find anything a comfort any more: the work they did, the entertainment materials they’d brought along.

But at least they had each other.

It had taken the two of them a month to work up the courage — and to get over their space adaptation syndrome — but now Libet and Mott were regularly spending their sleep times in each other’s quarters.

It was a small ship, and the rest weren’t stupid. She’d intercepted one or two quizzical smiles from Benacerraf, exasperated glares from Bill Angel. Only Rosenberg seemed too sunk in his own world to figure it out.

Sharing quarters designed for one person was pretty cramped, but that was okay for Libet; she seemed to find the closeness of another human body — the warm smoothness of Niki’s skin against hers — a great comfort.

Like the farm, maybe: elemental human contact, as a barrier against the huge searing dark outside.

A farm this size needed around sixteen hours work a day: planting, harvesting, wheat grinding, preventative maintenance, adjusting the nutrient solution. So that was work for two people, every day.

Libet did more than her fair share. But then, this was her favorite place in the spacecraft cluster.

She hadn’t expected to react like this, to hanker after growing things. She was a city girl. And after all she’d spent months in low Earth orbit, on Station.

But there, right outside every window of Station, had been Earth itself. Here on Discovery, between planets, Earth had been taken away. The only object that showed as more than a point of light — anywhere in three-dimensional space all around the orbiter — was the sun, huge and bright.

Oh, Venus was approaching; in a month or so they would make their first pass past the planet, for the first of the two fuel-saving gravity assists. It would be spectacular. But Venus was just a big white featureless billiard ball, hot and hostile and hidden. Venus didn’t count.

The orbiter was like an isolated island, suspended in blackness. And she missed Earth. She missed having that huge sky-bright skin below the craft all the time, complex and dazzling, throwing soft, diffuse light into the cabins. She missed having home so close. She was, she was realizing belatedly, a true creature of Earth; she just wasn’t designed to be out here, in all this emptiness, with only the hard, pitiless light of the sun around her.

And so she spent as much time as she could afford here, in this little bubble of light and life, ignoring the huge dark beyond the walls.

Angel pushed buttons to open up the protective doors over the various solar telescopes. The cameras provided images of the sun at a variety of wavelengths, each generated by a different temperature, and so corresponding to a different depth in the star. In the H-alpha wavelength the sun was a fat, roiling sphere of white gas, peppered with black specks that churned, slowly and grandly, like some huge bowl of boiling oatmeal. In the extreme ultraviolet, the sun was a disc of irregular patches of color, without pattern or meaning he could detect. And in X-ray the sun was a fantastic landscape of blue, black and orange, showing up the areas of greatest activity and heat.

As soon as he brought up the X-ray image he could see what the problem was.

There was a big fat dark blue patch, like a bruise, right in the middle of the sun’s disc. That was a coronal hole, a part of the solar surface where the corona — the sun’s outer atmosphere — was less dense. Magnetic field lines could sprout vertically out into space, gushing out heavy particles at twice the normal velocities, like a hose. And that powerful jet was slamming into the slower-moving solar wind that lay between the sun and the spacecraft, churning it up into vast disturbances with tangled magnetic fields.

And all that shit was coming down on Discovery.

Angel hit the master alarm. The hab module was filled with a loud, oscillating tone, and four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

A second later the automatic flare alarm joined in, triggered by the radiation pumping against the hull of the ship.

Benacerraf came stumbling out of her quarters. She was in her underwear, and Angel could see the curves of her small, blue-veined breasts. Her hair was stuck to the side of her face, and her eyes were huge.

Angel hit a button to kill the alarms.

“What? What is it?”

“SPE,” he said. Solar proton event: a solar storm. “We got to get everyone in here.”

“Rosenberg is supposed to be asleep, and Nicola is in the centrifuge.” She looked about. “Siobhan must be in the farm—”

“She’ll be safe if she stays in there,” Angel barked. “You bring Nicola in. I’ll talk to Siobhan, make sure she stays put for a few hours.”

As he snapped out the orders, he felt exultant. At last, they were going to see some action; at last, after these months of dullness, he could do something.

Angel tried the squawk box, but got no reply from Libet. So he went back to the science station to try to get more data on the SPE.

Soon, four of them were here: Angel, Benacerraf, hastily dressing, Rosenberg looking sleepy and confused, and Nicola Mott, still sweating from her time in the centrifuge.

Angel found his gaze wandering over Mott’s body, what he could see of it inside her shapeless Beta-cloth clothes. She was sunk in on herself, but she was cute as hell, dyke or not. It would be interesting to make her sweat some other way, he thought.

“How come those assholes on the ground didn’t warn us about this?”

Benacerraf shrugged. “They probably didn’t know themselves. We’re a lot closer in than they are; the storm may not have reached them yet.”

He tried the squawk box again. “Damn it. I still haven’t spoken to Siobhan.”

Mott looked horrified. “Then she mightn’t know what’s going on. Maybe I should go find her. You know what she’s like. She spends hours in that farm with her earplugs in—”

Benacerraf said, hesitant, “The access tunnel isn’t shielded. Wait until the storm passes. Anyhow, even if she has her plugs in she should see the alarm lights.”

Mott frowned, and started to chew at her fingernail, industriously.

Angel tried the squawk box again; there was no reply. “Ah, the hell with it. If there’s nothing you can do, make the best. Right? I’m hungry. Who wants to eat? Paula, who’s on chow detail?”

Rosenberg sounded disgusted. “I’m going back to bed. You asshole, Bill.”

The women turned away from him. Benacerraf said, “Keep trying Siobhan, Bill.”

Chicken-livered dykes,he thought.

He turned once more to the X-ray image in the monitor, and watched the grey-black coronal hole work its way across the boiling surface of the sun.

When her work was done, Libet stowed away her tools and cleaned her hands with disinfected wet-wipes. She was due for her daily four hours in the centrifuge; her legs seemed to ache in anticipatory protest.

She stripped off her coverall and hat, and stowed them away. She opened the hatch to the connecting tunnel which would take her back to the hab module. The tunnel, a few yards long, was light, flexible.

Unshielded.

She had to dog closed the hatch behind her. The hatch was heavy and tended to stick, and had taken some shifting; by the time she had it closed she was tired and felt ready to rest, briefly, in the tunnel.

She let herself drift in the air, and she could feel her relaxing muscles pulling her into the usual neutral-G foetal position.

She closed her eyes. After the breezy farm, the tunnel was cool and still and comfortable. Maybe she could nap for a few minutes; it wouldn’t do any harm.

A line of light streaked across her vision, a tiny meteor against the dark sky of her closed eyelids.

In the farm module, unnoticed, a red lamp was blinking.

There were no alarms in the access tunnel.

Benacerraf drifted in her sleeping bag, her reading light on, listening on the squawk box to the reports from JSC.

Solar plasma was buffeting the Earth’s magnetic field, making it shudder, and huge electric currents were surging around the upper atmosphere.

The power grid serving the Canadian province of Alberta had gone down. In Britain, the northern lights were visible as far south as London. The Global Positioning System was breaking down; navigational fixes from the GPS satellites were unreliable because of the changing properties of the atmosphere. The Chinese had lost Echostar 3, a communications satellite. The energetic electrons racing around the Earth had caused a build-up of charge; a spark had generated a fake command to turn Echostar’s solar panels away from the sun. After a couple of hours, its batteries ran down, and it was lost. The energy of the storm was also heating up the outer atmosphere, making it expand; satellites as high as two or three hundred miles were experiencing a twenty-fold increase in atmospheric drag…

She fretted about Siobhan. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do until the storm passed.

Discovery was designed to shield them from the radiation hazards of deep space — hazards from which Earth’s magnetosphere and thick layer of atmosphere sheltered the rest of mankind.

The system had to cope with three kinds of ionizing radiation, high-energy particles and photons which could knock apart the atoms of the body as they sleeted through it. There was a steady drizzle of solar cosmic rays — the regular solar wind, a proton-electron gas streaming away from the sun, boiled off by the million-degree temperatures of the corona — and galactic cosmic radiation, GCR, a diffuse flood of heavy, high-energy particles from remote stars, even other galaxies, which soaked through the Solar System from all directions. And then, in addition to the steady stuff, there were SPEs — solar proton events, the kind of storm they were suffering now, intense doses of radiation which persisted for short periods, a few hours or days.

Astronauts tended to think of solar and galactic radiation as career-limiting, and SPEs as life-threatening.

Discovery’s aluminum shell would shield them from the worst of the effects of GCR, reducing their cumulative six-year dose, anyhow, to maybe three hundred rem. That was high — and significantly increased the risks they all faced of cancer and leukaemia later in life — but within the four hundred rem advisory career limit.

Of course it meant they wouldn’t be able to sustain another six-year journey home again, without improved shielding.

But to shelter from an SPE they had to retreat to their storm shelters, either the hab module or the farm, with their heavy plating of aluminum and water tanks clustered around the walls.

If — just if — Siobhan was caught in the storm, she could expect a dose of a hundred rem. At least. That would give her nausea, vomiting for a day or so, fatigue. And some long-term damage to the more sensitive parts of her body — the gonads, lymphoid tissues.

If Siobhan was unlucky her dose might rise five times as high.

And anyhow, there was no safe lower limit, Benacerraf knew. However small the dose, you were at risk.

To Benacerraf, huddled in her cabin and waiting out the storm from the sun, it felt as if the metal walls of the ship, the elaborate precautions and dosimeters they had taken, counted for nothing, as if Discovery was no more protection than a canvas-walled tent, in this storm generated by huge and remote and impossibly violent events. She had never felt so far from the protective embrace of Earth.

The Discovery crew truly had stepped outside the farmhouse door.

In the access tunnel, Libet started awake.

She could see more flashes, within her eyeballs: little streaks and curves and spirals.

She knew what that meant, of course: the flashes were caused by heavy particles, lacing into the matter of her eyes. She thought she could feel the radiation sleeting through her, warm and heavy. Those heavy nuclei would be ramming into the molecules of her body, smashing away electrons in little cascades.

Hard rain, she thought.

She really ought to open the hatch to the hab module, she thought. But, as she peered up through eyes that were laced with flashes and spirals, it seemed a long way away, and an awful lot of effort. Maybe soon.

And anyhow she was starting to feel ill. Nauseous, a little giddy, tired. Maybe it was space adaptation syndrome back again.

And she thought she could smell ozone, like a beach.

She closed her eyes again, and drifted like a foetus in the air.

Poor Niki, she thought.

The flashes and spirals continued, as if a shoal of some tiny fish were swimming through her head.

Day 325

The blood trickled sluggishly out of Angel’s arm.

As he tended the donation bag, Rosenberg couldn’t tell what Angel was thinking.

Bill just didn’t seem the same guy Rosenberg had got to know down on Earth. Floating around up here in the usual semi-foetal position, so many of his gestures and postures had changed: he would never sit with his legs crossed like he used to, or stand with his hands on his hips, or cross his arms… Microgravity had even messed up their body language. Rosenberg just couldn’t read Angel any more.

It sure didn’t help them all get along, cooped up in here.

Now Rosenberg watched, irritated, as the clear plastic bag suspended from Angel’s arm slowly filled up. “Clench, God damn it, Bill.”

Angel’s fist closed harder around the little rubber grip, and the dripping flow of blood accelerated a little. “Fuck you, double-dome. You should be grateful. I got better things to do than bleed myself to death to preserve that shrivelled dyke in there.”

Paula Benacerraf came out of her quarters and joined them in the common area of the hab module. She looked as if she had been sleeping; her face was slack and baggy, and she was struggling into a grubby T-shirt. They were all wearing stinking, dirty clothes right now, because the laundry was malfunctioning again — clogging and leaking water — and none of them had had the will to fix it. “I think we’ve all heard what you have to say, Bill, a dozen times.”

“Oh, you have. Then screw you.” Angel pulled the loose bandage off his arm, and began to tug at the needle protruding from his skin.

Rosenberg said, “Hey, leave that alone. You’re not done.”

“Yes, I am.” The needle came loose, and Rosenberg hastily swabbed at the puncture wound in Angel’s flesh. Angel glared at him, his eyes wild above his tangle of floating, greyed beard. “This isn’t a goddamn nursing home. We don’t have the resources for this. I say we cut our losses.”

Rosenberg held up the half-full bag. “Paula, he didn’t complete the donation.”

Benacerraf looked at him from eyes sunk in pads of puffy flesh. “Make it up from stores, Rosenberg.”

Rosenberg kicked off the wall and caromed in front of Benacerraf, thrusting the bag in her face. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have any stores. This is all there is.”

“Make it up,” she said wearily. Without waiting to see if he complied, she pulled herself along the hab module to the waste management facility.

Angel snorted contempt, and went into his own quarters, slamming the door closed behind him.

Rosenberg was left alone in the common area, his own anger surging. He threw the bag of blood against a wall. It bounced off, soggily, and began drifting away from him, the viscous blood undergoing complex, slow-motion oscillations.

After a couple of minutes, his heart still rattling with anger, he scooted along the module to retrieve the blood.

Rosenberg’s personal theory of Angel was that he was the kind of bad-mouthing asshole who would always bitch at any leadership shown by anybody else, but would always be unwilling to take any real responsibility for himself. He reacted, not acted, and in the meantime made life a living hell for the rest of them stuck here with him.

But strictly speaking, of course, he was right about Libet.

Rosenberg was a biochemist, but he was also doubling up as the nearest thing Discovery had to a doctor. He’d done a crash basic medical training program. At the time he hadn’t taken it all that seriously: as the only crew member with any real grounding in the life sciences, he was the logical choice, but somehow he’d never thought he’d have to put any of this into practice.

But here they were — still inside the orbit of Earth, with a deep space maneuver and their second Venus flyby still to come — and not even one of the six years of the mission elapsed. Yet already one of the crew was basically hospitalized.

The purpose of the crew’s med training had been to enable them to prevent biological death. They had all rehearsed in resuscitation procedures: mouth-to-mouth, sternum compression to get the heart pumping, electroshock paddles, endotracheal intubation, cricothyroidotomy, tracheostomy. They had even — back in the remote early days of the mission when they had all still been talking to each other — tried to rehearse such procedures under microgravity conditions. It had soon become comically obvious that grappling with a limp crewmate in microgravity was physically awkward, distasteful, almost grotesque. And many of the steps in their manuals — tip the victim’s head back at forty-five degrees — no longer made any sense…

Anyhow, the theory of their training was that if they could just stabilize whatever situation came up, there would be time to wait for radio waves to crawl across the Solar System and bring advice from the medics on the ground.

But they simply weren’t geared up to nursing anyone — even one person, twenty percent of their crew — long term. This was a marginally capable interplanetary craft, not a convalescent home.

The blood had been the first, and most visible, stock to be diminished; the almost daily routine of drawing blood from the crew — who were already weakened by their own reactions to microgravity — had jammed the cost of maintaining Libel’s life in the faces of everybody on board.

Then there were the drugs. There was a pretty wide range of products in long-term storage. They had intravenous fluids, whole blood, crystalloid solutions: both saline and normal serum albumin, morphine sulphate, lidocaine, digitalis preparations… But the difficulty they faced now was that Libet had already absorbed a lot of the resources they’d started out with. And that had caused growing resentment among everybody else. Including, Rosenberg admitted, himself. Why the hell do we pour this stuff into Libet? This is all we have to keep us alive for the next decade or more… Anyway, getting caught by the flare was her own damn fault.

He tried not to think about it. There were other problems to face.

He dug out his softscreen, with his copy of today’s checklist. He was scheduled to put in a little time in the centrifuge himself right now. But he could feel the steady whir of the arm as it rocked the spacecraft. That was Nicola Mott; even as Libet declined, Mott seemed to be taking an obsessive interest in her own health, and was putting in extraordinary hours up there.

He listened for a moment to Mott wheeling overhead, grimly fighting back the tide of microgravity changes. Whump, whump.

According to the checklist, Mott should have been putting in some time in the farm. Rosenberg decided he might as well cover for her.

He pulled himself through the hab module hatchway, along the little flexible access tube, where Siobhan had gotten her close, and into the CELSS farm. He pulled on the protective gear — now, after months, rank with the sweat of others — and began to work around the racks of plants.

He didn’t like it in here.

Most of Rosenberg’s work, though on living systems, had been at the microbiological or biochemical level. The fact was, he hadn’t had much contact with living creatures, human or otherwise, and he found these ranks of straining plants a little sinister.

Overall the hydroponic system was working as it should, and he could see that many of the plants had the large leaves and small roots characteristic of such a facility. But he could also see, at a glance, there were the usual mechanical problems with the facility: clogged irrigation nozzles, a couple of failed fans, a suspiciously dark hue to the solution in one tank, indicating maybe a problem with the nutrient mix. And here was one place where the solution looked aerated, full of fat, sluggish bubbles which clung to the roots of the plants. Aeration was bad. The roots had to stay in contact with the solution to prevent dehydration and nutrient starvation, and to Rosenberg those plants looked, even to his naked, inexpert eye, undernourished.

There were more fundamental problems. Within the muddy hydroponic nutrient he could see roots growing — not downwards — but in straight lines away from the seed plate, and at bizarre angles to the shoots. And in these late-generation growths, healthy plants were dotted among many unhealthy and abnormal growths.

It wasn’t a surprise to Rosenberg that after billions of years of adaptation to a gravity well the plants were having trouble with microgravity. There were gravity-related mechanisms that controlled branch angles and leaf orientation, and gravity dominated plant cell growth, elongation and development. Without gravity, the physical stresses and loading on cells disappeared. In fluids buoyancy was lost, and gas-filled volumes and vesicles would not move as they should…

He could see that some of the wheat crop would need reseeding. Several generations since leaving Earth, the yield of the crops was reducing, and although he could see no gross morphological defects there was some evidence of discoloration and perhaps malformation of the stem growth. He reached into the trays and took out a couple of stems as samples. He was sure he would find problems in cell division, nuclear and chromosomal behavior, metabolism, reproductive development and viability.

He understood, deep down, that it had always been a gamble that they could make this little farm work, and they were just going to have to work their way through the problems as they came up. The truth was, nobody knew what the long-term effects of microgravity and GCR would be. The handful of experiments on biological systems in space — in Salyut, Mir and a few unmanned satellites — had not shown up enough data to provide much insight. Still, he thought, it was a shame to see the farm degrade from the triumph of the earliest months of the mission, when it had returned satisfying yields.

Libet had been the most assiduous farmer; her absence, here, among these fragile green things, was keenly felt.

In his softscreen he made a brief list of the main problems he found, to raise at a crew meeting later, and he began to strip off the protective gear.

Back in the hab module he had to climb past the wreckage of the laundry, which, it appeared, Benacerraf had been disassembling. The front cover was drifting loose, and he had to shove it aside to get by. It took a little experimentation; if he pushed away from the line of its center of mass the cover just spun, or oscillated in space. There was also other debris from the half-finished job, mops and small tools and a little clear plastic bag of nuts and washers, cluttering up the air.

He looked absently inside the laundry. Benacerraf had opened up the exit vents, and he could see there was some kind of growth in there, what looked like a black algae, coating the walls and vent grilles. He’d found some of the same growth himself on the shower curtain. Micro-organisms tended to flourish in the habitable compartments, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air.

But the problem was deeper than that. Their miniature biosphere had fundamental problems of scale. It was poorly buffered; the biota were connected with a much smaller reservoir of biogenic materials than on Earth. Carbon dioxide, for instance, was recycled through the Discovery system in a few hours or days, compared to several years on Earth. So minor imbalances could significantly affect the composition of the buffer in a short time, and imbalances could run away rapidly.

This algal growth was a typical, relatively harmless, example. The others bitched about scraping this stuff out of the shower, but things could get a lot worse: if, for instance, the levels of cee-oh-two rose or fell away from nominal too dramatically, the whole life support system could crash altogether.

Nobody knew what was really going on in here, and they just had to cope with it as best they could. Rosenberg felt he understood this, that he’d understood it before he got on board Discovery. It was part of the life he’d chosen.

As he waited for his mail to open on the softscreen he listened to the continuing slow rattle of Mott in the arm. He wondered if he ought to get her down out of there. These long periods in the arm wouldn’t do Mott any harm, but if she started giving them all an excuse not to do their hours in there she could damage them all…

One of his messages, from the surgeons on the ground at JSC, was a little worrying.

They had been monitoring the routine electrocardiogram readings Rosenberg had been sending down the loop. All five of them had suffered minor heart irregularities over the last twenty-four hours. Rosenberg himself had suffered a so-called bigeminy rhythm, in which both sides of the heart contracted at once. Rosenberg thought he could feel his own heart thumping now inside his chest, huge and vulnerable, as he tried to digest this piece of information. He checked the time of his bigeminy. He didn’t remember anything wrong, except maybe feeling tired. He frowned. He’d have to look into this later; the surgeons wanted more EKGs taken of all the crew, and they had a number of suggested causes for the irregularities…

He moved his analysis of the farm plant samples up his mental priority list. He was becoming convinced many of the problems with the biosphere could be related to deficiencies or surpluses of trace elements. The plants, on analysis, would be a good check of such problems.

He looked again at his checklist.

He couldn’t find any excuse to avoid his patient any longer.

Siobhan Libet was slung in her sleeping bag, and her cramped little quarters had been made over as a kind of miniature hospital ward. The place was cluttered, but it was clean and smelled fresh, if a little antiseptic. That was thanks to Mott, Rosenberg knew. As far as he was aware neither Benacerraf nor Angel ever ventured in here.

Libet was unconscious. She’d been that way for three days now.

He pulled the door closed behind him, and started his examination.

Siobhan’s problems were multiple, and linked.

The effects of microgravity were marked in Libet, who, after all, hadn’t been able to get to the centrifuge for a hundred and sixty days. Her skeletal muscles were deeply atrophied. The wasting of her cardiac muscles seemed to have stabilized at about eight percent. That was higher than the crew’s average, and Rosenberg worried about eventual cardiac arrest. Libet’s hemoglobin was down by fifteen percent, enough to mark her out for treatment, on Earth, as an anemic. That hemoglobin count meant less oxygen being carried to the debilitated heart and skeletal muscles.

Her white cell count was down too, so her ability to fight off infection was reduced. Rosenberg was administering interferon to her, a protein involved in the immune system — production of which was also suppressed.

A couple of simple tests showed him that Libet’s flexor muscles had lost around twenty percent of their strength, the extensors twenty-five percent. Even the cell structure of her muscle fibers was changing, he knew; microgravity was working on her right down to a micro-anatomical level.

Libet’s bone calcium continued to wash out in her urine, at a half percent a month. Rosenberg thought there was a danger of her inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, vanishing altogether, without hope of regeneration. He didn’t have any way of monitoring the build-up of some of that calcium in Libet’s kidneys, which could lead ultimately to kidney stones. And on top of all of that, Libet was working her way through the classic symptoms of acute radiation sickness.

In the first few days after the solar storm incident Libet had suffered from nausea, pain, a loss of appetite, extreme fatigue, vomiting. After a couple of weeks she had started to suffer diarrhea, hemorrhaging from the mucous membranes in her nose, mouth and other parts of her body, and hair loss, from patches all over her scalp.

Libet had taken a dose of around five hundred rem. The textbooks said her chances of survival in the short term were less than fifty percent; and in the long term — when effects like cancer had time to work through — even more marginal…

He suspected she’d done well to survive so long, even to stay conscious.

He looked at Libet’s face. He could see tears leaking steadily, and when he raised a lid, her eye was bloodshot. That was partly due to the changed fluid balance, and partly to the dustiness of the air: in microgravity, dust didn’t settle out. The eyes produced tears, and blink reflexes cut in, intended to wash foreign bodies off the eye, into the lacrimal duct and into the nose. The nose was supposed to run, then, to wash the particles out of the system. But in microgravity there was no gravity feed to the lacrimal duct. The blinking could only redistribute particles over the eye; Libet’s cornea was, as a result, red and scratched. And the particles which were forced into Libet’s lacrimal duct did not run out of her nose, because her nose was almost stopped up by excessive mucous secretions.

If she ever pulled through this he didn’t want Libet to emerge with eye damage. So he had set Mott the task of bathing Libet’s eyes, and treating them with various drops…

Complex, messy, unanticipated problems.

As he worked, Rosenberg thought about death.

If — when — Siobhan Libet died, it would be Rosenberg who would have to sign her death certificate.

He would have to perform the autopsy.

He would have to provide standard and X-ray documentation, and subject tissue samples to toxicologic, bacteriologic and biochemical analysis; he’d have to take samples from the liver, a kidney, the brain, a lung, cerebrospinal fluid, vitreous humor, hair, skin, spleen and the skeletal muscles…

The legal position wasn’t very clear.

NASA spaceflight crews were judged to be federal agency radiation workers, and so were covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration radiation protection measures. But those measures had not been drawn up for spaceflight, and NASA had prepared its own standards for crew dosage. As far as he could make out, because of get-out clauses, there were actually no radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions.

For sure, though, they hadn’t adhered to the ALARA principle that the standards laid down: exposure As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

If the law suits started flying, Rosenberg might even be asked to preserve the body. That would mean, as far as he could see, mummification.

Jesus. What a situation.

In the course of his med training, Rosenberg had had some preliminary introduction to psychology. It wasn’t exactly a subject he was interested in, but what he had learned had pretty much confirmed his preconceptions about NASA: that the psychological preparation of NASA crews, including this one, was pitiful.

Nobody had figured out how they should respond to a situation like this. What would they do if someone died? Hold a service? If so, what denomination? And if they had to store the evidence, what were they supposed to do with the mummified body?

Maybe the worst problem was that the five of them had, prior to Libet’s accident, come to some kind of accommodation with each other, and with their situation. But the injury to Libet during the solar storm, and now her likely death — the loss of her skills, her muscles, her dedication to the farm, her contribution to the collective personality of the crew — was likely to destabilize them all, he feared.

Or worse. It might destroy them altogether.

…In sleep, her skin was smoothed out, almost glowing in the soft light of her cabin’s reading lamp. She looked young, trouble-free, save for the occasional grimace, pain echoes which crossed her face.

It was an odd thing, but he’d never really gotten to know Libet, in the years they’d spent together training for this mission, even the months they’d been cooped up together in this hacked-up Space Shuttle. To him she was a kind of sketch, a collection of barely understood traits: her readiness to laugh, her obvious sense of wonder, her youthful impatience to fly in space, her relationship with Mott.

But then, he hadn’t really gotten to know any of the rest of the crew, except in so far as their interests crossed his own. It was only now, when he had been forced more or less to suspend his own work on the Titan data and had been reduced to a kind of low-level nurse for Libet, that he had started to see her as some kind of human being.

There was a person in there, he realized now: an interior presence as deep and complex as his own, inside this shell of damaged flesh. And she was suffering.

He hadn’t quite understood his own reaction when he saw how Mott, in her distress, held Libet, and how Libet responded to her. He had been baffled, angry, as if Mott was intruding.

It was a funny thing, but it was as if, out here, so isolated from all but this ill-assorted handful of people, Rosenberg was starting to gain some kind of psychic connection with his fellow humans, for the first time in his adult life. And it wasn’t all that hard for him to figure out why he had gotten so angry at Nicola Mott, Libet’s grieving lover.

It was because — in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him — he was falling in love with Libet himself.

Rosenberg was jealous.

When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other.

Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?”

“Aware of what?”

“What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw.

“Are you talking about drugs?”

Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.”

“Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—”

“Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.”

“Then you can take them from NASA.”

“NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?”

Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row.

“Steroids,” Rosenberg said.

They turned to look at him.

“Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.”

“Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.”

Angel shrugged. “Sue me,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight easier than those dumb hours in the arm.”

“It doesn’t work,” Rosenberg said. “What is it you’re using, the nandrolone? Look, steroids work by increasing muscle strength, not by acting directly on the bones. The stronger the muscles, the more stress they impose on the skeleton; and your skeleton adjusts itself until it’s just strong enough to withstand muscle stress. But — here’s the catch, Bill — you still have to do your exercise to get the benefit. Don’t you get it? And as for the fluoride, that really is dumb. You’ll start getting calcification where you don’t want it. And—”

“Up your ass, double-dome,” Angel said savagely. “You’re no doctor. What do you know?”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Fine. Your choice. Don’t come to me when your tendons ossify.”

“Fuck you,” Angel said. He pulled himself into his quarters, and slammed the door closed behind him.

Now that the shouting had stopped, the routine noises of the hab module became more apparent: the whir of the high-speed fans, the hiss of the vents, sixty decibels of white noise.

For a moment Benacerraf hung there in the air, her legs drawn up towards her chest. Her breathing was rapid, her face flushed, her eyes, over puffed cheeks, red-rimmed and irritated. Rosenberg wondered vaguely about the state of her heart. “Rosenberg,” she said now, “I want you to take responsibility for this. I want you to find a way of locking those damn drugs away from Bill.”

He didn’t respond.

He had no intention of locking away anything. He sure wasn’t going to intervene in some argument between Benacerraf and Angel, for the benefit of a control freak like Benacerraf.

Anyhow, he figured, he had enough responsibility already.

He got away from Benacerraf. He made his way past the debris of the laundry, and in the galley he tried to find something easy to fix for lunch.

Hadamard was in Washington during the inauguration of Xavier Maclachlan, after his wafer-thin win in the 2008 election.

Maclachlan called it a “liberation of the capital.”

Armed militia bands came in from Idaho and Arizona and Oklahoma and Montana, to fire off black-powder salutes to the nationalist-populist who promised to repeal all gun control laws. In the crowd, Hadamard saw a couple of Ku Klux Klan costumes, a sight he thought had gone into an unholy past. Come to that, there was a rumor that a former Klan leader was being made ready to become a future White House chief of staff. And in his speech Maclachlan appealed to the people to end what he called the “Israeli occupation of Congress…”

And so on.

As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama.

Army engineers — set in place during the handover from the last Administration — started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country’s membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started — arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs — ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese — and world trade collapsed.

The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan.

Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan’s old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his “da Vinci brains trust.” The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft.

And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form.

Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.

Jake Hadamard was still in his job at NASA, trying to maintain support for the Titan mission, still coping with the fall-out from the Endeavour launch. Not that anybody seemed to care much about that any more. The scuttlebutt, in fact, was that Maclachlan was lining up Al Hartle as Hadamard’s replacement. Maclachlan couldn’t have sent a clearer signal as to what he thought of the X-15 incident.

Hadamard had thought he could work with Maclachlan. All his life, Hadamard had put himself, his career, first; he’d thought he could work with anybody.

Maybe he’d been wrong.

He thought Maclachlan was causing a lot of people a lot of misery, needlessly. He was stirring up hate that might rebound on him. And he was taking one hell of a risk by enraging China like this.

Hadamard felt afraid of the future. But his greatest fear was that Maclachlan might actually be right. What if his protectionism and military bristling actually gained back the advantage for the U.S., as they all entered the second decade of what the commentators were calling “China’s century”? What if his own, Hadamard’s, vestigial moral doubts were exposed as the confusion of a weakling? What then…?

The future, his personal future and the nation’s, was more cloudy than ever before.

Marcus White asked to meet him at the KSC Visitors’ Center. He parked his car and walked through the Kennedy rocket park. Hadamard remembered how you used to be able to see the rockets as you approached the Visitors’ Center, sprouting from the far side of the freeway, white and silver, like the ash-coated stumps of burned-out trees, tied to the ground by their stay-wires.

Now, though, those silver treestumps were almost all fallen; those that hadn’t been dragged away to be dismantled lay against the hot ground like discarded matches.

He was early.

The old Visitors’ Center was deserted — the ticket booths closed up, the once-sparkling VR displays of the Moon and Mars just empty stages — but the main work of dismantling the place hadn’t yet begun, and as Hadamard walked the click of his patent leather shoes on the floor echoed.

He walked around the old-fashioned displays of real hardware: Gemini, Mercury, Apollo. The Mercury capsule — America’s first manned spaceship — was just a cone of corrugated metal, packed with equipment, enclosed in a glass sheath; the controls were glass and Bakelite and metal toggles, clunky and crude. It looked as if it dated from the 1930s, not the 1960s. It was hard to see how a man in a pressure suit could get inside there, let alone fly the thing into space.

Even the Apollo Command Module seemed small, dingy and primitive: impossibly cramped, with the metal frames of those three couches jammed in together. The interior finish had faded to a muddy yellow. There was big chunky machinery on the hatch, and tiny, thick windows, and Velcro patches everywhere.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

The gravelly voice in his ear made him jump. He turned. In the dimmed lights he made out the tough leather face of Marcus White.

“I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did they go to the bathroom in there? Well, I’ll tell you. You had to strip naked, see, and then take this plastic bag and clamp it to your ass. And when the turds came out you had to hook them down into the bag with your finger, through the plastic. No gravity; nothing to make stuff fall by itself, right? And then—”

Hadamard forced a smile. “Marcus,” he said, “I know how Apollo astronauts went to the bathroom.”

“So you came to see these old birds before they are taken out for scrap?”

“They’re not being scrapped, Marcus,” Hadamard said patiently. “As you know. They’ll be put in storage, here at the Cape or at Langley or Vandenburg. It’s just—”

“I know. Nobody wants to see this old junk any more. Right? So, you believe that too, Jake?”

Hadamard shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know any more, Marcus. Most of the population is too young to remember Apollo anyhow. And the opinion polls say most of them don’t believe it ever happened, that it was all faked, a Cold War stunt. Attendances here have dropped right off. What do you want to see me about?”

White let his mouth drop open. “You don’t know what’s going on here — you, the big cheese?”

“I don’t get to hear everything.”

“Sure. Not since Maclachlan took the oath, right?”

Hadamard stiffened. “So tell me.”

White made an odd, growling sound at the back of his throat. “I’ll show you. I was called in to do a VR recording. For the new arcade. They called us all in, those who are left alive. Pete, Neil… Quite a reunion.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Not really.” They walked on, past more mummified, dust-covered 1960s hardware. “You know, I see these guys once every five or ten years. And all I can think is, once you could bounce around on the Moon as light as a feather, and now, my God, look what all this gravity has done to you…

“Anyhow, come on. You won’t believe your fucking eyes.”

The new arcade was a lot smaller and more compact than the old, sprawling Visitors’ Center — it had an atmosphere more like a chapel, in fact, as opposed to the old center’s VR whizz-bang. There were no Geminis suspended from the ceiling, no wax dummies of spacewalking astronauts, no Jim Lovell spacesuits or Lunar Rovers on faked-up moonscapes. There were a few simple decorations — abstract paintings of the Earth, Moon and stars — and a discrete row of VR booths, almost like confessionals.

White pulled back the curtain on the first booth. It showed a simulated Buzz Aldrin, as he’d been when aged around seventy: tanned, seated, relaxed in a sports shirt and slacks. As the curtain opened he went into action.

…I remember reading about Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing when they got to the summit of Everest, in 1955,the VR said. They just had a few minutes on the peak. Hillary acted like a conqueror. He took pictures down the sides of all the ridges, to prove to everyone that they had made it. But Tenzing knelt down and hollowed out a little place in the snow, and filled it with offerings to his God. You see, for him, it was more like a pilgrimage.

If anyone was going to top that for a pilgrimage to a strange and remote place, it was Neil and me.

We had a quiet moment, after we’d settled down from the post-landing checks. In my Personal Preference Kit I’d packed away a little flask of wine, a chalice and some wafers. There was a little fold-down table just under the keyboard that worked the abort guidance computer. I keyed my mike, and said something like, “This is the LM pilot. I want to ask everybody listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” So I poured out my wine; I remember how slowly it rolled out of the flask in that gentle gravity, and curled up against the side of the cup. And I read, silently, from a small card where I had written out a quote from the book of John: “I am the wine and you are the branches / Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit / For you can do nothing without me…”

“Are these recordings?” Hadamard asked.

White shrugged. “Some recordings, some cleaned-up and digitized, some straightforward faked-up sims. The story about Buzz’s communion on the Moon is true, though. Look at this next one.” He pulled back a second curtain; another spectral simulation popped into life.

My name is Jim Irwin, and in 1971 I travelled to the mountains of the Moon. I was captivated — from my first footsteps off the LM, when I nearly tipped over, and found myself staring back up at the sparkling blue of Earth. When I stepped into that distant, untrodden valley, I felt buoyant, elated; I felt like a little child again. The Lunar Apennines weren’t grey or brown as I had expected, but gold, in the light of the early lunar morning. Golden mountains. They looked a little like ski slopes, actually. Others called that place stark and desolate; I have to say I found it warm, friendly, welcoming. The mountains surrounded our little base like a hand cradling a droplet of water, of life. I felt at home on the Moon… At one point we had a problem deploying our ALSEP, our science station, that we had never encountered in training. The cord that was supposed to deploy the central station broke. Well, I prayed for guidance; as I often did during those three days, I recited a phrase from the Psalms which goes: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills / From whence cometh my help? / My help cometh from the Lord.” And you know, I knew straight away that the answer was to get down on my knees and to pull that cord with my hands. And it worked. I had this glow inside me; I felt we could solve anything that came up, that nothing could go wrong. I sensed that God was near me, even in that remote place… I knew then that God had a plan for me, to leave the Earth and to come back to share the adventure with others, so that they could be lifted up in turn…

Irwin looked thin, pale, wasted to Hadamard; two decades after his return from the Moon, Irwin had died of a massive heart attack.

White was looking into his face, waiting for a response.

Hadamard spread his hands. “Maybe this isn’t so bad, Marcus. After all, maybe we’ve been too hot on the technology, rockets and capsules, for all these years. Maybe we neglected the spiritual side too much. This is just a — course correction.”

“Bullshit,” White growled. He stalked forward and pulled another curtain.

…I could see the crescent Earth rise, glowing, through the windows of the Command Module. We were returning home. The pressure was off after the Moonwalk, and we could relax and try to make sense of what had happened to us. And as I worked, just routine stuff keeping the spacecraft going, I was filled with a kind of gentle euphoria, a great tranquillity, and a sense that I understood. It was as if I had suddenly started to hear a new language — one spoken by the Universe itself. No longer did the Earth, or anything in the Universe, seem random to me. There was a kind of order — I could feel it out there — all the worlds of the Solar System, the stars and galaxies beyond, all moving like clockwork together. It was a sudden revelation, you must understand; one moment I was a detached observer, stuck in my head as if inside some kind of armored tank of flesh and muscles — just like you must feel — and the next I could see, for sure, that I was part of it all. And as I worked on I had a sense of being outside myself — as if I was a robot, and somebody else was turning the knobs and tracing down the checklists, I knew I had been enlightened, although right there I didn’t know how or why; I guess I have spent the rest of my life figuring it out. But I knew, even then, it was the most important moment of my life; it even overshadowed walking on the Moon itself…

White seemed to be grinding his teeth; big animal muscles worked under the silvery stubble of his cheeks. “They’re calling this display ‘Testimony.’ They want a contribution from each of us, the Moonwalkers, the story of our spiritual revelations on the Moon, or in space. For the guys who died, like Irwin and Tom Lamb, they’re assembling VR sims using old interview clips and autobiography stuff.”

“You won’t cooperate?”

“Like hell I will. Jake, believe me, it just wasn’t like that. It was about getting through the checklist, and not screwing up. No damn hand of God helped me wipe my butt in one-sixth G…”

Hadamard shrugged. “I guess this is what you get if you out-source your visitors’ center to the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.”

“That bunch of fucking creationists?”

“They have buddies in the White House now, Marcus. Look, you just have to go with the flow on this one. It’s a sign of the times. Maybe we’re entering a more spiritual age.”

“Come on, Jake. You don’t believe that. This is all just Maclachlan and his tub-thumping fundamentalism. We’re going to get dragged back to the fucking Dark Ages if we go on like this. You know they’re teaching creationism again in the schools?”

“I know.” Hadamard sighed. In fact there was more, probably unknown to White: for instance NASA press releases were already being “vetted” by a monitor appointed by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, for any anti-religious “bias;” the archive of images garnered from the Hubble space telescope and other satellite observatories was being “purged” of any images which might directly support theories like the Big Bang, in a manner which was not conducive to a “reasoned response” from proponents of alternative “theories…”

“So it goes, Marcus,” Hadamard said gently. “I guess you heard about the RLV.”

“Yeah.”

The final cancellation of the much-delayed, budget-strangled Reusable Launch Vehicle program had been one of Xavier Maclachlan’s first executive decisions.

“I’d like to think,” White said heavily, “that the decision was made over your head.”

Hadamard made, routinely, to deny that — then hesitated. “Effectively. I didn’t have much choice, after the President and his budget chief got together to beat up on me. The basic argument is the need to free up federal funds to counter the secession threats from Washington State and Idaho. Not to mention Nevada, if Maclachlan goes ahead with his threat to shut down the godless gambling in Vegas… Maclachlan thinks that the whole point of us launching off the Titan mission before he got elected was so we would have a peg to hang the RLV program on. He thinks we tried to pre-commit him to an expenditure of billions on space, year on year ongoing, before a vote was cast in the ’08 ballot. So he just shut the damn thing down.”

“So we don’t have a way to retrieve those guys. My God. A year out, and we already abandoned them.”

“That’s not the official position. That’s not my position. I have study groups in all the centers working on retrieval options without a new RLV. But I admit I had to fight even to ensure the resupply Delta IV launches… Marcus, space just isn’t where the President wants his head to be.”

“But at least you argued against the shutdown,” White said evenly. “Maybe you’re more than the paper-pushing fucker we all thought you were, Jake.”

“Thanks a lot,” Hadamard said drily.

The thing of it was, White was right. Hadamard had argued against the decision, and he probably had damaged his career prospects in Maclachlan’s eyes, and he’d gained nothing in the process.

He was still trying to figure out why he’d done it.

It sure wasn’t anything misty-eyed to do with the safety of Our Men and Women in Space. To hell with Benacerraf and the rest, frankly; they had known the risks, technical and political, when they climbed on board that last Shuttle.

For Hadamard, it was something deeper than that.

Hadamard found himself resisting Maclachlan, on whatever turf he could defend.

It all seemed to be becoming symbolic, for Hadamard. My God, Jake, he thought. I think you’re growing principles, in your old age.

But White was still talking. His praise, Hadamard thought drily, was less than unqualified.

“Of course you got it all wrong,” White said.

“How so?”

“Going to Titan in chemical rockets is a truly dumb thing to do. I supported Paula’s suggestion, because it was all we had. And I thought it would be the start of the future, not the end.”

“So what we should be doing is—”

“What we should be doing is building for the future. An integrated program. With this Chinese scare we had the chance to change hearts, to thrill and terrify, to lead America to space… We should be building the new RLV, and launching fission rocket stages to orbit, and going to Mars and back in a fortnight. We need an integrated vision of the colonization of the Solar System: Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, beyond. It’s not impossible, technically. It’s just will, and politics. Politics is just paperwork. And this country has carried through great, world-changing projects before. Look at World War Two…” And Hadamard let the old man talk for a while, until he ran dry.

Then he said, “We’ve been here before, Marcus. In the 1950s we dreamed of Tsiolkovsky: the orderly conquest of space. But in the 1960s, what we built was Apollo. That’s the kind of species we are, it seems. And the smart guy, the guy who achieves things, is realistic — about what we’re capable of, what we’re willing to do — and works in that framework.”

“Like Jim Webb.”

“Like Jim Webb. In the middle of the Vietnam war, after his President was shot out from under him, Jim Webb got you to the Moon. He did it by playing hard politics, and he couldn’t have achieved any more. And in the same way, with forty-year-old technology and Maclachlan coming down my throat—”

“You sent us to Titan.”

“Hell, yes. I know it’s not ideal, the smartest thing. But we ain’t so good at doing the smart thing, Marcus. You have to do what you can. Anyhow, would you rather not be going to Titan? Would you rather you hadn’t had those three days up there on the Moon?”

“No. Of course not,” White rumbled. “It’s just I’d rather have had half a lifetime…”

“That wasn’t an option,” Hadamard said severely. “We do what we can.”

They walked on through the rest of the half-finished center. White’s temper didn’t improve, as he picked out more VR highlights for Hadamard: Ed Mitchell’s cislunar ESP experiment, endless items from NASA apocrypha — “sightings” by astronauts all the way back to Armstrong of UFOs and alien bases on the Moon, a reconstruction of the supposed “lost” transcript of the last couple of minutes of the Challenger disaster, with its terrified astronaut’s voice reciting The Lord Is My Shepherd…

White was getting very upset, the muscles and veins in his neck standing out like steel cords.

“You know, when I was a kid, Titan was just a point of light in the sky, like thousands of others. Now, we’ve landed a probe there. It’s a new fucking world. We have maps of the surface. We have a crew on the way to land there, for Christ’s sake. But if Maclachlan and the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and all those other assholes have their way, in another hundred years Titan will just be a dot in the sky again. How the hell can we lose all that knowledge, Jake?”

Hadamard said, “But you walked on the Moon. Whatever else happens, they can’t take that achievement away. Not for all time.”

White studied him. “You are changing, paper-pusher.”

“Or maybe the world is changing and leaving me behind.” He took White’s arm; he could feel bunched muscle, still hard, through a light cotton sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a beer.”

They walked out, towards Hadamard’s parked car.

In the rocket park, a wrecking crew was hauling down the Atlas-Mercury. It was a slim silver cylinder topped by the dark cone of a Mercury capsule, the configuration that had taken John Glenn to orbit. The Atlas left the vertical with a groan of tearing metal.

Day 504

When Siobhan finally died, Mott realized that she had no framework for coping. She had no prayers to say, no hymns to sing, no rational or social structure which could accommodate death.

But then, the rest of the crew didn’t know how to handle this either.

Bill Angel argued for breaking down Siobhan’s body and using it as nutrient in the farm. “She always wanted to be a farmer in the sky,” he said, his face hard. “Now she can be. Just dumping her body overboard means losing raw material, a loss we can’t afford.” He stared at Mott, as if challenging her. “We’re on the edge here. Life must go on. Our lives.”

He’d actually had some endorsement for that, from the surgeons on the ground. Although they would have wanted Siobhan’s flesh and bones treated before being ground up for consumption by the plants.

Benacerraf opposed it, and Mott and Rosenberg backed her up.

At last they came up with a solution they could all accept.

Benacerraf clambered into her EMU, her EVA suit, and hauled Siobhan’s body out of the airlock and into the orbiter cargo bay. The body was wrapped in a Stars and Stripes — a flag that should have fluttered over the ice of Titan — and bound up with duct tape and Beta cloth.

Benacerraf braced herself in the payload bay and just thrust that body away from her, letting it drift away.

Benacerraf, floating in the payload bay, said some words, her voice a crackle, distorted by static.

“I want to read to you what Isaac Newton wrote to John Locke, on looking into the sun. I think it’s kind of appropriate…”

In a few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look on no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark. But by keeping in the dark and employing my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again and by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, though not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon the phenomenon…

“I think that sums it up,” Benacerraf said gently, her voice scratchy on the radio loop. “Siobhan looked, too long, into the face of the sun. We won’t forget her.”

Mott sat at the window of the flight deck and watched the body ascend past the shadow of the high-gain antenna. In the ferocious glare of trans-Venusian sunlight, it exploded with brilliance.

At last it was lost in the sky.

Mott tried to come to terms with all this, with her loss.

Part of her was frankly glad that it wasn’t her, Mott, who had been caught in that access tube. And another part was guilty as all hell about that.

But mostly, when she looked into her own soul, she found only incomprehension.

It proved impossible to forget Siobhan, to restore life to normal. Bizarrely, grotesquely, Siobhan hadn’t actually departed so far. The small impulse that Benacerraf had imparted to the body had done little more than send it on a slowly diverging, neighboring orbit to Discovery’s. Poor Siobhan was still tracking Discovery on its complex path around the sun.

It was as if Siobhan had never gone away. As if her absence, the hole she left behind, was a real thing, which pursued Mott, no matter what she tried to do: the hours of gruelling exercise she burned up in the arm, her work in the corners of the cluster like the farm or the Apollos, the time she tried to lose in the emptiness of sleep.

After a time, Mott realized, she was barely functioning, so far sunk was she in black despair.

Barbara Fahy, recently appointed head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, heard the news on a copied e-mail, passed down the chain of command from Jake Hadamard. Al Hartle — now working as a senior adviser to the President — was trying to block the release of the Delta IV boosters for the resupply of the Discovery crew.

Fahy couldn’t believe it. But she checked with Canaveral and Vandenburg. The payloads that had been under preparation for the first Delta IV launches — consumables and other equipment to follow Discovery to Titan — had already been stood down, and were being disassembled and placed in storage.

So it was true.

She called up Hadamard, in his office at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. In the image in her softscreen, Hadamard looked tired, his face slack.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s true. I would have told you in person, but—”

“But what? You couldn’t stand to face me?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. Hell.” The screen flashed up a blasphemy-filter warning.

“Jake, I didn’t want this job in the first place. How am I supposed to carry it through if you don’t keep me informed?”

“Washington’s a tough place right now. Do you really want me to involve you in every battle I have to fight?”

“If it involves the lives of our crew,” she said, “the only crew we have up there, then, hell, yes, I do.” Blasphemy warning. She poked reflexively at the softscreen, but there was no longer any way to turn off the obscenity filters. “We’ve already stranded them up there, without hope of retrieval. If we cut the resupply—”

“I know the implications,” he snapped. “I’m not a fool, Barbara. But right now there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I can’t win every battle. I have to pick my ground.”

“What ground is more important than this, the lives of—”

“I have to make that judgement,” he said, his voice laden with stress. “Look, I have a head-to-head with Hartle at nine a.m. tomorrow. In my office. I want you here.”

“Why?”

“It’s better if you find out then.”

“What shall I prepare?”

He smiled. “Just bring along the look you had on your face when you called me up. Use it on Al Hartle, instead of me…”

On flights into Washington nowadays, the airlines gave out smog filters and compact respiration packs, as standard to every passenger. And when Fahy reached the limo sent for her, outside the terminal building, the cloudless sky was so smoggy it was actually a little orange.

Maybe that was an omen, she thought. Titan weather, come to Earth.

Hadamard’s office was long, plush, old-fashioned, in the NASA Headquarters building.

When she arrived, Hartle was already there, with an aide, a thin officer in a sober blue uniform. He introduced himself as Gareth Deeke. He nodded curtly at Fahy, a small grin on his mouth, as if amused to see Fahy here. His eyes were hidden behind big insectile mirrored shades.

Deeke had unrolled a softscreen and plastered it over the office wall; it was filled up with a glowing, full-color map of the Pacific rim. This was, as far as Fahy could figure, some kind of military strategic briefing.

This might still be Jake Hadamard’s office, she thought, but it sure as hell wasn’t Jake’s agenda any more.

Deeke resumed his briefing.

“…This is the Asian century,” Deeke said. “Our analysts were predicting that twenty years ago, and it sure has come true. We can’t assume our geo-economic dominance is going to last a lot longer; we are going to enter a period in which we are just one of a number of players around the rim of the Pacific. We face Japan, Korea, Vietnam, several others, and the powerhouse of the whole area—”

“Red China,” Hartle said softly. “Red fucking China. Now the biggest GDP in the world, the fastest economic growth, the fastest military expansion: six million men under arms, ten thousand combat aircraft…”

Graphics of China; schematic starbursts around its periphery. Deeke said, “We know that China has a whole series of expansionist aims around its borders, by land and sea, some of which it has pursued for decades. Recently Chinese gunboats have been taking offensive action against PetroVietnam-Conoco oil rigs here, in the South China Sea, south-east of Ho Chi Minh City. I don’t need to remind you that China and Vietnam fought a border war in 1979. This whole area is crisscrossed by shipping lanes; any conflict between China and Vietnam could draw in Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines.

“Look up here,” he said, tapping another part of the map. “Vladivostok, the heart of what the Russians call their Pacific Maritime Territory. It was ceded by Beijing to the Russians in 1860, when the French and British were at China’s throat. Well, the Brits and the French have gone now, and China wants its province back. This is a key area. At stake is China getting hold of a port in the Sea of Japan; right now, you can see they are landlocked by Russia and Korea. And besides, the population density on the Chinese side of the border is three times that on the Russian side. It must look tempting…

“Item three,” he said, and he brought up another map. “Taiwan. The CIA thinks this is the main flashpoint area in the whole region. The Red Chinese have always claimed that any effort by Taiwan to achieve formal independence would justify them going to war. Currently the Taiwanese are pressing no such claim. But now we think the Chinese are preparing for a more significant push.

“We’ve seen exercises by the People’s Liberation Army on the mainland. Violations of Taiwanese airspace by Chinese military jets. Missile launches, impacting the ocean within Taiwanese waters. Blockades, particularly around the big ports, Keelung and Kaoh-siung… It’s a classic pattern. They did all this in the ’50s, and again in the ’90s. This time, we think they mean it. And there appears to be a faction within the senior and military Chinese leadership which believes that the U.S. would not intervene in the Taiwan Strait, no matter what happens there.”

“But why would the Chinese do this?” Fahy asked. “Why now?”

Hartle turned to her. “To see that, Miss Fahy, you have to understand the psychology of the very old men who run Red China. Have run that country for decades, in fact.”

She looked into his leathery face, the rheumy blue eyes embedded there. Nobody better placed to figure that psychology than you, General, she thought.

“The Party still has a grip on China. For now. But those wizened old dwarfs in Beijing can feel their grip slipping away. They fear koan — a return to chaos, which they see as fundamental to China’s former weakness — more than any other condition. And we have every indication that koan is indeed descending on the country.”

Deeke said, “Some of the new economic growth areas are pushing for more independence from Beijing. Nobody really knows what’s happening in the heads of the young people over there, in the new cities. And the influence of Communism in the rural areas has been waning for decades. In its place, you have all sorts of crazy cults and beliefs. There’s the cult of Wu Yangming, who was shot as a rapist fifteen years ago. He called himself a Holy Emperor, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Death didn’t stop him; Wu alone has a million followers. Some of these cult types are organizing using the methods Mao Zedong used during his insurrection — and his revolt worked, remember.”

Hartle said, “Think of it. A billion fucking peasants, still poor, their rice paddies drying out, all going crazy about their gods, consulting the I Ching… and organizing. What a tinderbox.”

Deeke said, “The leadership need some way to reassert their grip. A symbolic act, a show of strength. The space shots didn’t quite hack it, it seems. Maybe a war with Taiwan will do it.”

Hartle said with an almost comical darkness, “We must not allow the emergence of a great power on the Asian continent. We don’t want to spend the rest of the millennium paying tribute to the fucking Red Chinese. If the Red Chinese resent that, fuck them. But if they try to break out — go for Taiwan, for instance — we have to be ready…”

Fahy scowled. “I thought we were here to discuss the space program.”

Hartle studied her, analytically. “Here’s a quotation for you, Miss Fahy. I wonder if you recognize it: You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. You know who said that?”

“No.”

“Trotsky. War has come looking for us, young lady.” He eyed her. “You run the Office—”

“Of Manned Spaceflight.”

“Well, there ain’t going to be any more manned Spaceflight, Miss Fahy, so I guess you’re out of a job. But we hate to lose good people. Maybe you’re just the person we need for our new program.”

“What program?”

Hartle nodded to Deeke, who tapped his softscreen once more. A new schematic came up: blown-up images of bacteria, DNA strands. Deeke launched into his new spiel. His slickness unnerved Fahy; he was like a machine, utterly subservient to Hartle, without anything to say for himself.

He said now, “The Chinese are not short of people, and have always accepted the human wave — attrition, mass slaughter — as an acceptable form of warfare. The First World War should have been a Chinese war.”

“So,” Hartle said, “we need a new deterrent.”

Hadamard frowned. “What?”

“A bio-weapon.” Hartle smiled. “Jake, Miss Fahy, we seem to have reached a plateau in mechanical engineering, but those biological lab boys have made remarkable progress in the last couple of decades. Now that the human genome map is complete, new possibilities have opened up for us. It’s possible to distinguish the DNA variation between different racial and ethnic groups. What I’m saying is, the lab boys can develop an agent which will kill only a specific group.”

“My God,” said Fahy. “Such as?”

“Such as the Han Chinese. Miss Fahy, with such a weapon — delivered by some small-scale missile launcher, which is where we need NASA technicians — we could lop off the head of the Red Chinese flower. Or threaten to, which is equivalent.”

“You’re crazy,” Fahy breathed.

Hadamard said, “Now, Barbara—” He steepled his hands. “Al, I think we’ve gone far enough. NASA is still a civilian agency. Dedicated to the exploration of space and the dissemination of information to the public, and the world. And so forth. You cannot expect us to contribute to any such program as this…”

Hadamard, even to Fahy, sounded weak, unconvinced by his own words.

“He’s right. You can’t tell us what to do,” she said to Hartle. “No matter what Maclachlan says. Your authority has limits.”

Hartle seemed unfazed. “Jake, excuse me. Have you told her?”

Fahy frowned. “Told me what?”

Hartle said, “As of seventeen days hence, I will be Administrator of NASA. Changing times, Miss Fahy.”

Hadamard looked across at Fahy and shrugged. “It took fifty years, but in the end the Air Force won. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

Hartle grinned at Fahy, and she could see antique fillings in his teeth. “Let me tell you what my first orders are going to be, just so you can start to prepare, Miss Fahy. NASA has been a sink of national resources for decades; now we’re approaching a time of unparalleled crisis, and that is going to stop.”

Hadamard said, “Meaning?”

“Meaning, no more of this science crap. Item. The Deep Space Network can go. Item. All those science satellites, the observatories—”

“Some of them have been up there for decades,” Fahy said. The Hubble space telescope is the most successful—”

“If there are decades’ worth of data in the can,” Hartle said, “there shouldn’t be too much objection when I turn off the tap, should there?”

“It doesn’t work like that, Al,” Hadamard said mildly.

“What doesn’t? Science? Fuck the science, Jake. I guess you hadn’t noticed, here in this ivory tower of yours, but science isn’t exactly the top priority of this Administration. Six months from now, the only U.S. satellites I want operating up there are those with military or commercial potential — comsats, Earth resources, reconnaissance. Item. The Delta IV boosters currently assigned to these asshole deep space resupply missions will be switched to military missions, which was the primary function of the Delta IV program in the first goddamn place. Miss Fahy. You got a problem with any of that?”

“Yes,” she said, flaring. “Yes, I have a problem. Damn it, General—”

“Nobody forced that fucking crew of yours, that bunch of dykes and ecologists and has-been pilots up into space,” Hartle said. “Did they? They knew the risks when they accepted the assignment.”

“They didn’t accept the risk of being shot down.”

Hadamard said wearily, “Barbara…”

Hartle studied her, as if pitying her. “You know, I truly believe you haven’t taken in a word that’s been said this morning, Miss Fahy. Let me spell it out again. The time for your Buck Rogers space cadet stunts is over. The loss of your crew — if that happens — is regrettable. But it was their choice. We’ve been pouring billions every year into this fucking circus stunt. Well, Miss Fahy, I now have a clear mandate from the President to put a stop to that. And it’s the first thing I intend to do.”

“Let us keep a dish,” Hadamard said suddenly.

Hartle looked at him. “Huh?”

“A deep space dish. Let us keep Goldstone open, at least. That way, at least maybe we’ll be able to listen to Discovery. Better PR, Al.”

Hartle’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell,” he said. “Keep the fucking dish; what can that cost?”

Hadamard nodded, avoiding Fahy’s eyes.

He’d won a small victory, Fahy saw, extracting such a relatively inexpensive concession in this, Hartle’s moment of triumph. Maybe this was his main objective for the meeting, in fact. Maybe he brought me in here as a kind of diversion, to soak up Hartle’s fire.

I should be so political, she thought.

But I’m not.

She asked, “Who is going to tell the astronauts? You, General? The President? Who will tell their families?”

Hartle grinned easily and stood up. “I’ll leave that to old Jake here; he’s still the man holding the ball until next month. And you, Miss Fahy, will start working on delivery systems for those biobomb options we outlined.”

“I quit,” she said impulsively. “You’ll have my resignation on your desk the day you walk in here.”

He walked over to her; he stood before her threateningly, a squat pillar of silver hair and grizzled skin and tough, aged muscle. “And you’ll have it back up your ass, corners first, a day after that. This is a time of national crisis, Miss Fahy; quitting is not an option. For any of us.”

He turned and left. Deeke rolled up his softscreen, nodded to Hadamard, and followed.

Hadamard, staring at the floor, seemed to have nothing to say. Framed in the window behind him, a slab of orange Washington sky was brightening to a washed-out glare.

Day 680

On Discovery’s flight deck, Benacerraf sat strapped into the left-hand commander’s seat. She was wearing her usual grubby Beta-cloth T-shirt and shorts. The flight deck was homely, like a little den, glowing with the fluorescent glareshield lights, and the multicolored light of the instruments panels. Benacerraf always felt comfortable in here: at home, in the environment in which she’d spent so many hours training and flying. Anyhow, the flight deck, with its big windows, made a pleasing change from the shut-in squalor that the hab module had become, and the stinking cabin of the centrifuge.

Especially today, she thought. Because today, for the first time in nearly two years, Earthlight was streaming into Discovery.

Thirty minutes from closest approach, Earth was a fat ball that looked the size of a dinner-plate held at arm’s length.

From Benacerraf’s point of view, behind the big picture windows on Discovery’s flight deck, the planet was a gibbous disc, close to full, suspended over the roof of the cabin. The orbiter would fly past Earth with her belly away from the planet, and her pay-load bay turned to Earth, to give the instruments there a good vantage.

Discovery was barrelling in at around twelve miles per second — fast enough to cross the continental United States in five minutes, fast enough to traverse the diameter of Earth itself in eleven minutes.

The hemisphere turned to the sun was coated with land: it was noon somewhere over central Asia, and much of the Pacific must be in darkness. She could see the mountain-fringed plateaux broadening out from Turkey, through Iran and Afghanistan, to the great Tibetan plateau. The plateau was cut off from the rest of India by the still higher Himalayas. To the south and east of this plateau were the great river valleys of Asia, crammed with humanity. Masses of stratus clouds were piled up behind the mountains; she could see how the mountains, protruding through the vapor layer, were causing disturbances in the clouds, like waves, along a front a thousand miles long.

Benacerraf — parochial to the last — felt a stab of regret she wasn’t going to get to see more of the continental U.S.

There were few signs of human life, even from here.

She knew that the old Apollo astronauts had been struck by the beauty and fragility of Earth from space. It hadn’t hit Benacerraf like that at all. At first glance Earth was a world of ocean, desert and a little ice, half-covered by cloud. The areas colonized by humans seemed tiny, dwarfed, little rectangles of cultivated ground clinging to the coasts, or the banks of rivers, or timidly at the feet of mountains. Almost all of the Earth was empty, too hostile for man; humans clung in little clusters to the fringes of continents, like some feeble lichen.

To Benacerraf, the view from space showed her not so much the delicacy of Earth, but the tenuous grasp of humanity, even on this single planet, even after four billion years of life’s adaptation, down there at the bottom of that murky gravity well.

Humans were restricted to a shell around the surface of Earth, no thicker than an hour’s car ride. In the depths of interplanetary space, where Earth and Moon were reduced to faint specks, man had left no mark but a handful of ageing spacecraft, a thin hiss of radio static… and Discovery.

The Universe was huge, empty, dead. It knew nothing of mankind and all its works. Benacerraf had travelled beyond Venus; she had seen that for herself. Here she was scooting over the surface of Earth itself, and she still thought so.

At such times, the thought of life aspiring to anything but to cling to the surface of that big ball of rock down there seemed absurd.

She was alone up here, on the flight deck. She didn’t even know where the others were right now.

It made you think, if the four of them couldn’t stand each other enough even to be together even for the few hours of this flyby of the home world.

But she was going to stay up here. It was, after all, one hell of a view. And she had a duty to perform.

Discovery was passing behind the planet, crossing over its night side, so from Benacerraf’s point of view the fat gibbous disk began to narrow, soon approaching a crescent.

The crescent thinned rapidly as it grew, as if the light were bleeding from its tapering horns. Soon it was so huge that Benacerraf had to crane her neck to see its full extent.

And then, with a flare of gold and red, the sun passed beyond the horizon.

Discovery,flying over oceans, plunged into Earth’s huge shadow. Now, the spacecraft inhabited a new landscape, which revealed itself to Benacerraf as her eyes dark-adapted.

Over the night hemisphere of Earth, a huge aurora glowed. It was a curtain of green light that appeared to extend from the fleeing spacecraft all the way to Earth’s horizon, at the pole. Beneath, the aurora blended in with the airglow, the luminous gas layer high in the atmosphere excited by the sun’s radiation. And Benacerraf could see noctilucent clouds, very high decks illuminated by the airglow, like the surface of a thin, milky sea. Above the aurora, very faint, she could see streamers, very thin striations which seemed to extend down from much higher altitudes, spokes aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field.

The aurora’s curtains and folds seemed to be on the same level as Discovery — the orbiter was near its closest approach now, just a couple of hundred miles above the planet — and Benacerraf had a rare sense of motion, of speed, of sailing through some invisible sea, populated by these bergs of cool light.

It was the most beautiful thing Benacerraf had ever seen. And a hell of a relief from the bleak emptiness of interplanetary space, where it never felt like she was going anywhere. Damn, damn. How could I abandon all this?

Discovery was revisiting Earth for its final gravity assist before Jupiter; Earth was, in fact, the most massive object between the sun and Jupiter.

By passing so close to Earth — coming within a couple of hundred miles of its surface — Discovery had become briefly coupled to Earth, like, Benacerraf thought, a child grabbing hold of a merry-go-round propelled by the strong arms of its father. When Discovery flew on, it would have picked up energy from the encounter — the equivalent of thousands of pounds of additional fuel — and Earth’s store of energy would be reduced; forever after the planet would circle the sun a little slower.

Benacerraf remembered a Public Affairs Officer trying to explain this at a JSC briefing, a couple of months before the launch. A reporter asked if the resulting slowdown in the Earth’s orbit around the sun would do harm to the environment. On the podium, there were the usual shaking of heads and rolling of eyes. Then Bill Angel had said, mockingly, that NASA would just have to launch another spacecraft and make it fly by Earth on the opposite side…

General laughter.

It had left a sour taste in Benacerraf’s mouth. That reporter had been entitled to a better answer than that. There was too much bullshitting of the ignorant, when it came to science and engineering, she thought. You only had to look at the history of the civil nuclear power program to see that engineers didn’t deserve any kind of implicit trust, that they had a duty to answer as fully as possible every question and concern from the public, however dumb it might seem.

And anyhow, Angel’s answer had been wrong tactically; because after that the questioning had gotten very hostile, for instance on what contingency plans NASA had to shoot Discovery down if something went wrong — if the ship came barrelling in towards a collision with Earth, with the payload bay full of uranium…

And maybe all that arrogance had contributed, in the end, to the decision to dump Benacerraf and her crew: to cut off the retrieval program, even to close down the resupply missions.

Benacerraf and the others had half-expected such a sentence from the beginning, she suspected, even as they’d formulated the unlikely mission profile, over Chinese food in her house at Clear Lake. And, oddly, it hadn’t seemed so hard to take when the news first came in, as they sailed around the sun at the boiling heart of the Solar System.

But now, so close to Earth, it was much more difficult. To sail over that blue-glowing landscape, so close, to be within a couple of thousand miles of Jackie and the kids — and not be able to reach them — was pretty much unbearable.

For this closeness was an illusion. She was separated from Earth now by intangible barriers of energy and velocity, as impenetrable as the huge distances of the Solar System. There was no way Discovery could shed all its hard-won kinetic energy, and allow them to sail safely home.

Benacerraf was not going home, ever again. Her only destination now was Titan, a cold dark hole, out on the chilly rim of the System.

Suddenly, the sunrise was approaching, far ahead, at the rim of the roof which the Pacific hemisphere had become.

A blue streak, deep and beautiful, spread around Earth’s huge curve. Then a golden brown began to seep into the light. Abruptly the gold flooded out the blue, becoming as bright as rocket light, and spreading around the horizon; a fingernail arc of the sun appeared at the horizon, and the shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards Benacerraf.

Blight white light flooded the cabin, as the sun hauled itself over the limb of Earth.

It was, Benacerraf realized, almost certainly the last Earth sunrise she would ever witness.

…There was a sharp tap, directly in front of her, making her jump.

Holy shit, she thought. It had sounded for all the world like a fingernail on the window.

She released her restraints and pushed herself out of her chair, head first towards the window before her.

She could see a tiny crater there, maybe a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. It picked up the flat sunlight coming over the ocean, and gleamed like a raindrop on the outside of the glass.

She knew she was in no danger. The exterior window was a half-inch thick, and two further panes lay behind that; there was a total of two inches of glass between her and the vacuum.

Maybe this little dink had been caused by something natural, a micrometeorite. Maybe. On the other hand, Discovery was flying right through the altitude where the maximum density of man-made debris had accumulated: bits of broken-up satellites, droplets of frozen fuel, nuts and bolts. She was willing to bet that if she dug down into that little pit, she’d find a flake of some cheap Chinese paint, or a droplet of frozen urine from the Mir.

A minute after closest approach, Earth had receded by seventy miles, and Benacerraf could see the planet falling away; a couple of minutes after that and Discovery had risen more than a thousand miles above the surface. As Earth closed over its own spherical belly of silvery ocean, Benacerraf felt a stab of loneliness, of loss.

Earth receded, now, as dramatically as if she was rising in some kind of high speed lift. The huge, delicately-edge crescent of blue and white opened out rapidly, the sky-bright sunlit side expanding into the darkness. She could see how rapidly she was moving; the clouds piled up over the equator seemed to flow steadily into her view as Discovery flew on. After perhaps fifteen minutes the orbiter had receded to about a full Earth diameter, and suddenly she could see the half-shadowed disc of Earth, contained in her window, hanging over the payload bay like some unlikely Moon…

And, over the night side of Earth, Benacerraf saw a bright streak of light: a flare, hair-thin, its length of perhaps a few hundred miles dwarfed by the carcase of the planet.

The light died, as rapidly as it had formed.

She felt her mouth draw into a smile.

That was what she had been waiting up here to see. Now, Discovery would sail on alone; now, perhaps, Niki Mott would be able to get some sleep.

After sailing with Discovery around the sun, Siobhan Libet had made it home.

When he got off the plane at Sea Tac, Marcus White found a long queue at passport control. He stood in line like everyone else, ignoring the pain in his back and his rebuilt hips and his osteoporosis-stricken legs and the pressure from his bladder, which seemed to hold no more than a shot glass these days.

The thing of it was, he felt just the same as he ever did, inside; he was just stuck inside this decaying, betraying husk of a body, getting slower all the time, in a world that was moving past him ever more quickly.

There was a huge screen up ahead, Frank Sinatra and Katherine Hepburn starring together in a new gender-reversed version of Casablanca, and everyone else in the line seemed to be goggling up like mesmerized sheep at sim-Sinatra’s digitized face.

The line shuffled forward. His attention drifted.

…Sometimes he thought he could see that light-drenched landscape again: the glowing regolith under the black sky, his own reflection in Tom’s mirrored visor, breaking through the washed-out reality of the present…

Some guy poked him in the back. He’d been holding up the line.

He remembered something that Chinese kid, Jiang Ling, had told him during her visit a few years back. In China, for all its faults, things were different; in China, they were aiming for economic growth, but without dumping the family en route. Jiang talked about how it was her duty to protect her parents, her surviving grandparent.

He could see it in the faces of people around him, even here, in this goddamn line: they looked on him as just an obstruction, an irritation.

Meanwhile that prick in the White House, Maclachlan, was talking about “radical solutions to our demographic problems…”

Happy booths, they were calling them. Sometimes, when White thought about it, he got scared. But Geena was long dead, and his son, Bob, had a family of his own, who White hardly ever got to see. Most of the time, he couldn’t give a fuck.

At last he got to the front of the line. The clerk was just a kid; her face was so covered in image-tattoos she almost looked like one of those fucking Nullists who were making life miserable for everyone. White took the opportunity to vent off a little steam at her. Maybe Washington was a different country now, but as far as he was concerned it was a joke to have to produce a passport — even the new type, a shiny patch tattooed to the back of your hand — just to get from Houston to Seattle.

The clerk just tolerated him; she had, of course, no reply to offer.

Outside the terminal he caught a cab, and gave the driver Jackie Benacerraf’s address, just off 23rd Avenue, in the Capitol Park district.

Seattle was bright, clean, growing; the air seemed clean and fresh, and he felt he might have been able to smell the scent of the woods. He didn’t even need the umbrella he’d brought, against the habitual drizzle.

It was a city he’d always liked; a long, skinny town sprawling along an isthmus, a tongue of land, with its parks and waterways and its neat views of mountains and lakes. He’d come out here years ago, during Apollo, to visit Boeing for training and familiarization and glad-handing; they’d been responsible, back then, for the development of the Saturn first stage. He recognized a lot of the landmarks he’d gotten to know then. But there was a lot of construction going on, and it seemed to White that everywhere he looked he saw plump Asian faces: Chinese, Japs, Malaysians. And the walls, even of the older buildings, were covered with those huge new softscreen billboards, pumping out ads and infomercials and online soaps day and night, so that it was somehow hard to make out the shape of things, the sweep and structure of the city, and he could have been anywhere.

New Columbia,they called it now: an amalgam of Alaska, Washington, Oregon — all seceded from Maclachlan’s imploding U.S. — with the old Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. On its formation the new nation had instantly become an economic giant, with a massive trade surplus and a lot of assets: Alaskan oil, Albertan natural gas and wheat, Washington’s nuclear, aerospace and software industries, Oregon’s timber and high-tech industries, a string of massive ports serving the Asia-Pacific trade, not to mention a highly educated workforce.

He was a long way from what was left of the old US of A now, he thought, all that smoggy old development on the East Coast. This was a modern Pacific nation-state, prosperous, aggressive.

He shook his head. He hated to find himself thinking like an old fart. His real trouble was not that Seattle wasn’t part of the USA any more, but that it wasn’t the 1960s. The young people were remaking the world, and Earth was becoming an alien planet to him: more alien, in fact, than the Moon, if by some magic he could have been transported back there.

Still, he thought, if you had to go to somewhere that had seceded, he still preferred Washington State to Idaho.

At Jackie Benacerraf’s house, it only took a minute to be allowed in through the security barrier, although he had to present his passport tattoo to the cameras. A kid, a little boy around ten, let him into the house itself, and directed him to the living room where he’d find Jackie.

White dropped his bag in the hall. The house was big, sprawling, bright, but messy. Softscreens were playing in every room, mostly kid’s stuff, pop videos and animations. It was a clamor of noise and imagery to White, but it didn’t seem to faze the kids — two of them, Fred and Ben, Paula Benacerraf’s grandchildren, boys who ran around and wrestled and seemed to be doing pretty much what White had gotten up to when he was nine or ten. But the kids looked odd, to White, with their image-tattoos and pierced cheeks and ears and shaved-off, sculpted hair. The younger one, in fact, was pretty much coated with image-tattoos, like a Nullist, but he was too young to hold still for long enough to let the processors turn his flesh invisible.

It ought to be possible to exert some kind of control, he thought. These kids ought to be playing softball in the yard, not dressing up like high-tech Barbies, playing with the designs on each other’s faces.

We got decadent, he thought. Like ancient Rome. No wonder the Chinese are beating the pants off of us economically.

In the living room, Jackie Benacerraf was sitting on the floor. She was surrounded by softscreens and books, which she was pawing through and tapping desultorily. On the wall, apparently unnoticed by Jackie, a softscreen bore the image of Paula Benacerraf’s face — pale, a little haggard, her grey hair floating around — against a dimly-seen background of clunky, beat-up hab module interior. Paula was talking quietly, describing how the surviving crew all were, what they were doing, their daily routine, their science observations.

Jackie looked up at White. She smiled, but it looked forced. “Hi. You didn’t need to come out, you know.”

He shrugged, standing there awkwardly. “It’s not a problem. I thought somebody ought to.”

“Yeah.” She stood up, a little stiffly. She looked to have aged, too, to White. How old was she now? — no more than thirty, surely… Her face had lost a lot of its prettiness, he thought sadly; her skin already looked slack and lifeless, her eyes deep-shadowed, and he thought she was putting on weight, though the black, softscreen-sequined kimono she was wearing masked a lot of that. Her hair was a close-cropped black fuzz, and there were pale patches on her cheeks where she had had old image-tattoos removed.

“So,” she said without enthusiasm, “you’re here. You want a meal? Are you hungry?”

“No. I ate on the plane. A coffee would be good, though.”

She smiled. “Let me guess. Black, sugar, caffeine.”

“Almost. I take it white. You have any cream?”

She pulled a face. “Are you kidding? Take a seat.”

He sat on the end of a sofa. He had to clear a space, move aside some softscreens and books. The cushions were too soft, and he knew he would have trouble getting up later; but it was, he admitted to himself, a relief to sit down again.

He heard her banging around, the hum of a microwave. “We’re all out of caffeine,” she called.

“Forget it. I’ll take it as it comes.”

Paula Benacerraf kept on talking.

…You have to try not to worry. We aren’t in despair; no way. The whole point of this trip was to figure out how we could become self-sufficient up there. Now, that list has a little extra sharpness. And we have Rosenberg, who’s a bright guy, and you can be sure when we get to Titan we’ll be doing our best to figure out how we can use the local resources to…

The quality of the image was poor; big blocky pixel faults crawled over Paula’s face like organized, repetitive insects. Benacerraf’s personal message would have been recorded, digitally compressed, and then fired off in a brief pulse from Discovery to Goldstone, probably as filler along with another data stream.

He understood how hard it was for Paula to express herself in such a situation. Space was a mixture of the bland — the endless dull routine, the business of survival — and the deadly. And in the midst of all the routine stuff, how could you talk of your fears, without sounding lurid and indulgent? But if you didn’t, how could you communicate with the folks at home?

Damn, damn. Paula Benacerraf was an impossibly brave woman, and she had been betrayed, by NASA itself. The anger, the near-grief he’d been nursing since that asshole Hartle had started issuing his draconian edicts came bubbling to the surface once more.

He turned away, looking for distraction.

Under the layers of softscreens the walls were just plaster, he saw, white-painted. Nobody decorated their home any more, he thought, save for throwing up these damn screens. Jackie’s home was a kind of shell of shifting light shapes, like an underwater cave, nothing permanent, nothing worthwhile, nothing owned.

No wonder the kids these days are going crazy, he thought.

He flicked through Jackie’s softscreens, until he found some news, an online edition of the Seattle Times.

Lousy economic figures once again: the depression seemed to be deepening, with more trade barriers going up around the world, capital fleeing from one country to another. Australia was the latest to have run into the buffers. There were pictures of queues for some kind of new-millennium soup kitchens in Sidney and Melbourne, starving kids in the outback, swollen pot-bellies that made White think of pictures of Africa rather than anywhere with an Anglo-Saxon background.

He had been born during one great depression, he thought; maybe he was going to die during another.

There was more trouble from the Nullists, this time some kind of pipe bomb in New York. And the negotiations between Washington DC and Boise over the future of the nuclear silos were getting stalled again, and there had been some kind of border-crossing incident near Richmond, Utah…

Here was a piece on the new Pope — some Italian cardinal called Carlo Maria Martini, who’d taken the name John XXIV — coming to visit Idaho, the first major figure from the outside world to do so. Maybe some of the conspiracy nuts were right: the guys who thought that Idaho, Christian-Fundamentalist as it was — even more extremely so than Xavier Maclachlan’s America — was being funded in its secession by the Catholic Church, which, in the wake of the uprise of fundamentalism all over the planet, seemed to be trying to reemerge as a global force.

It wasn’t impossible, as far as Marcus White was concerned. He was even prepared to believe that the Catholics had been working, covertly, with Islam for years, in defence of common precepts on sexuality and reproduction. Some said it went all the way back to John Paul II, the last Pope but one…

The news drizzled on, depressing, a series of high-tech images of timeless human foolishness and misery.

It seemed to Marcus White beyond dispute that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. But then, maybe every old geezer who ever lived thought the same way.

Jackie came back in, carrying a coffee and a can of diet soda for herself. She sat with him, at the far end of the sofa, her gaze drifting around the junk in the room.

White killed the softscreen. He sipped the coffee gratefully; it was bland, lacking the charge he felt he needed from the caffeine, but at least, he thought, he should get a boost from the sugar.

She said, “I don’t really understand why you’re here.”

“You don’t…? Barbara Fahy asked me to fly over. It’s a kind of tradition, at times like this.”

“Times like what?”

He frowned. “Your mother’s situation.”

“Her situation.” She smiled. “The truth is, NASA has abandoned my mother, left her to die up there. Why not just say it?”

He said doggedly, “It’s a tradition to send an astronaut, or an astronaut’s wife, to break news like this. The theory is we understand how this feels, better than anyone else.”

“You aren’t breaking the news,” she said mildly. “I heard already.” She pointed to Paula’s image, ignored, still working through its message on the wall. “I got a notification from Al Hartle’s office. In fact I heard it first from the net news, the public stuff…”

He grunted. “It wasn’t headline. How did you — ?”

“News gophers, of course,” she said. She smiled, a little more kindly. “You really are behind the times, Marcus.”

“Whatever.” He felt irritated, to his shame a little petulant. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t have come. It’s a tradition, is all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean to be so sharp. It’s just that I have my head full of other stuff. Here. Look at this junk.”

She picked up one of the softscreens; it was scrolling through some kind of text, with diagrams, on religion.

He scanned it quickly. It was — he read, bemused — a modern rework of the Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas, issued by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

“It’s what they’re teaching the kids at school now; by law, every parent has to learn this stuff too.”

He said, “The Foundation was the group behind Maclachlan.”

“Yeah.” She smiled, tiredly. “In New Columbia, we might have bust away from Maclachlan’s politics and economics, but I’m afraid we took his theology with us…”

The Summa — the original written in 1266 — was a kind of theological Theory of Everything, White read. It united Christian practice with Aristotelian physics. White read about transubstantiation, for instance: the moment in the Catholic Mass in which the bread and wine held by the priest became the body and blood of Christ. The stuff might still look like bread and wine, but — according to Aristotle — the form and the substance of every object were different. And at the moment of transubstantiation, while the form was unchanged, the substance of the bread became that of Christ’s body… And so on.

“It makes a kind of logical sense,” Jackie said. “It just isn’t science. Which is why they’ve started teaching Aristotelian physics in the schools.”

That gave him a double-take. “Woah,” he said. “You’re kidding.”

“No,” she said. “The kids these days are getting the whole shebang. Even the cosmology: the spheres of Moon and sun, the fixed stars beyond… Technology is allowed to continue as long as it’s limited to practical, Earth-bound applications. Even low Earth orbit satellites are okay, because they are beneath the sphere of the Moon. But we’re not supposed to look up at the sky, for fear of getting scared. In greater Seattle, they’ve even banned telescopes… Xavier Maclachlan is putting us back at the center of the Universe, Marcus; he says he wants to heal the spiritual dislocation that science has caused.” She shrugged. “There are compensations. Aristotle taught the interconnectedness of everything; that’s not a bad thing for kids to learn. Look at the environment. Besides, who am I to say Maclachlan’s wrong, if it does make people happier?”

“It’s not right, damn it,” he growled, shocked.

“But you have to face the facts, Marcus,” she said. “To most people the Earth might as well be flat anyhow. The sun might as well be a disc of fire floating round the sky…”

“But I walked on the Moon.”

Her face hardened. “Not too many people care about those old Moonwalks nowadays, Marcus. Anyhow, you can see why I can’t make too much of a fuss about Paula. She’s gone to a place which — according to what my kids are being taught — doesn’t even exist.”

After a time, they ran out of things to say.

White stared into his coffee cup. The milk substitute, whatever it was, had created some kind of scum that swirled around on top of the coffee’s meniscus; when he drank, he tried to filter the shit through his teeth.

The two boys just ignored White, carrying on with their business as if he wasn’t there. There had been a time when it was different. There had been a time when any ten-year-old kid would have been as thrilled as all hell to have a Moonwalker come visit.

Paula’s message ran out. At the end, Benacerraf seemed to be trying to say something a little more personal — I love you, I miss the kids — but her face just hovered on the wall, mute and distressed and inarticulate.

At last, to White’s relief, the image faded to black; the softscreen filled up with some kind of cartoon.

Jackie, awkwardly, offered to put him up for the night. It was a genuine offer but not exactly heartfelt; he found it easy to turn down. He would take a cab back into the city and find a hotel, fly home tomorrow.

When the cab came she walked him to the door; he emerged info the fresh sunlight.

He said, “I got a feeling I wasted my time here.”

“No,” she said, distracted. Then she seemed to be trying to make more of an effort. She put her hand on his arm; her fingers were light, as fragile as dried twigs. “No. I’m sorry you feel that. I’m grateful you came. I know you were trying to help.”

“In my old fart way.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Sure you did.”

A shadow drifted across them, like a cloud. Together, they looked up, White shielding his rheumy eyes against the low afternoon sunlight.

It was an aerostat: a filmy bubble a mile wide, a geodesic sphere overlain by a translucent film that caught the sunlight, like a huge soap bubble. The shell, buoyed up by the heated air inside, was tinged with the green and yellow of crops, growing in the rich high-altitude light. And the base trailed what looked like spiny tentacles; they were electrostatic chargers, generating and scattering ozone. White could just make out the huge Boeing logo, and the ocean-blue flag of New Columbia, painted on the side.

To White, it was just another fix of disorientation. The whole floating factory-farm looked like some huge jellyfish: an alien invader, maybe, drifting through the tall blue sky of Earth.

Jackie looked up at him, her eyes empty, the tattoo scars on her cheeks a washed-out pink in the sunlight. “I lost my mother years ago. Or maybe she lost me. The fact that she’s still alive up there, floating around half-way to Jupiter in some metal coffin, is just—” She hunted for the word. “Theoretical.”

He tried to think of something to say, some way to get out of this situation.

You’re too old, Marcus, just too damn old.

Day 1181

Alone in the humming calm of the flight deck and with her feet padding at the Teflon sheet — with all the lights subdued save for the small instrument glows, surrounded by the soft sounds of her mother’s voice, her own breathing and the high-pitched whir of the pumps — Nicola Mott stared upwards at the moons of Jupiter.

The crop yields continued to fall, and the transmission of mutations to successive generations was rising. Some plants, like the strawberries, refused to flower altogether. Rosenberg had talked about the reasons for this — inappropriate cell structures, poor fluid transmission — but Mott just tuned him out. The science really didn’t matter right now; in a sense, it never had.

They just had to find solutions with their available resources. Ways to survive.

So they were improvising. Rosenberg had designed a new plant growth unit to work in the centrifuge arm, where the plants could be subjected to a high percentage of a G for most of each day. That meant transferring some of the farm’s equipment — lamps, the air blower system, racks and nutrient baths and reservoirs — into the cramped arm cabin.

It was a long and difficult job, to which they were all having to contribute, under Rosenberg’s reluctant supervision. It wasn’t going to be a complete answer; the growing area inside the arm would be nothing like sufficient to fulfil their needs. And the arm wasn’t shielded from radiation so well as the farm itself. But Rosenberg’s hope was that stronger growths in the arm, coupled with at least some provision from the original farm, would close the gap in their requirements, before they started to go hungry.

The biggest drawback was the loss of the centrifuge for the crew.

They had reinstalled the exercise cycle, up on the flight deck, where there was still a little room. But not the treadmill.

That pissed Nicola Mott. It had been proven, all the way back to Skylab, that a treadmill was a much better way of exercising a range of muscle groups than a cycle. In her opinion it was just another example of the crew’s collective laziness and incompetence, which would lead them all, ultimately, into disaster.

Anyway, she had got on with devising her own solution.

She improvised a treadmill. It was just a slippery sheet of Teflon that she bolted to the floor of the flight deck, behind the pilot’s seat. She could balance herself with a hand on the seat in front of her, and just walk along, her feet slithering on the slippery pad. She wore socks, so her feet could slide more easily. It wasn’t as effective as the real thing; too often she stubbed a toe on the bolts that held the Teflon in place, and because she couldn’t vary the resistance, generally it was muscle fatigue that stopped her working. But she found if she worked at it long enough her calves, tendons and toes got a real workout.

And so, here she was. She had slapped a softscreen on the wall, and as she worked she listened to a message from her parents, relayed from their home in Cambridge, England. She didn’t trouble to watch too carefully; the quality was low because of reduced capacity anyhow, and her father was prone to providing her with badly-shot home movies overlaid by her mother’s slow, monotonic speech. Right now, for instance, there was a shaky pan of the new rice paddy fields around Ely in Cambridgeshire.

…You remember your cousin Sarah,her mother said. Came down with CJD, didn’t she. She was only twenty-two. Such a pretty girl. She chose the euth clinic, you know, even though Mary — your aunt Mary, you know, her mother — said it was un-Christian, What a mess the whole thing is. Of course we don’t have blood donors now, all our transfusion blood is flown in from abroad, and the Tories say the government’s blood tax is too high. Quarantine, they call it. The French were the first — typical bloody French, your father says — when they poured all that concrete down the Channel Tunnel. Oh, John Major died. There was a program on the telly. I didn’t realize he was the last Tory Prime Minister, who’d have thought it…

Her mother’s face, on screen now, was a ruin, the left side imploded, cratered. She had come down with a prion disease related to Creutzfeld-Jakob, non-fatal but disfiguring, the prions steadily sculpting the soft cells of her flesh.

It had taken Mott herself a hell of a lot of tests to be proven fit to come to the States, to get into NASA.

She had come a long way from Cambridgeshire.

…Everything was different here.

Discovery was now five hundred million miles from the sun — five times the distance of Earth from the parent star. As the mission had unfolded the inverse square law had worked inexorably at the sun’s radiation and size; from here the sun was still brilliant — at magnitude minus seventeen, much brighter than any star or planet seen from Earth — but its disc was tiny, like a flaw in the retina, like a distant supernova, like nothing she had seen from the surface of Earth. The light it cast had a strange quality, too: almost the light of a point source, the shadows stretching over the orbiter long and sharp.

Even the sun was different here, transmuted into something alien by distance.

As Discovery’s separation from Earth had grown, and the lag of radio signals from Houston had risen to an hour and a half round trip, it was as if their tenuous link to home had stretched, broken.

Now Earth was just a spark of blue light close to the shrinking sun, the place the high-gain antenna pointed. And those remote voices, from Mission Control and in the back rooms of Building 30 at JSC, with their detailed reams of advice and instruction — trying to control the crew, as once they had choreographed Moonwalkers, step by step — seemed to have little to do with their situation, here, suspended in extraordinary isolation in this outer darkness.

It was taking a while to sink in, after four decades of the culture of the ground control of spaceflight, but out here, as they sailed past the moons of Jupiter, the crew of Discovery was truly alone. There was nothing to fall back on but what they had brought along with them, for better or worse, and whatever ingenuity they could apply.

Your father’s talking about a holiday. He wants to go to Mega-Power — you know, the turbine tower, that Dutch monstrosity in the North Sea. Apparently they have restaurants and a hotel and shop, four miles high. All covered over, of course. Fancy that. But I wouldn’t trust it, not after the leak of that huge cloud of ammonia last year…

Directly above her head Mott could see the half-disc of Jupiter. It glowed salmon-pink in the flat sunlight. Discovery was coming no closer than two million miles to the planet — twenty-five Jupiter diameters — but even so the giant world showed a sizable disc, like a big pink coin held at arm’s length, four times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky. On the sunlit hemisphere she could make out the stripes of the ammonia ice cloud bands, brown and white and orange stripes, streaked and curdled with turbulence along the lines where they met. She couldn’t see the Great Red Spot, and that was a disappointment. But Jupiter’s day was only ten hours or so; perhaps the planet’s disc would stay visible long enough for the Spot to be brought into view.

And Mott could see some of Jupiter’s moons, strung out in a line parallel to the equator of their parent.

Io — a little larger than Earth’s Moon — lay between its parent and the sun, about two Jupiter diameters from the cloud tops, its illuminated hemisphere a sulphur-yellow spot of light. Ganymede, twice as far from Jupiter as Io, sat behind its parent, its ice surface glittering white. Europa and Callisto, the other large moons, were harder to spot; eventually she found Callisto as a bright white spark against the darkness of Jupiter’s shadowed hemisphere.

It only took Io, the innermost of the large satellites, a day or so to travel around its orbit around Jupiter. If she stayed up here long enough, Mott would get to see the moons turn around their parent in their endless, complex dance…

The compact Jovian system was oddly charming. Like an old-fashioned orrery, a clockwork model of the Solar System. But Jupiter was eleven times the diameter of Earth. And its moons, if freed from Jupiter’s grip, were large enough to have qualified as planets in their own right. Ganymede — out here, a spark dwarfed by Jupiter — was the largest moon in the Solar System: larger than Titan, larger, in fact, than the planet Mercury.

In a window frame of this beat-up Shuttle orbiter, she could see five worlds, clustered together in one gigantic gravity well.

But, she thought, there was no life here, not even — as far as anyone could tell — on that slush ball Europa. There was no life for a half-billion miles in any direction, save within the battered walls of this spacecraft, the bubble of air which sheltered her.

Damn it all. She wished Siobhan could see this. That remote death, back in the heart of the Solar System, was losing its power to hurt her now. But still, what a waste, what a meaningless, cruel waste.

No, I want to go to the hedgerow museum in Hampshire, Apparently they still have some ptarmigans there, the last ones. Oh, I have to tell you, you wouldn’t believe the price of potatoes in the shops. All the sweetcorn you could ask for, but it’s not the same… We know you are still missing Siobhan, love. We know you two were pals. You take care of yourself, and try not to fret about it all too much…

Pals. Her parents had never known — or had preferred not to know — about Libet’s true relationship with their daughter. Her parents had been young in the 1970s, hardly the Victorian era. Mott wondered if there was something in the human genome which dictated that no generation could accept the sexuality of its offspring.

But, out here, it hardly seemed to matter, like so much else.

Discovery’s path — whirling around the inner planets, and then out past Jupiter to Saturn — was actually similar to that of Cassini, which had come this way more than a decade before. But since then Jupiter and Saturn had wheeled through their grand orbits, of twelve and twenty-nine years, and they weren’t in such a favorable position for Discovery’s slingshot as they had been for Cassini. Discovery needed to come in a lot closer than Cassini, to extract still more energy from Jupiter, the most massive planet in the Solar System.

But that meant the orbiter had to penetrate deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

Mott knew she, and the rest of the crew, were paying a price. Jupiter’s magnetic field was ten times as powerful as Earth’s, and its magnetosphere — the doughnut-shaped belt of magnetically trapped solar wind particles — stretched fifty Jupiter diameters, far beyond Discovery’s current position. Right now heavy solar wind particles, electrons and hydrogen and helium nuclei, which circled, trapped, in Jupiter’s magnetosphere — ten thousand times as energetic as those in the Van Alien belts of Earth — coursed through the fabric of the ship, and her body.

Arguably this place, the magnetosphere of the most massive planet, was the most hostile section of deep space in the Solar System. And here she was, staring out the window at it.

Mott stayed on the flight deck as long as she could, exercising in Jupiter light.

She slowed her pace on the treadmill. She hung onto the pilot’s seat for a moment and let her aching legs drift, deliciously, in the balm of microgravity, bearing no weight at all. Then she swivelled and pulled herself to the instrument panel at the back of the flight deck, and looked out over the orbiter’s instrument bay.

Discovery was passing Jupiter with its payload bay turned up to the giant planet and its system, instruments straining, the big high-gain antenna pointing at remote Earth, lost now in the glare of the sun. The point-source sun and pink Jupiter, at right angles to each other, cast complex multiple shadows over the blocky, blanketed equipment in the payload bay, and over Discovery’s curving wings.

It was impossible to reconcile the awesome spectacle up here with the squalor and crap of their lives inside the spacecraft — the shitty, failing systems, the endless slog of their daily lives.

But there had been no other way to get here, to see this.

She towelled off her sweat, wrapped up her softscreen, and went back to the hab module.

Rosenberg clambered into Apollo Command Module CM-115, through the tight little docking tunnel in its nose, past the compartments containing the drogue and recovery parachutes and their mortars and the forward reaction control system.

He came down into the big pressurized crew compartment in the mid-section, descending on it from above. There were three couches in there, side by side on their backs. They were just metal frames slung with grey Armalon fiberglass cloth, so close together he was sure it wouldn’t be possible for three adult humans to pack in there without rubbing shoulders, elbows and knees against each other.

Rosenberg wriggled into the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. He spread out his manuals on his knee.

He was here as part of his in-flight training program. He was never going to be a pilot, but he had to learn how to fly an Apollo — in case of contingency — all the way to the surface of Titan.

The Command Module was like a small aircraft, upended, its interior coated with switches, dials and cathode ray displays. The lights were subdued, the glow in the cabin greenish from the CRTs. Directly in front of him there was a big, gun-metal grey, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel, glistening with five hundred switches. There were control handles on the commander’s couch armrests: the attitude controller assembly on the right, which was used to control the reaction thruster assemblies, and the big thrust-translator controller on the left, which could be used to accelerate the craft forward or back. For this unique mission, the attitude control would also be used to direct a paraglider, a shaped parachute which would guide Apollo down to a safe landing on Titan’s slushy surface.

There was a smell of plastic and metal; all around him the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred.

The windows seemed small and far away; he was pretty much surrounded by metal walls, here, and even though the side hatch was still open, he felt closed in.

The Command Module showed Apollo’s priorities: it had been built to keep people alive, not to let them sightsee, or do any of that fancy science crap en route to the Moon.

He turned his attention to the instrument panel.

There were toggle switches, thumb wheels, push buttons, rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights and little rectangular windows. There were tiny joysticks and pushbuttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets. He experimented with the switches. They were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. He worked his way across the panel, practising flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, he saw, circuit and flow charts. He consulted his manuals. All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once he started to see the system behind the diagrams, he began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

He surveyed the cabin, checking he understood the contents of the lockers.

The equipment bay beyond the left-hand couch contained components of the environment control system, including the control unit. The bay in front of this held more life support equipment such as a water delivery system, and doubled as a clothing store. The right-hand bay contained more food, and the extremely clunky Apollo-era waste management systems: plastic condoms, and bags within which you had to catch and treat your turds. In a bay ahead of this Rosenberg found medical kits, survival gear and modern-looking camera equipment. In the aft bay, beneath the couches, were components of pressure suits.

If you docked with a Lunar Module, Rosenberg learned, you stowed your docking probe in that aft bay, and the circular tunnel cover in the left-hand bay…

In the lower bay at the foot of the center couch he found guidance and navigation electronics. Communications equipment was also crammed in there, along with batteries, food and other equipment.

There was also a tiny, beautiful sextant and telescope, for navigating between Earth and Moon.

GM-H5 had been built four decades earlier, to fly to the Moon. But now it had been rebuilt, to some extent. CM-115 had been upgraded to stand a space soak of six years. Its attitude control system was to be based on nitrogen, which would not degrade in space. Hydraulic systems, which might freeze, were replaced by systems of wires and electric motors. The cooling system had been replaced by a water-based design, because chemicals in the old system like glycol were corrosive and couldn’t be stored over long periods. A thermal blanket cocoon had been fitted over the Command Module’s heatshield, to protect it from micrometeorite damage. The life support systems — some of which dated back to the Mercury era — had been upgraded to Shuttle technology. And so on.

The main challenge, in learning to handle this thing, was going to be the computer system.

Rosenberg spread a softscreen over his knee, opened up a manual, and began to poke at the Command Module’s DSKY — pronounced “disky,” the little computer touch-control pad. The technicians had torn the heart out of Apollo’s computers, but had to leave the same interface. Anything else would have meant pulling the ship apart, and nobody had got the confidence to do that.

The DSKY was not a softscreen — not even much like the keyboard, mouse and monitor technology he had grown up with. There was just a block of status and warning lights labelled PROG and OPR ERR and UPLINK ACTY and COMP ACTY… He began to study their meanings.

Tentatively, he started to punch the keypad. The pad wasn’t even qwerty; it contained a blocky numeric pad, with addition and subtraction signs, and eight function keys with tiny lettering: VERB, NOUN, ENTER, RSET, PRO, others. The keypad was used to construct little command sentences, to communicate with the computer. There were about a hundred verbs and nouns he would have to know.

He practiced loading a rendezvous program. He touched the surface of his softscreen, and a little prompt panel opened up. He told the computer he wanted to change the program: he pressed the VERB function key, and then 3, 7, ENTER. He gave it the new program: P31, a rendezvous mode. 3, 1, ENTER. He asked for data. VERB 0, 6; NOUN 8, 4. Five-digit numbers flashed up on the display area. That was the velocity change he’d need for the next maneuver.

The display could show decimal numbers, angles, octal numbers, time… He could only tell which was which by context, following his checklist.

The flight load had dozens of programs. Rosenberg would have to learn which was which, learn to select them without thinking. There wouldn’t be much help for him, if he had to run this stuff in anger. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

And besides, he was kind of enjoying this. It was like solving a series of little logical puzzles.

They nearly didn’t have computers in the old Apollos at all, he’d learned. Not everyone had agreed they needed them for navigation and rendezvous; ground control could cover all of that. Two arguments got computers in here. The first was the Russians. What if those Soviets tried to disrupt communications with Houston? The astronauts needed some way to get around the jamming by doing their own calculations. And the second was that NASA wanted to prepare for longer-duration missions, such as the flights to Mars that had never been funded: far enough away, you can’t afford to wait out the minutes, or hours, it might take for some number to come up from the ground; you needed a local processing ability.

Fear and dreams, he thought, that’s what had driven the computer technology, and everything else about Apollo, and maybe now the Titan mission as well. Fear and dreams.

The DSKY system was so counter-intuitive it was going to be tough to learn. But he had six years to study it, en route to Titan; if he ever needed to fly this ship he’d be able to play the crummy little gadget like a piano.

And anyhow he enjoyed the work. He enjoyed being tucked away, alone, in this humming little cabin with all its gadgets, occupying his mind with creaky old computer codes. It was a break from the complexities of life support, and his ambiguous and increasingly unwelcome role as ship’s doctor, and the sour relationships that prevailed in the hab module.

And besides, Rosenberg found himself being slowly seduced by the Apollo.

He loved the endless lockers, the compact equipment, the careful design and storage, the way everything was tucked away.

When he was a kid, he’d built himself a den cum spaceship something like this. It was just a plastic tent hung up inside a climbing frame. He had little food boxes in there, and stocks of soda, and a rolled-up Army-surplus sleeping bag in one corner, and a couple of boxes of cold lights. He’d landed on a hundred planets in that little ship, all of them contiguous with his mother’s back yard; He would peer through muddy plastic portholes, then creep out of his ship with his torch and his walkie-talkie and explore; but the main joy was to huddle back in the safety of his den, cocooned by his materiel and equipment, the stuff of his portable world, and write up his log.

Sad little bastard, he thought bleakly.

Anyhow, what was Apollo but the apotheosis of all dens?

And what did that say about Isaac Rosenberg? By launching himself off on this endless spaceflight, was he braving a new frontier, or retreating to some cozy fantasy of his lonely childhood?

It was best, he had learned much earlier in this mission, to avoid self-analysis.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, he worked his way through his manuals, learning how the old spaceship was flown.

Benacerraf had instituted a weekly crew meeting.

They were facing so many problems now, she figured they couldn’t afford to indulge in their habitual acrimonious isolation from each other. They had to discuss their problems, come up with solutions, parcel out pieces of work.

Much as she hated the idea herself.

And so, now, the four of them hooked legs or arms around stanchions and struts, their postures taking on the stooping crouch of the neutral-G position.

They looked, Benacerraf thought, like four birds of prey, perched on some metal branch.

“…We traced the root cause of the heart arrhythmia problems,” Rosenberg was saying, reading from a softscreen which was suspended in the air before him. The computer folded softly like a bird’s wing, the letters and numbers shimmering across its surface. “It was a trace element deficiency.”

Benacerraf said, “What trace element?”

“Potassium. You find it in sea water and in various salts, like carnallite and sytvine. Potassium is essential in the biocycles. Its salts are used as fertilizers in the farm’s nutrient solution, which—”

“Cut to the chase, asshole,” Angel said mildly, his eyes closed.

Rosenberg said, “In the potable water we have a limit of three hundred forty milligrams per liter. We’ve actually been recording a level of a tenth that.” He scratched his face. The problem is partly the excess peeing we all do. Potassium, along with other stuff, gets flushed out of the system. So it has to be replaced. Now I’m spiking the potable water with electrolytes, specifically potassium, to restore the balance.”

“So will we have long-term heart problems because of this?” Mott asked.

“Probably.” Rosenberg shrugged. “But this is not a regime in which we’re aiming for a long and healthy old age anyhow. I wouldn’t worry; it’s just another bogeyman to bite us, in a long line with all the others.”

Benacerraf found Rosenberg’s thin voice fantastically irritating, as he droned through his lists of facts. “So tell me what caused the deficiency in the biocycles.”

“It has to be the SCWO,” Rosenberg said, his eyes studiously on Benacerraf’s face.

Angel showed no reaction, his face hidden by his beard.

Rosenberg doesn’t want to take him on. So, Benacerraf thought wearily, it’s up to me to confront this asshole again, to take on the burden of responsibility for us all.

“Bill, the SCWO is your baby. We’ve been having problems with it for years. And now this potassium crap.”

Angel shrugged, his body moving minutely in the air as his center of mass shifted. “What do you want me to tell you? Look, we knew when we launched that the SCWO was immature technology, a risky piece of equipment to haul along. Basically the damn thing works. Hell,” he said, leering casually at Mott, who looked away, “you know that, or we’d all be knee-deep in Rosenberg’s pale shit, right? But we still get a lot of corrosion of the surfaces in there — it’s a hostile environment, and there are a shit-load of toxic gases which—”

“Bill, I’ve been relying on you to fix it. And now I hear this.”

“I’ve nursemaided the damn thing half way to Saturn already,” Angel snapped. “I’m a pilot, not a plumber.”

“You have to get it right, Bill. Right to the last decimal place, of the last trace element. That’s what it takes.” She felt herself slipping into peevish anger. “Don’t you see that? Why should I have to tell you what to do, how to do it? Why can’t I trust you to do your job…?”

She noticed Mott folding her arms over herself, and rolling her eyes, escaping inward.

Damn it, she thought. We set ourselves the trap again. And I fell into it.

Angel was still blustering, justifying his negligent work on the SCWO. And Rosenberg, unfortunately, was going into lecture mode. He put his hands to his temples, his own long hair and wispy beard drifting around his face, and he started telling Angel stuff he already knew: about the instability of their miniature biosphere, the lack of buffering reservoirs of essential elements like potassium, the way the balance had to be monitored and adjusted constantly by the crew…

Angel started yelling back at Rosenberg, who just closed his eyes and droned on. Their voices seemed amplified in the dingy metal tube of the hab module.

Benacerraf knew she needed to find some way of defusing the situation. But, she thought wearily, why me? Why is it always me who has to be the peacemaker, to eat shit, to make Bill calm down and force Rosenberg to look up from his softscreen and dry Nicola’s eyes over her girlfriend — why me?

The meeting broke up, acrimoniously, with no real outcome. Mott went to her sleep compartment, Rosenberg to the farm.

And Angel…

Benacerraf watched, discreetly, as Angel took up position near the water spigots of the galley. And, with his skinny, spindled legs folded under him, he started to play with water. Angel took a syringe now, for example, and filled it with water from a spigot. When he pressed the plunger, slowly and carefully, injecting water into the air, a small bubble grew from the needle’s tip. He jerked the needle away and the water took the form of a tiny planet, floating in the air. Angel worked his needle and produced a whole set of the little water globes, drifting in the air around his head.

Then he took smaller syringes from a set he’d improvised from medical waste, and injected the bubbles with iodine, grape juice, diluted orange juice, to stain them blue, green, yellow, red. Soon he had a whole Solar System, Benacerraf thought, with a miniature Mars and Earth and Jupiter, floating around his bearded head as if around a sun. Angel’s eyes followed the little spheres, entranced.

Now Angel tried to herd his little water planets together, with his open palms. The water spheres were clammy to the touch; if Angel was gentle they bounced away from his palm as if coated with some fine elastic membrane, but if he wasn’t so careful the balls of water would cling like some jellyfish, spreading over the surface of his palm. With one such glob dangling from his palm, he shook his hand gently, up and down; the spherical cap rippled symmetrically, clinging to his skin.

In microgravity, water’s surface tension became dominant, and tried to haul it constantly into the shape of a sphere. But with a little ingenuity a lot of bizarre shapes could be conjured out of this most basic of materials. And it fascinated Bill Angel.

Angel spent hours turned in on himself like this, with his syringes and lathes and bizarre, oscillating shapes. And as he stared into the shimmering meniscus of some new sphere or torus, he seemed, to Benacerraf, to be peering into some world of his own, a private place the others couldn’t share, a place he could escape to, as if the water forms were projections of his own mind.

Rosenberg had his own theory about Bill. So he’d told her privately. He thought Bill was ageing too quickly. There were studies that showed how cosmic rays caused irreversible damage to nervous tissue. For instance, the response of nerve cells to muscarinic neuro-transmitters, which helped muscle-controlling neurons communicate, deteriorated. Maybe this was happening to Bill, Rosenberg speculated. Maybe space was turning him into a decrepit old man, before their eyes.

She suspected Bill had gotten wind of this, in fact. He had taken to sleeping at one end of the hab module, surrounded by big batteries with lots of nickel and cadmium, which gave him good shielding. But it was probably too late.

Benacerraf was no expert on abnormal states of the mind. But she hadn’t tried to discuss this with Mission Control. She wasn’t sure who would be listening any more anyhow. And on a planet where local wars were flaring over water management problems, the image of gaunt Americans playing head games with the wet stuff on some dumb Buck Rogers mission halfway to Saturn would not play well with the public.

On and on Angel fiddled, while Discovery, cradling its little nest of light and warmth, sailed further from the sun.

Around the U.S. carrier Independence, the Pacific stretched to the horizon, as flat and still and steel-grey as the deck of the carrier itself, its sluggish waves reflecting the cobalt blue of the cloudless sky. Even the rest of the battle group was out of sight, over the horizon.

The sun was low, the light harsh, and Gareth Deeke was grateful for his cap and sunglasses.

A single aircraft stood ready on the deck: a McDonnell-Douglas F-28, its slim form sixty feet long, its delta wings all but obscured by the snaking hoses of the fuelling tankers — kerosene and hydrogen peroxide — which surrounded it. The F-28’s thermal shield, plated over its upper hull, gleamed white as snow in the Pacific sunlight.

The F-28 was Deeke’s aircraft.

The Independence was four hundred miles from the Chinese coast, and two hundred miles from Taiwan, to the south-east of the island. And it was a matter of hours — less, perhaps — from the initiation of a U.S.-China war. But, suspended in this instant of calm, the ship could have been anywhere, Gareth Deeke reflected, anywhere on the surface of this watery planet; and it could have been transported to almost any time in the last half billion years.

He was pretty much alone up here, save for the service techs. He’d been here for a time, but he wasn’t bored. He was standing on alert. He had stood on alert many times before, in his long career.

He had a choice of being up here or going down below, to sit with the other pilots and chew on pizza and mixed vegetables and watch softscreen CNN reports on the progress of the Chinese preparation for invasion.

His preference was clear.

Besides, he didn’t exactly mix easily with the others. They respected his ability and experience, but most of the guys, with one eye on their own careers, shied away from a man with a past as tainted and complex as Deeke’s.

It didn’t trouble him. At least, not away from the cramped confines of his quarters, where he had too much time to think. He wasn’t troubled by anything here: up on the flight deck, in the salt air.

A shadow flickered across the deck. Deeke looked up.

It was a Condor, an unmanned surveillance plane built by Boeing. The Condor was a light, subsonic craft with a single turbofan engine. It was big, with the wing span of a 747, and it could hover at sixty thousand feet for a week without replenishment, scanning the ground with high-resolution radar and electro-optic sensors. Condors — and their smaller cousins the DarkStars — had become a common sight in areas of tension like this, wheeling through the air like expectant birds of prey…

There was a low beeping.

He lifted his wrist. A softscreen patch on the back of his hand was scrolling with symbols.

The Chinese ships were leaving harbor. It had started. Deeke grinned.

He turned on his heel and headed for the personal gear room.

The hot war had started two weeks ago; Deeke had followed it closely, expecting his call.

Taiwan’s president, after his latest reelection, at last came out openly in favor of a declaration of formal independence from Beijing. China responded immediately, and the Taipei stock market hit the floor.

It took three days for Beijing to assemble a hundred thousand troops in the embarkation ports in the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Taiwan put its armed forces on their highest level of alert and mobilized its reserves, and asked the U.S. for arms shipments under the Taiwan Relations Act.

The next day, Taiwan naval patrols in the Strait had been fired on by Chinese “fishing boats.” They returned fire, and China proclaimed that a “hostile act against ordinary Chinese people.” In response, China announced a naval blockade of all the tankers ferrying oil to Taiwan.

Air battles started over Taiwan, mass flights of ancient Chinese Russian-built Sukhois against Taiwan’s more modern Western-built F-16s and Mirage 2000-55. The technology was a mismatch, but the numbers were telling: after a couple of days China had achieved a tentative control of the air over the Strait.

The Great Helmsman himself had appeared in Tiananmen Square to announce that if Taiwan didn’t capitulate, the invasion would begin.

Maclachlan responded by saying that an invasion of Taiwan would amount to a declaration of war with America. And besides, China’s control of the Strait didn’t amount to a hill of beans, said Maclachlan; not with the U.S. carriers, and F-15s in Okinawa, ready to join the action.

Anyhow it didn’t seem likely the Chinese could secure a beachhead, even without the U.S. coming to the aid of Taiwan. And a failed invasion could cost fifty percent casualties.

But the Chinese had nukes, and ICBMs. They could simply wipe Taiwan off the face of the Earth.

Nobody was too sure about what the U.S. would do in that circumstance. Did the Americans, asked the Great Helmsman, care as much about Taiwan as about Los Angeles?

The Chinese would have to be dumb, or desperate, to take such a step. But they were indeed desperate, Deeke thought.

For decades they had watched the U.S. cozying up to India, recognizing Vietnam, selling F-16s to Taiwan, forging alliances with Japan, trying to work for a united Korea under Seoul allied to the U.S.

From the Chinese perspective, it looked like a ring around China. Which, of course, it was.

And besides, there was one way the Chinese could win… Which was why Deeke was here.

So matters stood. Now, they were all waiting.

Deeke emerged in his flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute on his back, survival kits for several environments tucked into pockets, emergency oxygen, intercoms.

He walked up to the F-28.

Close to, the plane looked something like a miniature Shuttle orbiter, with the underside of its fat delta wing coated with black silica-based thermal protection tiles, and the upper hull layered with a gleaming white felt blanket, patched with black around the attitude control nozzles. The felt blanket gave the plane an oddly clumsy look, he thought; it lacked the metallic sleekness of the hulls of conventional aircraft. But that blanket was plastered with USAF logos, and his own name and rank, picked out under the canopy.

The F-28 looked what it was: a plane built for space, America’s first rocket plane since the X-15.

Although the basic rocketry would have been recognized by von Braun, in every other way the F-28 was a child of the twenty-first century.

The concept was based on proposals touted in the 1990s by space enthusiasts for a fast-turnaround, relatively cheap, single-stage-to-orbit military spaceplane. When Xavier Maclachlan came to power, and after extensive lobbying by the USAF, he wasted no time in pulling Lockheed Martin out of NASA’s doomed RLV development, and ordering the accelerated development of what became the F-28 for the Air Force.

Needless to say, it had come in way over budget. But even so the cost was manageable. The F-28 was designed to work with existing runways, fuel distribution systems, non-specialized hangars and standard handling equipment… The only novelty was the use of kerosene and concentrated hydrogen peroxide to burn in the plane’s five engines, to give the F-28 a high power to weight ratio.

The cost of the whole project had been about equivalent to two Delta IV launches, less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch. For that price, the USAF had gotten itself a whole new aerospace craft.

Gareth Deeke was just grateful that a new chain of command — via Hartle, up to President Maclachlan — had brought him and his skills and experience here, to head up the USAF’s newest battle wing. The USAF didn’t have so many rocket-plane pilots that it could afford to ignore a man like Gareth Deeke, age or not.

Two techs helped him climb up and lower himself into the cockpit of the F-28. The rocket plane’s white-tiled walls were only just wide enough for him to squeeze in.

The elemental countdown dialogue with his controller inside the carrier began as soon as he strapped into his seat; around the plane, the stubby, shielded fuelling tankers withdrew.

“Data on,” he said. “Generator reset. Hydraulic pressure, check. Electrical pressure, check. Rudder, check…”

“One minute, Gareth.”

“Rog. Master arm is on, system arm light is on…”

“Ready for the prime.”

“Prime, igniter ready. And precool, igniter and tape…”

“Thirty seconds.”

Inside the craft, there was little similarity with 1970s Shuttle technology. This cockpit was high-tech: the walls were coated with softscreens, which reconfigured to suit each successive flight phase, and his helmet offered head-up and virtual imaging, overlaid on his view through the canopy. Now, the systems worked him calmly through the final preparations.

“…Fifteen seconds.”

“Pump on,” Deeke said. “Good igniter.”

“Five seconds. Looks good here, Gareth. And three, two, one.”

Deeke braced.

The noise of the F-28’s five rockets rose to a roar.

In his glass bubble Deeke was slammed in the back, suddenly cocooned in light and noise and vibration. The carrier deck whipped away, exposing the grey, bone-hard surface of the ocean. The plane swivelled back, pitching suddenly upwards, so that he lost sight of the ocean.

The F-28 rose almost vertically. Twisting his head, he glanced down: the carrier was already lost, remote, a patchwork of blue grey adrift on the wider hide of the ocean.

Then, in a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep pearl blue.

At thirty-five thousand feet he levelled off. The plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming white felt and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky.

There was a tanker aircraft waiting for him here. The F-28 carried a full load of fuel, but it needed replenishment of its heavy oxidizer for its final leap into space. With practiced ease, he slid the replenishment nozzle mounted in the nose of the plane into the dangling cup trailed by the tanker. The replenishment took just three minutes.

When it was done, the tanker pulled away.

Deeke hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The rockets howled again, and the Gs rammed him hard into his seat; his head was pushed into his shoulders, and his vision tunnelled, walled by darkness.

There was the mildest of vibrations as the craft went supersonic, and then the ride got a lot smoother, the noise of the rockets dying to a whisper. The cockpit now was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, he knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ocean below.

Eighty thousand feet. He moved the throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. He was already so high he could see stars above, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Pacific spread out beneath him, the shining skin of the world.

There was a rattle of solenoids, a brief squirt of gas beyond the cockpit. His reaction control thrusters had activated.

The rockets shut down with a clatter.

He was thrust forward against his restraints as the acceleration cut out, and then he drifted back again.

He had gone ballistic. He was weightless inside the cabin, and it felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck. Up here, coasting in near-silence, he lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

He was fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the softscreen displays gleamed brightly. He could see the eastern coast of Asia all the way from Japan to the Philippines, with the distinctive teardrop shape of Taiwan directly beneath him; it was all laid out under him like some kind of relief map. Up ahead the Earth curved over on itself, looking huge and pregnant, and at the horizon’s rim he could see the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed.

Just like the old days.

Then there was a final kick from his rocket engines, the injection into space.

On orbit, he opened the F-28’s payload bay doors.

The payload deployed automatically. It was a small, complex satellite with a compact rocket booster. As it unfolded from the narrow payload bay the satellite looked like a fat, ungainly toy, illuminated from beneath by the glowing blue skin of Earth.

A spring mount pushed the satellite away from the F-28. Then the main solid-rocket booster pack opened up; Deeke could see orange smoke and debris gush from the fat, squat nozzle.

He watched the satellite arc away, upwards, directly away from Earth. It was heading for geosynchronous orbit, to hover over Borneo.

Thus, less than twenty minutes after receiving the order to launch, Deeke’s mission was complete.

The satellite was a derivative of Aquacade technology. It was a communications link, one of the final pieces in the U.S. forces’ electronic coverage of the battle zone around Taiwan. It would enable other satellites — Milstar communications birds, Keyhole surveillance craft; others — to communicate directly with each other, rather than via signals to ground stations. The satellite-to-satellite links would make the system virtually impregnable to Chinese attempts at jamming or interception.

The only real Chinese threat to the U.S. forces, in fact, was their stock of cruise missiles: the M-12 intermediate-range weapon, originally a derivative of the Scud but now heavily upgraded, and generally recognized as China’s best piece of kit.

But with the surveillance systems successfully deployed, no M-12 would be able to get more than twenty miles from its launcher without intelligence on it being fed down to the battlefield. Deeke doubted, in fact, that a single cruise would get through the antimissile batteries.

Information was the key to this war. Information flowed throughout the U.S. and Taiwanese forces. Every ship, every land vehicle, every infantryman, airman and sailor was suffused with computer technology, linked directly or through the satellites. The forces, joined by the technology, were like a single organism, ready to respond as if united by a central nervous system.

There were, in fact, more warriors in this conflict deploying computers than firing weapons.

The Chinese, with their crude human-wave strategies and resources, had only the rudiments of this technology. It was like a conflict between time travellers. As if a Roman legion had taken on a band of Australopithecines.

The war might take some days to play out yet, and no doubt many lives would be lost. But for China, Deeke reflected, it was already lost. The containment was going to continue.

He cleared his helmet of its displays. For a few seconds, he allowed himself to look out through the sparkling clearness of his canopy.

Here — for the next few minutes anyhow — he was suspended between the curve of Earth below, the stunning blackness above. His mission was achieved, his fuel spent.

He felt an odd stab of emotion. It’s so beautiful, he thought. So beautiful.

Below him, hundreds of thousands of men were swarming like ants to meet each other in a conflict that would be all but invisible from this height. Across the thin sky of Earth, aircraft and missiles scratched contrails; far above him, twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, artifacts of the most advanced nation on the planet clustered, to observe and monitor and warn.

And right now, there were four human beings — four Americans — suspended between Jupiter and Saturn, engaged in the most extraordinary adventure yet conceived by man. And his role in that adventure had been to try to shoot them down on takeoff.

But space travel was an absurdity. The journeys were magnificent, but there was nowhere to go, nothing but a series of lethal landscapes, floating like islands in the sky.

And if the U.S. had reached for the stars, like a soaring tree, its enemies — first the USSR, now the Chinese — would have had no hesitation in spreading over the face of the planet to cut away its trunk.

Gareth Deeke had no doubts as to the strategic correctness of the massive U.S. military investment of the last fifty years. No doubts, in the end, about his own role in the ludicrous Titan adventure. Military spending had caused the Soviet Union to implode, with barely a shot being fired; now it would enable the U.S. to contain China indefinitely.

Space had nothing to do with humanity. Down there, in the eternal blood and mud and dust of the two-dimensional battlefields of Earth, was where history was shaped. It had always been thus, and would always be thus.

And it was possible, he thought, that over Taiwan this day, the shape of the planet’s destiny for the next century might be determined.

He closed the payload bay, and, briskly, he prepared his ship for reentry, and the long glide home to the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Day 2460

Six years and nine months after its launch, the human spacecraft Discovery reached the moons of Saturn.

The etiolated crew prepared for SOI: Saturn orbit insertion, the long rocket burn which would embed them forever in the gravity well of the giant, remote planet.

They had arrived, Paula Benacerraf thought, at the desolate rim of the Solar System.

“Okay,” Nicola Mott said. “Twenty minutes to the burn. Let’s go to auxiliary power unit prestart.”

“Rog.” Benacerraf consulted the checklist strapped to her leg, and began throwing switches on the panel to her right. “Boiler nitrogen supply switches to on, one, two, three. Controller switches on, one, two, three. Power heater switches to position A, one, two, three. APU fuel tank valve switches closed, one, two, three.”

“Copy,” said Mott. “OK, APU prestart complete.”

“Good…”

Benacerraf — sitting to Mott’s right, in Discovery’s pilot’s seat — closed her visor. Sealed inside her orange pressure suit, she was cocooned in a little bubble of sound: the hum of fans, the hiss of oxygen, over her face, her own slightly ragged breathing. She heard Rosenberg’s voice as a crackle over the speakers in her Snoopy hat.

“Rog to the visor,” he said. Rosenberg was sitting behind Mott and Benacerraf, in the flight engineer’s seat.

Bill Angel was the only member of the crew not on the flight deck; he was back on the orbiter’s mid deck.

“Bill?” Benacerraf called. “How about you? Bill, do you copy about the visor? Respond, Bill, you asshole.”

“Copy, copy. Jesus, Benacerraf, give me a break.” On the loop now there came the sound of humming: fragments of song, mostly unrecognizable, jumbled up and reassembled as if at random.

“I’ll take that as a rog,” Benacerraf said.

Rosenberg laughed. “He won’t close his suit. He told us so; we ought to believe him. Who cares? Let him play with himself all the way through the burn. Let him—”

“Can it,” Benacerraf said sharply.

Crazy or not, Benacerraf didn’t want Angel’s death on her conscience. And besides, there were no scenarios which showed how just three of them, of the five nominal crew, could expect to survive on Titan’s surface. Angel was a resource she needed, and she had to protect him.

For now, however, they had a checklist to get through.

One step at a time, Paula.

“Load the SOI software, Niki.”

“Rog.” Her gloved fingers clumsy, Mott entered a sequence of commands into the computer keyboard. OPS 702 PRO. This was a chunk of a new software mode written by the ground crews and loaded up into the Shuttle’s guidance computers. OPS 7: software to control SOI, Saturn Orbit Insertion.

The light was changing. Benacerraf looked up from her checklist.

Mott said, “Time for the maneuver to the burn attitude. Track me, Paula.”

Benacerraf glanced at Mott. She could see Niki’s face framed inside her white helmet: calm, almost expressionless, a hint of fear about her eyes.

She reached over and, briefly, closed her glove over Mott’s. “You’ll be fine, Niki. Just like the training.”

“Sure.” Mott laughed weakly. “Just like the training.”

Neither Mott nor Benacerraf had piloted a Shuttle before, though both had worked as flight engineers. If the prelaunch plans had worked out, Bill Angel and Siobhan Libet would be sitting here now, as prime orbiter commander and pilot.

But Libet was long gone. And, after a lot of agonizing — and solitary, time-delayed conversations with the ground — Benacerraf had taken the decision that Angel couldn’t be trusted near the controls of the orbiter any more.

So, absurd as it was, Mott and Benacerraf had to pilot Discovery through its most crucial maneuver since leaving Earth orbit. All the good pilots were nearly a billion miles away, or dead, or half-crazy.

Mott reached forward. “Flight control power switch to on.”

“Copy that,” said Benacerraf. “ADI ATT switches—”

“Attitude switches to inertial, panels F6 and F8. ADI error to median. ADI rate to median…”

Mott reached for her hand controller, and pulsed the RCS jets. Benacerraf could hear the hard click of solenoids, feel the soft shudder of the little jets as they shoved at Discovery’s mass.

The light started to change.

As Discovery turned, the sun was crossing the window, right to left. It was a shrunken disc. Pale, yellowish light played directly into the cabin, the window struts casting long, sharp shadows over Benacerraf’s lap. False images sparkled in the scuffed plexiglass of her helmet visor.

Diminished since Jupiter, the sun was still more brilliant than any star or planet seen from Earth, ten thousand times brighter than a full Moon. It was a little like looking directly into an approaching headlight.

And now the limb of Saturn, a thin crescent, reached into the window frame. Precise and huge and intimidating, it reared up before the sun. It was a yellow arc, obviously flattened from the circular, blistered with turbulence. The colors were subtle, and she found she had to shield her eyes from the glaring yellow and white and green of the orbiter’s instrument lights.

Saturn was no gaudy pyrotechnic display, but an autumn-color sculpture wrought of the soft light of the remote sun. It was, Benacerraf thought with a shiver, utterly unearthly.

Mott had to turn the orbiter so it was flying tail-first. Discovery had accelerated as it had fallen into Saturn’s gravity well. Already deep within the planet’s magnetosphere the spacecraft was now plunging towards Saturn itself; it would make its closest approach over the dark side of the giant world, just a sixth of a Saturn radius above the cloud tops. And there, at the lowest point in the gravity well, the SOI burn would be initiated.

After a six year space soak, the orbiter’s OMS engines, the small orbital maneuvering system, had to burn for a hundred minutes, sucking fuel and oxidizer out of the big supplementary tanks that were strapped to the orbiter’s wings, like two fat bomb pods, slowing the craft into a looping, five-month orbit around Saturn.

The burn had to work. Otherwise, Discovery would not shed enough velocity to be captured by Saturn’s gravity. They wouldn’t make it to Titan. Not only that, the orbiter would be hurled onward in an involuntary slingshot, towards the stars.

Benacerraf had privately calculated they might make it one-tenth of the way to the orbit of Uranus, the next giant planet, before their consumables finally gave out.

And — although it hadn’t been expressed — she was sure nobody had forgotten that it was the OMS burn which had been ultimately catastrophic on Columbia’s last flight.

But whether they survived all this or not, this battered old space truck had come a hell of a lot further than had been dreamed by those old guys who had devised the Shuttle in the 1970s.

Saturn drifted out of the window frame.

“Maneuver to burn attitude complete,” Mott said.

Benacerraf forced her attention to the checklist, and to the instruments on the panels before her. She compared the attitude shown on the CRT display with that given by the eight-ball, the attitude direction indicator. They matched each other and the predictions in the checklist, to several decimal places.

“Good work, Niki,” she said. “Maneuver complete, confirm.”

“All right,” Mott said evenly. Under strain, she was visibly turning her attention to the next obstacle.

One step at a time, Benacerraf thought.

Mott said, “Let’s go for single APU start.”

“Rog. Number one APU fuel tank valve to open. Control switch to start/run, number one APU.”

“Confirm hydraulic pressure indicator one is green,” Mott said.

“Hydraulic circulation pump switches to off, one, two, three.”

“…Okay, we have single APU start.”

“Good. We’re doing fine, Niki. Now. Arm the engines.”

Mott reached forward, and over her head. “Auto pilot to auto. OMS helium pressure switches to GPC, left and right engines. OMS engine switches to arm.” She looked across at Benacerraf. “Engines armed.”

“Good girl.”

The routine, the checklists and procedures for just another OMS burn, was comforting. It allowed her to forget what they were doing here: firing rocket engines to go into orbit around Saturn, for God’s sake.

“One minute to the burn,” Rosenberg said.

Mott reached forward to the computer keyboard. She pressed the EXEC key, and the computer began its countdown to the burn.

…And suddenly, light exploded into the flight deck, for Discovery was sailing above the plane of Saturn’s rings.

To Benacerraf the rings looked like a broad sheet of colored light, as if Discovery were a mote of dust flying high above some elaborate laser display. This close, it was impossible to see their full extent; Benacerraf could see only a portion of the ring-disc framed in her window. Though the lighting was dim, the different bands within the rings were clearly visible, distinguishable by their faint, yellow-brown colorations, separated by dark gaps.

“Incredible,” Rosenberg said. Benacerraf could see the rings reflected from his visor, precise stripes of smoky, washed-out light. “It looks like an artifact, doesn’t it? Something made… But if those rings were transplanted home, they would fill up the space between Earth and Moon. Think of that. And look.” He pointed. “You can see a moon, buried in there in the structure. That’s the E ring; the moon must be Enceladus, I think. See how bright it is?”

After some searching she made out the moon, barely discernible as an icy spark, suspended in one of the dark ring gaps.

The giant shadow of Saturn, blunt and physical, lay across the rings, casting a precise terminator across their structure: perhaps the longest straight line in the Solar System. Earth itself could have rolled around that ring disc, like a ball bearing on a plate. Space here was filled by huge shapes, Benacerraf thought, like gigantic machinery.

Mott said, “Ten seconds to the burn. Five, four, three, two, one.”

The orbiter shuddered, and Benacerraf thought she could hear a remote bass roar, transmitted through the structure of the craft.

“Ignition,” Mott shouted.

“Copy OMS ignition.”

“Building up to full thrust. Point zero five G. Point zero eight. Zero nine. Stabilizing there Benacerraf felt herself sink back into her seat. It was as if the orbiter was tipping up, and she was lying on her back in her couch. The metal of her couch, folds in the fabric of her pressure suit, dug painfully into her flesh. And now there was a dark fringe to her vision, as if she was looking along a tunnel. The colors seemed to leach out of the control panel before her.

My God, she thought. I’m greying out.

She was experiencing acceleration, for the first time since the CELSS farm had been transferred to the centrifuge, more than three years ago.

The checklist fell from her lap against her chest, landing with a thud that knocked the air out of her. Her arms were across her chest, and she could feel where they lay, like concrete beams compressing her lungs, her gloved hands huge and massive. And her internal organs, her heart and guts and lungs, were settling out, moving to some new equilibrium inside her. She couldn’t have moved, reached up to a control, to save her life. And this is only a tenth of a G. We’ll be incapacitated on the surface of Titan. Even if we survive the reentry.

“Holy shit,” Mott said. Her voice was remote, weak.

Benacerraf tried to turn her head to see Mott, but her skull felt as heavy as a ball of concrete. “Take it easy, kid,” she said. “Discovery can fly itself; we don’t have to do a damn thing.” The burn went on and on.

Discovery sailed into the shadow of Saturn. The darkness seemed cool, immense, deepening their isolation. It was the first time in six years that the orbiter had not been bathed in sunlight.

And now, with the instruments in the payload bay gaping at the planet, Discovery fell through the plane of the ring system. The rings were less than a mile thick, and at Discovery’s interplanetary velocity, the plane was crossed in a fraction of a second.

Benacerraf, staring back along the path of Discovery, could see the shadowed rings above her. They were a huge roof of darkness, occluding the patchy stars. Here and there she thought she could see a gap in the ring system, a fine circular arc, full of stars. The bulk of the planet was to her right, a flat-infinite wall of shadowed cloud, just a sixth of Saturn’s radius away.

Discovery was a fly circling the flank of an elephant. And now, as her eyes continued to dark-adapt, she saw that there was a patch of light tracking over the shadowed ceiling of the ring system: a diffuse circle, like the image of the sun seen through fog. It seemed to be matching the movements of Discovery.

It was the light of Discovery’s engines — the burning of monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tet, hauled out here all the way from Earth, reflecting from the icy rings of Saturn.

Then, as Discovery fell beneath Saturn’s equatorial plane, the diffuse glow faded out. There was a bang, sharp, muffled by the thickness of her helmet.

It was gone so quickly she wasn’t sure if it had been real.

“Niki. Did you hear that?”

“No.” Mott hesitated. “But I felt something. A shudder.”

A bang, a shudder. Put it together, Paula.

Benacerraf felt fear gather like a sharp knot in her stomach. But she was helpless, trapped in her seat by this minuscule gravity.

The sounds of the cabin, the whir of the pumps and fans — already subdued by the helmet around her head — died away.

“We’re losing pressure,” Mott said, her radio-transmitted voice full of wonder.

Rosenberg started yelling. “Bill, close your eyes! Bill, if you can hear me, close your eyes!”

…Light seeped into the cabin. Above Benacerraf, the ring-plane terminator was sliding into view, a geometrically straight line that could have stretched from Earth to Moon. The subdued gold-brown light of the rings soaked over her face.

Rosenberg, with no reply from Angel, quit yelling.

“What the hell happened, Rosenberg?”

His voice was fragile. “We got hit by a ring fragment.”

“But we’d already passed through the plane of the damn rings. And besides, we aimed for a gap.”

“But the rings we see are patterns imposed on a complex, chaotic cloud of particles or dust and ice. This is a crowded part of space, Paula. We only came this deep because we needed the benefit of a low periapsis. We gambled we wouldn’t hit anything on the way through.”

“Lucked out,” Nicola Mott said.

Rosenberg pointed out, “Bill isn’t answering.”

“How long until the burn’s done, Niki?”

“Eight more minutes, Paula.”

Rosenberg said, “Look, we have to go down and help Bill. Vacuum exposure will kill him.”

Mott said, “Sit still.”

“She’s right,” Benacerraf said wearily. “If you try to get out of your couch you’ll just fall the length of the cabin. Rosenberg, we have to wait.”

“If we wait, we’ll find him dead,” Rosenberg said. “Damn it, Paula. If Bill is dead I hope you can live with yourself.”

Benacerraf felt herself smile, tiredly. And there’s my function on this flight, she thought. Blame Paula: not that asshole Angel for endangering his own life by his madness and stupidity, not the confluence of forces which delivered us to this perilous point in space and time in such a fragile craft, not the malevolent God who put that fragment of primordial ice right in our path in the middle of the one and only traverse, by humans from Earth, of the rings of Saturn…

At last the burn died.

“Good burn,” Mott whispered. “Residuals were less than three tenths, on all axes.”

“Welcome to Saturn,” Rosenberg said drily.

The mid deck, like the flight deck, was in vacuum.

The chunk of ring material had entered the mid deck at about waist height in the middle of the left hand wall, close to the galley. They found a neat round hole in the panel there, almost big enough for Benacerraf to push her finger into. And there was a matching hole in the floor, a few feet away, as if the particle had slanted down like a sniper’s rifle shot through the cabin.

In fact, they had been lucky, she realized. It was a clean impact. A grain the size and speed that hit them could have done a lot more damage than just puncturing the pressure hull so cleanly.

Ring material. At least, thought Benacerraf, it was more glamorous than the particle of flaked-off paint or frozen cosmonaut urine that had zapped them during their Earth flyby.

It was simple to slap patches over the damage; soon the air pressure in the mid deck was restored.

They found Angel sitting strapped into his fold-up seat. He had his pressure suit helmet on, with the visor closed; but the helmet wasn’t locked correctly at the neck. He was unconscious. Benacerraf could see his eyes were closed, his face contorted. And there was some kind of fluid, smeared over the inside of his visor, making it difficult to see inside.

Rosenberg peered into Angel’s helmet, and shrugged. “He must have been exposed to vacuum for a few seconds, low pressure for a while longer. We got to get him out of here.”

They manhandled Angel through the airlock at the rear of the mid deck, and into the hab module. Then the three of them went into the resuscitation routines they had rehearsed on Earth.

With Benacerraf and Mott holding Angel’s limbs, Rosenberg checked for breathing, then braced himself against a wall and pumped four mouth-to-mouth breaths into Angel’s lungs. There was no response, so Rosenberg had the women move Angel around so that he could push his arms around Angel’s thorax and under his arms. He grabbed Angel’s elbows and worked them like a bellows, up and down, four times.

“All right,” he said, breathless. “Now we got oxygenated air in his lungs,” He looked exhausted, his glasses sweat-streaked, as if he might pass out himself. “Now, the heart.” He felt for Angel’s carotid pulse. “Nothing. Niki, you’re stronger than me. Come around here.”

Mott pulled herself behind Angel. She placed her left hand fist in Angel’s sternum and grabbed the fist with her other hand. She pulled Angel’s back against her chest, then compressed his sternum, hauling him hard towards her, counting. “One. Two. Three…—” The idea was to squeeze the heart between the sternum and the thoracic vertebrae, and so push oxygenated blood through Angel’s body.

At a count of twelve, Angel shuddered. He coughed, his throat dry and ragged.

Later, Benacerraf was at a squawk box, listening to the insectile voice of a capcom, the words eighty minutes old. The capcom was enthusing about the images they had received during the Saturn closest approach. Already NASA was receiving requests for the commercial rights, and there were believed to be hundreds of illegal hacked-up VR copies running through their cycles even now, out in the net.

She stared into a monitor.

Discovery was receding from Saturn now, skimming back, briefly, towards the sun, and the planet was once more turning its full face to the spacecraft. The cloud bands were sharply distinguished, though more subtle and yellowish than Jupiter’s. Along the fringe of one band at the equator Benacerraf could see turbulence, oval clouds like cells. The rings themselves cast a shadow, a thin, complex line, over the milky equator of Saturn’s daylit hemisphere. The shadow was curved, an exercise in projective geometry. And the rings had a lacy, tenuous appearance, so that she could see the curve of the bright limb of the planet through their structure.

There was nothing to compare to this experience.

This was not, she thought, even like travelling from Earth to Moon, from one closed-up sphere to another. They had journeyed for years, into the huge outer wastes of the Solar System, and entered orbit around this metahuman artifact, this structure of rings and spheres that could fill up the Earth-Moon system.

It is the dream of a million years, she thought, to be here and see this.

Rosenberg drifted in, and took her through Angel’s injuries.

“…Paula, you have to understand the human body is not designed to withstand vacuum. Basically the internal pressure turns it into a kind of low-tech bomb. All Bill’s internal material tried to escape, through his skin, the orifices of his head and body. Bleeding everywhere. His lungs are torn. His blood vessels have been leaking. A few more seconds and he would have drowned in his own blood. His blood must have been close to boiling in his, veins.”

“Will he live?”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Sure. For a while. We all will, for a while. But if he was at home he’d be hospitalized.”

“We aren’t at home.”

“And, Paula—”

“What?”

“His brain was starved of oxygen. I don’t even know how long for.”

That helps, she thought bleakly.

“What was that fluid, on the inside of his visor?”

“The clear stuff?” His face was neutral. “Oh, that. I did tell him to keep his eyes shut. His left eye ruptured, and—”

Benacerraf felt bile pool at the back of her throat. She made it into the waste management area in time to throw up, violently, into the commode.

She wiped her mouth on a wet-wipe, the antiseptic stinging her tongue.

In his quarters, Angel was waking up. He was starting to scream.