"Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

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.