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

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.