Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 by Ellen Datlow Page B

a fresh start.
    He paused with his finger on the icon labeled “Embrace Space!” He was still fond of that slogan—the rhythm and rhyme were compelling, and the text treatment the graphic artists had come up with had a lot of snap. But the client thought it was “too pedestrian.”
    “Delete.” The icon dissolved beneath his fingertip in a puff of pixels.
    Damn the client, anyway. Damn all clients everywhere.
    Tony stood and stretched. The clock in one corner of his desk read four o’clock . . . one more hour and it would be the weekend. Maybe he should knock off early, get in a little surfing.
    He touched a control on his desk and the window blinds rotated, letting in the sun and the view. Just a few miles away, across the Indian River, one of the client’s boosters stood idle—a slim white cigar crammed with construction supplies for Virgin LLC’s growing Branson Station, pinned to the launchpad by lawsuits over noise.
    There was the problem in a nutshell: the thunder of rocket engines had changed from a triumph to an annoyance. Noise lawsuits, problems hiring and retaining qualified people, stagnant stock price—all of these were symptoms of the public image problem that Virgin had hired Tony’s firm to solve. If this launch hiatus went on much longer they might pull out of Florida. They might even give up on space altogether.
    Tony paced behind his desk, the surf momentarily forgotten. How the heck was he supposed to make space exciting? He’d interviewed dozens of people—space workers as well as the general public—and not one of them thought of it as much more than just another place to work. Sure, there was some danger to it. But driving to work was dangerous right here on Earth.
    He scrolled through the interview folder on his desk, looking for inspiration, and paused at the image of an eighty-year-old Anglo who still remembered the California redwoods and the space race with the Russians. “When I was a kid,” he’d said, “astronauts were heroes, not people. You only ever saw them in black and white, on teevee or in the papers. These days they’re everywhere, in living color. But they’re just like all the rest of my neighbors—boring!” And he’d laughed, showing perfect white reconstructed teeth.
    Tony had written off that guy at the time as just another disaffected boomer. But now he wondered if people like him might find it easier to get excited about space if it was smaller and further away again—squished down to fit into a tiny black and white teevee screen.
    No, that wasn’t quite it. But there was something there he could use.
    Black and white, yes. Plain. Simplistic. A plain and simple hero. Something people could believe in. Something real .
    Tony was starting to get excited about this one. “New file.” A window opened on his desk, the blinking cursor awaiting his words.
    An astronaut, like in the space race? No . . . too old-fashioned, too militaristic for today’s audience. It had to be some kind of space worker.
    He scrolled back through the interview folder until he found an orbital welder named Sara he’d cornered for an hour in a bar on Merritt Island, and touched Play. “There was this guy called Mike,” the welder’s image said. “I’ll never forget him. We called him Titanium-Belly Mike—he’d drink anything .”
    Tony’s lip quirked. That wasn’t the right image at all. But the name . . .
    And then the whole thing snapped together in his head.
    “This is the story of Titanium Mike,” he said, and the words appeared silently on the screen. “His father was a shuttle pilot and his mother was a welder. He was born wearing a space suit, and when he was nine days old he built himself a rocket and took off for orbit. Then, when his rocket ran low on fuel, he lassoed a satellite with a length of high-tensile cable and pulled himself up the rest of the way on that. He was so tough that radiation just bounced off him . . .”
    It was crazy and nonsensical and