controllers were telling her, in clipped sentences, of some disaster involving the American Space Shuttle. They sounded jubilant, she thought. They had her intone words of sympathy, of fellowship, broadcast from orbit.
The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.
Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.
And it was only fifteen years away.
Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that…
And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.
Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.
This was the end of the U.S. space program, and the end of her own career.
Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.
She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of Columbia, and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.
She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.
Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.
She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.
Book Two
LOW EARTH
ORBIT
A.D. 2004–A.D. 2008
W hat did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?”
Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair; she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”
“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”
“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”
Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”
“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”
“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”
“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”
“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”
“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.
“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.
“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. It Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound
The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.
Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.
And it was only fifteen years away.
Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that…
And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.
Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.
This was the end of the U.S. space program, and the end of her own career.
Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.
She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of Columbia, and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.
She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.
Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.
She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.
Book Two
LOW EARTH
ORBIT
A.D. 2004–A.D. 2008
W hat did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?”
Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair; she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”
“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”
“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”
Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”
“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”
“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”
“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”
“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”
“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.
“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.
“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. It Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound
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