White pulled back the curtain on the first booth. It showed a simulated Buzz Aldrin, as he’d been when aged around seventy: tanned, seated, relaxed in a sports shirt and slacks. As the curtain opened he went into action.
…I remember reading about Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing when they got to the summit of Everest, in 1955,the VR said. They just had a few minutes on the peak. Hillary acted like a conqueror. He took pictures down the sides of all the ridges, to prove to everyone that they had made it. But Tenzing knelt down and hollowed out a little place in the snow, and filled it with offerings to his God. You see, for him, it was more like a pilgrimage.
If anyone was going to top that for a pilgrimage to a strange and remote place, it was Neil and me.
We had a quiet moment, after we’d settled down from the post-landing checks. In my Personal Preference Kit I’d packed away a little flask of wine, a chalice and some wafers. There was a little fold-down table just under the keyboard that worked the abort guidance computer. I keyed my mike, and said something like, “This is the LM pilot. I want to ask everybody listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” So I poured out my wine; I remember how slowly it rolled out of the flask in that gentle gravity, and curled up against the side of the cup. And I read, silently, from a small card where I had written out a quote from the book of John: “I am the wine and you are the branches / Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit / For you can do nothing without me…”
“Are these recordings?” Hadamard asked.
White shrugged. “Some recordings, some cleaned-up and digitized, some straightforward faked-up sims. The story about Buzz’s communion on the Moon is true, though. Look at this next one.” He pulled back a second curtain; another spectral simulation popped into life.
My name is Jim Irwin, and in 1971 I travelled to the mountains of the Moon. I was captivated — from my first footsteps off the LM, when I nearly tipped over, and found myself staring back up at the sparkling blue of Earth. When I stepped into that distant, untrodden valley, I felt buoyant, elated; I felt like a little child again. The Lunar Apennines weren’t grey or brown as I had expected, but gold, in the light of the early lunar morning. Golden mountains. They looked a little like ski slopes, actually. Others called that place stark and desolate; I have to say I found it warm, friendly, welcoming. The mountains surrounded our little base like a hand cradling a droplet of water, of life. I felt at home on the Moon… At one point we had a problem deploying our ALSEP, our science station, that we had never encountered in training. The cord that was supposed to deploy the central station broke. Well, I prayed for guidance; as I often did during those three days, I recited a phrase from the Psalms which goes: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills / From whence cometh my help? / My help cometh from the Lord.” And you know, I knew straight away that the answer was to get down on my knees and to pull that cord with my hands. And it worked. I had this glow inside me; I felt we could solve anything that came up, that nothing could go wrong. I sensed that God was near me, even in that remote place… I knew then that God had a plan for me, to leave the Earth and to come back to share the adventure with others, so that they could be lifted up in turn…
Irwin looked thin, pale, wasted to Hadamard; two decades after his return from the Moon, Irwin had died of a massive heart attack.
White was looking into his face, waiting for a response.
Hadamard spread his hands. “Maybe this isn’t so bad, Marcus. After all, maybe we’ve been too hot on the technology, rockets and capsules, for all these years. Maybe we neglected the spiritual side too much. This is just a — course correction.”
“Bullshit,” White growled. He stalked forward and pulled another curtain.
…I could see the crescent Earth rise, glowing, through the windows of the Command Module. We were returning home. The pressure was off after the Moonwalk, and we could relax and try to make sense of what had happened to us. And as I worked, just routine stuff keeping the spacecraft going, I was filled with a kind of gentle euphoria, a great tranquillity, and a sense that I understood. It was as if I had suddenly started to hear a new language — one spoken by the Universe itself. No longer did the Earth, or anything in the Universe, seem random to me. There was a kind of order — I could feel it out there — all the worlds of the Solar System, the stars and galaxies beyond, all moving like clockwork together. It was a sudden revelation, you must understand; one moment I was a detached observer, stuck in my head as if inside some kind of armored tank of flesh and muscles — just like you must feel — and the next I could see, for sure, that I was part of it all. And as I worked on I had a sense of being outside myself — as if I was a robot, and somebody else was turning the knobs and tracing down the checklists, I knew I had been enlightened, although right there I didn’t know how or why; I guess I have spent the rest of my life figuring it out. But I knew, even then, it was the most important moment of my life; it even overshadowed walking on the Moon itself…
White seemed to be grinding his teeth; big animal muscles worked under the silvery stubble of his cheeks. “They’re calling this display ‘Testimony.’ They want a contribution from each of us, the Moonwalkers, the story of our spiritual revelations on the Moon, or in space. For the guys who died, like Irwin and Tom Lamb, they’re assembling VR sims using old interview clips and autobiography stuff.”
“You won’t cooperate?”
“Like hell I will. Jake, believe me, it just wasn’t like that. It was about getting through the checklist, and not screwing up. No damn hand of God helped me wipe my butt in one-sixth G…”
Hadamard shrugged. “I guess this is what you get if you out-source your visitors’ center to the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.”
“That bunch of fucking creationists?”
“They have buddies in the White House now, Marcus. Look, you just have to go with the flow on this one. It’s a sign of the times. Maybe we’re entering a more spiritual age.”
“Come on, Jake. You don’t believe that. This is all just Maclachlan and his tub-thumping fundamentalism. We’re going to get dragged back to the fucking Dark Ages if we go on like this. You know they’re teaching creationism again in the schools?”
“I know.” Hadamard sighed. In fact there was more, probably unknown to White: for instance NASA press releases were already being “vetted” by a monitor appointed by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, for any anti-religious “bias;” the archive of images garnered from the Hubble space telescope and other satellite observatories was being “purged” of any images which might directly support theories like the Big Bang, in a manner which was not conducive to a “reasoned response” from proponents of alternative “theories…”
“So it goes, Marcus,” Hadamard said gently. “I guess you heard about the RLV.”
“Yeah.”
The final cancellation of the much-delayed, budget-strangled Reusable Launch Vehicle program had been one of Xavier Maclachlan’s first executive decisions.
“I’d like to think,” White said heavily, “that the decision was made over your head.”
Hadamard made, routinely, to deny that — then hesitated. “Effectively. I didn’t have much choice, after the President and his budget chief got together to beat up on me. The basic argument is the need to free up federal funds to counter the secession threats from Washington State and Idaho. Not to mention Nevada, if Maclachlan goes ahead with his threat to shut down the godless gambling in Vegas… Maclachlan thinks that the whole point of us launching off the Titan mission before he got elected was so we would have a peg to hang the RLV program on. He thinks we tried to pre-commit him to an expenditure of billions on space, year on year ongoing, before a vote was cast in the ’08 ballot. So he just shut the damn thing down.”
“So we don’t have a way to retrieve those guys. My God. A year out, and we already abandoned them.
”
“That’s not the official position. That’s not my position. I have study groups in all the centers working on retrieval options without a new RLV. But I admit I had to fight even to ensure the resupply Delta IV launches… Marcus, space just isn’t where the President wants his head to be.”
“But at least you argued against the shutdown,” White said evenly. “Maybe you’re more than the paper-pushing fucker we all thought you were, Jake.”
“Thanks a lot,” Hadamard said drily.
The thing of it was, White was right. Hadamard had argued against the decision, and he probably had damaged his career prospects in Maclachlan’s eyes, and he’d gained nothing in the process.
He was still trying to figure out why he’d done it.
It sure wasn’t anything misty-eyed to do with the safety of Our Men and Women in Space. To hell with Benacerraf and the rest, frankly; they had known the risks, technical and political, when they climbed on board that last Shuttle.
For Hadamard, it was something deeper than that.
Hadamard found himself resisting Maclachlan, on whatever turf he could defend.
It all seemed to be becoming symbolic, for Hadamard. My God, Jake, he thought. I think you’re growing principles, in your old age.
But White was still talking. His praise, Hadamard thought drily, was less than unqualified.
“Of course you got it all wrong,” White said.
“How so?”
“Going to Titan in chemical rockets is a truly dumb thing to do. I supported Paula’s suggestion, because it was all we had. And I thought it would be the start of the future, not the end.”
“So what we should be doing is—”
“What we should be doing is building for the future. An integrated program. With this Chinese scare we had the chance to change hearts, to thrill and terrify, to lead America to space… We should be building the new RLV, and launching fission rocket stages to orbit, and going to Mars and back in a fortnight. We need an integrated vision of the colonization of the Solar System: Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, beyond. It’s not impossible, technically. It’s just will, and politics. Politics is just paperwork. And this country has carried through great, world-changing projects before. Look at World War Two…” And Hadamard let the old man talk for a while, until he ran dry.
Then he said, “We’ve been here before, Marcus. In the 1950s we dreamed of Tsiolkovsky: the orderly conquest of space. But in the 1960s, what we built was Apollo. That’s the kind of species we are, it seems. And the smart guy, the guy who achieves things, is realistic — about what we’re capable of, what we’re willing to do — and works in that framework.”
“Like Jim Webb.”
“Like Jim Webb. In the middle of the Vietnam war, after his President was shot out from under him, Jim Webb got you to the Moon. He did it by playing hard politics, and he couldn’t have achieved any more. And in the same way, with forty-year-old technology and Maclachlan coming down my throat—”
“You sent us to Titan.”
“Hell, yes. I know it’s not ideal, the smartest thing. But we ain’t so good at doing the smart thing, Marcus. You have to do what you can. Anyhow, would you rather not be going to Titan? Would you rather you hadn’t had those three days up there on the Moon?”
“No. Of course not,” White rumbled. “It’s just I’d rather have had half a lifetime…”
“That wasn’t an option,” Hadamard said severely. “We do what we can.”
They walked on through the rest of the half-finished center. White’s temper didn’t improve, as he picked out more VR highlights for Hadamard: Ed Mitchell’s cislunar ESP experiment, endless items from NASA apocrypha — “sightings” by astronauts all the way back to Armstrong of UFOs and alien bases on the Moon, a reconstruction of the supposed “lost” transcript of the last couple of minutes of the Challenger disaster, with its terrified astronaut’s voice reciting The Lord Is My Shepherd…
White was getting very upset, the muscles and veins in his neck standing out like steel cords.
“You know, when I was a kid, Titan was just a point of light in the sky, like thousands of others. Now, we’ve landed a probe there. It’s a new fucking world. We have maps of the surface. We have a crew on the way to land there, for Christ’s sake. But if Maclachlan and the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and all those other assholes have their way, in another hundred years Titan will just be a dot in the sky again. How the hell can we lose all that knowledge, Jake?”
Hadamard said, “But you walked on the Moon. Whatever else happens, they can’t take that achievement away. Not for all time.”
White studied him. “You are changing, paper-pusher.”
“Or maybe the world is changing and leaving me behind.” He took White’s arm; he could feel bunched muscle, still hard, through a light cotton sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a beer.”
They walked out, towards Hadamard’s parked car.
In the rocket park, a wrecking crew was hauling down the Atlas-Mercury. It was a slim silver cylinder topped by the dark cone of a Mercury capsule, the configuration that had taken John Glenn to orbit. The Atlas left the vertical with a groan of tearing metal.
* * *
Day 504
When Siobhan finally died, Mott realized that she had no framework for coping. She had no prayers to say, no hymns to sing, no rational or social structure which could accommodate death.
But then, the rest of the crew didn’t know how to handle this either.
Bill Angel argued for breaking down Siobhan’s body and using it as nutrient in the farm. “She always wanted to be a farmer in the sky,” he said, his face hard. “Now she can be. Just dumping her body overboard means losing raw material, a loss we can’t afford.” He stared at Mott, as if challenging her. “We’re on the edge here. Life must go on. Our lives.”
He’d actually had some endorsement for that, from the surgeons on the ground. Although they would have wanted Siobhan’s flesh and bones treated before being ground up for consumption by the plants.
Benacerraf opposed it, and Mott and Rosenberg backed her up.
At last they came up with a solution they could all accept.
Benacerraf clambered into her EMU, her EVA suit, and hauled Siobhan’s body out of the airlock and into the orbiter cargo bay. The body was wrapped in a Stars and Stripes — a flag that should have fluttered over the ice of Titan — and bound up with duct tape and Beta cloth.
Benacerraf braced herself in the payload bay and just thrust that body away from her, letting it drift away.
Benacerraf, floating in the payload bay, said some words, her voice a crackle, distorted by static.
“I want to read to you what Isaac Newton wrote to John Locke, on looking into the sun. I think it’s kind of appropriate…”
In a few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look on no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark. But by keeping in the dark and employing my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again and by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, though not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon the phenomenon…
“I think that sums it up,” Benacerraf said gently, her voice scratchy on the radio loop. “Siobhan looked, too long, into the face of the sun. We won’t forget her.”
Mott sat at the window of the flight deck and watched the body ascend past the shadow of the high-gain antenna. In the ferocious glare of trans-Venusian sunlight, it exploded with brilliance.
At last it was lost in the sky.
Mott tried to come to term
s with all this, with her loss.
Part of her was frankly glad that it wasn’t her, Mott, who had been caught in that access tube. And another part was guilty as all hell about that.
But mostly, when she looked into her own soul, she found only incomprehension.
It proved impossible to forget Siobhan, to restore life to normal. Bizarrely, grotesquely, Siobhan hadn’t actually departed so far. The small impulse that Benacerraf had imparted to the body had done little more than send it on a slowly diverging, neighboring orbit to Discovery’s. Poor Siobhan was still tracking Discovery on its complex path around the sun.
It was as if Siobhan had never gone away. As if her absence, the hole she left behind, was a real thing, which pursued Mott, no matter what she tried to do: the hours of gruelling exercise she burned up in the arm, her work in the corners of the cluster like the farm or the Apollos, the time she tried to lose in the emptiness of sleep.
After a time, Mott realized, she was barely functioning, so far sunk was she in black despair.
* * *
Barbara Fahy, recently appointed head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, heard the news on a copied e-mail, passed down the chain of command from Jake Hadamard. Al Hartle — now working as a senior adviser to the President — was trying to block the release of the Delta IV boosters for the resupply of the Discovery crew.
Fahy couldn’t believe it. But she checked with Canaveral and Vandenburg. The payloads that had been under preparation for the first Delta IV launches — consumables and other equipment to follow Discovery to Titan — had already been stood down, and were being disassembled and placed in storage.
So it was true.
She called up Hadamard, in his office at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. In the image in her softscreen, Hadamard looked tired, his face slack.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s true. I would have told you in person, but—”
“But what? You couldn’t stand to face me?”
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