She walked back to Mott. She bent and dug her hands under Mott’s shoulders again, and pulled her all the way out onto the ice. Her hands left tholin streaks on Mott’s pressure suit.

She turned Mott over. Mott’s visor was smashed, her helmet full of slush. Benacerraf reached inside and scooped the slush away from Mott’s face. Mott’s eyes were open. Benacerraf tried to push closed the lids, but they were frozen, even the eyeballs hard.

Rosenberg said, “Do you have her?”

“Yes, Rosenberg. I have her.”

Rosenberg fell silent.

There was Titan slush in Mott’s mouth. Benacerraf dug it away with a finger. Her gloved finger seemed too fat for Mott’s mouth; it was like clearing vomit from the mouth of a sick child.

“So,” Rosenberg said. “Then there were three.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Paula.”

“Me too. Rosenberg, prepare a message for the ground. Her parents…”

“Sure.”

Benacerraf straightened up and returned to Jitterbug. By touch, in a storage compartment behind the head of Mott’s couch, she found a spade, and a little packet of cellophane that contained the Stars-and-Stripes. The spade was broad-bladed, like a snow-shovel. It had a handle that telescoped out. She walked a few yards away from the apex of Jitterbug and began to dig.

The blade penetrated the gumbo easily, and she could lift big shovelfuls away into the thick air. But the stuff clung to the spade and was difficult to shake off. And the walls of the little trench she dug kept collapsing inwards. It was like digging into wet sand.

She kept going, until she was four feet down.

She scraped gumbo off Mott’s chest, exposing the Union Jack sewn there. Then she opened the cellophane packet. She shook out the flag, and laid it over Mott’s body. She wrapped it underneath, making a neat parcel. Now the weak gravity helped her; Mott was feather-light, easy to handle, like a small child.

Two flags, two bodies, she thought.

Benacerraf laid Mott in the trench she had dug.

It was easy to fill. She just pushed the mounds of slush back over the body. The bright orange of Mott’s pressure suit, the brave red and blue and white of the flag, were soon obscured, claimed by the ubiquitous brown of Titan. The clinging stuff oozed quickly back to smoothness.

Benacerraf rested her shovel against the hull of Jitterbug, and stood at the head of Mott’s grave.

“No words this time, Paula?”

“She should have been the first,” Benacerraf said. “Not me. She should have been first… That’s all, I guess.”

Her exhaustion was immense, crushing, beyond anything she had known before. “Paula,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s go open up Discovery.”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly, standing here in the slush and dark, the idea of the glowing lights of the orbiter’s flight deck — and the cramped, clean confines of the hab module, the warm growing smells of the CELSS farm — seemed welcoming to Benacerraf.

She could see, in the murk, Rosenberg plodding away from Bifrost towards Discovery, the dangling form of Angel limp over his shoulders.

Jackie Benacerraf sat alone on the floor of her lounge, waiting for the pictures of her mother’s first footsteps on Titan.

So far the big softscreen on the wall was blank, save for schematics and timelines and a couple of animated sponsors’ logos. But sound was coming through: traditional astronauts’ voices, distorted and overlaid with pops and crackles, and with a judder imposed by the lousy bandwidth of the compressed signals.

For the record, we have a go for vent… Affirmative, we’re all sealed up. Go for vent…All right.

Jackie couldn’t even tell which voice was her mother’s. There they were, the astronauts, solemnly reporting each step as if working on an unexploded bomb. All for the benefit of those who might follow one day.

But, of course, nobody would. Not ever.

Anyhow, it was hard to concentrate. She was worried about the kids.

She was always worried about the kids.

At least Fred had grown out of his Nullist phase, and he was having some of the image-tattoos removed. That was leaving marks on his skin, but the doctors were saying they shouldn’t be permanent — unlike hers — because he was still young enough. That skin cancer he’d developed when one of the laid-bare patches had been exposed to the sun was more worrying, but again the specialists said it would clear up…

What bothered her more right now was his determination to quit school and go join the Hunter-Gatherers in Central America.

She’d listened to the arguments and lectures until she thought her head would bust open.

The agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago was now pretty much accepted by the academics as a global disaster. So her son told her, anyhow. The archaeology showed the incidence of tooth cavities rose seven-fold; mothers were badly under-nourished; anemia became much more common, and so did tuberculosis… We were better off, ran the argument, so argued Fred, before agriculture. It was true that farming a piece of land could support ten times as many people as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but that didn’t buy you much; today there were seven billion people in the world, almost all of whom were worse nourished than their Stone Age ancestors… and so on.

Once, Jackie would have been passionate about such arguments, either for or against. Now, all she cared about was Fred.

The governments cooperating in the Central American park scheme — Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize — had pledged to protect and shelter the young Americans and New Columbians flooding down there to — in theory — rediscover an ancient lifestyle. There was supposed to be no regulation, beyond a simple limit on numbers — but, of course, no communication was possible once you went inside.

Jackie pulled at a tuft of hair. All she could do was keep talking, trying to persuade Fred to think again, to wait, to stick with college…

It was just like the arguments her mother had had with her. Maybe she was doomed to turn into her mother, just as her own kids seemed to be turning into her.

Okay. Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…

You ready for your one small step?

Astronaut humor, Jackie thought bleakly.

The irony was, science was making a certain comeback. The environmental problems were becoming so pressing and complex that Maclachlan had reopened some of the university science labs and departments he’d ordered shut down. Even in Seattle, a clear-plastic uv filter over your lawn was now almost as common as a sprinkler system.

It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we’ve reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we’ll understand how it all used to work.

You’re lined up nicely. Come back towards me… Okay, put your foot down… you’re doing fine… A little more.

It was the plankton crash in the oceans that seemed to be scaring the scientists most. The plankton crisis, it was said, might actually make the planet uninhabitable, ultimately. And in the short term the big problem was the rice crop. There was a blight with an unpronounceable name that was laying waste to rice crops all over the planet. The price of rice in the Seattle stores — particularly Italian rice, for some reason — had gone through the roof. In the longer term, it was said, people would soon be starving, especially in the major rice-producing countries: China, India, Britain.

It was all to be expected, said the doom-mongers. World-wide, humanity got more than fifty percent of its calories from three carbohydrate-rich crops: wheat, rice and maize. Gigantic monocultures, exceptionally vulnerable to disease.