Benacerraf waved a hand deliberately quickly, so fast the processing couldn’t keep up, and she left a trail of pixels, ghostly shadows of her fingers. “But so what? None of this is real. None of it is even unpredictable, challenging. You bind yourselves up in these endless rules, and—”

“And by contrast,” Jackie said coldly, “you and your little band are going off to break ground on the high frontier.”

“Isn’t that true? Isn’t that more worthwhile, more real than this?”

Jackie said bleakly, “There’s nothing out there but a collection of dead rocks and ice balls. Even the Earth is falling apart.”

“So where else to go but inwards, retreating into your own head? Right?”

Jackie sighed. “Is this why you’ve come here, Paula? To attack me again? Because if it is—”

Benacerraf held her hands up. “Time out, kid. Whenever we get together, we fall into the same old rut.”

Jackie shrugged and didn’t respond.

Showing she didn’t care about their flawed relationship was, Benacerraf thought, the most hurtful response she could have made.

“So,” Jackie said at length. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I need you to sign some documents.”

Benacerraf explained her plan.

“Virtually all my assets are in the accounts, and my salary will continue to be paid into it, as long as I’m alive. I think you ought to have immediate access to those funds. But you have to sign authorization papers; we can do that here, electronically, in Green Town. I also tried to have my pension contributions made over in your favor, but they couldn’t do it. Administrative reasons.” It was ironic, thought Benacerraf; here was NASA busting all the technical and political barriers in the way of a ten-astronomical-unit mission to Titan, but the bean counters couldn’t find any way around their own rule books…

Jackie listened to all this, her virtual face expressionless and unreadable. Benacerraf realized, belatedly, that she didn’t even know where her daughter was.

In the end, Jackie wouldn’t agree to Benacerraf’s proposals.

“Look, Mother, you don’t really care about me, or the kids. If you did you wouldn’t be indulging yourself in this ludicrous jaunt to Saturn.”

“I’m trying to make you a gift, of all my property, for God’s sake—”

“No,” Jackie said, with a harshness not matched by the china-doll prettiness of her virtual face. “You’re just trying to ease your damn conscience. Well, I don’t see why I should make it so easy for you. I won’t sign anything; I won’t have any part of this.”

They started to argue again.

It was like resuming a conversation, even though they hadn’t spoken for so long.

Benacerraf struggled to understand.

Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.

In another century, we may not recognize each other.

Or maybe, she thought gloomily, I’m just getting old.

Maybe it’s just as well I’m getting the hell out, of a world I don’t understand any more.

She tried, one last time, to marshal her thoughts.

“Jackie, your life is your own — as is mine, to do with as I please. And I think it’s better to do this, to go to Titan — or the in the attempt — than to stay around here, getting steadily older, becoming a cliche for you. I’m sorry if it hurts. But I don’t owe you anything.”

“And what about the kids? What will I tell them when I have to explain they can’t see grandma any more?”

“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf said sadly. “In a few years they wouldn’t be interested anyhow. And besides, there will be telecasts from the mission—”

Jackie stood up. “Don’t you get it? Nobody will watch the telecasts. Nobody has cared for years. Only you, you old people. Nobody will give a damn, as you drift off into the darkness. If you go, I’ll tell the boys you’re dead,” she said evenly. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? What is this, but an elaborate suicide?”

On and on.

They parted without affection. Jackie came forward to hug her, but Benacerraf couldn’t bear to submit to such an electronic embrace.

Benacerraf walked out of the house, and back down the steps to the lawn where she’d first arrived. So, at the end of it all, they were reduced to this, a mother and daughter able to face each other only by locking themselves away in darkened rooms, hundreds of miles apart, with their faces buried inside electronic masks.

She tramped over the grass, fumbling at the mask which covered: her face.

When she emerged into the booth in the Galleria, she got out as quickly as she could. She half-ran out of the mall, and when she got outside, under a murky sky, she sucked in great lungfuls of hot, smoggy Houston air.

As the launch itself approached, the intensity of the training slackened, and it seemed to Rosenberg that they started to enter a realm of tradition, and superstition, and magic.

A couple of weeks before the liftoff, for example, they all went down to the Outpost Tavern. This was a wooden shack outside the gates of KSC, and the tradition was that every astronaut had to drink in there. Its walls were encrusted with signed photos of grinning spacemen, and Rosenberg learned — it was incredible — that the Outpost had originally been situated at Ellington, near Houston, and moved out here plank by wooden, beer-stained plank.

He didn’t dare question any of this stuff. It was understandable when you remembered that space travel was almost fifty years old now, and like any other human activity it was bound to accrete its own traditions. If these NASA people, under their WASP technocratic hides, believed some kind of white magic was necessary to get their birds off the ground, Rosenberg wasn’t going to start arguing now.

And then, a week before the launch, they were moved into the quarantine facilities at Houston, and then the crew quarters at the Cape, and now nobody from the outside world was allowed in — not even families — unless they passed a strict medical. That made sense to Rosenberg; he had no wish to take infection into space.

But, incredibly, a couple of days before leaving, they were allowed to greet their families one last time, face to face in the open air, on a grassy sward close to the crew quarters, separated only by a fifteen-feet ditch. Rosenberg couldn’t believe it. He recognized Jackie Benacerraf, Paula’s daughter, over there with her boys, and, standing there in cold January sunshine, they had a short, shouted, embarrassed conversation about life on Titan.

He observed how tough it was for the others — particularly Paula — to say goodbye, this one last time, without even being able to touch their family members. As a quarantine procedure it was dubious. And as a piece of psychology, he thought, it was truly, spectacularly dumb.

And then there were two days to go.

And then one.

And then, a subtle knock by a WASP fist on the door of his room, and he was awake on Earth for the last time, for it was the morning of the launch.

He even had a personal checklist:

9:00 p.m. Wake up

9:30 p.m. Breakfast

2:58 a.m. Lunch and crew photo

3:28 a.m. Weather briefing

3:38 a.m. Don launch and entry suits

3:50 a.m. Crew suiting photo

4:08 a.m. Depart for pad 39-B…

Rosenberg went through the routines he’d practiced so often in a daze; he let the various techs just manage him through.

It took him a full hour to be loaded into his pressure suit, for instance. The rubber sleeves and neck were tight, and he had to squeeze in there, like putting on a tight-fitting sweater. The suits were actually a post-Challenger modification designed to close a few more non-survivability windows in case of malfunction. Nobody had been prepared to tell Rosenberg, for all his pressing and all the training time they’d spent on disaster recovery, whether in the pinch the suits would be any use at all.