But it grew harder to care, as the radio voices grew fainter, buzzing like wasps in a jar. Even Jackie’s irregular, begrudged messages seemed to be losing their power to hurt her.
Earth was irrelevant, now; America was simply the crucible within which this mission had been forged. She was glad to leave it all behind, she was deciding; in many ways she preferred her new life here, cooped up in this handful of dimly lit, sour-smelling compartments, the confines of the ship her only reality, the cool logic of Newton’s laws her only constraint.
After a time, she pushed away the coelostat eyepiece.
She cycled for her regulation four hours.
Discovery was moving at a little more than Earth’s escape velocity, seven miles a second. So, Benacerraf figured, while she had been cycling Discovery had crossed around a hundred thousand miles: nearly half the distance between Earth and Moon. It would be something to radio back to her grandsons.
With a shuddering whir, the centrifuge began to slow. Soon, the cabin had snuggled against the docking node.
The day eroded to its close.
Her sleeping restraint was just a bag fastened against the wall of her quarters, her little rounded-door compartment on the starboard side of the hab module. Sometimes she was cold, because the sleep compartments were ventilated to the point of being draughty. There wasn’t much choice about that, because otherwise, in the absence of convection, she could suffocate in the lingering carbon dioxide of her own breath. But at first she’d found the ventilation stream was blowing up into her face, into her mouth and nose, making her feel chilled to the bone. So, defying the local vertical, she’d turned her sleeping bag around. But now the draft tended to blow up into her sleeping bag, making it billow around her, and dissipating the warmth generated by her body…
Besides, the hab module was full of noise.
She wasn’t disturbed by the whine of the pumps and fans of the air conditioning system. That was a comforting, surrounding susurrus. But as the sun approached, the heat made Discovery expand and contract, popping and banging like a tin roof. And whenever Discovery’s RCS thrusters fired, making some automated tweak to the trajectory, it sounded like machine gun fire.
She’d adapt, she expected. She had, after all, two and a half thousand days to get used to this.
To unwind, she read her book.
It was science fiction, a lightweight paperback. There were whole libraries stored on CD-ROM, of course, but she’d never gotten used to reading online, even on softscreens. She’d brought this book, and a handful of others, along with her in her Personal Preference Kit.
(…Actually the books had had to be tested for their flammability; she’d had to give up a couple of her precious old paperbacks, to let engineers at JSC set fire to them. Oddly, books didn’t burn so well. The engineers called them ablators. Each page had to be on fire before the next inwards reached its scorching point, and so the books would protect themselves, shedding heat by discarding pages, like a spacecraft entering an atmosphere…)
The book was 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke, a yellowing paperback from 1971. She wasn’t a sci-fi buff, but this book had always been a favorite.
It charmed her that this wonderful old book also featured another ship called Discovery, heading for the moons of Saturn. But Clarke’s nuclear-powered Discovery was all of four hundred feet long, and in its pressure hull, a spacious hall thirty-five feet across, a carousel rotated fast enough to simulate lunar gravity. (Too small, she thought wistfully; Poole and Bowman would have been knocked sideways by Coriolis, and spent their lives throwing up.)
The truth was, she thought sadly, 2001 had come and gone, and the book, like the work of Wells and Verne before, had mutated into a period-piece, a description of a lost alternate world. But at least, she thought, she had been spared Hal.
She let go of the book. It drifted off into the air like a yellowing bird, and the residual strength of its cracked spine closed it up, losing her place.
It had been a pretty good day. She’d managed to get through the whole, of it without encountering the others once.
She closed her eyes.
In the end, the launch actually brought Barbara Fahy some favorable publicity. NASA’s PAO presented her as the woman who had lost Columbia, but who had redeemed herself by making the right decisions when rogue USAF officers had tried to shoot down Endeavour. It was a neat feel-good story. Even if not everyone agreed that those USAF assholes had gone rogue.
Hadamard promoted her out of Building 30, to a more senior program management role. But she found her time occupied by PR: TV interviews and newspaper profiles and goodwill tours.
Hadamard even asked her to accompany him to China.
Thus she found herself as part of a NASA-USAF party, headed up by Hadamard, on a goodwill visit to the Xi Chang launch center. Incredibly, Al Hartle came along, the notorious Chinese-basher who everyone suspected was at the heart of the X-15 plot. But Hartle was a close ally of Xavier Maclachlan, and in exercises like this, many constituencies had to be pacified.
They were flown into the sprawling city of Chengdu, at the heart of the green and mountainous Sichuan province, and then driven in a fleet of air-conditioned limousines toward the launch center. There, they would be met by Jiang Ling, the first of China’s dozen or so astronauts, who Fahy had gotten to know a little during her trip to Houston three years earlier.
Looking around the car at her companions — Hadamard’s passive stare, Hartle’s ferocious, paranoid bald-eagle scowl — she suspected that none of them really wanted to be here. This “friendship” tour was an empty gesture.
But the gesture was the whole point.
The White House had more or less forced this trip on NASA and the Air Force. Every poll indicated that Maclachlan was going to storm the election at the end of the year, and after that all bets were off; the outgoing Administration wanted to do whatever it could to cement Sino-American relations while it had the chance, before Maclachlan started building walls around the nation. Fahy applauded the motive; one look at Hartle’s body language today was enough to show her how fragile any kind of China-U.S. accord was likely to be.
But the huge reality of China soon began to overwhelm Fahy, diminishing the internal calculations of the Americans to absurdity.
The heart of Chengdu was impressive, but the city was choked by a huge shanty-town, a constricting girdle of wood and paper snacks. Children sprawled by the roadside. They stared at the cars, their bare bellies swollen, their palms lifted to their pretty, empty faces in the universal sign for “please.”
Out of the conurbation itself the convoy entered the eternal Chinese countryside. Fahy caught high-speed glimpses of peasants, scratching at the soil, as their forebears must have done for centuries. China was crowded: everywhere there were more people than she had expected — impossibly many of them, working in the dried-out paddies or stumbling along the fringe of the highways or squatting by the road.
Fahy was stunned by her glimpses of the immensity of the Chinese landscape, the huge human resources of the nation.
Like most modern Americans, she had never set foot outside the U.S. before, even though she had worked on a mission to another planet. But she was shamed to find how little she had really seen and understood of her own world.
The space center itself was little more than twenty years old. It had been designed as China’s door to geosynchronous orbit, using its Long March fleet. The center was cupped by green-clad hills. The sky was blue, the air fresh and clear; the party were taken around by car and golf-cart buggy.