“Failing?”

“The country is suffering a severe water shortage. You must realize this is a global phenomenon. The Earth offers us only a finite amount of fresh water each year. Global warming is depleting the supply. And as the population and water usage grows, we may soon pass a fundamental limit… In China, much agriculture is water-intensive. The rice paddies, tended for a hundred generations, are drying out. So what is there to do? Life in a Shenzhen dorm — ten to a room, stinking metal bunks, locked in to mitigate against theft — may be horrible, and prostitution may be morally foul. But it is better than starvation in a parched field. And then there are the plagues. Tuberculosis is the worst—”

Fahy couldn’t help but flinch at that.

Jiang’s hold on her arm tightened. “Don’t worry. There are monitors at the border fence, and medical patrols within. The TB is excluded from the city; cases are rare.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my own safety,” Fahy said, but she was lying. “There must be solutions to the water problem,” she said. “Dams, river diversions—”

“For many years such schemes have been proposed,” Jiang said. “There is a scheme to dam the Yangtze below the Three Gorges, for example, and another to divert half the Yangtze’s waters to the arid north. But the West has been reluctant to invest in such projects. Environmental concerns are raised, for example.”

“That must be valid.”

“But perhaps also there are ulterior motives: a continuing desire to contain China, to restrict its growth, using environmental factors as a pretext.” Jiang’s face, masked by her colorful softscreen glasses, was unreadable, betraying no resentment; her voice was even.

They walked near the river, the Lohu, and the stink of hydrocarbons from the polluted water made Fahy think of the surface of Titan.

Jiang led her to a park called Splendid China. This was a kitschy theme park with models of Chinese wonders, like the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square and the Potala Palace in Tibet. This was what passed for Shenzhen culture, said Jiang.

They walked past a little model of a Long March, and a toy Lei Feng Number One suspended on a wire.

Jiang laughed at this. “I can buy myself here, as a doorstep god,” she said, “How strange life is!”

They called into a tea shop; they sat in comparative comfort and sipped hot jasmine tea — decaffeinated, Jiang assured her.

An old man went by taking his canary in its cage for its constitutional. He encountered another owner on a small grass space outside a broken-down apartment building; they held up their birds, and stayed silent, while the birds sang to each other. Somewhere, the voice of a sim-Elvis — probably pirated — was crooning a song called, said Jiang, Ah, Chairman Mao, How the People from the Grasslands Long to Behold You.

Fahy studied Jiang, discreetly. The slim girl she had met back in Houston in ’05 was still there, she thought, but now Jiang looked much older: strained, disoriented.

“You look tired, Jiang Ling,” she said.

Jiang smiled. “Three years of touring the world. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to return to my first love.”

“Flying.”

“Yes.” Her face worked. “But I understand I am too valuable in my symbolic role. How I envy you.”

“Me?”

“You worked on the voyage to Titan. You showed vision and perseverance. And now, the fact that you are prepared to continue with your work even after the latest setback—”

“You mean the RLV deferment.” Hadamard had been forced to accept another scaling-down of the Shuttle replacement project, another deferment of hardware delivery and testing. The current funding problems were the result of preliminary maneuvering in Congress as the members tried to position themselves for the new climate to come when, as expected, Maclachlan took the White House later in the year.

The current scenario showed a Titan colony being resupplied by payloads delivered by a series of unmanned boosters — Delta IVs or Protons, probably — while some new manned capability, based on a Shuttle II, was developed, so they could be retrieved. But that possible retrieval date was receding further and further into the future. And if Maclachlan was elected — and did everything he said he would — it was quite possible even the resupply strategy would be allowed to wither altogether.

Fahy refused to believe the dire worst-case predictions mouthed in the NASA centers. Was it really possible that some future Administration would actually choose to abandon Americans, on a remote world, without hope of retrieval or resupply…?

Despite brutal controls, China’s population had grown to one and a half billion — a quarter of all the humans alive. Of those, a billion lived as peasants in the interior. And, it was estimated, as many as a hundred million lived in squalor and poverty in the shanty-town fringes of the glittering cities.

More than a billion people, she thought, living in a cage, imposed by the continuing technological dominance of the West, and the rigid grip of the ageing Party hierarchy.

As long as the cage held, maybe things could persist. But it was all so damn unstable.

China was not what she expected. China was different. China wasn’t just another geopolitical foe, like the Soviets used to be. It seemed to Fahy, sitting here in this tea shop, that China was the huge soul of humanity, its grandeur; and now that soul was waking, and America, with its tin-foil technology and rocket-ships, seemed remote and fragile, a land of fools.

The future was bewildering. Not for the first time she wished she was travelling with Paula Benacerraf, leaving this huge, messy planet for the clean simplicities of spaceflight.

A group of young people moved into the restaurant. Their faces and hands were invisible, as if made of glass. They sat in silence at their table. They wore plain Mao suits and caps. Their exposed flesh must be uniformly coated with image-tattoos which, thanks to some smart arrangement of microcameras, projected images of the background to each piece of flesh, so that their heads and hands looked invisible. They were even wearing softscreen contact lenses over their eyes, and their heads must be shaven of hair and lashes and beards.

Of course the illusion wasn’t perfect; there was a vague sense of shape and form in the diffraction of light through the imaging systems, and whenever a hand or face was moved too quickly the imaging systems would lag, and the illusion would be briefly lost. But perhaps those imperfections, Fahy thought, merely added to the oddly repulsive fascination of the adornments.

She pointed them out to Jiang, who looked surprised.

“You’ve not seen this before? It is a new cult among the young. The Nullists. The cult of non-existence of the self.”

“Good grief… I thought I’d seen everything. What is this, some kind of protest against the net clampdown?”

“You are being parochial, Barbara. Remember, we never enjoyed the brief freedom of the net indulged by the West. No, it is, I think, a consequence of the way we explain ourselves and our world to the young. Science and economics: science, which teaches that we come from nothing and return to nothing; economics, which teaches us that we are all mere units, interchangeable and discardable. Science is already a cult of non-existence, in a sense. The most extreme adherents coat their bodies in image-tattoos, hiding themselves utterly. The Nullists are a strange mixture of scientific and Zen influences.”

“Good grief. It’s the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m sorry. An old Kurt Vonnegut book. I haven’t seen this before.”

“But the world is a small place. I’m sure it will spread to the U.S…”

Fahy thought again of Xavier Maclachlan, of the anti-science mood he seemed determined to tap.