“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 terms 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?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. Hell.” The screen flashed up a blasphemy-filter warning.

“Jake, I didn’t want this job in the first place. How am I supposed to carry it through if you don’t keep me informed?”

“Washington’s a tough place right now. Do you really want me to involve you in every battle I have to fight?”

“If it involves the lives of our crew,” she said, “the only crew we have up there, then, hell, yes, I do.” Blasphemy warning. She poked reflexively at the softscreen, but there was no longer any way to turn off the obscenity filters. “We’ve already stranded them up there, without hope of retrieval. If we cut the resupply—”

“I know the implications,” he snapped. “I’m not a fool, Barbara. But right now there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I can’t win every battle. I have to pick my ground.”

“What ground is more important than this, the lives of—”