In the living room, Jackie Benacerraf was sitting on the floor. She was surrounded by softscreens and books, which she was pawing through and tapping desultorily. On the wall, apparently unnoticed by Jackie, a softscreen bore the image of Paula Benacerraf’s face — pale, a little haggard, her grey hair floating around — against a dimly-seen background of clunky, beat-up hab module interior. Paula was talking quietly, describing how the surviving crew all were, what they were doing, their daily routine, their science observations.

Jackie looked up at White. She smiled, but it looked forced. “Hi. You didn’t need to come out, you know.”

He shrugged, standing there awkwardly. “It’s not a problem. I thought somebody ought to.”

“Yeah.” She stood up, a little stiffly. She looked to have aged, too, to White. How old was she now? — no more than thirty, surely… Her face had lost a lot of its prettiness, he thought sadly; her skin already looked slack and lifeless, her eyes deep-shadowed, and he thought she was putting on weight, though the black, softscreen-sequined kimono she was wearing masked a lot of that. Her hair was a close-cropped black fuzz, and there were pale patches on her cheeks where she had had old image-tattoos removed.

“So,” she said without enthusiasm, “you’re here. You want a meal? Are you hungry?”

“No. I ate on the plane. A coffee would be good, though.”

She smiled. “Let me guess. Black, sugar, caffeine.”

“Almost. I take it white. You have any cream?”

She pulled a face. “Are you kidding? Take a seat.”

He sat on the end of a sofa. He had to clear a space, move aside some softscreens and books. The cushions were too soft, and he knew he would have trouble getting up later; but it was, he admitted to himself, a relief to sit down again.

He heard her banging around, the hum of a microwave. “We’re all out of caffeine,” she called.

“Forget it. I’ll take it as it comes.”

Paula Benacerraf kept on talking.

…You have to try not to worry. We aren’t in despair; no way. The whole point of this trip was to figure out how we could become self-sufficient up there. Now, that list has a little extra sharpness. And we have Rosenberg, who’s a bright guy, and you can be sure when we get to Titan we’ll be doing our best to figure out how we can use the local resources to…

The quality of the image was poor; big blocky pixel faults crawled over Paula’s face like organized, repetitive insects. Benacerraf’s personal message would have been recorded, digitally compressed, and then fired off in a brief pulse from Discovery to Goldstone, probably as filler along with another data stream.

He understood how hard it was for Paula to express herself in such a situation. Space was a mixture of the bland — the endless dull routine, the business of survival — and the deadly. And in the midst of all the routine stuff, how could you talk of your fears, without sounding lurid and indulgent? But if you didn’t, how could you communicate with the folks at home?

Damn, damn. Paula Benacerraf was an impossibly brave woman, and she had been betrayed, by NASA itself. The anger, the near-grief he’d been nursing since that asshole Hartle had started issuing his draconian edicts came bubbling to the surface once more.

He turned away, looking for distraction.

Under the layers of softscreens the walls were just plaster, he saw, white-painted. Nobody decorated their home any more, he thought, save for throwing up these damn screens. Jackie’s home was a kind of shell of shifting light shapes, like an underwater cave, nothing permanent, nothing worthwhile, nothing owned.

No wonder the kids these days are going crazy, he thought.

He flicked through Jackie’s softscreens, until he found some news, an online edition of the Seattle Times.

Lousy economic figures once again: the depression seemed to be deepening, with more trade barriers going up around the world, capital fleeing from one country to another. Australia was the latest to have run into the buffers. There were pictures of queues for some kind of new-millennium soup kitchens in Sidney and Melbourne, starving kids in the outback, swollen pot-bellies that made White think of pictures of Africa rather than anywhere with an Anglo-Saxon background.

He had been born during one great depression, he thought; maybe he was going to die during another.

There was more trouble from the Nullists, this time some kind of pipe bomb in New York. And the negotiations between Washington DC and Boise over the future of the nuclear silos were getting stalled again, and there had been some kind of border-crossing incident near Richmond, Utah…

Here was a piece on the new Pope — some Italian cardinal called Carlo Maria Martini, who’d taken the name John XXIV — coming to visit Idaho, the first major figure from the outside world to do so. Maybe some of the conspiracy nuts were right: the guys who thought that Idaho, Christian-Fundamentalist as it was — even more extremely so than Xavier Maclachlan’s America — was being funded in its secession by the Catholic Church, which, in the wake of the uprise of fundamentalism all over the planet, seemed to be trying to reemerge as a global force.

It wasn’t impossible, as far as Marcus White was concerned. He was even prepared to believe that the Catholics had been working, covertly, with Islam for years, in defence of common precepts on sexuality and reproduction. Some said it went all the way back to John Paul II, the last Pope but one…

The news drizzled on, depressing, a series of high-tech images of timeless human foolishness and misery.

It seemed to Marcus White beyond dispute that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. But then, maybe every old geezer who ever lived thought the same way.

Jackie came back in, carrying a coffee and a can of diet soda for herself. She sat with him, at the far end of the sofa, her gaze drifting around the junk in the room.

White killed the softscreen. He sipped the coffee gratefully; it was bland, lacking the charge he felt he needed from the caffeine, but at least, he thought, he should get a boost from the sugar.

She said, “I don’t really understand why you’re here.”

“You don’t…? Barbara Fahy asked me to fly over. It’s a kind of tradition, at times like this.”

“Times like what?”

He frowned. “Your mother’s situation.”

“Her situation.” She smiled. “The truth is, NASA has abandoned my mother, left her to die up there. Why not just say it?”

He said doggedly, “It’s a tradition to send an astronaut, or an astronaut’s wife, to break news like this. The theory is we understand how this feels, better than anyone else.”

“You aren’t breaking the news,” she said mildly. “I heard already.” She pointed to Paula’s image, ignored, still working through its message on the wall. “I got a notification from Al Hartle’s office. In fact I heard it first from the net news, the public stuff…”

He grunted. “It wasn’t headline. How did you — ?”

“News gophers, of course,” she said. She smiled, a little more kindly. “You really are behind the times, Marcus.”

“Whatever.” He felt irritated, to his shame a little petulant. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t have come. It’s a tradition, is all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t mean to be so sharp. It’s just that I have my head full of other stuff. Here. Look at this junk.”

She picked up one of the softscreens; it was scrolling through some kind of text, with diagrams, on religion.

He scanned it quickly. It was — he read, bemused — a modern rework of the Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas, issued by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

“It’s what they’re teaching the kids at school now; by law, every parent has to learn this stuff too.”

He said, “The Foundation was the group behind Maclachlan.”