At a count of twelve, Angel shuddered. He coughed, his throat dry and ragged.

Later, Benacerraf was at a squawk box, listening to the insectile voice of a capcom, the words eighty minutes old. The capcom was enthusing about the images they had received during the Saturn closest approach. Already NASA was receiving requests for the commercial rights, and there were believed to be hundreds of illegal hacked-up VR copies running through their cycles even now, out in the net.

She stared into a monitor.

Discovery was receding from Saturn now, skimming back, briefly, towards the sun, and the planet was once more turning its full face to the spacecraft. The cloud bands were sharply distinguished, though more subtle and yellowish than Jupiter’s. Along the fringe of one band at the equator Benacerraf could see turbulence, oval clouds like cells. The rings themselves cast a shadow, a thin, complex line, over the milky equator of Saturn’s daylit hemisphere. The shadow was curved, an exercise in projective geometry. And the rings had a lacy, tenuous appearance, so that she could see the curve of the bright limb of the planet through their structure.

There was nothing to compare to this experience.

This was not, she thought, even like travelling from Earth to Moon, from one closed-up sphere to another. They had journeyed for years, into the huge outer wastes of the Solar System, and entered orbit around this metahuman artifact, this structure of rings and spheres that could fill up the Earth-Moon system.

It is the dream of a million years, she thought, to be here and see this.

Rosenberg drifted in, and took her through Angel’s injuries.

“…Paula, you have to understand the human body is not designed to withstand vacuum. Basically the internal pressure turns it into a kind of low-tech bomb. All Bill’s internal material tried to escape, through his skin, the orifices of his head and body. Bleeding everywhere. His lungs are torn. His blood vessels have been leaking. A few more seconds and he would have drowned in his own blood. His blood must have been close to boiling in his, veins.”

“Will he live?”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Sure. For a while. We all will, for a while. But if he was at home he’d be hospitalized.”

“We aren’t at home.”

“And, Paula—”

“What?”

“His brain was starved of oxygen. I don’t even know how long for.”

That helps, she thought bleakly.

“What was that fluid, on the inside of his visor?”

“The clear stuff?” His face was neutral. “Oh, that. I did tell him to keep his eyes shut. His left eye ruptured, and—”

Benacerraf felt bile pool at the back of her throat. She made it into the waste management area in time to throw up, violently, into the commode.

She wiped her mouth on a wet-wipe, the antiseptic stinging her tongue.

In his quarters, Angel was waking up. He was starting to scream.

Voyager One flew high above the plane of the ecliptic, that invisible sheet in space which contains the orbits of the major planets of the Solar System.

Voyager was a spindly dragonfly construction, of booms and struts and instrument platforms, and a huge antenna which pointed back at Earth. Built around a compact ten-sided box, it weighed about a ton, and was big enough to fill a small house.

During its long mission, it had visited both the Solar System’s largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn. The gravitational fields of those worlds had flung Voyager onwards at such a high speed that it had broken the bonds which once tied it to the sun.

Now, Voyager One was racing across space at a million miles per day, heading for the stars.

But in the year 2014, an expected command from Earth did not arrive.

Voyager had been designed to operate during an extended lifetime and at a great distance from Earth, with an hours-long downlink-uplink communications round-trip time. Since contact with the ground would not be continuous, the spacecraft could know if it had lost contact with Earth only if it missed an expected command. So the software embedded in its engineering flight computer contained a command loss subroutine.

When the command did not arrive on schedule, an internal alarm went off.

The computer went into an algorithm designed to protect the spacecraft and its mission.

First Voyager was placed in a stable, passive state. Then, for two weeks, Voyager waited for the ground control to solve whatever problem had arisen on Earth, and to send the spacecraft a new command sequence. The basic design assumption was that the control centers would be sending a stream of commands, frantically trying to get the spacecraft’s attention.

When no command sequence was received Voyager assumed the fault was with itself. It went through an emergency routine, in a bid to reestablish contact with the Deep Space Network stations.

The procedure worked in a loop. First the computer tried to figure out whether the craft’s radio antenna was still pointing at Earth. Voyager had sensors to detect the sun, and fixed, bright stars like Canopus; it knew where it was in three-dimensional space. The craft was smart enough to know where Earth should be, relative to the fixed stars, at any moment during the extended mission.

So the software checked the angles, and the antenna was pointed at Earth.

Still no commands were detected.

Voyager’s next assumption was that its radio receiver was dead. So it shutdown its primary radio and turned on its backup receiver. It broadcast telemetry to Earth, indicating what it thought might have happened.

There was no response from Earth.

Voyager went back to the beginning of the loop, and began the reacquisition process once more…

It could not know there was nobody on Earth who was listening, any more, to voices from the sky.

The Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery sailed over the equator of Titan, five hundred miles above rust-brown cloud tops. It was flying with its payload bay facing the clouds, and its instruments, battered by their billion-mile flight, peered down at the hidden surface. The blunt heatshields of two Apollo capsules, facing Titan, glowed in the light of the world they had come so far to challenge.

Nicola Mott sat in the flight deck commander’s seat, loosely strapped in.

Titan hung above the flight deck windows, above her head.

From pole to pole, she could see no differences, no details in the drab burnt-brown clouds, no breaks, no structure. There was perhaps a subtle shading, the south hemisphere a little lighter than the north. But the light was so uncertain that Mott couldn’t be sure. And Titan was dark, darker than the enhanced Voyager and Cassini images had led her to expect, a deep dull brown rather than orange.

It was almost like the flybys of Venus again, Mott thought. Here was the same perfect sphere, the billiard-ball-smooth sheen of haze and cloud, hiding any glimpse of the ground. But the light of the sun was less than a hundredth its strength at Venus; the clouds of Venus had been dazzling white, almost blinding, like sheets of sunlight. Titan looked almost spectral, sombre, the ochre hue of its clouds drawn from the palette of some obsessive, gloomy painter.

And Titan was a small world. Its curve was evident, much more so than Earth from low orbit, and its orange-brown belly protruded at Mott, shaded, obviously three-dimensional. Discovery rolled into another two-hour sunrise. Mott watched the sun lift through the cloud layers. The thin light, occluded by the air, gave her glimpses of structure: onion-skin layers deep in the clouds, perhaps the glimmerings of faint outer shells, beyond the bulk of the atmosphere. And Saturn rise was… remarkable.