Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

In the flight simulator, she’d watched the simulated rocket’s progress on a screen in front of her, helping her translate every burst of noise and thrust into the language of stages and separations, but now she shied away from interpreting the cues, afraid of getting it wrong and convincing herself that the worst was over when it was only just beginning. The force of the engines and the shaking of the cabin made her teeth ache in ways she’d never felt before; this wasn’t brain surgery, it was some kind of gonzo dentistry.

And when everything seemed still and quiet, she refused to trust her senses. Maybe she was just numb to the onslaught, or she was blocking it out in some kind of dissociative state.

“Aisha?”

She opened her eyes. Gianni was beaming madly. He took a pen out of his pocket and released it; it floated in the air like a magic trick, like a movie effect, like her phone doing a cheesy AR overlay. She’d watched 2001 a thousand times, but this couldn’t be happening to her in real life.

He said, “We’re astronauts now. How cool is that?”

Three days later, when they disembarked at Sinus Medii, Aisha was jubilant. She summoned up her twelve-year-old self to gaze in astonishment at the blazing daytime stars and the ancient fissured basalt stretching to the horizon, then she waddled precariously forward across the landing pad like her grandmother performing water aerobics. She knew that if she did X, Y , or Z she would instantly die a horrible death—but she was no more likely to enact one of the fatal blunders she’d been warned against than she’d ever been inclined to open a window in a tall building and jump out.

Medii Base was a sprawling complex of factories and workshops open to the vacuum, but the sole pressurized habitat was about the size of a small suburban dwelling, albeit with a greenhouse in the back. Zhilin introduced the honeymooners to the staff: Jingyi, botanist and medical doctor; Martin, roboticist and mining engineer; and Yong, geologist and astrophysicist. These double-degreed geniuses all looked about thirty, and Aisha was intimidated at first, but that soon gave way to a kind of relief: envying them would be like envying an Olympic athlete. She wanted to enjoy the experience for what it was and emerge without any delusions or regrets: there’d be no if only she’d done a PhD , or it was not too late to leverage her flight hours as a passenger into a new, interplanetary career .

Jingyi sketched the whole complex system of nutrient and energy flows supporting the hydroponic crops, responding patiently to all the questions Aisha’s students had passed on to her. Martin showed them the solar-thermal smelter that was processing basaltic rubble into useful materials—albeit, so far, mostly just the silica fiber for Yong’s baby. The Moravec skyhook was a rotating cable, its length a full third the width of the Moon. Yong had spun it up to the point where the low end swung backward above the surface so rapidly as to momentarily cancel out the velocity due to its orbit. It was like a spoke on a giant wheel rolling around the Moon’s equator—except that the imaginary track it was rolling on was several kilometers above their heads, so there was no risk of decapitation even at the top of the most exuberant bound. One day the hook would grab vehicles and supplies and sling them away toward Mars. For now, it was just a beautiful proof of concept, a tireless, hyperactive stick insect doing cartwheels over their heads.

Back in their room, Aisha Skyped her father. The three-second delays were impossible to ignore, but she’d had worse between continents.

“You’re healthy?” he asked. “You’re not sick from the journey?”

“Not at all.” She’d done all her vomiting in the ship.

“I’m so proud of you. Your mother would have been so proud!”

Aisha just smiled; it would have been heartless to protest that she’d done nothing more than accept his gift.

When they finished the call, she flopped back in her chair and sighed. “Where are we, again?”

“Are you jealous of my sister scuba diving on the reefs?” Gianni joked. They’d given her the Fiji holiday; it would have been greedy to take both.

“No.” Some commentators had written sniffily that a smelter was hardly a tourist attraction. But in truth, nothing could be mundane here.

“They won’t have put cameras in the room, will they?” Gianni asked. Aisha hoped he was joking; whatever their role, it was still a notch or two above contestants on reality TV. But she shut down the computer anyway, just to be safe.

They kissed, tentatively, wary of performing some simple movement that would lead to a pratfall here. Anything that wasn’t Velcroed or magnetically locked to the floor might as well have been a banana skin.

She said, “Once we’re inside the bag, we should be right.” They undressed each other, trying not to laugh, unsure just how quiet they’d need to be to keep their neighbors from hearing.

“When your father asked me if I’d go on this trip, I almost said no,” Gianni admitted.

Aisha frowned. “Well, that’s a real turn-on.”

“I was trying to be honest.”

“I’m joking!” She kissed him. “I almost chickened out a dozen times myself.”

“Then I’m glad we both stuck with it,” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure this is going to make us happy for the rest of our lives.”

Aisha had switched her watch’s default display to Dunedin time, so she wouldn’t miss her appointment to talk to the school. She woke around six, showered, then stood by the sleeping bag and prodded Gianni’s shoulder with her foot.

“Do you want to get up and have breakfast?”

He squinted at his own watch. “It’s two a.m.!”

“Only in Beijing. Come on… you need to be sitting next to me when I call the kids, or they’ll just spend the whole hour asking me what you’re doing.”

When they’d eaten and made themselves presentable, they sat down in front of the computer and powered it up. It booted without any problem, but when Aisha opened Skype, it told her that she had no connection to the internet.

“Maybe we’re out of view of the dish,” Gianni suggested.

“I thought they had us covered around the clock.” There were ground stations in Mongolia, Nigeria, and Honduras, and no one in the training camp or on the base had mentioned a particular time window for contacting Earth.

Gianni frowned. “Did you hear that?” The gentle thump had sounded like the air lock’s inner doors closing.

They walked out into the common room. Martin had just returned from outside; he was still suited, and holding his helmet.

“We’re having communications problems,” he said.

“Oh.” Aisha hesitated. “Is it going to be easy to fix?” Forget about her disappointed students; Martin and his colleagues were stuck here for another four months, and if they didn’t have the right replacement parts on hand, the link could remain broken until the new crew arrived.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing wrong at our end.”

“Okay.” Aisha wasn’t sure why his tone suggested that this was bad news. “So when we switch over to a different dish…?”

Martin said, “We should have been through one handover already.”

“So the problem’s at mission control?” Gianni suggested.

“No.” Martin sounded harried. “We should be getting carrier from the dishes themselves, whatever’s happening at Dongfeng.”

Aisha was bewildered now. “How can there be two separate problems at two different dishes, halfway around the world?”

Martin shook his head. “I have no idea.”