Time

‘3753 is not in the main belt. In fact, it’s a near-Earth object, like Reinmuth. What the astronomers call an Aten.’

Malenfant nodded. ‘So its orbit mostly lies inside Earth’s.’

‘It was discovered in Australia. Part of a routine sky watch run out of the Siding Springs observatory. Nobody’s done any careful spectral studies or radar studies. But we think it’s a C-type: a carbonaceous chondrite, not nickel-iron, like Reinmuth. Water ice, carbon compounds. It probably wandered in from the outer belt – far enough from the sun that it was able to keep its volatile ices and organics – or else it’s a comet core. Either way, we’re looking at debris left over since the formation of the Solar System. Unimaginably ancient.’

‘How big is it?’

‘Nobody knows for sure. Three miles wide is the best guess.’

‘Does this thing have a name?’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Cruithne.’ He pronounced it Crooth-knee. ‘An ancient Irish name. The ancestor of the Picts.’

Malenfant was baffled. ‘What does that have to do with Australia ?’

‘It could have been worse. There are asteroids named after spouses, pets, rock stars. The orbit of Cruithne is what made it worth naming.’ Cornelius pointed to numbers. ‘These figures show the asteroid’s perihelion, aphelion, eccentricity …’

Asteroid 3753 orbited the sun in a little less than an Earth year. But it did not follow a simple circular path, like Earth; instead it swooped in beyond the orbit of Venus, out further than Mars. ‘And,’ said Cornelius, ‘it has an inclined orbit …’ Cornelius’s diagrams showed 3753’s orbit as a jaunty ellipse, tipped up from the ecliptic, the main Solar System plane, like Frank Sinatra’s hat.

Malenfant considered this looping, out-of-plane trajectory. ‘So what makes it a moon of the Earth?’

‘Not a moon exactly. Call it a companion. The point is, its orbit is locked to Earth’s. A team of Canadian astronomers figured this out in 1997. Watch.’

Cornelius produced a display showing the orbits of Earth and Cruithne from a point of view above the Solar System. Earth, a blue dot, sailed evenly around the sun on its almost-circular orbit. By comparison, Cruithne swooped back and forth like a bird.

‘Suppose we follow the Earth. Then you can see how Cruithne moves in relation.’

The blue dot slowed and stayed in place. Malenfant imagined the whole image circling, one revolution for every Earth year.

Relative to the Earth, Cruithne swooped towards Venus – inside Earth’s orbit – and rushed ahead of Earth. But then it would sail out past Earth’s orbit, reaching almost to Mars, and slow, allowing Earth to catch up. Compared to Earth it traced out a kind of kidney-bean path, a fat, distorted ellipse sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Venus.

In the next ‘year’ Cruithne retraced the kidney-bean – but not quite; the second bean was placed slightly ahead of the first.

Cornelius said, ‘Overall 3753 is going faster than the Earth around the sun. So it spirals ahead of us, year on year …’ He let the images run for a while. Cruithne’s orbit was a compound of the two motions. Every year the asteroid traced out its kidney bean. And over the years the bean worked its way along Earth’s orbit tracing out a spiral around the sun, anti-clockwise.

‘Now, what’s interesting is what happens when the kidney bean approaches Earth again.’

The traced-out bean worked its way slowly towards the blue dot. The bean seemed to touch the Earth. Malenfant expected it to continue its spiralling around the sun.

It didn’t. The kidney bean started to spiral in the opposite direction: clockwise, back the way it had come.

Cornelius was grinning. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? You see, there are resonances between Cruithne’s orbit and Earth’s. When it comes closest, Earth’s gravity tweaks Cruithne’s path. That makes Cruithne’s year slightly longer than Earth’s, instead of shorter, as it is now. So Earth starts to outstrip the kidney bean.’ He ran the animation forward. ‘And when it has spiralled all the way back to where it started –’ Another reversal. ‘Earth tweaks again, and makes Cruithne’s year shorter again – and the bean starts to spiral back.’

He accelerated the timescale further, until the kidney bean ellipses arced back and forth around the sun.

‘It’s quite stable,’ said Cornelius. ‘For a few thousand years at least. Remember a single kidney bean takes around a year to be traced out. So it’s a long time between reversals. The last were in 1515 and 1900; the next will be in 2285 and 2680 –’

‘It’s like a dance,’ said Malenfant. ‘A choreography.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

Although Cruithne crossed Earth’s orbit, its inclination and the tweaking effect kept it from coming closer than forty times the distance from Earth to Moon. Right now, Malenfant learned, the asteroid was a hundred times the Earth-Moon distance away.

After a time Malenfant’s attention began to wander. He felt obscurely disappointed. ‘So we have an orbital curiosity. I don’t see why it’s so important you’d send a message back in time.’

Cornelius rolled up his softscreen. ‘Malenfant, NEOs – near-Earth objects – don’t last forever. The planets pull them this way and that, perturbing their orbits. Maybe they hit a planet, Earth or Venus or even Mars. Even if not, a given asteroid will be slingshot out of the Solar System in a few million years.’

‘And so –’

‘And so we have plausible mechanisms for how Cruithne could have been formed, how it could have got into an orbit close to Earth’s. But this orbit, so finely tuned to Earth’s, is unlikely. We don’t know how Cruithne could have got there, Malenfant. It’s a real needle-threader.’

Malenfant grinned. ‘And so maybe somebody put it there.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘We should have known. We shouldn’t have needed a signal from the downstreamers, Malenfant. That Earth-locked orbit is a red flag. Something is waiting for us, out there on Cruithne.’

‘What?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘So now what?’

‘Now, we send a probe there.’

Malenfant called back George Hench. The engineer prowled around the office like a caged animal.

‘We can’t fly to this piece of shit, Cruithne. Even if we could reach it, which we can’t, Cruithne is a ball of frozen mud.’

‘Umm,’ Cornelius said. ‘More to it than that. We’re looking at a billion tons of water, silicates, metals, and complex organics – aminos, nitrogen bases … Even Mars isn’t as rich as this, pound for pound. It’s the primordial matter, the stuff they made the Solar System out of. Maybe you should have planned to fire the probe at a C-type in the first place.’

Malenfant said evenly, ‘George, it’s true. We can easily make an economic case for Cruithne –’

‘Malenfant, Reinmuth is made of steel. My God, it gleams. And you want to risk all that for a wild goose chase with your la-la buddy?’

Malenfant let George run on, patiently. Then he said, ‘Tell me why we can’t get to Cruithne. It’s just another NEO. I thought the NEOs were easier to reach than the Moon, and we got there forty years ago.’

George sighed, but Malenfant could see his brain switching to a different mode. ‘Yeah. That’s why the space junkies have been campaigning for the NEOs for years. But most of them don’t figure the correct energy economics. Yes, if you look at it solely in terms of delta-vee, if you just add up the energy you need to spend to get out of Earth’s gravity well there are a lot of places easier to get to than the Moon. But you need to go a chart deeper than that. Your NEO’s orbit has to be very close to Earth’s: in the same plane, nearly circular, and with almost the same radius. Now, Reinmuth’s orbit is close to Earth’s. Of course it means that Reinmuth doesn’t line up for low-energy missions very often; the orbits are like two clocks running slightly adrift of each other –’

‘So tell me,’ Malenfant said heavily, ‘why Cruithne is so much more difficult.’

George ticked the problems off on his fingers. ‘Cruithne is twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. Plane changes are very energy-expensive. That’s why the Apollo guys landed close to the Moon’s equator. Two. Cruithne’s orbit is highly eccentric. So we can’t use the low-energy Hohmann trajectories we employ to transfer from one circular orbit to another, for instance in travelling from Earth to Mars. Changes to elliptic orbits are also energy-expensive. Three –’

Malenfant listened a while longer.

‘So you’ve stated the problem,’ said Malenfant patiently. ‘Now tell me how we do it.’

There was more bluster and bullshit and claims of impossibility, which Malenfant weathered.

And then it began.

George produced mass statements for the BDB and its payload, began to figure the velocity changes he would need to reach Cruithne, how much less manoeuvring capability he would have, how much less payload he could carry there compared to Reinmuth. Then he began calling in an array of technicians, all of whom started just as sceptical as himself, most of whom, in the end, were able to figure a reply. They called up Dan Ystebo at Key Largo to ask him how little living room his pet squid really, truly could survive in. Dan was furious, but he came back with answers.

It took most of the day. Slowly, painfully, a new mission design converged. Malenfant only had to sit there and let it happen, as he knew it would.

But there was a problem.

The present spacecraft design packed enough life support to take Sheena 5 to Reinmuth, support her work there, and bring her home again: she was supposed to come sailing into Earth’s atmosphere, behind a giant aeroshell of asteroid slag.

But there was no way a comparable mission to Cruithne could be achieved.

There was a way to meet the mission’s main objectives, however. In fact it would be possible to get Sheena to Cruithne much more rapidly.

By cutting her life support, and burning everything up on the way out.

For Sheena, a Cruithne voyage would be one way.

Emma Stoney:

From Emma’s perspective, sitting in her office in Vegas, everything was starting to fall apart.

The legalistic vultures were hovering over Malenfant and his toy spaceships, and meanwhile the investors, made distrustful by rumours of Malenfant’s growing involvement with bizarre futurian types, were starting to desert.

If Malenfant had made himself more available, more visible to shore up confidence, it might have made a difference. But he didn’t. Right through Christmas and into the New Year Malenfant remained locked away with Cornelius Taine, or holed up at his rocket test site.

It seemed to Emma events were approaching a climax. But still Malenfant wouldn’t listen to her.

So Emma went to the Mojave.

Emma stayed the night in a motel in the town of Mojave itself. She was profoundly uncomfortable, and slept little.

Her transport arrived before dawn. It was an Army bus. When she climbed aboard, George Hench was waiting for her. He had a flask of coffee and a bagel. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. She accepted gratefully; the coffee was industrial strength, but welcome.

The other passengers were young engineers, trying to sleep with their heads jammed in corners by the windows.

The drive out to the BDB test site was dull but easy. The sun had risen, the heat climbing, by the time they hit the thirty-mile road to Malenfant’s BDB launch complex – or launch simplex, as he liked to call it.

Hench jammed open the bus window. ‘Natural air conditioning,’ he said, cackling.

She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.

Hench shrugged. ‘They’ll sleep.’

At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.

The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.

There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People – engineers, most of them young – moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.

And there was the pad itself, the centre of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown Shuttle external tank and the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would some day ride into space.

Hench said gruffly, ‘I’ll tell you, Ms Stoney –’

‘Emma.’

‘Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design … but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything fail before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished …’

And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls – he even had a spanner in a loop at his waist – and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.

‘So what do you think of Nautilus? Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘Kind of rough and ready.’

Malenfant laughed. ‘So she’s supposed to be.’

An amplified voice drifted across the desert from the launch pad.

‘What was that?’

Hench shrugged. ‘Just a checklist item.’

‘You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?’

Malenfant said, ‘Demonstration test only. We’re planning two tests today. We’ve done it a dozen times, already. Later today we’ll even have that damn squid of Dan Ystebo’s up in the payload pod, on top of a fully fuelled ship. We’re ready. And Cruithne is up there waiting for us. And who knows what lies beyond that. As soon as you can clear away the legal bullshit –’

‘We’re working on it, Malenfant.’

Malenfant took her for a walk around the booster pad, eager to show off his toy. Malenfant and Hench, obviously high on stress and adrenaline, launched into war stories about how they’d built their rocket ship. ‘… The whole thing is a backyard rocket. It has Space Shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from a MD-11 airliner. In fact the BDB thinks it’s an MD-11 on a peculiar flight path. We sent the grad school kids scouring through the West Coast aerospace junkyards, and they came back with titanium pressure spheres and hydraulic actuators and other good stuff. And so on. Assembled and flight-ready in six months …’

He seemed to know every one of the dozens of engineers here by name. He was, by turns, manipulative, bullying, brutal, overbearing. But he was, she thought, always smart enough to ensure he wasn’t surrounded by sycophants and yea-sayers.

Maybe that’s why he keeps me on.

‘How safe is all this, Malenfant? What if the ship blows up, or a fuel store –’

He sighed. ‘Emma, my BDBs will blow up about as often as a 747 blows up on take-off. The industries have been handling LOX and liquid hydrogen safely for half a century. In fact I can prove we’re safe. We’ve kept the qual and reliability processes as simple as possible – no hundred-mile NASA paper chains – and we put the people on the ground in charge of their own quality. Qual upfront, the only way to do it.’ He looked into the sun, and the light caught the dust plastered over his face, white lines etched into the weather-beaten wrinkles of his face. ‘You know, this is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘Right now this is Kitty Hawk. You got to start somewhere. But some day this will be a true spaceport.’

‘Like Cape Canaveral?’

‘Oh, hell, no. Think of an airport. You’ll have concrete launch pads with minimal gantries, so simple we don’t care if we have to rebuild them every flight. We’ll have our own propellant and oxidizer manufacture facilities right here. The terminal buildings will be just like JFK or O’Hare. They’ll build new roads out here, better rail links. The spaceport will be an airport too. We’ll attract industries, communities. People will live here …’

But she heard tension in his voice, under the bubbling faith. She’d gotten used to his mood swings, which seemed to her to have begun around the time he was washed out of NASA. But today his mood was obviously fragile, and, with a little push, liable to come crashing apart.

The legal battle wasn’t won yet. Far from it. In fact, Emma thought, it was more like a race, as Bootstrap lawyers sought to find a way through the legal maze that would allow Malenfant to launch, or at least keep testing, before the FAA inspectors and their lawyers found a way to get access to this site and shut everything down.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow I have to confront him with the truth. The fact that we’re losing the race.

As the sun began to climb down the blue dome of sky, Emma requested an Army bus ride back to her motel in Mojave. There she pulled the blinds and spread out her softscreen. She fired off mails, ate room service junk, tried to sleep.

… The phone rang, jarring her awake. It was Malenfant.

Go to your window.

‘What?’

I’m simplifying a few bureaucratic processes, Emma.

He sounded a little drunk. And dangerous. She felt a cold chill settle at the pit of her stomach. ‘What are you talking about?’

Go to the window and you’ll see. I’ve been talking to Cornelius about Doctor Johnson. Once Johnson was asked how he would refute solipsism. You know, the idea that only you exist, all else is an illusion constructed by your mind …

She opened her shutters. In the direction of the test range, a light was spreading over the bottom half of the sky: a smeared yellow-white rising fast, not like a dawn.

Johnson kicked a rock. And he said, ‘I refute it thus’…

Oh, Malenfant. What have you done?’

They came to shut me down, Emma. We lost the race with those FAA assholes. One of those smart kids of George’s turned out to be an FBI plant. The inspectors arrived … They would have drained the Nautilus and broken her up. And then we’d never have reached Cruithne. I decided it was time to kick that rock. Emma, you should see the dust we’re raising!

And now a spark of light rose easily from the darkened horizon, climbing smoothly into the sky. It was yellow-white, like a fleck of sunlight, and it trailed a pillar of smoke and steam that glowed in the light spark.

She knew what that was, of course. The yellow-white was the burning of the solid propellents of the twin boosters, half-combusted products belching into the air; the central hydrogen-oxygen main engine flame was almost invisible. Already, she could see, the arc of the climbing booster was turning east, towards the trajectory that would take it off the planet.

And now the noise arrived, rocket thunder, billowing over her like the echo of a distant storm.

This is just the beginning, Malenfant whispered.

2

DOWNSTREAM

And so some day

The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe

Ringed around with hostile force

Will yield and face decay and come crumbling to ruin …

– LUCRETIUS

Sheena 5:

Drifting between worlds, the spacecraft was a miniature planet, a bubble of ocean just yards across.

The water was sufficient to protect its occupants from cosmic and solar radiation. And the water sustained concentric shells of life: a mist of diatoms feeding off the raw sunlight, and within them, in the deeper blue water, a shell of krill and crustaceans and small fish schools, hunting and browsing.

And, at the centre of it all, a single enhanced cephalopod.

… Here was Sheena, swimming through space.

Space: yes, she understood what that meant, that she was no longer in the wide oceans of Earth, but in a small, self-contained ocean of her own that drifted through emptiness, a folded-over ocean she shared only with the darting fish and the smaller, mindless animals and plants on which they browsed.

She glided at the heart of the Nautilus, where the water that passed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the assemblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black mass before her, suspended in dark water, lights winking over its surface, weeds and grasses clinging to it. Sheena saw no colours; she swam through a world of black, white and grey. But she could discern polarized light; and so now she saw that the light which gleamed from the polished surfaces of the machinery was subtly twisted, this way and that, giving her a sense of the solidity and extent of the machinery.

When the ship’s roll took her into shadow, she hunted and browsed.

She would rest on the sand patches that had been stuck to the metal, changing her mantle colour so as to be almost invisible. When the fish or the krill came by, all unawares, she would dart out and snatch them, crushing them instantly in her hard beak, ignoring their tiny cries.

Such simple ambushes were sufficient to feed her, so confused did the fish and krill appear in this new world which lacked up and down and gravity. But sometimes she would hunt more ambitiously, luring and stalking and pursuing, as if she was still among the rich Caribbean reefs.

But all too soon the ship’s languid roll brought her into the light, and brief night gave way to false day.

Rippling her fins, she swam away from the machinery cluster, away from the heart of the ship, where she lived with her shoals of fish. As she rose the water flowing through her mantle cooled, the rich oxygen thinning. She was swimming out through layers of life, and she sensed the subtle sounds of living things washing through the sphere: the smooth rush of the fish as they swam in their tight schools, the bubbling murmur of the krill on which they browsed, and the hiss of the diatoms and algae which fed them, and the deep infrasonic rumble of the water itself, compression waves pulsing through its bulk.

And just as each successive sphere of water was larger than the one it contained, so Sheena knew there was a hierarchy of life. To sustain her, there had to be ten times her weight in krill, and a hundred times in diatoms.

And if there had been other squid, of course, those numbers would increase. But there was no other squid here but herself.

For now.

She could see, through misty, life-laden water, the ship’s hull, a membrane above her like an ocean surface. Except that it wasn’t above her, as it would be in a true ocean. And there was no sandy ocean floor below. Instead the membrane was all around her, closed on itself, shimmering in great slow waves that curled around the sphere’s belly.