2051 MD; or

In token of my debt for his genius and labor, this story is dedicated to

HERMAN MELVILLE.

From: Ivy Martin <IKMartin@JohnsonCharles.law>

To: Rajesh Ogunyemi <Raj@KodiakPlanet.space>

Subject: RE: Who is this madman?

Raj,

Please convey once again my appreciation to the KPI Board for their patience with this process. We are still going through Mr. Almanza’s account of the Carthage incident. We had hoped to provide an initial draft of our report to the Board by this date. However, as you know, the unprecedented scale of the loss has led to several official inquiries. Our efforts to facilitate KPI’s cooperation with the authorities have diverted significant time and resources.

While we complete our review of Mr. Almanza’s record, please find below a brief glossary (“Nomenclature”) that my associate put together for our forthcoming report on the Carthage incident, plus some “Historical References.” The Board members might find some of this useful while they look over the Almanza file.

I haven’t had time to read all the References myself, so feel free to give them a thorough chop before sending on to the Board.

Cheers,

Ivy

Notwithstanding the fact that natural objects in outer space have been a matter of scientific observation for several millennia, and a subject of commercial enterprise for almost a century, significant confusion continues to surround the names of these bodies. This confusion is rampant in the popular press and even extends to commercial and legal correspondence. To address this confusion, we provide the following definitions:

“ASTEROID,” a rocky and/or metallic celestial body that orbits the Sun or another planetary body, and which is too small to generate enough self-gravity to form a spherical shape.

“CELESTIAL BODY,” this term appears frequently in scientific and even legal documents (see, e.g., Outer Space Treaty arts. I-XIII) yet it remains officially undefined.

“COMET,” a large celestial body of rock and ice that orbits the Sun.

“METEOR,” a celestial body that enters a planet’s atmosphere.

“METEORITE,” a meteor that strikes the ground.

“MINOR PLANET,” a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite of another planet or dwarf planet.

“MOON,” a celestial body in orbit around a planet or minor planet.

“PLANET,” a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Humans have watched, wondered at, and awaited objects in outer space since time immemorial. Records of some of the earliest surviving human communications contain references to planetary, solar, and/or “celestial” objects. These references appear in the written and spoken histories of almost all civilizations for which records still exist. The oldest evidence comes to us across temporal gaps of several thousand years, having made tortuous journeys across physical and linguistic borders, including passage through nations and languages now long gone. Therefore, the astute reader will consider these extracts of the historical record with caution, as one might regard a meal whose ingredients, preparers, and servers are not well-known.

“Then the Lord rained down sulfur and fire from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah. He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with all their inhabitants and the produce of their soil.”

Genesis

“The chief presages of [Julius Caesar’s] death were the appearance of a comet, his father Drusus’s monument being struck by lightning, and the death of most of the magistrates of all ranks that year.”

De vita Caesarum – Suetonius

“But my father Anchises joyously raised his eyes to the skies and uplifted to heaven his hands and voice: ‘Almighty Jupiter, if you are moved by any prayers, look upon us – this only do I ask – and if our goodness earn it, give us your aid, Father, and ratify this omen!’

“Scarcely had the aged man thus spoken, when with sudden crash there was thunder on the left and a star shot from heaven, gliding through the darkness, and drawing a fiery trail amid a flood of light. We watched it glide over the palace roof and bury in Ida’s forest the splendor that marked its path; then the long-drawn furrow shone, and far and wide all about reeked of sulfur. At this, indeed, my father was overcome and, rising to his feet, saluted the gods and worshiped the holy star.”

Aeneid – Virgil

“No man is so utterly dull and obtuse, with head so bent on earth, as never to lift himself up and rise with all his soul to the contemplation of the starry heavens, especially when some fresh wonder shows a beacon-light in the sky. As long as the ordinary course of heaven runs on, custom robs it of its real size. . . So this concourse of stars, which paints with beauty the spacious firmament on high, gathers no concourse of the nation. But when there is any change in the wonted order, then all eyes are turned to the sky. . .

“The same thing holds in regard to comets. If one of these infrequent fires of unusual shape have made its appearance, everybody is eager to know what it is. Blind to all the other celestial bodies, each asks about the newcomer; one is not quite sure whether to admire or to fear it. Persons there are who seek to inspire terror by forecasting its grave import. And so people keep asking and wishing to know whether it is a portent or a star. But, by my honor, no one could embark on a more exalted study, or master a more useful branch of knowledge than that which treats of the nature of the stars and planets. . .”

Natural Questions – Seneca

“[A comet] is generally regarded as a terrific star, and one not easily expiated; as was the case with the civil commotions in the consulship of Octavius, and also in the war of Pompey and Caesar. And in our own age, about the time when Claudius Caesar was poisoned and left the Empire to Domitius Nero, and afterwards, while the latter was Emperor, there was one which was almost constantly seen and was very frightful. It is thought important to notice towards what part it darts its beams, or from what star it receives its influence, what it resembles, and in what places it shines. If it resembles a flute, it portends something unfavorable respecting music; if it appears in the parts of the signs referred to the secret members, something respecting lewdness of manners; something respecting wit and learning, if they form a triangular or quadrangular figure with the position of some of the fixed stars; and that someone will be poisoned, if they appear in the head of either the northern or the southern serpent. . .”

Natural History – Pliny

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the Sun will be darkened, and the Moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

The Gospel According to Matthew

“And when the leader had quieted the crowd, he said, ‘Men of Ephesus, what man is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple guardian of the great Artemis, and of her image, which fell down from Zeus?’”

The Acts of the Apostles – Luke

“It is also requisite to notice, with respect to general events, the risings or first appearances of those celestial phenomena called comets, whether presenting themselves at ecliptical times or at any other periods. They are displayed in the shape of beams, trumpets, pipes, and in other similar figures, and operate effects like those of Mars and Mercury; exciting wars, heated and turbulent dispositions in the atmosphere, and in the constitutions of men, with all their evil consequences.”

Four Books – Ptolemy

“A large shooting star like a bushel fell onto the rebel Lu Ming-yueh’s camp. It destroyed his siege engine and crushed to death more than ten people.”

Suí Shū, The Official History of the Suí Dynasty

“We have already sent Our messengers with clear evidence, along with the scripture and the rest so that the people may maintain their affairs in justice. We have also sent down iron, wherein there is great military might and benefits for the people, and so that Allah may make evident those who support Him and His messengers unseen.”

The Quran

“Almighty Allah sent a revelation to Abraham, saying, ‘Build for me a house on earth!’ This command disturbed Abraham greatly, so Allah sent down a strong wind. . . The wind whirled around itself at a certain point like a coiling snake, so Abraham began to build a house there. When the time came for a stone to be added, Abraham said to his son: ‘Help me find a stone.’ Ishmael searched and found a stone, but when he brought the stone to his father, Ishmael found that the black stone had already been set in its place. Ishmael asked his father, ‘Where did you get that?’ Abraham replied: ‘From someone who does not need your assistance. Gabriel brought this stone down from heaven.’ With that stone, Abraham finished the house of Allah.”

The Life of the Prophet Muhammad – Ibn Kathir

“ . . . In the year 1456, in the Summer time, a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the Sun . . . Hence I dare venture to foretell that it will return again in the year 1758.”

A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets – Edmond Halley

“There came a horrendous explosion; a thunderbolt clanging in the air

Multisounding: and there fell a burning stone,

Shaped like a Grecian Delta, triangular with three sharp corners,

Singed and earthy and metalliferous,

It fell obliquely through the air

As though hurled from a star like Saturn.

Ensisheim felt the force of it; all Suntgaudia felt it

As it plunged into a field and devastated the ground . . .

The Roman honor and German nation

Stand by you, oh highest King.

Take as truth that the stone was sent to you,

God warns you in your own land

That you should arm yourself,

Oh mild King, lead out your army

Let armor clang and roar of guns

Let triumph resound:

Curb the swollen pride of France

Preserve your honor and your good name.”

On the Thunderstone fallen in the Year [14]92 before Ensisheim – Sebastian Brant

“The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d

And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;

The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth

And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;

Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,

The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,

The other to enjoy by rage and war:

These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.”

The Life and Death of King Richard the Second – William Shakespeare

“It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812- the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly- like an arrow piercing the earth- to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.”

War and Peace – Tolstoy

“‘I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” Oh! I am looking forward to that.’”

Mark Twain, A Biography: 1835-1910 – Albert Bigelow Paine

“Last night was a most beautiful night. The moon shone so brightly as to almost blot out the stars; a gentle breeze from the James [River] fanned one’s features with just enough motion to produce a feeling akin to inspiration, and I made my bed outside, as the thought of a crowded tent on a night like this seemed unbearable. And there I lay dreaming day-dreams far into the night.

“I watched the comet, wondering if that mysterious little visitor was not perhaps at the same time watched by eyes that would beam gladly into mine; and I composed quite a number of beginnings of addresses to the curious thing, whatever it may be. But the comet is now tired of his visit to these regions of space, or disgusted it may be with the appearance of things on this side of our planet, for he is now leaving in seemingly greater haste than he came, with his tail between his legs, for the unknown regions out yonder.

“Well, good-by and fare thee well, Stranger. And I fervently hope that thou mayst see the face of the Earth beaming with smiles where now her frowns are lowering, on thy next visit, if that should be while this little world is still in existence.”

The Long Roll: Being a Journal of the Civil War, as set down during the years 1861-1863 – Charles F. Johnson, Private, U.S. Army

DATE/TIME/ZONE: 2120-11-21 10:18:51 UTC

BEGIN RECORDING:

This is Mission Specialist Almanza of the U.S.M.V. Carthage.

I can’t tell if this is working.

My name is Turghun Almanza. My location . . . I can’t see. It’s getting hotter. My status is critical. I am- I don’t know. I’m alone.

PAUSE RECORDING.

START RECORDING:

Since there is a good chance I won’t make it back, I should explain how I ended up here. My friends and family must be wondering what happened to me. If they ever find out, I’m sure they’ll wonder how I got myself into this situation, and why.

People who know me know that I make it my business to go to space. It’s not easy; it’s a hard choice that I don’t regret even now, if you can believe that. I have often found it difficult to explain this choice- or, I should say I’ve found the explanation to be either impossible or unnecessary. To some, my desire- my need to go to space is unfathomable; the dangers of hard vacuum, extreme heat and cold, radiation, isolation, and hypersonic debris being so horrendous as to defy any logical explanation for seeking them out. To others, my motives are self-explanatory; of course I want to explore the universe. Who wouldn’t? But to those I leave behind, I owe at least my best attempt at an explanation, and it’s not like I have much else to do in my current circumstances.

Speaking of, there’s a good chance that this recording won’t survive the next few days, or even the next few hours, but I think this old disk drive is a lot more rugged than my squishy human form, so I’m putting my story down here. This may be nothing more than a shout into the void. Then again, what isn’t? Look upon my cockpit voice recorder, ye mighty, and despair! Anyway, there’s no point in worrying about that right now. Maybe someone will find this record. If not, then there will be some little orbit in the solar system that’s forever a part of me, and of Tala, Qara, Schmidt, Amos, Rakkesh, Dmitry, everyone – even Athalie; especially Athalie. Before I get ahead of myself, here’s our story, starting with mine:

I realized a few years ago, when I was running low on money and ways to make myself useful that I needed a more elevated perspective. Whether by aircraft, spaceplane, or rocket, I find the best way to get my mind functional is to give it altitude, the more the better. Whenever I can’t bear to open an info feed and hear any more talk about the issues of the day, I know it’s time to get myself to a launch pad or runway. Otherwise, I fear that someone will find me eventually with my eyes glued to a screen and dueling mixtures of uppers and downers coursing through my veins or stopped therein. Friends of mine like to throw themselves into epic rhetorical battles with foes real and imaginary in their info feeds. As for me, I would rather learn a few checklists, get myself fitted for an extravehicular suit, and strap in for a launch. I think everyone would benefit from a little time up here, at least anyone who has ever been impressed by the sight of stars.

Luckily for me, my home in Brooklyn has more than its fair share of roads to space. Spaceplanes take off daily from Floyd Bennett Field, where the maglev rail rushes them quietly down the runway and into the air so as not to disturb the residents nearby. Listen carefully, though, and you might just hear the hum of the aerospike throttling up as a plane gains altitude and distance to the southeast. On a quiet day, you might even hear the faint boom, which registers softer than a car-door slamming way over in Rockaway, as the plane turns east and goes supersonic in its race to orbit.

Not to be outdone by the runway jockeys, a fleet of hovercraft dock at a dozen wharves from Newtown Creek to Seagate and carry passengers and crews to the great vertical launch platforms off the Jersey coast. Whenever I stand by the rail of the hovercraft pier, I note with some melancholy that most of those gathered around me, and even a fair amount of the hovercraft passengers, have not come for a trip into space. For them it is enough to watch others go down to the sea, shipping out for business in the great depths of space.

Whenever we launch, you can find them watching us. They see us in a corner of their work screen, on a wristpad as they ride to or from a date, or as a speck on the ocean horizon, just visible from the top deck of a hovercraft floating north of the launch complex’s min-safe line. They crane their necks upward like their ancestors might have done on the beaches near Cape Canaveral. Coast Guard and police vessels must constantly patrol to keep boats from wandering too close to the launch platforms. Dire warnings of flaming death are necessary to keep back the gawkers who would trespass into the rockets’ blast zone with drinks raised or cameras held in outstretched arms to frame their holders’ thrilled faces against the backdrop of ballistic flight.

Of course, this fascination with space isn’t unique to city dwellers. To the contrary, one of the many appeals of living or traveling far from a metropolis is the reduction of light pollution and the resulting visibility of multitudes of stars. Take the busiest, most absorbed person and put them in an open field on a clear, cloudless night and see whether they stop for at least a moment to look up at the stars in wonder. See how long they stare.

For centuries, our popular arts have grown almost obsessed with space travel. Starting with a few novelists and spreading ever more rapidly to comics, radio, and films, then to television, games, streams, VR, AR, every manner of media; space travel has seized and held the high ground of popular imagination. How many stories have featured intrepid space voyagers traveling higher, further, and faster, achieving more than any living person? How many new worlds, galaxies, and civilizations did the authors and artists conjure? How many billions of Earth’s residents, all but a few million of whom would never leave their planet’s atmosphere, could cite chapter and verse from stories of star pilots, space knights, and weird, wild, alien worlds? I dare say that certain spacecraft, which have only existed as images, models, and toys, are better known than any real vessel that ever plied the sea, air, or space.

I think the dream of space endures because, when we look out into our ever-expanding universe, we see no end of possibilities. Any freedom, any opportunity, any danger, any good, and any evil may be found somewhere among those effectively infinite points of light.

Of course, I have not been content to dream of space, nor have I satisfied myself by watching the stars float by from the comfort of a passenger cabin. I think I would find that tiresome. My love of spaceflight comes from the feeling of making myself useful; doing my little part to extend humanity’s reach into the cosmos. I have looked into a few other professions, but none seem to have quite the same importance as confronting the most brutal realms of the solar system in the service of mankind; “retiring risk,” as the old timers used to say. Making a slightly larger section of the universe a little safer and more prosperous for humanity seems like a worthwhile reason to face down the multitudinous horrors lurking just on the other side of the spacecraft’s hull.

That’s why I go to space as a crewmember; usually a mission specialist, occasionally a payload specialist if I’m qualified on the gear. I’ve done a bit of piloting, but not much (until very recently). There is usually a long line of applicants waiting for a pilot assignment, many of them eyeing the ladder toward command. That isn’t my style. I don’t mind riding on someone else’s spaceship as long as I get to contribute my little part to the mission. Also, pilots are the least likely members of the crew to go extravehicular, catching a few breaths of “fresh” spacesuit air outside the spacecraft. If I don’t think I’m going EV on a mission, I’ll be tempted to stay home and let screens eat a few of my days.

For these reasons and more that I’m probably forgetting, I’ve always been perfectly happy to serve as a crewmember, spending hours outside picking micrometeoroids out of solar panels, wrapped in an EV suit at the end of a tether. I’d rather do that than command my own spacecraft. Even captains have bosses. While the captains are in their cabins worrying over spreadsheets and trying to craft the most pleasing reports for their admirals or investors, humble crewmembers like myself are out on tethers or grappling arms, hacking away at regolith or inspecting heat shields, looking up once in a while to watch Earth or some other world rotate slowly by.

My crew service has usually been on passenger transports and cargo tugs. I’ve done a few thousand orbits and a couple dozen Earth-Moon runs. I also did two Mars trips, including one where I made boot prints (we just orbited on the other flight) plus one Europa fly-by, hauling a bunch of scientists and their gear.

With that background, I suppose it is somewhat odd that I ended up on a mining crew; a type of work I’d never done before. It didn’t seem very significant at the time. I imagine that my departure attracted minimal notice among my friends and relatives. Maybe it popped up briefly in some of their feeds between headlines about the election in Afghanistan.

I’ve never thought of myself as a believer, but I know a few people who feel quite adept at interpreting the influence of sacred, systemic, structural, and otherwise intangible forces in their lives. Indeed, such a person is chiefly responsible for me being in my present circumstances, but I’ll explain all that later. In any case, for those readers who believe they can divine some insight from learning the circumstances of my joining the U.S.M.V. Carthage, I will describe them as best I can remember – and maybe with a little help from my wristpad notes.

Also, as I’ve said, it doesn’t look like I will have anything else to do for a while. I’ve got nowhere to go, except continuing my path around the Sun, but I guess the same could be said of any of us. We are all in a gravitational dance with some planet or moon, or maybe a star, which itself is doing a little bit of push and pull around some other, greater mass that spins around some even greater mass, et cetera, until all the lines loop around the center of the universe. We circle and influence each other in a constant dance of action and reaction, only occasionally stopping to wonder whether and where our own choices begin and end in this cosmic waltz. Do we at least choose what we wonder? I don’t know. I have never found wondering about those kinds of things to be particularly useful.

Where was I? Oh right: asteroid mining. I remember being drawn to mining work because I was fascinated by miners’ tales of confronting the lifeless hulks of rock and ice that lurk silently throughout the Solar System. Even now, after all that has happened, there is still a haunting majesty about asteroids that gives me goosebumps.

I have also learned, from hard experience, that the miners’ quarry includes another class of celestial body. From out in the Kuiper Belt or even the Oort Cloud, way out past Neptune, a thousand times farther- maybe a hundred thousand times farther from the Sun than Earth itself, monsters approach. These great lumbering beasts emerge from the darkness and drift, ever so slowly at first, down the gravity well toward the Sun. Over time, their deliberate passage accelerates, drawing them faster and ever faster toward perihelion, the bottom of their elliptical orbit, closest to the Sun. Their increasing proximity to the Sun’s massive gravity speeds them along until, racing at their greatest speed, they make their closest approach. Blasted by solar radiation as they pass close to the Sun, the icy water within these leviathans vaporizes and bursts outward, forming a huge plume of ice crystals and debris, an enormous white tail that can extend for millions of kilometers out into space. The interlopers complete their turn around the Sun and the very same forces of immense gravity that drew them close now slingshot them back out into the depths of the solar system, gradually slowing as they rise back up the gravity well, heading back out into the darkness toward aphelion, the highest point in their orbit, in the distant realms of Kuiper or Oort, where they slow almost to a stop before turning Sunward and plunging down the well again.

“Comets,” we call them. They are recognizable by their watery ice, which burns away in the Sun’s photonic winds to form tails so massive that you could spot one with a naked eye from your home on Earth, Moon, or Mars. Asteroids are comets’ less dramatic cousins, usually orbiting the Sun without blazing white pennants to announce their arrivals or departures. From Earth they all seem pleasant enough, journeying across the sky from time to time, sometimes waving tails like signal flags to anyone who cares to look up. But for those who chase them up and down the gravity well, who hope to capture some of their resources, these icy behemoths are as deadly as anything in the solar system. There is also something wildly alien about them, especially the comets. Their journeys take them so far from our Sun that they might as well be visitors from a foreign solar system. To lay hands on such a thing, I thought, would be like reaching beyond the human experience. Incidentally, it could also make someone rich.

So, it was to be a mining mission for me. I made my preparations, arranged my affairs, and suspended my accounts. The whole time, I tried to imagine what it might be like to step out of an airlock and confront such a giant; a dirty snowball the size of a mountain or a mountain range, tumbling through space, spouting geysers of gas, mist, and debris furiously in all directions, racing around the Sun and dragging a deadly, lucrative tail of ice crystals.

I saved a few new libraries in my wristpad and reserved a space on the next spaceplane with an open space for a ride to, well, space.

We took off from Floyd Bennet Field on the maglev rail. The plane’s aerospike purred to life when we were a few kilometers above the Atlantic, just south of Jones Beach. The engine throttled up and I could feel myself tilting back in my seat as the plane pitched up, way up, more than 45 degrees above straight-and-level flight. The plane was racing to get up into the thin air, where the aerospike engine could kick into a higher gear, so to speak. We soon broke the sound barrier, which meant that we were moving too fast to hear the sonic boom echoing faintly over the Long Island shore behind us.

The plane continued rising into higher, thinner air. Having started from sea level just over a minute earlier, we were almost as high as Mount Everest and climbing faster with every passing moment. We doubled the speed of sound in less than half the time it had taken to break Mach 1. We soon tripled the speed of sound, but at this point there would be no more sonic booms because the atmosphere outside the plane was too thin to provide enough friction against the plane.

As we cleared the stratosphere, the aerospike really got to work. The plane throttled up to full power and I felt the acceleration push me firmly into my seat. I was unable to move my head without effort, so I stopped trying to look out the window. Instead, I watched the velocity and altitude numbers rising ever more rapidly on the screen built into the seat-back in front of me. We were now moving ten times faster than the speed of sound. Lightning might have been flashing in the Atlantic clouds below, but the thunder would never catch us.

Seconds later, we were moving twenty times faster than a thunderclap. In my peripheral view I could sense the sky darkening out the window. The plane was leveling off. Our pitch dropped lower so the nose of the plane was aimed only a few degrees above the horizon, which now curved in front of us in a hazy blue arc. Still, we accelerated.

Within minutes, the spaceplane and its venerable aerospike engine had accelerated us from a dead stop on the ground in Brooklyn to Mach 25, the speed at which we now orbited Earth. A few minutes later I saw a Cush Network station growing larger on the screen mounted to the seat in front of me; the view from our bow camera. A few minutes after that, I felt the gentle thump of the docking clamps as our plane attached itself to the station.

I don’t recall if it was because of a weekend or a holiday but I had missed the last cislunar shuttle and would have to wait for the next available flight to my destination, Shackleton Base near the Moon’s south pole. A quick look and listen around the CushNet’s terminal module confirmed what I suspected: most of my fellow passengers would not be standing by for a ride to Shackleton. The majority had already contracted for work on ships docked here, at the CushNet, but I had other ideas. I would make my way to the Moon’s south pole and find myself a mission from one of Shackleton’s storied launchpads.

Even though CushNet stations have been multiplying throughout Earth’s orbit and drawing an ever-larger share of the deep space vehicle traffic, so much so that the CushNet docks now outnumber the old Shackleton pads, the Shack remains, in my humble opinion, the grandmother of the deep space industry; the site where humans first drew rocket fuel from soil other than Earth’s. Shackleton was the birthplace of the first indigenous human civilization to arise in centuries. It spawned an industry that made the first human missions to Mars possible. It launched prospecting probes and barely shielded crew capsules to the asteroid belt in search of ice and other consumables, armed with nothing but some printed harpoons of dubious quality to seize the great rocks, plus a few hand-crafted mirrors to melt their snowy gravel.

Unfortunately, I would have to wait at least a day before I could catch the next cislunar shuttle to the Shack, so I resolved to find a place to catch some sleep in the CushNet. Looking around the quickly emptying Arrivals terminal, I suddenly felt a little lonely. Knowing exactly what I would find, I checked my account status on my wristpad and saw that I had only enough currency for a few nights’ lodging at an extremely modest price, after which a low-balance notification would probably prompt someone from Station Security or the Space Command office to put me on a shuttle back to my home of record on Earth. I looked up and down the corridor and told myself that this was no time to be choosy about accommodations.

Here at the outermost ring of the CushNet station, the rotation of the structure created an artificial gravity that was almost Earth-normal. It wasn’t exactly like home, though, so I strode somewhat deliberately down the corridor in search of lodging. The first habitation module I came to along the corridor wall was called “Lance,” but a quick glance through the hatch revealed that it was clearly at capacity. The next module I found was called “Terl’s,” which announced itself before I even saw it by the thumping musical beats that oscillated down the ring corridor. By the looks of the clientele on the dance floor, it seemed like a fine place to spend an evening or two, but decidedly outside of my price range. There was even a line of smartly dressed astronauts leading up to the hatch, like you might find outside one of the trendier bars in Hunts Point, and I knew I would only embarrass myself if I made it to the front of the queue. Resigning myself to a bit of neurological discomfort, I climbed a nearby ladder to the slower rotating inner ring of the Cushnet Station. I then continued my search in the inner ring’s decidedly less Earth-like gravity conditions.

It took me some time to adjust to the reduced gravity in the inner ring. I had to keep reminding myself which way was “down,” at least conceptually. Several of the hatches I passed by on the walls were sealed shut, perhaps because the CushNet hadn’t found anyone willing to pay the modest fee to dock a module in such low gravity. Other hatches apparently served basic functional modules like groceries and repair shops, but they were all deserted at this hour (the CushNet ran on UTC Time, and it was past midnight in that regard). Finally, I found a hatch that was half-way open with a light on inside and could hear someone speaking within. Pulling myself through the hatch as much with my arms as my legs, I bumped my head against a genealogical caliper and let out an involuntary grunt of pain.

Looking around, I felt like I had stumbled into a court on the verge of doing some horrible justice. The people’s faces were strained, their bones all but showing through pale cheeks. They glared at me for my interruption of their proceedings. Looking past them, I saw their instructor or commissar standing at the far end of the module, raising his voice and trying to draw the crowd’s attention back to the dreadful images flashing on a screen. It was a political assembly of some kind. I made a careful apology, turned my face toward the hatch, and exited before anyone thought to record me.

Growing impatient, I bounded along the corridor for a few more minutes until I found another half-open hatch with an apparently hand-written sign outside that read, “The Influencer.” The name seemed tasteless, probably a joke, but I wasn’t in much of a position to be picky. It was getting late, and I didn’t much fancy the idea of throwing myself down to sleep against the wall of the corridor. Station Security might have something to say about that. I reasoned that a hotelier who didn’t bother to print their sign (or use an algorithm to generate a cleverer name) probably wouldn’t charge too much for a room, so I set my suspicions aside and ventured in.

The module felt slightly off-kilter when I entered. It apparently hadn’t docked quite evenly against the CushNet’s ring. Due to the slight tilt of the module, its floor wasn’t precisely perpendicular to the sense of “down” I felt from the station’s artificial gravity. As a result, it felt like I was always tilting slightly toward one wall.

Rather than pay spacewalkers to go out and adjust the module’s mounting angle to the station, someone had hit upon the economical solution of carving semicircular grooves into the tables to prevent plates, bowls, and glasses from sliding onto the floor. Standing or sitting, much less eating, in such a place might be enough to make a rookie astronaut vomit, but I’m proud enough to say that after closing my eyes for a moment and leaning my body just so, I found the sensation of misdirected gravity no more troubling than a stiff breeze on Earth.

Sadly, one can’t spend all of one’s time in a module closing one’s eyes and leaning into the off-kilter gravity. I had to look around to walk around, and in doing so I had to withstand the troubling effects of vertigo. I’m able to accept my own humble limitations with a modicum of patience, at least for as long as I can manage it, but I know there are plenty of others who are not so fortunate - who could barely spend an hour, much less a day, in such a disorienting environment without vomiting or dry-heaving. Ah, well. Someday there will be a cure for that, too. If medicine cannot correct the effects of inner-ear disequilibrium, perhaps our inner ears themselves, or the neurons connected to them, might be altered to be less fastidious about arbitrary conventions like “up” and “down.”

Anyway, I’ve got a mining story to tell, and plenty of real hardship to come that will leave my space adaptation syndrome seeming pale in comparison. Therefore, allow me to introduce you to “The Influencer.”

A semi-classic film was playing, projected on the left-hand wall as I entered the module’s cantina. Most of the patrons ignored it, enjoying their meals and drinks from the bar. The module’s speakers were playing music instead of the film’s sound. I suppose I could have connected my earpiece to the wireless network to hear the film’s audio feed, but I was too tired and not quite curious enough to tune in and listen.

Perhaps the most unsurprising thing about the film was its space-related theme. Most hotels in low Earth orbit, on the doorstep of the solar system, are crowded with self-consciously space-themed entertainments in the same way that sea-side resorts are full of nautical paraphernalia. From the quality of the special effects, I could tell that the film was very old, decades before my time. It was an asteroid-impact thriller, which meant that it was set in the years before the space industry as we know it, at a time when spacecraft and telescopes were so few and far between that Earth was still exposed to surprise impacts from dangerous asteroids and comets.

I ordered a late dinner and a whiskey (not trusting my stomach to handle anything carbonated in this low gravity) and ate quietly by myself while occasionally glancing up at the film on the wall screen. The story opened like many early films of the genre: a great big rock is heading for Earth, and the only way to save humanity from extinction is to quickly jury-rig nuclear fission bombs on top of heavy-lift launch vehicles (or hope the audience doesn’t know that ICBMs can’t reach deep space) and then try to explode these hastily-assembled devices in or around the great big rock, hoping that the now radioactive debris will not crash down to Earth.

These stories depicted a desperate and savage response by a barely space-competent civilization, but they sometimes made for fine cinema. They were made in the days before prospectors and mining rigs routinely spotted asteroids years before they became dangerous and gently guided even the largest ones into harmless orbits where their metals could be used to make solar panels and reactor walls instead of crashing spectacularly into inhabited worlds. I turned my attention to my meal.

Looking back up at the wall screen a little later, I realized that I may have mis-dated the film by a few years. In addition to the standard nuke-the-rock plan that dominated early asteroid movies, the characters in this one also considered the less dramatic option of dismantling the asteroid in orbit. Although the latter option is more realistic, being the day-to-day job of millions of people around the modern solar system, nuking the rock is much more fun from a cinematic point of view. When these films were made, nobody had ever seen a fission bomb explode in space; indeed, no one has seen such a thing to this very day, except for myself and a few others – but I shouldn’t get ahead of my story. Anyway, one of the things I find frustrating about these later asteroid movies is that the conflict is usually not between the people and the asteroid; not a matter of humans versus nature itself. Instead, this genre tends to wallow in a lot of totally unnecessary fights between a handful of sensible engineers, who want to seize control of the asteroid, and some thinly sketched military characters who want to blow the thing up for no discernible reason other than a juvenile desire to see the big rock go boom.

Ordering another whiskey, I watched the film continue to play silently on the wall and awaited a lab-coats-versus-uniforms confrontation, which strangely never came. After a while, I suspected that this movie fell into another subgenre of science fiction altogether, a story type that thankfully went out of fashion long ago. One might describe this category as, “Maybe the apocalypse wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.” Figuring that was where the film was headed, I turned my seat toward the bar, flipped on my wristpad, and read an article on asteroid capture techniques.

The barkeeper, whom I later learned to be the concierge and proprietor of this establishment, sidled over for a peak at the article I was reading. “Looking to do some mining?” she asked.

“I am,” I told her.

“First time?” she asked. She must have guessed from a glance at my flight bag. None of the mission patches sewn on it were from mining companies.

“First time mining, yes,” I answered.

She gave me a knowing nod. “You’ll want to start with the Khan course on fastening methods. Look here.” She sent a link from her wristpad to mine, which I opened. “Best to begin with harpoons, pitons, and rock anchors.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I said.

“I spent twenty-five years on mining rigs. Started out with Olympus Mines, worked my way up the ranks, eventually caught a break and got an LM pilot job with KPI. I flew with them until I was ready to quit and open up my own shop,” she said, rapping the bar with her knuckles. I looked down at the mottled-gray, polished surface of the bar and considered the concierge’s story. It then occurred to me that the bar top might not be a synthetic polymer made to look like marble, as I had assumed.

“Is this real?” I asked.

The concierge nodded, smiling. “My retirement present. One hundred percent genuine carbonate, from 2091 SC, my last catch. Some of my crewmates knew I was planning to open my own watering hole, so they convinced the captain to let them have this. They carved and polished it into a bar top for me.”

I observed how the single piece of stone extended seamlessly around the entire length of the bar, running more than halfway across the entire cantina. “Must have been a big rock,” I said.

The concierge scoffed. “That little guy was nothing. We barely even spotted him, even though we knew where to look. You get out there on a mining rig, you’ll see mountains.”

I tried to imagine climbing along the side of a mountain as it tumbled through space. Unconsciously, I placed a hand on my stool and pulled myself more firmly down onto it.

“You need a place to stay?” the concierge asked. I told her I did, and she replied that her rooms were all booked up, but if I really needed a place for the night, I could share a room with one of her guests.

“They won’t mind?” I asked.

“Not at all,” said the concierge. “She’s been out giving head around the station all week. She’ll be happy to jump into bed with you, believe me.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this comment, whether it was a joke or not. The concierge certainly wasn’t any help. I hoped the concierge would clarify her remark, but before I could ask another question a notification flashed on the concierge’s wristpad. She turned to the rest of the patrons and announced, “Must be your lucky day, boys and girls. The Gratias Piscibus just got back from Saturn. A round on the house as soon as they come through that door!”

Feverish anticipation gripped the room, and I was caught up in it just as much as anyone else. The free drinks were beside the point. It’s a rare day when you meet people who have flown among the moons of Saturn. I myself have travelled no farther than the Jupiter system, and that seemed like an epic journey at the time, being more than five times as far from the Sun as Earth itself. A journey to Saturn is nearly twice as far. The Sun, which had seemed so small and dim when we looked back toward it from Europa, would be hard to distinguish from other stars for an astronaut circling Saturn.

Minutes later, members of the Gratias Piscibus’s crew began straggling into The Influencer, individually and in small groups. One of them turned out to be a fellow named Crosby, whom I would encounter again a few days later. Crosby and the other new arrivals met with cheers from the crowd of patrons, after which the proud but tired voyagers were most insistently encouraged to sit down, have a drink, and start talking.

“Did you fly over the rings?”

“How high were the Enceladus plumes?”

“What do you think of terraforming Titan? Is it ethical? Is it possible?”

After much entreating from the crowd, Crosby pulled open a video file on his wristpad, which the concierge projected onto the wall screen. The four-quadrant film showed the views from the G.P.’s exterior cameras as the ship passed through the Maxwell Gap in the middle of Saturn’s C ring. The entire room was silent for more than a minute as we all watched, spellbound, the ship’s passage through the massive gap in Saturn’s rings. A wall of icy particles rushed toward the craft and, after a momentary, disorienting transition, it was suddenly rushing away. All the while the great gas giant, Saturn, loomed in the distance, casting its shadow dramatically across the plane of rings. Even the ship’s crew, who had doubtless seen these videos dozens of times, who had witnessed these sights with their own eyes as they undertook the heroic passage, were as silent and reverent as the rest of us while the film played out on the wall screen.

Unlike most of my fellow patrons, I soon took pity on the exhausted arrivals, who quite clearly wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and a place to lie down. I excused myself from the bar and headed toward Room 3, which the concierge had assigned me to share.

When I stepped into the room, I was disappointed to see that my roommate was already in bed and apparently asleep. She must have slipped through the cantina while the other patrons and I were congratulating/interrogating the Gratias Piscibus’s crew. I’d have to wake her. Before I did, though, I noticed that her arms and shoulders, which were exposed above the blanket, were devoid of tattoos. Curious, I picked up the blanket by one corner and raised it so I could see more of her. There appeared to be no body art of any kind on her back and legs. It’s not that I have anything against a person without tattoos, mind you, but it’s just not something I was used to seeing in a woman her age. I started to wonder whether she didn’t have a single tattoo on her entire body, and I looked forward to finding out for certain.

A loud and angry shout broke this train of thought. It came from my new roommate, who had evidently just noticed my presence and had several questions, largely of the rhetorical variety, about “who the devil” I was, and why I was in her room, lifting her blanket to stare at her.

“I’ve never seen a body like yours,” I answered simply, expecting her to take my double entendre as a compliment. She did not.

“That’s not an answer!” she retorted. She bolted from the bed and wrapped the blanket around herself. She quickly extended one foot under the bed and placed it on a black case that had been stowed under the bed, dragging the case toward herself. Holding her blanket fast around her torso with one hand, she reached down with the other and picked up the case by its handle, clutching it toward her body.

I wondered why the black case was important enough that she would seize it during this moment of stress, but before I could ask about it, my new roommate instructed me to turn around, punctuating her command with a shout, “Now!”

Mystified, I turned around and tried to clarify whatever misunderstanding had just occurred.

“Look, I’ve got a full health check. It’s authenticated,” I said, raising my wristpad over my shoulder so she could see the certificates flashing across the screen.

“I don’t care about your health,” my roommate immediately replied, deepening my confusion.

“This is Room 3, right?” I asked, knowing how foolish the question seemed in a hotel module with only five rooms.

“Yes, it’s Room 3,” said my roommate. I could hear her opening drawers from the wall cabinets and putting clothes on.

“Alright, well, the concierge said I could share Room 3. She said you wouldn’t mind, especially since you-” I stopped myself.

“Especially since I what?” asked the voice over my right shoulder.

I hesitated for a moment, then blurted it out: “She said you’ve been giving head around the station.” I flinched as soon as I said it, expecting something heavy, perhaps the black case, to strike me in the back.

Instead, my roommate treated me to a long and painful silence. Finally, I heard, “Turn around.”

I turned slowly, keeping my eyes down on the slightly slanted floor until I could see in my peripheral vision that my roommate was dressed in long-sleeved exercise clothes. I looked up to her face and saw a layer of self-discipline struggling to control a sea of fury. She turned and punched the wall button for the room’s communicator system and barked an order: “Concierge.”

The concierge soon appeared on the wall screen. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

In the decidedly tense conversation that followed, the concierge explained to my roommate, apparently for the first time, that she would be sharing her room with me for the evening. A brief negotiation about amendments to her bill ensued. With that settled, my roommate ended the chat by punching the wall button again and turned to address me.

“I suppose that where you come from-” she started, then stopped herself and started over. “Would I be correct in guessing that, in your experience, it is not particularly meaningful when people engage in sexual relations?”

“I guess not,” I replied.

“And you regard sexual relations in such a casual manner,” she continued. “That you assumed I wouldn’t mind you entering my bed unannounced?”

I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but this didn’t seem like the time to quibble, so I gave a noncommittal shrug.

“Well, not that it’s any of your business, but I don’t share your . . . attitude,” she said.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were committed-” I started.

“I didn’t say I was in a committed relationship,” she countered. “Also, and again it’s not any of your business, but I don’t go around space stations and-” she shook her head. “Some people think I’m strange, so they make up stories. When they learn that I won’t have sex, it somehow leads them to conclude that I must be extremely enthusiastic about other things short of intercourse.”

“That . . .” I said, not sure how to finish the sentence. Finally, I settled on, “That doesn’t seem like math.”

She gave an appreciative snort. “Anyway, those rumors beget other rumors, and before you know it, well, you shouldn’t believe whatever you hear.”

“Okay,” I said. After a moment, I added, “I am very sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Thank you. It seems that this wasn’t entirely your fault, and I’m sorry we had to meet in such unpleasant circumstances. What’s your name?”

“Turghun Almanza,” I told her.

“I’m Tala Inouye,” she said. “You can share the room as long as you keep your clothes on and sleep on the fold-out couch.”

Tala didn’t seem interested in much further conversation at this point, so I folded the couch cushions down onto the floor and made a makeshift pillow out of my bag.

I lay down on the couch cushions. They didn’t provide much comfort or support. I could feel the hard floor panels where my elbows and knees poked into the makeshift mattress. I was also distracted by the sight of the rigid black case under the bed, the same one that Tala had pulled to herself when I first invaded her space. A cable lock connected the case to one of the legs of the bed, which was bolted to the floor. Aside from a handle and a few straps, apparently for carrying, the case was thoroughly non-descript. It was rectangular and rather large, perhaps big enough to fit the boots, gloves and helmet of an EV suit, but certainly not the rest of the suit. Aside from Tala’s name and contact information, there didn’t appear to be any other markings on the case. I soon gave up any hope of guessing its contents and rolled over onto my other side in the doomed hope of finding a position comfortable enough for sleep.

After several minutes of listening to me wriggling about, trying to relax my muscles on a floor where “down” didn’t feel quite like down, I heard Tala ask, “You’re not going to be able to sleep on the floor, are you?”

“I’m working on it,” I answered.

“Well, I can’t sleep if you keep moving around like that, so you can come up here and sleep on the bed as long as you stay on your side of the mattress and on top of the blanket,” she told me.

Without further comment, I got up off the floor and climbed onto the bed next to Tala. I wondered whether I might still have trouble sleeping next to this woman, given the strained character of our interactions up to this point. I was probably still wondering about that seconds later when I fell promptly and deeply asleep.

I woke pleasantly to the warm feeling of someone in my arms, only to realize very unpleasantly that I had unconsciously thrown my arm across Tala’s back during the night. Realizing that I had, through no deliberate effort, plainly violated the law Tala had so forcefully laid down the prior evening, I tried to gently lift my arm, but a jolt of tingling pain from my bicep to my fingers stopped me. Although the rest of me was wide awake, my arm was still “asleep” due to a lack of circulation. I doubted I could lift it all the way without flinching or making a noise that would wake Tala.

Feeling so trapped, I was briefly reminded of a mission years ago, my first trip to Mars, when I found myself stuck in a habitation module for a whole day in observance of local quarantine rules. The rules required all visitors to spend a Martian day under automated observation. This period of confinement felt especially long, and not just because a Martian day is thirty-seven minutes longer than a day on Earth. I also knew that our crew, a merchant freighter delivering fusion reactors, only had a week to explore the surface before we needed to get back up to our ship in orbit. I couldn’t help watching the minutes tick by in the corner of my wrist pad as I tried to distract myself with books from my libraries.

I spent most of that Mars trip reading the historical texts and commentaries of religious faiths from around the world. (Space travel is nothing if not time-consuming, and I’ve found it’s best to pick one subject and do a deep dive each trip.) I remembered these studies as I lay with my arm temporarily stuck across Tala’s back, observing a thin chain around her neck. Craning my head sideways, I could see that the chain connected to a small cross, a symbol of the Christian religion, which rested on the pillow beneath her. Thinking back on my previous reading, I suspected that Tala’s reaction to my presence the night before and her strict rules about cohabitation had something to do with her religious beliefs.

I might as well admit that I was disappointed and maybe even a little frustrated by my roommate’s aversion to intimacy, but I certainly wasn’t judgmental about it. A few of my friends back home might have given Tala a cool reception if she walked into their living room without a tattoo on her body and that cross around her neck, but I try to be a go-along/get-along type of guy. Also, I’ve read her faith’s religious texts along with plenty of others during my travels, and although I don’t think they awakened any spiritual consciousness in me, I certainly appreciated their aesthetic and moral virtues. Perhaps it’s because my technical training has been a lot more extensive than any philosophical education I’ve picked up, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about religions.

After a few moments of exquisitely careful effort, I managed to remove my arm from Tala’s back without a flinch or noise. If she noticed anything, she didn’t mention it when she arose a few minutes later.

Tala collected her coverall and undergarments from the dry-cleaning compartment and changed into them. Recalling her modesty from the previous night, I turned around and offered to leave the room, but she told me I could stay as long as I kept my eyes averted. She also told me that she would face in the opposite direction while I changed into my own clothes, which she did.

Once we were both dressed, Tala entered a keycode and used her thumbprint to unfasten the cable lock that had secured her case to the bed. She brought the case over to the room’s reading station, where she unfolded the seat bench and tabletop from the wall.

Tala sat down and placed the case on the tabletop. I looked forward to seeing whatever was locked inside, but instead of opening it, Tala turned to me with an expression of polite patience and said, after a long moment, “I guess you’ll be wanting to go get some breakfast.” Finally taking the hint, I excused myself and headed out the door to the cantina, allowing Tala to open her mysterious case in private.

As it had been the night before, the cantina was filled with astronauts of all kinds; mission specialists, payload specialists, pilots, even a commander or two. I grabbed a seat at an open table and I was soon joined by a medical officer from the Yemeni Space Force. His wobbling gait as he approached the table led me to suspect that he had just completed an extended voyage with relatively little gravity exposure. We struck up a conversation and I soon learned that the doctor’s most recent tour had taken him to the surface of Ganymede, which I found completely fascinating. He was very excited to return home, not least because his wife had given birth to twin girls in his absence (he showed me pictures, of course), and he would be seeing them as soon as his shuttle landed that afternoon.

More astronauts entered and filled the nearby seats. I eyed the mission patches on their coveralls and flight bags while trying not to be too obvious about it. I noted that a few of my tablemates appeared to be asteroid miners, or at least they had asteroid mining experience. I hoped to glean some insight from them that would aid me in my goal of joining a reputable mining crew.

One of the miners, named Veronica, wore a coverall showing several patches from a China-flagged mining company. I tried to strike up a conversation about her mining experience, but she seemed a little uncomfortable discussing technical matters in English, at least at this early hour. Since I likewise find it difficult to talk about engineering in Mandarin before I’ve had my coffee, I decided not to pursue the matter with her.

The other miner at my table was Karim, an Argentinian whose flight bag bore a cosmopolitan assortment of mission patches and flags from all over Earth and Moon. Karim’s English was excellent. From off-hand comments he made to others at the table, it seemed he could make do in whatever language a conversation demanded. He also had a gregarious manner, but he seemed to greatly prefer speaking about any subject other than asteroid mining. I guessed that he was loath to risk disclosing the proprietary information of any of his prior employers. We ended up talking a great deal about lunar basketball, since the playoffs had just concluded with Austria’s surprise victory.

A few minutes later, I noticed Tala entering the cantina. The mysterious case, which she had fastened to our bedframe overnight, was now on her back, secured by two shoulder straps so that she wore it like a backpack. Tala looked around the room and saw that there were no open seats at any of the tables. Undeterred, she walked over to my table and, taking the case off her back, placed it on the floor at the head of the table and sat upon it like a makeshift chair. I was reminded, not for the first time, of the practical and inventive turn of mind by which astronauts so quickly find expedient solutions to material problems.

Although the other astronauts kept up a lively conversation, mostly led by Karim and myself, Tala did not participate, nor was she invited to do so. Perhaps a few of the more experienced fliers ignored her because her coverall showed only a few humble patches from cislunar missions. Perhaps they sensed that she wasn’t interested in talking. She ate her breakfast in silence and excused herself soon afterward.

Having finished my breakfast, I set out for a walk along the passageways of the inner CushNet ring, determined to prove, at least to myself, that I could keep the meal down despite the weirdness of the local gravity. While ambling through the inner ring, I observed several first-flight astronauts among the passers-by. Uncharitable veterans sometimes refer to these newcomers as “pukers” for obvious reasons. It was easy enough to spot them by their brand-new flight suits, often bedecked with unnecessary and expensive gear, and almost always stained once or twice with the evidence of artificial-gravity-induced nausea.

As much as some old-timers like to make jokes at the rookies’ expense, even experienced fliers like myself find it more than a bit unnerving to walk along a passageway that curves around in a circle; seeing the floor curving upward and disappearing behind the ceiling in front of you and knowing that the floor behind you does the same thing. Some people suggest trying to avoid thinking about the fact that the floor in front of you and behind you will eventually come together and meet at a point directly above your head. They recommend pretending that you’re walking across the bottom of a valley and imagining that the floor rising in front of you will eventually terminate in a hilltop, even though you’ll never reach it. I’ve never found that kind of self-delusion to be helpful. Instead, I think about the way pet rodents like mice and gerbils get their exercise in wheels that are not too dissimilar from these great rings. If those little ones can hack it, so can I.

Aside from the queer gravitational effects upon the human body, a space station is an odd place to amble about. You never know just what or whom you might come across as you wander the passageways; perhaps a group of migrants on their way to Mars, chatting with football players carrying a Lunar League trophy back to Earth, or adrenaline junkies hoping to become the first to summit the highest mountains or dive the deepest depths on multiple planets. I have personally seen military personnel from nations that are supposed to be desperate enemies fraternizing in ways that would shock their political leaders, not to mention their parents!

Space stations are also places where one can find paradoxical displays of extravagant wealth severely circumscribed by volume and mass limitations. On Earth, it’s not uncommon to see massively ostentatious homes, ships, aircraft, etc. Yet aboard a space station, the most prosperous residents adopt sublimely miniaturized demonstrations of affluence. Whereas an Earth billionaire might construct for himself a mansion with sunset views over the Gulf of Guinea, a CushNet trillionaire will satisfy herself with a much smaller module, tastefully accented with exquisite fixtures of rare Earth elements. The major shareholders of asteroid mining ventures welcome visitors to their modestly sized apartments and casually inform them that they have a personal capsule docked just outside, complete with its own fusion drive. The very same type of reactor on which entire cities depend for light and power can also be found in the propulsion module of a vehicle in which a CushNet resident takes her sight-seeing voyages.

I was soon surprised and not terribly pleased to realize that I my stroll through the passageways had led me to the very same module where I had stumbled into that horrific political gathering the night before. I quickened my pace to pass the spot as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t help stealing a glance toward the module’s docking port, which I was surprised to see wide open, without even the protective curtain that had obscured the entrance the previous night. Looking through the open hatchway, I observed that the genealogical calipers were gone, as were the previous night’s crowd of stricken, ghostly figures. Instead, a much smaller number of astronauts were scattered throughout the rows of seats, some of them reading aloud from a document on their wristpads, others reciting the same words by heart while looking forward to the far end of the module. I was surprised to notice Tala, my roommate, among them, seated near the end of the module, close to the docking hatch.

Out of curiosity, I stepped inside. No one seemed to notice, much less mind my entrance. I took a seat in Tala’s row, leaving two open seats between us. I soon recognized the gathering as a religious ceremony, the kind of regular convocation that is common to the Christian faith. I had learned about such things in my study of world religions during my first Mars trip. I was unable to place the specific denomination of this service at the time, but I later reviewed my wristpad libraries and deduced that I had happened upon a Catholic mass. Tala noticed me a few moments after I sat down. Although she was surprised to see me, she gave me a polite smile and didn’t seem to mind my presence.

An image of the Christian messiah was projected at the front of the module, and pictures on the side walls memorialized fallen astronauts. The dates inscribed beneath the pictures of the departed were mostly quite old, evidencing that the majority of the lost in space perished decades ago, when even the most routine operations were fraught with extreme peril. Throughout my previous voyages, I’ve always been keenly aware of the improving safety in human spaceflight and considered this to be a very heartening trend. But on that particular morning in the CushNet’s multipurpose module, looking at the pictures that flashed on the wall screens, I couldn’t help but notice that, of the few astronauts who died in the service in recent years, most of them were prospectors and miners.

The inscriptions gave the dates of the astronauts’ births and deaths, but rarely did any locations appear. They died in space, mostly in places that had no recognizable addresses like the ones you might find on Earth or the Sea of Tranquility or Phlegra Montes. Somewhere, in the databases of the agencies or companies they had served, one might find a set of numbers depicting the orbital parameters of their remains, but those cold figures did not appear in the projections on the chapel wall. The omission of any final resting place in these loving, somber inscriptions conveyed that these space voyagers will continue to circle the Sun for millenia, tumbling gently through the starlight in the company of worlds. Most humans go to eternity wrapped in a planet, buried in ground or sea. These explorers face the depths of the universe and await its demise, cloaked in nothing but a spacecraft or an EV suit, in death as they were in life.

A large cupola, constructed of seven oversized window panels in the classical configuration, stood in place of a wall at the far end of the multipurpose module. The cupola was large enough to take up the entire space where the module’s far wall would be, such that the priest, who stood in front of the cupola, was completely silhouetted when the Earth appeared through the windowpanes and the bright sunlight reflecting off the clouds filled the module. I worried that the sight of Earth constantly rotating in and out of view would become distracting, if not nauseating, but thankfully the CushNet station’s orbit soon brought it around the planet to a place where the cupola was oriented outward from Earth. As this happened, the only sights visible through the windows were stars that slowly rotated, first from right to left, then downward, then left to right, then upward, and finally from right to left again as the module rotated along with the rest of the CushNet ring.

The priest who stood before the cupola introduced himself as “Father Lwanga.” I did a quick search on my wristpad and learned that, almost forty years previously, Lwanga had earned Uganda’s highest decoration for gallantry after his role in the evacuation of the Caelestis, a luxury passenger liner that became crippled and unable to maintain its orbit over Venus. Observing the vigorous figure he cut as he belted out the lyrics of hymns in front of the cupola and its circling field of stars, I thought the old fellow would have little trouble donning an EV suit and scrambling across the station’s outer hull if the need arose.

A few members of the congregation took turns at the lectern by the altar, reading aloud from something, presumably a Bible. I furtively glanced at my wristpad throughout these readings, trying to gain some background and context. As a consequence, I managed to distract myself and miss a good portion of the proceedings. I do remember that one of the stories was about an ancient prophet whom God had commanded to go to Nineveh, but the prophet shirked his duty and met some great misfortune for his insolence. Although I missed most of the details, I remembered the name of the town because some years ago I spent a lovely week in that area, vacationing with some friends in the mountains nearby.

After the readings were complete, Father Lwanga stepped around to the front of the altar and gave a sermon about a launch accident that happened more than a century ago. I took most of what he said down on my wristpad because I found it very moving. His sermon began not with the accident itself, but with an engineer who found himself standing next to a fax machine (a form of telegraph, I think) in an almost deserted office on the night before the launch:

“It was the middle of the night, just hours before the spacecraft was scheduled to lift off from the pad a few miles away. Through the window, the engineer could see the enormous spacecraft and its launch system bathed in the glow of spotlights. In a building nearby, the crew of astronauts were still asleep, or maybe some of them were fitfully awake, knowing they should get as much rest as possible, but unable to force themselves to relax with their trip to space only a few hours away.

“Meanwhile, in the darkened office, the engineer waited by the fax machine for a message from his employer, a company that had built the solid rockets that were meant to help lift the large spacecraft and its gigantic liquid fuel tank up from the ground, giving it enough upward momentum, enough of a ‘boost,’ to enable the spacecraft to eventually achieve orbit under its own power.

“It was a cold night, unusually cold for that part of the world, even in winter, and someone was rightly concerned that the cold might cause a problem with the boosters. Maybe they would malfunction. Maybe they would destroy the spacecraft and kill its crew. A group of engineers and managers gathered to discuss this issue long into the night. Someone should have called off the launch, but no one did. There were concerns about schedules and how delays might look bad. There were excuses and justifications. Finally, there was a request for a fax: someone asked the company that made the boosters to say that the boosters would work properly.

“The fax arrived.

“The next morning, the spacecraft launches. One of the boosters fails, explodes, blasting most of the spacecraft apart with it. The spacecraft’s commander and pilot try frantically to save it. There are no ejection seats, no escape system, no way for the crew to exit the vehicle. Another example of failure, overreach, underthinking. The mission specialists and payload specialists, if they are still conscious, cling to the arms of their chairs. One of them is a schoolteacher. She’s here because she won a nationwide contest. The materials for her ‘lessons from space’ are stowed in a nearby compartment.

“All over the world, schoolchildren have just watched what should be one smoke trail in the sky suddenly, violently split into several. People are screaming in the viewing stands near the launch pad. They are watching people die because someone was responsible but not responsible enough. Someone was smart but not smart enough. Someone was truthful but not truthful enough.

“Months later, the engineer who stood next to that fax machine the night before the launch now finds himself sitting before a special commission in his country’s capital. The nation’s president has selected thirteen members of the commission to determine the cause of the disaster, and every one of them gives the engineer good reason to be intimidated.

“The chairman of the commission is one of the men who built the world in which the engineer grew up. After fighting at sea in a world war, the chairman would serve one American president as Attorney General. For another president he would serve as Secretary of State. A third president selected him to chair this commission. To the chairman’s left and right were persons whose names are still printed in history books to this very day, yet there they were, in the flesh, as if they had stepped out of the newspapers and were now staring at the engineer, intent on his every word. The commission’s members included the first human being who ever walked on the Moon, the first American woman to fly in space, the first person to fly an airplane faster than the speed of sound, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had helped invent nuclear bombs, and so on.

“The circumstances were enough to make anyone meek. Such circumstances could make some people too meek to speak out, but the engineer knew a truth that had not yet been revealed; a truth about what was wrong with the spacecraft, and who had known about it, and when. The engineer told that truth, and when he did, the chairman of the commission leaned forward in his seat, flanked by some of the greatest aviators and scientists and engineers in the world. The chairman’s voice had shouted orders to sailors over thundering guns in battle. It had rung out in courtrooms where lives and freedom hung in the balance. It had made threats of war to the leaders of nations. The chairman’s practiced voice was calm, but he made every crisp syllable heard by everyone in the room: ‘Would you please come down here and repeat what you’ve just said, because if I just heard what I think I heard, then this may be in litigation for years to come,’ he said, a note of warning in his voice.

“This was it, the last moment for the engineer to back down, but he told the truth: there was something wrong in that spacecraft, and people had known it was wrong, and they had failed to do the right thing.”

It went on like that; a very good sermon, I thought. Shortly afterward, the congregation sang several verses of a hymn called “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” Even now, months later, I can still clearly hear Tala’s voice in my head as she sang the last verse, the one dedicated to astronauts:

“Eternal Father, King of birth,

Who didst create the heaven and Earth,

And bid the planets and the Sun

Their own appointed orbits run;

O hear us when we seek they grace

For those who soar through outer space.”

I checked the hymnal and saw that this last verse was attributed to a “J.E. Volonte,” and dated “1961.” I thought it was fast work for someone to draft a verse for astronauts in the same year they started flying in space.

Speaking of prayers, that reminds me: I have to deploy my sail to get my aphelion to 150 million. If I botch that, well, I’m not sure if there’s any point in telling the rest of this story. Here goes nothing.

PAUSE RECORDING.