Great Red Spot.
After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?
Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents – a car factory worker and his wife – raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it's time to fix the leaky joint for good.
An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence.
Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way – and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers.
* * *
Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen: Mom calls her 'your father's fancy bitch' with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her – not hard, just a warning.) 'Is Daddy there?' she asks.
The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) ' Oui. Ah, yes.' She smiles tentatively. 'I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?'
It comes out in a rush: 'I want to see him.' Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. 'Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette
– '
'Hush.' Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. 'You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?'
Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go 'right now': 'I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.' Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, can it?
'Very good.' Annette glances aside. 'Manny, I have a surprise call for you.'
Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. 'Hi – Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?'
He looks slightly worried.
'No,' she says confidently, 'the phone came in a box of Grahams.'
'Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me.
And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?'
'Yes, Daddy.' She sighs. 'Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?'
'Um.' For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. 'Go ahead. There's something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?'
She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. 'I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week -
she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can't do what she wants – I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt – I can't even think straight anymore!' To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. 'Get me out of here!'
The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking worried. 'You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.'
Amber sniffs. 'Can you help?' she asks.
'I'll see what I can do,' her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.
* * *
An instrument package peels away from the
Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the
they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults – working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count.
'Hey, slave,' she calls idly; 'how you doing?'
Pierre sniffs. 'It's going okay.' He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. 'Got cruise speed,' he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. 'Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it.'
'I'll shove if I want,
'And if you make me drop it?' he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious – 'Are we supposed to be doing this?'
'You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine,' she says, then turns bright red. 'You know what I mean.'
'I do, do I?' Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: 'Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune
