Time

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 wrench 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 ofNautilusl 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 launchpad.

“What was that?”

Hench shrugged. “Just a checklist item.”

“You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?”

“Demonstration test only,” Malenfant said. “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 pay-load pod, on top of a fully fueled ship. We’reready. 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,” Malenfant said. “It has space shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from an MD-11 airliner. In fact the BOB 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 takeoff. 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 up front, 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 someday 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 oxi- dizer manufacturing 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’reraising!

And now a spark of light rose easily from the darkened horizon, climbing smoothly into the sky. It was yellow light, 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 propellants 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, toward 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.

PART TWO 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 itself 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 center 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 colors; she swam through a world of black, white, and gray. But she could discern polarized light; and so now she saw that the light that 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 color 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 that lacked up and down and gravity. But sometimes she would hunt more ambitiously, luring and stalking and pursuing, as if she were 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 offish. 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, the hiss of the diatoms and algae that fed them, and the deep infrasonic rumble of the water itself, compression waves pulsing through its bulk.