The fuss and excitement surrounding Sean and Arjuna, the Moses Lake spaceport, and the voyage of Ymir had drawn attention away from the routine, faithful, grind-it-out progress being made the whole time by NASA, the European Space Agency, Roskosmos, China National Space Administration, and the space agencies of Japan and India. These organizations were staffed by conservative old-line engineers, not far removed culturally from the slide-rule-brandishing nerds of Apollo and Soyuz fame. In fact, some of them were those nerds, just a lot older and a lot crustier. They were baffled, nay, infuriated by the ease with which a few upstart tech zillionaires could command the world’s attention and go rocketing off on ill-advised, hastily planned missions of their own choosing. The departure of Sean and Larz from Izzy had occasioned a big sigh of relief, and a return to the steady and unimaginative work that these people were best at.
And anyone paying attention to the numbing details expressed in the spreadsheets and the flowcharts would see the value of that work on A+0.144, when Ivy opened a meeting in the Banana with the words “twenty percent” (for the latest projections from the astrophysical lab of Dr. Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris at Caltech, and from the other labs doing the same calculations at other universities around the world, were that the White Sky would happen on or about A+1.354, or one year and 354 days after the breakup of the moon; they were one-fifth of the way there).
The purpose of the Scouts—the first wave of what amounted to suicide workers such as Tekla, who had arrived starting on Day 29—had been to build out the improvised network of hamster tubes and docking ports that would make it possible for a much larger population of so-called Pioneers to reach Izzy. The basic distinction between a Scout and a Pioneer was that the Scout went up knowing there was no place to dock, but the Pioneer knew that, at least in theory, there would be an available port for their spacecraft, with pressurized atmosphere on the other side of it. The promise had failed in one case, with the result that half a dozen Pioneers crammed aboard a Soyuz had silently asphyxiated. The problem was traced to a defect in a hastily built docking mechanism. Three Chinese taikonauts lost their lives when the hamster tube in which they were moving was pierced by a micrometeorite and lost pressurization. But from about Day 56 onward, Pioneers were arriving at a rate of between five and twelve per day. There was a lull once all the available docking spaces were occupied, but after that it began to snowball as spacecraft began to dock to other spacecraft, and the hamster tube network was built out, and inflatable structures were deployed.
Izzy, which had been a complicated and hard-to-understand contraption even before all of this had happened, was now an utterly bewildering maze of modules, hamster tubes, trusses, and ships docked to ships docked to ships, “like a freakin’ three-dimensional domino game,” as Luisa put it. The only way to get one’s bearings, looking at a rendering of the complex, was by picking out the rugged and asymmetrical shape of Amalthea at one end and the two tori at the other. Those were “forward” and “aft,” respectively, and the axis between them was the basis for the traditional nautical directions of “port” and “starboard” as well as “zenith” and “nadir,” which were space lingo for basically “up away from Earth” and “down toward Earth.” If you arranged yourself so that your back was to the tori and your face toward Amalthea, with the “port” stuff on your left hand and the “starboard” stuff on your right, then your head would be aimed toward the zenith and your feet toward the nadir and the surface of Earth four hundred kilometers below.
That, however, was the privileged view of people outside the thing in space suits. Inside, it was still easy to get lost in the three-dimensional domino game. Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.
“IT’S JUST A CHRONOLOGICAL ACCIDENT THAT I’M HERE AT ALL,” IVY mused, during one of her and Dinah’s increasingly rare drinking sessions. All of their original stashes of booze had long since been consumed, but new arrivals were kind enough to slip them bottles from time to time.
“I disagree,” Dinah said. It wasn’t exactly a scintillating response. But she’d been caught off guard by the suddenness with which Ivy had dropped her guard.
“If the moon had blown up two weeks later, some Russian sourpuss would be in charge up here and I’d be on the ground, married and pregnant.”
“And under the same death sentence as everyone else.”
“Yeah, well, there’s that.”
Dinah reached for the bottle and refilled the shot glasses, trying to stretch out the moment. It had never been easy to get Ivy to open up, even back in the happy days before Zero.
“Look, Ivy, it’s not an accident that you were in charge of Izzy. They gave you the job for a reason. You’re the last girl in the world—or out of it—who should be suffering from impostor syndrome.”
Ivy stared at her through a somewhat amused silence. “Go on,” she finally said. “What is this impostor syndrome you speak of?” For they’d talked about it before—but usually with Dinah being the one who felt it.
“Don’t try to deflect this. What’s going on?”
Ivy glanced at the ceiling: a sort of visual signal, borrowed from the Russians, to remind Dinah that you never knew when someone was listening. Then she looked into Dinah’s eyes. But only for a moment. She was fundamentally a shy person, who preferred inspecting her shoes while baring her soul.