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  “Calls refused,” Lurch replied, meaning Derek had taken himself fully offline for a while.

  Sighing, she asked, “Where was his last reported location?”

  “Apartment Alpha-six,” Lurch answered.

  “Is that his . . . Is that Derek Hakkens’ apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Eight minutes ago.”

  So then, Derek was in his quarters. Sometimes you just had to know the right questions to ask.

  She let go of the comm button and opened her hatch, swinging it inward and then flipping around it into Gamma Corridor, and kicking off from a grab bar without bothering to close the hatch again behind her.

  Derek’s quarters were in the other residential cluster, so she flipped and kicked and soared and swung her way through the station, not caring if she showed off more zero-gee maneuvering skill than she was supposed to have right now. Gamma Corridor had a weird, flexible tube connecting it to Alpha Corridor, but the tube had several hard bends in it, and no handholds, and there was hard vacuum outside of it, and it all just seemed a bit sketchy to her. Instead she took the long way around, through Beta Corridor and a couple of laboratories. She passed women she didn’t know yet except by sight, doing things she didn’t have much clue about. Some had VR headsets on. Some were typing into tablet keyboards or whispering into microphones or peering into scientific instruments. One—Saira Batra, the mathematician from Dandelion—was diligently cleaning the wall (or floor) of Beta Corridor with a squirt bottle and a scrubby sponge.

  “Hey,” Alice said as she brushed by.

  “Hi,” Saira said back, not looking up from her work.

  Finally Alice came to Derek’s apartment—number Alpha-6—and rapped twice on the hatch with her knuckles. It was made of fairly thin steel, and rang like an old metal trash can lid.

  For a few seconds, nothing happened. She knocked again. Again, nothing happened for a few seconds, but then she heard some rustling against the metal of the hatch, and then it swung inward, revealing Derek. His coverall was unzipped to the waist, revealing that bright orange space undershirt. His hair was messier than usual, and his lips looked red, almost as if he’d been . . . kissing someone.

  “What?” he said, looking annoyed.

  From inside, Jeanette Schmidt’s voice said, “Is it Alice?”

  “Yes,” he answered. Then, to Alice: “Do you need something?”

  “I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

  “Right now?”

  “It’s urgent, yes.”

  “Come on inside,” Jeanette’s voice said. “Derek, invite her in.” She sounded . . . nervous. Self-conscious. Caught.

  Damn. It wasn’t like Derek was Alice’s boyfriend or anything, and she had already resolved not to fuck him. Not today. And yet, jealousy bloomed within her shriveled heart.

  She couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Damn it, Jeanette.”

  “Come in,” Jeanette said. Then, more firmly, “Alice, please. Come on in.”

  Still looking annoyed, Derek nudged his body out of the way, making space for Alice to squeeze past him and into the apartment. But his irritation was giving way to . . . curiosity? Slightly smug curiosity? And in another moment, Alice could see why: Jeanette was hanging in midair dressed only in golden hair and gray space underpants.

  Jesus. Jesus Christ. This wasn’t the first time Alice had been invited into a threesome—Hell, it wasn’t even the sixth. Over eight years among the Special Forces of every major service (including, once, the I-shit-you-not super-secret nuclear commandos of the U.S. Department of Energy), she’d heard just about every lewd suggestion it was possible to hear. But only ever half-sincere, and only ever from the men.

  It’s not like it had never occurred to Alice, to wonder what she’d do if the opportunity actually arose. This was, in many ways, the most sexually fluid decade in American history. But the opportunity never had arisen.

  What she said was, “Jeanette? Goddammit. What makes you think . . .”

  But the words trailed away, and she came inside, and let Derek close the hatch behind her.

  Well, well.

  In another wordless minute, her hands were on Jeanette’s hips, and Derek’s hands were on her coverall zipper, and Jeanette was saying, “Station full of women. You think I didn’t think about that before . . . I might need you to show me . . . I might need you to . . .”

  And Alice was saying, “I’m not really . . . This isn’t actually . . .”

  And Derek was saying, “Just relax. Take it slow. Just let it unfold.”

  And Alice was just taking Jeanette’s breasts into her hands when the hatch swung open again, and a head covered in aquamarine hair was sticking in sideways.

  “Derek?” said Maag. “Are you . . . Oh. Oh, wow. Excuse me! I didn’t . . .”

  Jeanette looked up, laughed nervously, and drawled, “Malagrite, your timing is simply amazing. You might as well come in.”

  To which Derek said, “Um, sure,” and Maag said, “Are you serious?” And Jeanette said, “Why not? The more, the merrier.”

  And then the hatch was closing again, with Maag on this side of it, and all Alice could think to say was, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  And then, for quite some time, no one said anything at all.

  6.1

  25 April

  ✧

  Airship Lepidoptera

  West Antarctica

  Earth

  Lawrence stared morosely out the window, at the shadow of his airship on the paper-white, mirror-flat West Antarctic Ice Sheet below and behind him. It was an autumn afternoon here in Antarctica, so while the day was bright, the shadow lagged well behind the airship Lepidoptera itself, looking stretched out, more dragonfly than butterfly.

  Lawrence Edgar Killian—Sir Lawrence Edgar Killian—would be the first to admit, he was accustomed to things going his way. Very accustomed. Too accustomed, perhaps. And yet, even trillionaires and Horsemen could have bad days, and this here was one of his.

  Oh, his problems were first-world problems, to be sure. Gilded, diamond-encrusted problems! He’d wanted to gather up some close chums and skydive from the balcony of Lepidoptera onto the South Pole, and that had been kiboshed in pretty much every way the ki could bosh. His personal physician had caught wind of it and advised strongly against, saying, “Your heart has had enough nonsense for a man your age, Larry.” And while he’d been more than ready to ignore that advice, his jump master had told him that even in heavy spacesuits they’d be risking amputation-class frostbite if they free-fell more than half a mile. Which, what was the point if they didn’t? And then all but one of the chums had backed out in favor of other engagements, too full of their own lives to drop everything and indulge a septuagenarian on something like this. And even then Lawrence had been prepared to try it. Even then.

  But the embargo and the blockade had somehow put all his threelium in the hands of Grigory Goddamn Orlov for the foreseeable future and then some, and that spelled curtains and mothballs for poor Lepidoptera, too heavy to float on normal helium.

  And so, the craft Popular Mechanics had once called “perhaps the most fantastical vehicle real life has yet served up” was on its final voyage (or final for a long, long while) across Antarctica to Tierra del Fuego, where it would float into a rented airport hangar and, for the first time in almost six years, power down and sleep.

  “Can’t you run it on pure hydrogen?” one of the old chums had asked. “I hear it’s not really that dangerous.”

  But Lawrence had looked into it, and the risks were horrendous. Specially designed hydrogen balloons could be piloted with relative safety—safe as skydiving, anyway—but for a craft of this type, this unique type—the ever-present risk of static electricity was a pin through the heart. And so Lepidoptera would be pinned to the Earth, and by the time he could unpin it, he might just actually be too old for such things.

  “Sir, your three o’clock is
coming up,” said Gill Davis, peeking around the gilded doorway into Lawrence’s cabin, here at the aft of the airship’s long gondola. His hand on the doorframe disturbed a pair of butterflies—a brushfoot and a swallowtail—that had been clinging to it. Their flight disturbed several others resting nearby, so that Davis seemed to have puffed into existence in a cloud of brightly colored wings.

  “Right. Thank you,” Lawrence said, glancing up for only a moment before returning his gaze to the airship’s shadow trailing behind them.

  “Are you all right?” Davis asked. He was a slight, servile, middle-aged man with truly impeccable manners. Truly impeccable. Would have made a perfect English butler, and some might say he was one, among other things. But there was concern in his voice.

  “I will be,” Lawrence assured him.

  “You’ve been in here a long while. You should come have something to eat.”

  “I might do,” Lawrence agreed. Then, just to sound less stuffy and disconnected, he asked, “How long until we reach the ocean?”

  “I believe about twenty hours,” Davis said, “although I can check with the crew if you like. We’ll be crossing the Thiel mountain range a lot sooner, if you’re pining for something to look at. And then it’s the Ellsworth Mountains, and then we’ll overfly the colony at Ciudad de Esperanza, and then the Ronne Ice Shelf. Then we reach the ocean, and run parallel to it toward the tip of South America.”

  “Hmm. I suppose I am pining for visual relief. This little adventure sounded more adventurous in principle than it turns out to be in practice, hmm? Just whiteness. Miles upon miles of blank whiteness, with only the occasional crevasse for our shadow to cross.”

  The crevasses were impressive in principle, too; blue-white cracks a mile deep, reaching probably all the way down to bedrock. But in practice they were just razor-thin squiggles on a white canvas, quickly vanished into the distance. To date, the only excitement along the way had been sixty hours ago—a storm they couldn’t outrun and couldn’t outclimb. Lepidoptera had to go to ground for that one, and wait it out for about five hours.

  The ship’s gas bag was roughly the size and shape of the old Goodyear Blimp, but with a much larger gondola slung beneath, and four brightly colored turbofans projecting out from the corners of that—the butterfly’s wings. A pregnant butterfly that flew upside down, with its wings beneath its fat body, and impossibly beautiful for all that. How Lawrence loved this ship!

  With little choice and little time, the crew had sat her down on the ice sheet, a mile and more above sea level, and they had all bundled into heavy coveralls and parkas and goggles and masks, and stood outside to watch as the bag deflated and, under the influence of carefully timed cable retractors, folded up like a paper map against the curve of the magnesium-alloy keel. The ship then looked like a fat-footed lizard carrying a quartered pickle on its back, and the crew threw mooring lines over it and affixed them to spikes they pounded into the ice with pneumatic hammers.

  That gasbag was Mylar over Kevlar, coated on the inside with alternating layers of aluminum and glass many thousands of times thinner than a human hair, and on the outside with microstructured photonic crystal that shimmered in every conceivable color and pattern as winds and sunlight played across it. That bag remained, gram for gram, the most expensive aircraft component ever constructed, but though its gas transfusion rates were fantastically small, and although the lift gas was fifteen percent deuterium-depleted hydrogen and eighty-five percent threelium (the absolute lightest gas mix he could run without the aforementioned risk of fire and explosion), Lawrence still paid a billion a month to keep the thing inflated. A billion a month. It had seemed a playful, exuberant idea when he’d first thought of it, and some of the public seemed to agree, celebrating Lepidoptera as a wonder of the world when it finally took to the air. Iconic images of it had made the rounds: in the air over Paris, over London, over Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon, over Sydney and Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur. The world could be such a dreary place, and after Rosalyn had died, he’d just wanted to create something truly magical, and let it loose in the public eye.

  But then the backlash had started. The tabloids had dismissed it as an obscenity in a world where a few children did still go hungry sometimes. And over time, year by year, more and more people seemed to agree, which did take some of the fun out of it. And seeing it huddled there on the ice, its bag folded, its fans angled against the rising wind, had taken another swipe out of the joy that this pride-and-joy contraption brought him. It was slower and more fragile than an airplane or a helicopter, and colossally more expensive, and also vulnerable to the whims of weather, and of men like Orlov. Worse than that, it was unappreciated by, it seemed, even his close associates, who’d stopped coming ’round to ride on it with him.

  Well, fine. So be it. He still had the Moon, did he not? No grander airship than that!

  Davis said, “Shall I ask the crew if we can ascend to a higher altitude? It might afford a less monotonous view.”

  “Why not?” Lawrence said. “We’ve got to enjoy this trip while we still can.”

  “Indeed,” Davis agreed. “I’ll take my leave of you, for the moment, and consign you to your moping, but three o’clock is two minutes away. You have the address you’re calling?”

  “It’s in my calendar,” Lawrence assured him. “Along with the reminder. But thank you.”

  “Mmm-hmm!” Davis said, and disappeared in another cloud of butterflies.

  Sighing, Lawrence turned on his teleconferencing system and clicked on the calendar reminder. He was a minute and a half early, but he wanted to get this over with. He believed in delivering bad news personally, and it was an ugly chore even at the best of times. He wanted it behind him.

  The call went through, and his teleconferencing screen lit up, and in another few seconds he was looking across in full 3D at the control center of Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station. Fernanda Harb, the station commander, was standing there in her mustard-yellow jumpsuit, and beside her was Huntley Millar, the construction crew foreman, also in yellow, and Brother Michael Jablonski in a beige-and-brown monk’s habit, his hands folded peaceably at his waist.

  “Hello?” Lawrence said experimentally.

  After a little under three seconds’ speed-of-light delay, Fernanda smiled and said, “Lawrence, hello. Always a pleasure to hear from you.”

  “Not this time, I’m afraid,” Lawrence told her. Then, “Brother Michael, I see you’re dressed formally for the occasion. Egad, let me apologize profusely; when I scheduled the call I wasn’t thinking about your personal logistics. What did you do, carry a clean, shrink-wrapped cassock and change in the airlock?”

  After the same delay, Brother Michael smiled warmly and said, “It was more complicated than that, actually, but I thought it best not to meet you in my underwear. Please, sir, think nothing of it. After all these months, it’s a fine occasion for me to meet your people as something other than spacesuits and radio voices.”

  “Well,” said Lawrence, “you have my apologies nonetheless. Rosalyn and I always did our best to be godly people, and I fear without her to lift me up, my social graces have fallen. And other graces. She’d be very cross with me, if she knew I’d inconvenienced a man of God.”

  Brother Michael laughed at that. “A monk’s raison d’être is to be inconvenienced, sir, and a Lunar monk doubly so. In any case it’s helpful to see what you citizens do with the same basic modules we have at Saint Joe. I should have stopped by months ago to compare notes.”

  Lawrence grunted and nodded, not sure what else to say. Brother Michael was an unassuming man, perhaps forty years old, clean-shaven and balding on top. Lawrence knew Michael Jablonski had a master’s in divinity from Fuller and a master’s in physical chemistry from MIT, and that he was temporarily in charge of the monastery, but knew almost nothing else about him, other than the fact he was Canadian. Lawrence had stopped by once when Michael and two other monks were training for their mission in the big wat
er tank at Harvest Moon’s Houston facility, but they’d been underwater in training spacesuits at the time, and everyone around them busy as bees. He hadn’t stayed to chitchat.

  What he finally said was, “I’ve never actually met a monk before. I’m afraid I don’t know the protocol.”

  Brother Michael smiled and said, “You’ve met where I come from, sir. Imagine the annoyingly studious guy you went to college with, who wanted nothing more than to spend weekends in the library, learning everything and yet somehow taking a long, long time to graduate. Imagine also the annoyingly religious girl, who went not only to Sunday service but to twice-weekly Bible study, and also took classes in comparative religion and whatnot. Now imagine those two had a baby, who grew up only wanting to please them both, and the Lord.”

  Lawrence chuckled dryly. “That’s you, is it?”

  Michael spread his hands slightly, looking sheepish. “That’s every monk in Saint Joe, I’m afraid. If we lived on Earth, there’d be nothing remarkable about us at all.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Lawrence told him, “although your modesty is quite charming in this age and day. You’ve given a fair description not only of yourself but also of my son, Alan, although he doesn’t live to please either parent as far as I’ve ever known. But his mother was pious, and his father—me—has a PhD. So you have that in common.”

  “Well then,” said Michael, “that makes you even more a patriarch to us. If I may say so, sir, I’m quite impressed with that credential. How many PhDs go on to make a living wage, I wonder? Not many end up trillionaires, although I hear a fair number of plutocrats and laboris generantii have been known to buy a degree or two after the fact.”

  “Generantii, eh? I suppose some do,” Lawrence allowed. “But not this one. Anyway, Brother Michael, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Hello to you, too, Fernanda. And . . . Huntley, is it?”

  “Good morning, sir,” said Huntley Millar.

  “Is it morning? I’m over the South Pole right now, where it’s afternoon all day long.”