It was all hubris, fourteen-year-old Ben explained to her earnestly. Humanity had been pursuing a gigantic project, the construction of a technosphere, within which the human species could effectively be freed of its dependence on the Earth: isolated, like grandmother in her metal ship, Ben said…

She let him talk. Jackie had a bigger argument to win with Ben. The destiny of the species was a piece of ground she could afford to concede.

Okay, the picture’s good. A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can’t fix.

Now, at last, the screen filled up. In the foreground Jackie could see what looked like the white-tiled hull of a Command Module, splashed with some kind of mud, and a little further away the ghostly form of an astronaut, a bulky suit topped by a visor that returned brief highlights from the cabin lights. Beyond, no landscape was visible, save only a few yards of what looked like orange-brown swamp.

The astronaut seemed to be pawing at the surface with one foot.

It was, Jackie thought, probably her mother.

The picture was full of digital flaws, rectilinear cross-hatchings and missing pixels, so that you could never forget it was artificial. When the astronaut moved about, so poor was the image quality that she trailed ghosts, pale shadows of limbs and head and torso. It was oddly like the films she’d seen of the first, crude television pictures from Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin moving around like ghosts up there.

I’m in the hatchway. The Command Module has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can’t see any exposed ice…

Still analysing, Jackie thought. Still doing science, even out there, a billion miles from home, one little woman scratching at the surface of a whole world. As if any conclusions she came to made a damn bit of difference.

Still, this wasn’t Apollo 11. Hardly anyone was watching these four-hours-old images. The broadcast, on a minor cable channel, wasn’t exactly illegal, but it also wasn’t encouraged by the authorities either. After all, here were these Americans bounding around in a place the current orthodoxy said didn’t even exist…

What bullshit it all was; what damage space had done to the cause of science, in America and the rest of the world. Twenty-billion-dollar golf shots. Maybe, she thought, we ought to see the space program — not as the culmination of some huge project of science and technology — but as a gigantic, alienating disaster. Maybe if not for the space program, my kids wouldn’t be forced to listen to two-thousand-year-old cosmology every day.

If only it had been done differently: with imagination and daring and style. NASA’s ultimate triumph had been to reduce everything — even the Moon, even Titan — to the dull, the bland, the predictable. But probably, on the other hand, space had made no difference. Jackie was becoming receptive to a thesis put about by some academics now that science and technology had anyway reached the end of their usefulness. Humans were becoming overwhelmed by their own sophisticated machinery, because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than that needed to survive it. There were endless examples: all the nuclear-industry catastrophes leading up to Chernobyl, her own mother’s Columbia crash, even the new airborne AIDS variant…

Her mind came back to the kids, to Ben, with a wrench. To hell with science, the future of the species, the space program. Who is there to tell you what to say when your fourteen-year-old son comes home and says he wants to get pregnant?

Ben said he was gay. He was in love, with a boy a couple of years older. He wasn’t a virgin any more, he said. And, he said, he wanted a kid.

Of course that was possible now, with cloned foetuses being implanted directly into the stomach wall of a father. It was even safe, they said, more so than natural childbirth.

Jackie argued against it. She had found herself sounding like her own mother again, and she hated it. You’re too young. Wait. Don’t make any decisions now that you can’t unpick later. Finish your education…

But then, she reflected, if it made Ben happy now, maybe she should let him go ahead. Maybe I should just let Fred go too, go seek a better solution in the jungles.

She wasn’t convinced that to plan for a long and happy life was a rational decision any more. In her opinion, you could forget the plankton and the uv; the most likely thing to end it all for them was a bunch of Chinese ICBMs flying over the Pacific.

Sometimes she fell into despair, when she thought about the future her kids were going to have to negotiate. She hated her own lack of control over that future, her impotence in the face of the huge changes sweeping like winds across the planet.

Her mother, moving about in the dense orange atmosphere of Titan, looked less than human. Like some kind of deep-sea fish.

All right. I’m going to step out of Bifrost now.

Jackie leaned forward. This is it, she thought. This is the peak of my mother’s life. Her crowning achievement, her moment in history.

This is the stuff of life, her mother, on Titan, said, and she stuck her hand in the mud.

Oh, God, Mother, I wish you were here.

Rosenberg, suited up, began his daily inspection tour of Tartarus Base. His boots squelched as he dragged them through the icy mud. He walked like an old man, shuffling and huddled over, his helmet lamp splashing yellow light over the glistening slush. He just couldn’t get used to working in this stiff suit, where it took an effort to make the slightest movement, and he was always overcompensating, so that he blundered about like a fool, slamming into equipment and the others, sometimes without even realizing it. Dragging the suit around, in fact, even without attempting anything constructive, was as hard work as shovelling snow, or climbing a ladder on Earth.

But he liked the feeling of being embedded in a gravity field once more, after all those zero-G years. He felt as if he was somewhere. Oddly, it made him feel less lonesome.

The Base was, if he cared to be charitable about it, looking a little more like a permanent encampment now, and less like a couple of crashed spacecraft.

He walked around the Shuttle orbiter. It looked like a bulky, downed aircraft, all of a hundred and twenty feet long, its cut-down delta wings ploughed into the gumbo. The trail it had dug on landing still stretched off behind it, into the murk that concealed the horizon. But slowly, that shallow valley was filling in: the gumbo was relaxing, seeping back into the trench. Rosenberg had installed markers — just bits of aluminum and plastic from the wreck of Jitterbug — at various points along the valley floor and walls; the creep ought to give him a good understanding of the viscous and mechanical properties of the gumbo.

He stepped up onto the left wing. There was gumbo coating the upper surface of the wing, thrown up there by the landing, and a more uniform coating from the tholin drizzle since. But it was a thin layer, and Rosenberg found it a relief to step onto this hard surface, after a few minutes on the uniform gloopy mess that was Titan’s ground.

The orbiter’s payload bay doors were open, resting on the wings, like folded-back pieces of the hull. After the landings, the crew had discovered the doors had gotten stuck, and they had to be cranked open by hand. Now Rosenberg clambered up onto the curved inner surface of the payload bay door and, his feet clattering, walked along the sixty-feet length of the cargo bay, inspecting its contents. The payload bay wasn’t completely exposed to the elements of Titan. They had rigged up a crude canopy, of parachute fabric on aluminum struts, over the bay, like a tent; the centrifuge arm held it up to some extent. The canopy caught the worst of the tholin drift, but it was already sagging under the accumulated weight. Some day he was going to have to get up there and knock the crap off, like a suburban home-owner clearing snow from his roof.