“How about that,” Benacerraf called.

Rosenberg shouted, “If you’re going to lift that thing, Paula, strap in.”

Benacerraf began fumbling at the restraints at her waist.

The whir rose in pitch to a thin whine, and the skimmer shuddered. It lifted off the ground, the skirt billowing beneath it. Benacerraf whooped, and Rosenberg applauded.

If it worked, the skimmer would extend their range of operations hugely. Any kind of surface car was going to be impractical, given the stiffness of the tholin slush. But the ground effect vehicle idea might have been made for Titan, with its low gravity, all this lovely thick air… The best way to get around in these conditions.

Except for human-powered flight on Leonardo wings, of course. But that was a little beyond the imagination of NASA.

The skimmer hung with its four footpads suspended about a yard off the ground. Rosenberg thought he could see the murky Titanian air being sucked into the mouth of the duct, particles of aerosol crud marking the airflow. The central duct jerked this way and that, blasting its jet of air for directional control. There wasn’t much sophistication in controlling the craft; you swivelled the ducted fan, taking care not to disrupt the air cushion that held the whole thing up, and went where the downward blast took you…

But now the skimmer was wobbling from side to side, as if suspended from an invisible wire. Benacerraf was wrestling with the joystick. “It handles like shit,” she called. “It’s nothing like the training vehicle at Ellington. This is completely unstable. I can feel it. It feels as if it’s about to—”

Abruptly the front of the skimmer tipped upwards, and the skirt lifted clear of the ground. A great gush of gumbo came fountaining out from beneath the skimmer, falling in slow, complex arcs back to the ground. With its cushion of air lost, the skimmer slipped backwards, its rear two legs slamming into the ground.

Benacerraf worked to kill the fan, and the skimmer tipped forward, settling at last on all four legs.

The skimmer looked like an ungainly meteorite, fallen to ground at the center of a great radial splash of churned-up gumbo.

As the fan noise died, Rosenberg stepped forward. He checked Benacerraf was okay, and they started to talk about ways to gain control of the stability.

They kept trying. Benacerraf kept taking the skimmer up, until the batteries started to flatten. They didn’t manage to get the skimmer to fly more than five yards before, every time, it veered off course and dug itself into the gumbo like a badly thrown frisbee.

Rosenberg had a deep, pessimistic sense they were wasting their time. The design of the craft looked all wrong to him: its center of gravity much too high, the air cushion the wrong shape. With a ground-effect vehicle stability depended on the design of the air cushion, aerodynamic guidance. The Boeing people had done their best, but they just hadn’t had the time or facilities to test out their models of how the thing was going to behave in Titan conditions: the air density, the temperature structure, the gravity.

The skimmer was a wipe-out. And that meant that wherever they went, they were going to have to foot-slog it. They’d travelled a billion miles, and now they were here they could go no further than they could walk.

Their options had suddenly closed in even further.

He’d been out a long time; he was tired. He went to the airlock.

Once inside and de-suited he started to clean off the gumbo still sticking to his EMU.

Fifty million bucks, he thought.

On the day of the funeral of Chen Tong, Jiang Ling arrived early at Tiananmen Square.

She stepped out of her hotel onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace. She walked west under the canopy of sycamore trees, just budding, that fringed the bright red wall of the Forbidden City. The sky was suffused with a pearl grey.

She reached the end of the sidewalk, and stepped forward onto a checkerboard of cement paving stones. The place was all but deserted. She walked to the center, her footsteps clicking loudly.

The vastness of the Square swept away around her, like a frozen sea of stone.

She turned, and looked around the frieze of monumental architecture that lined the hundred acres of the Square: the museums to the east, the Great Hall of the People to the west, Mao’s mausoleum to the south. And at the very center of the Square there was the Monument to the Martyrs of the People, a granite obelisk inscribed in Mao’s own hand with the epigram Eternal Glory to the People’s Heroes.

And to the north there was Tiananmen itself: the Gate of Heavenly Peace, leading into the ancient Forbidden City. The Gate was a ten-storey rampart set in the massive walls of the Forbidden City; it was painted imperial maroon, capped by two tiers of sloping yellow-tiled roofs, the colors still washed out by the dawn grey. Five portals ran through the base of the Gate, and just above — flanked by inscriptions saying Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World and Long Live the People’s Republic of China — sat the massive, familiar portrait of Mao Zedong. The gigantic softscreen image, responding to her presence, appeared to look down on her and smile in welcome. Something inside her melted. On the screen, a blue sky, fluffy with clouds, blossomed into view behind Mao’s corpulent face.

Her memories never did justice to this place, she thought. Photographs had a way of making the Square seem as flat and uninspiring as the endless shopping malls and parking lots she had seen in America. But this was the Square: the largest public quadrangle in the world, the center of the country’s center — the north star, as Confucius would have said, to which all other stars are attracted. Standing here she was overwhelmed by the physical size of her nation, the history embedded in the ground on which she walked. And she was touched by her own significance, as the first astronaut, her role in the millennial extension of tianming, the Mandate of Heaven.

This was, she believed, a sense of oneness which no Westerner could understand: certainly not the Americans, with their endlessly recycled images of the Tiananmen students of 1989, those unfortunate, misguided wretches with their Western clothes and English-language banners.

This was China, after all: for all its faults and problems, founded on a billion souls, five millennia of history; this could never be America.

And today, it was promised, she would meet the Great Helmsman himself. Her heart thumped as it had not when, during her endless tours, she had shaken the hands of presidents and kings. Perhaps, today, she would at last be released from the burden of her ceremonial duties, and permitted to return to what she loved: to fly, to sample again the light-filled glories of spaceflight.

With hope and expectation, she walked forward towards the Great Hall of the People. The early morning cold dug through the layers of her light Mao suit, but soon the sun would rise, and pour orange light and warmth into the remote corners of the Square.

She entered the grandiose gloom of the Hall itself. This was a true monument of socialist architecture, all of a thousand feet long, room enough to seat five thousand banqueting guests. And today, under the glare of TV lights, the focus of all this immense volume was the wizened body of a very old man, which lay draped in a Chinese flag, under a crystal sarcophagus. There was a sea of Party leaders, almost all of them men, lapping in orderly waves in their dark Mao suits around the glittering coffin. Jiang took her place in line, alongside her mentor Xu Shiyou.

Sandwiched between two octogenarian Party stalwarts from the provinces, they filed forward slowly towards the coffin. On a small stage a senior official was intoning a long, lugubrious eulogy over Chen Tong — a celebration of his glorious career, which stretched back to service with Mao himself before 1949 — and the Party grandees, one by one, reached the sarcophagus and bowed three times, and then each of them passed on to Chen’s widow and shook her withered old hand. Thus Jiang Ling found herself adrift in the sea of old men.