The statistics went on and on, baffling, the slides bewildering.

For someone responsible for NASA’s PR, York thought, Rick Llewellyn’s speaking style was oddly drab, uninspiring. It was hard to fix your attention on him for much longer than a couple of sentences at a time. It was like one of her early ground-training classroom sessions: all those block diagrams, the endless, droning afternoons.

But the content of Llewellyn’s slide show was terrifying, if you thought about it too hard.

“We’re already planning a world tour for you guys when you get back. Over forty-eight days you will visit thirty-five countries, meeting key groups of press, television, scientists, students, and educators, as well as politicians. You’ll go to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, England…

“We set a couple of broad guidelines for the media stations around the world, a long way back in the mission planning. First, of course, Ares represents man on Mars, it’s a culmination of an age-old dream, it’s in the nature of man to accept difficult challenges, blah-blah, all of that stuff. And then, historically, Ares is built on the achievement of many scientists, Newton and Goddard and von Braun. You know the score. And today Ares has a strong international flavor, with the overseas investigators, the open access to samples and data, the tracking stations around the world, the assistance from the Russians in your training, and so on. Additionally, of course, space is benefiting man — you have a lot of stuff here about the spin-offs — and you have the hope that Ares, spectacular off-Earth achievement as it is, represents a promise that man may eventually use his technologies to resolve the Earth’s intractable problems…”

Ares, as the shop window for technocratic solutions, York thought sourly. Jorge was right. It’s turned out just like Apollo after all.

But today the mood was a little darker than in the 1960s. Today, you had Reagan’s Star Wars talk, of particle beams and lasers and smart bullets. Space was again an arena for flexing national muscles. And Ares was being used, blatantly, by the Reagan administration to appease national and international sensibilities about the aggressive use of space technology.

Ares had become twinned with the Star Wars initiative in the media. Ares was the dreaming half of the U.S. space program, coupled to its threatening sibling. Maybe that had been the administration’s intention all along, when they approved Joe Muldoon’s reshaping of the mission back in ’81.

She could see the hand of Fred Michaels in this, still pulling strings, even from his retirement in Dallas. Michaels had locked Ares together with SDI in the mind of Reagan — and the public and Congress. As long as Reagan kept on pumping billions of dollars into military spending, some of that was going to flow into NASA, to sustain Ares. It was smart footwork by Michaels. Even if it was, she reflected, completely amoral. Do anything, say anything — just keep the mission progressing.

Meanwhile, every news item about her mission — every gimmick, every toy, every image — had multiple meanings, she saw: Ares, as a geopolitical symbol; Ares, as an ad for technocracy.

It would probably always be like that. To gain political advantage was the only reason, really, why any government would fund travel into space.

And here was she, Natalie York, the great skeptic about space, being transformed into one of the great icons of the deadly space glamour business.

She looked up at the screen, at a thousand reproductions of her own face, and shivered.

The tours, the press conferences, the photo opportunities continued.

Her message was formulaic, coached by the Public Affairs Office people. I need you! Do good work!

Everywhere she went, there were people: thousands of them, all gazing at her, smiling, with an odd pregnant distance about them. As if they longed to touch her. And always, they applauded her.

She hadn’t thought much about the future. To her, “after the mission” was so remote it might as well not exist; it was as if her whole life was going to end at the moment she stepped into the Command Module.

But her life afterward would, inexorably, go on. And in a sense nothing she actually did on Mars — not even her precious geology — would matter so much as the simple fact that she’d been there.

She thought of the looks on the faces of the press and public, as they gazed on people who had been into space, to the Moon. When I get back they will look at me in the same way. They do even now. And they’ve a right to; it’s their money.

And what about herself? Would she become like Joe Muldoon, a kind of walking ghost, her life transformed by her brief, dreamlike — and forever unrepeated — interval on Mars?

She began to see a darker side to the fascination with which people regarded her. Sure, they wanted to witness that woman — that otherwise ordinary person — who might walk on Mars, take an unimaginable evolutionary step on their behalf.

But they also thought she might die.

The little cemetery struck York as classic small-town: neat, well tended, the white marble gravestones gleaming in their rows. The open grave was like a wound in the cultivated soil, waiting to be healed.

Somehow, the astronauts, current and former, among the mourners at the graveside — Joe Muldoon, Phil Stone, others — didn’t look out of place, in their crisp black suits, their military bearing. Astronauts were small-town heroes to perfection, nothing more, nothing less.

The day was glorious, the sky an infinite blue, the sunlight sharp with the edge of early spring.

York felt numb, empty, unable to mourn.

Peter Priest had died a squalid death, of a cocaine overdose, at age twenty-five. He’d pissed away his life, she thought brutally, and achieved nothing; what the hell was there to mourn in that? And she shouldn’t feel guilty for her absence of feeling. The kid would probably have opposed this heavyweight turnout for his funeral anyhow; it was all his mother’s idea.

York remembered the little boy who’d gone running around the nuclear rocket plant, all those years ago. What did his death mean? Was it somehow linked to that long-ago day at Jackass Flats — to the space program in general, to its obsessive dedication to its goals — to his father’s final consumption by it?

And how did this new; grisly, numbing event cast light on her own ambiguous relationship with Ben?

She shouldn’t have come. But Karen Priest had asked for her specifically: “Ben often spoke of you. I know you were one of his good friends. I’d be honored if you would be here to remember Petey, as best we can…”

Peter, for Christ’s sake. He wanted to be called Peter. Not much of a thing to ask.

Oddly, Karen didn’t seem as distressed as York had expected. As if she’d accepted Peter’s death as part of the ancient deal she’d made with her husband.

Sometimes York’s lack of feeling at times like this made her wonder if she was somehow less than human. Maybe her single-minded, lifelong pursuit of her own goals had made her obsessive. Hollow inside, as people perceived the space program itself. She simply couldn’t imagine how it felt to be Karen Priest, to have to attend funerals of husband and son within a few years of each other. Maybe NASA ought to fix up a sim of it for me, she thought sourly.

The service was over. The party broke up and people began heading back for their cars: battered Fords for the locals, big hired Chevies for the space program people.

York knew Karen was inviting people back, but she didn’t think she could stand what she was feeling much longer: not grief, but the awful emptiness.

A man — short, overweight, dark — came up to her. “Hi.” He was neatly groomed, and wearing an expensive topcoat. He smiled at her.