Emergency propulsion system for disabled vessels, a “solar moth” where half of a balloon is silvered and sunlight is reflected onto a window chamber hoop boiler, where hydrogen seeded with alkali metals serves as the propellant. Tiny exhaust velocities and not powerful beyond Mars, but very compact until deployed, Mars, 2099;

Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma, which can “shift gears” from high thrust to high exhaust velocity, depending on need, Callisto, 2278;

advances in physics, materials science, and rocketry, plus a growing desire for improvements in speed and fuel efficiencies, now drive an industrial race for new designs, dominated by organizations on Luna, Mars, and Callisto, so we can expect to see

KIRAN AND LAKSHMI

The next time he was passing through the Cleopatra train station, Kiran called the number Swan had given him, and the call was picked up by Lakshmi herself. When he explained how he had gotten the number, she gave him directions to a noodle house near him and told him she would be there in an hour, and she was. She turned out to be a Venusian native in the classic mold—tall, dark, handsome, taciturn. Her combination of Chinese ancestry and Indian name resembled that of some others he had met; he had been given to understand it marked Venusians who wanted some separation from the old country, with the name being a way of saying they were more Venusian than Chinese.

“Don’t stop working for Shukra,” Lakshmi told him immediately, even though Shukra had left him in a state of xuanfu(drifting chaos). She would help him to get to cuo suo. (Both meant “place,” Kiran’s translation belt told him, but suowas one’s own place, meaning also his work unit.) She would give him a better assignment, which would involve serving as a courier in his travels, moving things and information from one xiaojinkuto another. Xiaojinku, small gold-storage centers: this sounded good to Kiran. He agreed to do it. Only then did Lakshmi tell him that he would be paid in yinxing gongzi, invisible wages. That didn’t sound as good, but something in the way she said it made him think it would be all right.

At the end of her description of his new job, Lakshmi stared at him. “Shukra got you from Swan Er Hong, but he did not use you. Does he think you are stupid? Or maybe Swan? Or me?”

Kiran almost said, Maybe Shukra is the stupid one, but Lakshmi did not actually seem to expect him to reply. She got up and left, and an hour later he had a new ID number, thus a whole new identity and name. None of which seemed to matter to anyone. His first assignment from Lakshmi was to courier a small packet from Cleopatra back to Colette; he was to fly back, to get there faster. With the packet, Lakshmi gave him a pair of translating glasses, which looked like thick old-fashioned black spectacles, with speakers in the earpieces. “Better translator,” she explained.

So he booked a flight, and in the process found that his new identity had quite a number of credits—so many it was a little scary. But interesting too, to see what kind of resources Lakshmi commanded. Maybe a whole xiaojinku, or more than one. People in his old work unit had said she was in the Working Group, and the Working Group ruled the planet.

Certainly her translator glasses were an upgrade; when he looked at Chinese language signs, with all their intricate ideograms, he now saw them overlaid in glowing red with the words rendered in English. It was startling to discover just how much information was written into the cityscape, now in glowing red: Beware of the Three Withouts. Vote for Stormy Chang. Towering Mountain Beer. The Door in the Middle of Half the Sky Alterations.A gender clinic, apparently. One could also Give Father a Second Sister.

Then he was off on a plane, then up above the turbulent clouds, into the permanent night under Venus’s sunshield. Only starlight illuminated the cloudtops below. Being in a jet reminded him of Earth. Out the window Earth itself made for a bluish double star overhead, with Earth twice as bright as Luna, the two together jewel-like and a little bit heart-stopping. Then the clouds below cleared, and he could see broken chopped jumbled ridges—the Maxwell Montes, apparently. They formed a giant mountain range, Venus’s Himalayas.

In Colette he gave Lakshmi’s packet to a person who approached him at his lodge entrance, and two days later the same person came by and asked him to take another packet to Cleopatra, on another flight.

Back in Cleopatra Kiran went up to the promenade running around the crater circumference just inside the dome, as instructed. Snow flowed down the outside of the dome in a perpetual avalanche. The packet was to be taken to point 328 on the dial of 360 degrees that divided the rim promenade. He found that the rail on the promenade was numbered as if in an arena concourse. The person waiting for him at 328, a small of indeterminate gender, spoke in Chinese. “We are the night runners of Bengal, very important work,” Kiran’s glasses translated out loud, causing a smile from the speaker, who apparently understood English; the glasses must have said something funny, but Kiran didn’t know what it was. “Tell me more about that,” he said quickly, and the small led him to a nearby bar.

Kexue (Science) sat on the bar’s edge while Kiran sat on a stool, and for a couple of hours Kiran listened to stories muttered in his ear by his glasses, stories that made little sense to him but were interesting anyway. They were part of a project, Lakshmi was a goddess, Science had once kissed her foot and almost electrocuted humble self; one could not touch the gods, but only obey. When they parted, Kiran got Kexue’s number and a promise to get together again.

His run back to Colette, with another packet, was to be on the ground this time, in a dedicated rover. He found he was only honorary pilot at best of this squat rover with six wheels, as it ran by AI. It was pretty fast, humming over a road of crushed rock and hard-packed gravel and passing enormous mining trucks with deft lane changes. The cab of the rover tilted backward, it seemed from the weight in the freight compartment behind. The freight had not been identified for him, but there was a dosimeter clicking steadily away on the dash. Uranium, maybe? The packet Kexue had given him was not sealed, and he checked in it, hoping this action would not be detectable, and saw that he was carrying a number of handwritten notes. Their Chinese letters scrawled like drunken calligraphy and were surrounded by little sketch drawings of birds and animals. His glasses overlaid the letters with red words:

Only he who has eyes can see.

In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Seemed like codes to him. Whether the messages were personal or official, important or routine, he could not know. At one point his glasses had translated Kexue as saying that to circumvent both Shukra and the qubes, Lakshmi was being forced to keep to just a word in the ear. Maybe these notes were part of that. Things were very, very unclear at the top, Kexue had said.

“Like in China?” Kiran had asked.

“No,” Kexue had said. “Not like China.”

Back in Colette, Kiran gave the packet to the same person outside his lodge door, then rejoined his work unit and spent a few weeks back on the ice, then got another call from Lakshmi and went to Cleopatra to get another packet. That happened quite a few times, with nothing in particular to distinguish each instance. As Kiran continued to live with his work unit in Colette and perform work associated with Shukra, he supposed he might have accidentally become some kind of mole or double agent, but he couldn’t be sure. He would have to call on Swan for his defense if anyone got annoyed. One day he found out by accident, when pushing his translation glasses back up on his nose, that they would translate with the red words floating on the lenses from spoken Chinese as well as written ideograms. This was a great discovery, and helped him both to learn faster and to stay in the game while he did learn. Red writing plastered over the visible world—it could be disconcerting, but it was so nice to have things explained at last. He kept it on more than off.