impressive."
And so it was. In her time as part of the president's science advisory team, she'd put in a lot of hours on spaceflight stunts like this, manned and unmanned. She had to admit that being able to share the experience vicariously -- to be able to sit in her own apartment wearing her VR headband, and yet to ride down to the asteroid with the probe itself -- was a vast improvement on what had been on offer before: those cramped visitors' booths behind Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, that noisy auditorium at JPL.
And yet she felt restless, here in the dark and cold. She longed to cut her VR link to the Bruno feed, to drink in the sunlight that washed over the Baltimore harbor area, visible from her apartment window just a meter away.
"It's just that space operations are always so darn slow," she said to Xenia.
"But we have to take it slow," Xenia said. "Encountering an asteroid is more like docking with another spacecraft than landing; the gravity here is so feeble the main challenge is not to bounce off and fly away.
"We're coming down at the asteroid's north pole. The main Gaijin site appears to be at the other rotation pole, the south pole. What we intend is to land out of sight of the Gaijin -- assuming we haven't been spotted already -- and work our way around the surface to the aliens. That way we may be able to keep a measure of control over events..."
"This is a terribly dark and dusty place, isn't it?"
"That's because this is a C-type asteroid, Ms. Della. Ice, volatiles, and organic compounds: just the kind of rock we might have chosen to mine for ourselves, for life support, propellant."
Yes, Maura thought with a flicker of dark anger. This is our belt, our asteroid. Our treasure, a legacy of the Solar System's violent origins for our future. And yet there are Gaijin here -- strangers, taking our birthright.
Her anger surprised her; she hadn't suspected she was so territorial. It's not as if they landed in Antarctica, she told herself. The asteroids aren't yet ours; we have no claim here, and therefore shouldn't feel threatened by the Gaijin's appropriation.
And yet I do.
The Alpha Centauri signal -- though the first, picked up a year ago -- was no longer unique. Whispers in the radio wavebands had been detected across the sky: from Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, Luyten 726-8 -- the nearby stars, the Sun's close neighbors, the first destinations planned in a hundred interstellar-colonization studies, homes of civilizations dreamed of in a thousand science fiction novels.
One by one, the stars were coming out.
There were patterns to the distribution. No star farther than around nine light-years away had yet lit up with radio signals. But the signals weren't uniform. They weren't of the same type, or even on the same frequencies; such differences were just as confusing as the very existence of the signals. And meanwhile the Gaijin, the Solar System's new residents, remained quiet: They seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat.
It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures -- or machines -- were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now.
But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.
And, for Maura, that was a matter to regret.
She was never short of work, of invitations like this. She knew that as part of the amorphous community of pols and workers who
And so it was. In her time as part of the president's science advisory team, she'd put in a lot of hours on spaceflight stunts like this, manned and unmanned. She had to admit that being able to share the experience vicariously -- to be able to sit in her own apartment wearing her VR headband, and yet to ride down to the asteroid with the probe itself -- was a vast improvement on what had been on offer before: those cramped visitors' booths behind Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, that noisy auditorium at JPL.
And yet she felt restless, here in the dark and cold. She longed to cut her VR link to the Bruno feed, to drink in the sunlight that washed over the Baltimore harbor area, visible from her apartment window just a meter away.
"It's just that space operations are always so darn slow," she said to Xenia.
"But we have to take it slow," Xenia said. "Encountering an asteroid is more like docking with another spacecraft than landing; the gravity here is so feeble the main challenge is not to bounce off and fly away.
"We're coming down at the asteroid's north pole. The main Gaijin site appears to be at the other rotation pole, the south pole. What we intend is to land out of sight of the Gaijin -- assuming we haven't been spotted already -- and work our way around the surface to the aliens. That way we may be able to keep a measure of control over events..."
"This is a terribly dark and dusty place, isn't it?"
"That's because this is a C-type asteroid, Ms. Della. Ice, volatiles, and organic compounds: just the kind of rock we might have chosen to mine for ourselves, for life support, propellant."
Yes, Maura thought with a flicker of dark anger. This is our belt, our asteroid. Our treasure, a legacy of the Solar System's violent origins for our future. And yet there are Gaijin here -- strangers, taking our birthright.
Her anger surprised her; she hadn't suspected she was so territorial. It's not as if they landed in Antarctica, she told herself. The asteroids aren't yet ours; we have no claim here, and therefore shouldn't feel threatened by the Gaijin's appropriation.
And yet I do.
The Alpha Centauri signal -- though the first, picked up a year ago -- was no longer unique. Whispers in the radio wavebands had been detected across the sky: from Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, Luyten 726-8 -- the nearby stars, the Sun's close neighbors, the first destinations planned in a hundred interstellar-colonization studies, homes of civilizations dreamed of in a thousand science fiction novels.
One by one, the stars were coming out.
There were patterns to the distribution. No star farther than around nine light-years away had yet lit up with radio signals. But the signals weren't uniform. They weren't of the same type, or even on the same frequencies; such differences were just as confusing as the very existence of the signals. And meanwhile the Gaijin, the Solar System's new residents, remained quiet: They seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat.
It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures -- or machines -- were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now.
But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.
And, for Maura, that was a matter to regret.
She was never short of work, of invitations like this. She knew that as part of the amorphous community of pols and workers who
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