a hiatus was coming to an end. This changes everything.
He took Nemoto’s hand, and they walked back across the regolith to the tractor.
The priest was not what Xenia Makarova had expected.
Xenia herself wasn’t religious. And Xenia’s family, emigrant to the United States four generations ago, had been Orthodox. What did she know about Catholic priests? So she had expected the cliché: some gaunt old man, Italian or Irish, shrivelled up by a lifetime of celibacy, dressed in a flapping black cassock that would soak up the toxic dust and prove utterly unsuitable for the conditions here at the launch site.
Her first surprise had come when the priest had expressed no special accommodation requirements, but had been happy to stay in the town of Baikonur, along with the technicians who worked for Bootstrap here at the old Soviet-era launch station. Baikonur – once called Leninsk, at the heart of Kazakhstan – was a place of burned-out offices and abandoned, windowless apartments, of roads and roofs coated with strata of gritty brown powder, blown from the pesticide-laden salt flats of the long-dead Aral Sea a few hundred kilometres away. Baikonur was a relic of Soviet dreams, plagued by crime and ill-health. Not a good place to stay.
So Xenia wasn’t sure what to expect by the time the bus drew up to the security gate, and she went out to greet her holy guest.
The priest must have been sixty, small, compact: fit-looking, though she showed some stiffness climbing down from the bus. Camera drones, glittering toys the size of beetles, whirred out in a cloud around her head.
Her, yes: of course it would be a female, one of the Vatican’s first cadre of women priests, that would be assigned to this most PR-friendly of operations.
And no black cassock. The priest, dressed in loose, comfortable-looking therm-aware shirt and slacks, could have held any one of a number of white collar professions: an accountant, maybe, or a space scientist of the kind Frank Paulis had recruited in droves, or even a lawyer like Xenia herself. It was only the dog collar, a thin band of white at the throat, that marked out a different vocation.
From the shadows of her broad, sensible sun-hat the priest smiled out at Xenia. ‘You must be Ms Makarova.’
‘Call me Xenia. And you –’
‘Dorothy Chaum.’ The smile grew a little weary. ‘I’m neither Mother, nor Father, thankfully. You must call me Dorothy.’
‘It’s a pleasure to have you here, Ms – Dorothy.’
Dorothy flapped at the drones buzzing around her head like flies. ‘You’re a good liar. I’ll try to trouble you as little as I can.’ And she looked beyond Xenia, into the rocket compound, with questing, curious eyes.
Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, Xenia thought.
Xenia, in fact, had been against the visit on principle, and she had told her boss so. ‘For God’s sake, Frank. This is a space launcher development site. It’s a place for hard hats, not haloes.’
Frank Paulis – forty-five years old, squat, brisk, bustling, sleek with sweat even in his air-conditioned offices – had just tapped his softscreen. ‘Just like it says in the mail here. This character is here on behalf of the Pope, to gather information on the mission –’
‘And bless it. Frank, the Bruno is a mission to the asteroids. We’re going out to find Eeties, for God’s sake. To have some quack waving incense and throwing holy water over our ship is – ridiculous. Mediaeval.’
Frank had got a look in his eyes she’d come to recognize. You have to be realistic, Xenia. Live in the real world. ‘The Vatican are one of our principal sponsors. They’ve a right to access.’
‘The Church is using us as part of its repositioning,’ she’d protested sourly. It was true; the Church had spent much of the new millennium rebuilding, after the multiple crises that had assailed it after the turn of the century: sexual scandals, financial irregularities, a renewed awareness of the horrors of Christian history – the Crusades and the Inquisition chief amongst them. ‘Not to mention,’ Xenia said bitterly, ‘the Church’s refusal to acknowledge female reproductive rights and to address the issue of population growth, a position not abandoned until 2013, a historic wrong which must be on a par with –’
‘Nobody’s arguing,’ Frank said gently. ‘But – who are you suggesting is cynical? Us or them? Look, I don’t care about the Church. All I care about is its money, and there’s still a hell of a lot of that. And, just like any other corporate sponsor, the Church is entitled to its slice of the PR pie.’
‘Sometimes I think you’d take money from the Devil himself if it got your Big Dumb Booster a little closer to the launch pad.’
‘Since we have a bunch of those apocalyptic cultists here – the ones who think the Gaijin are demons sent to punish us, or whatever – I suppose I am taking money from the other guy. Well, at least it shows balance.’ Frank put his arm around her – he had to reach up to do it – and guided her out of his office. ‘Xenia, this witch doctor isn’t going to be with us for long. And, believe me, a priest is going to be a lot easier for you to entertain than some of the fat cats we have to put up with.’
‘Me … Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn’t valuable –’
‘Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours.’
‘What lecture?’
He frowned. ‘I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life.’
She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. ‘The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?’
‘Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the co-discoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk.’ He grinned. ‘Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting.’
‘Are you going?’
‘Of course I am.’ And, gently, he had closed the door.
Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.
Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s long-hidden space centre, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base – some of it said to be the last relics of Russia’s never-successful Moon rockets.
But Dorothy’s attention was diverted, away from Xenia’s sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks
