the xiaohao, after the small isolation cells which were still operated within Qincheng Prison in Beijing. But her brief feeling of confinement had passed, for the capsule was already alive: the cabin floodlights glowed cheerfully, complex graphics scrolled through the softscreens embedded in the walls, and green lights shone all over the instrument panels.
There were two small circular windows, one to either side of her. Now there was only darkness within them, because the spacecraft – perched here a hundred and seventy feet above the ground at the tip of the Long March booster – was enclosed within its protective fairing. But there was a small periscope, its eyepiece set in the center of the instrument panel before her, whose extension poked out beyond the fairing.
Seen through the periscope, the sky was a vast blue dome, devoid of moisture.
This was Inner Mongolia, the north-east of China. The desert was a vast, tan brown expanse, as flat as a table-top, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Beijing was hundreds of miles east of here. To the north, beyond the shadow of the Great Wall, camel trains still worked across the Mongolian Gobi.
The Jiuquan launch center itself was modest. There were just three launch pads set in a rough triangle a few hundred yards apart. The pads were concrete tables, a hundred feet across, with minimal equipment at each; there was a single gantry almost as tall as the Long March booster itself, which was moved on rails between the pads. She could see the railway spurs which brought booster stages here. There was no surrounding industrial complex, as at Cape Canaveral or Tyuratam. There was only an igloo-like blockhouse close to each pad, buried partly underground, containing the firing rooms; further away there were gleaming tanks and snaking pipelines for propellant storage and delivery, and a small power station.
The launch complex, in fact, was dwarfed by the thousand-mile hugeness of the Gobi.
To Jiang, the elemental simplicity of this facility was its power. Here in the mouth of the desert it was as if her booster had barely any connection with the Earth it was soon to shake off. To Jiang, Jiuquan was the reality of spaceflight, reduced to its core …
The flight was still to come, of course. But already, she sensed, the worst of her mission was over: the public tours, the attention from TV and net correspondents, the speeches to thousands of Party cadres in Tiananmen Square, even the meeting with the Great Helmsman himself. Of course there would be many more such chores after the flight, but that was far from her mind.
For now she was alone in here, contained within the xiaohao – in this environment she had come to know so well. Here, she was in command, and she was ready to confront destiny: to become the first Chinese, in five thousand years of history, to break the bonds of Earth itself.
A voice crackled in the small speakers on her headset. ‘Lei Feng Number One from the firing room. Are you ready to begin your checklist?’
She was still clutching the brass bell. She reached up, and fixed it to the handle of the hatch above her with a twist of wire. She touched Mao’s face with a spacesuited finger. The bell rang gently. She smiled. Now, ta laorenjia could protect her as he did millions of Chinese; Mao Zedong, three decades after his death, had become the most popular household folk god.
She settled back in her couch. ‘This is Jiang Ling in Lei Feng Number One. Yes, I can confirm I am ready to proceed with the checklist. Today is a good day to fly!’
The work seemed to come in waves, with clusters of switches to throw and settings to check in a short time. In addition she had to record measurements in her log book. And she had to work to reduce the condensation inside the cramped compartment. In orbit this would be done automatically, but on the ground the light pumps were overwhelmed by Earth’s gravity, and she had to open and close valves at set times, and she had a little hand-pump she used to move condensate from one part of the cabin to another.
There were several long holds in the countdown, when malfunctions were encountered. During these periods she had literally nothing to do, and she found them difficult times.
She was aware of continual movement and noise. She could feel the rocket swaying as the thin desert wind hit its flanks; and there was a succession of thumps, bangs and shudders, as ancillary equipment was moved to and from the booster. She was very aware that she was suspended at the top of a thin, fragile steel tower housing thousands of tons of highly explosive propellant.
There were cameras all over the cabin, focused on her face behind its open visor, their black lenses glinting in the floods. She tried to keep her expression clear, her movements calm and assured.
She felt a deep nervousness gnaw at her, more worrying even than the prospect that some catastrophe might claim her life, today. If something went wrong, if the mission was aborted, was it possible that she would somehow be blamed?
Jiang was not Han Chinese. She was a Turkic Uighur, a Muslim minority which emanated from the westernmost province of Xinjiang. Jiang’s family came from the desert capital Urumqi; her family had moved to Beijing when she was a child when Jiang’s father, a mid-ranking Party cadre, was posted to the Minorities Institute in the capital in the 1970s. Since her father was both an official and a Uighur, the family had been treated with a special deference reserved for select representatives of minority groups who served as symbols for the Party’s efforts to build ‘socialist solidarity’ between central China and the non-Han regions. In Beijing, Jiang had attended a special ‘experimental’ school reserved for the children of the Party élite.
Among the Han astronaut trainees there had been some resentment at her promotion – sometimes suppressed, sometimes not. And there had been genuine surprise when she had been selected for the honour of this first flight, ahead of the Han candidates.
Jiang believed that it was on the basis of her superior abilities. Perhaps that was true. But she knew that she could not help but accrue rivals and enemies, now, as she moved into national, even international prominence.
Meanwhile the xiaodao xiaoxi – the back-alley scuttlebutt – was that the Chinese space program, in its thirty-year history, had already killed five hundred people. Even worse, it was said, one astronaut had already lost his – or her – life, in a clandestine suborbital test of the Lei Feng-Long March system.
Jiang Ling believed some of this, but not all. She would be a fool to try to deny that she was exposing herself to enormous risks, here in the Lei Feng. Perhaps more risks than any other astronaut from East or West since the first pioneers themselves.
But for Jiang it was worth it. And not for the glory – for being what the People’s Daily called a jianghu haojie, a modern-day knight errant – and certainly not for the ‘iron rice bowl’ which her status afforded her. To Jiang, it was simply this moment, the hours and days to come: to be thrust into orbit, to look down on the Earth like a glowing carpet below. To Jiang, that was worth any risk.
As she’d come to the pad, a technician had told her the Americans were claiming to have found life on Titan, moon of Saturn.
Lying here now, Jiang tried to absorb the news. What could it mean? Could it be true?
In the end she dismissed the speculation. What value was a mission to Saturn? What use was life on Titan, even if it existed? Perhaps the stars were for America, but Earth was for China.
And now the holds started to clear up, and her mood lifted.
Jackie Benacerraf didn’t know what to expect of JPL. She certainly didn’t rely on the descriptions from her mother, the famous spacewoman.
