Once more into the Perihelion auditorium, then, along with everyone who hadn't gone up the coast to see the event in person. I sat up front next to Jason and we craned our heads at the video feed from NASA, a spectacular long shot of the offshore launch platforms, steel islands linked by immense rail bridges, ten huge Prometheus boosters (called "Prometheus" when they were manufactured by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the Russians, the Chinese, and the EU used the same template but named and painted them differently) bathed in spotlights and ranked like whitewashed fenceposts far into the blue Atlantic. Much had been sacrificed for this moment: taxes and treasure, shorelines and coral reefs, careers and lives. (At the foot of each gantry off Canaveral was an engraved plaque bearing the names of the fifteen construction workers who had died during the assembly work.) Jason tapped his foot in a violent rhythm while the countdown drained into its last minute, and I wondered if this was symptomatic, but he caught me looking and leaned into my ear and said, "I'm just nervous. Aren't you?"
There had already been problems. Worldwide, eighty of these big boosters had been assembled and prepared for tonight's synchronized launch. But they were a new design, not entirely debugged. Four had been scrubbed before launch for technical problems. Three were currently holding in their counts—in a launch that was supposed to be synchronized worldwide—for the usual reasons: dicey fuel lines, software glitches. This was inevitable and had been accounted for in tile planning, but it still seemed ominous.
So much had to happen so quickly. What we were transplanting this time was not biology but human history, and human history, Jase had said, burned like a fire compared to the slow rust of evolution. (When we were much younger, after the Spin but before he left the Big House, Jase used to have a parlor trick to demonstrate this idea. "Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist")
Then the NASA voice announced, "Ignition," and Jason sucked air between his teeth and turned his head half away as nine of ten boosters, hollow tubes of explosive liquid taller than the Empire State Building, detonated skyward against all logic of gravity and inertia, burning tons of fuel to achieve the first few inches of altitude and vaporizing seawater in order to mute a sonic event that would otherwise have shaken them to pieces. Then it was as if they had made ladders of steam and smoke and climbed them, their speed apparent now, plumes of fire outpacing the rolling clouds they had created. Up and gone, just like every successful launch: swift and vivid as a dream, then up and gone.
The last booster was delayed by a faulty sensor but launched ten minutes late. It would arrive on Mars nearly a thousand years after the rest of the fleet, but this had been taken into account in the planning and might prove to be a good thing, an injection of Terrestrial technology and know-how long after the paper books and digital readers of the original colonists had crumbled into dust.
* * * * *
Moments later the video broadcast cut to French Guyana, the old and much-expanded Centre National d'Études Spatiales at Kourou, where one of the big boosters from the Aerospatiale factory had risen a hundred feet and then lost thrust and tumbled back onto its pad in a mushroom of flame.
Twelve people were killed, ten aboard the NEP ark and two on the ground, but it was the only conspicuous tragedy of the entire launch sequence, and that probably amounted to good luck, taken all in all.
* * * * *
But that wasn't the end of the exercise. By midnight—and this, it seemed to me, was the clearest indicator yet of the grotesque disparity between terrestrial time and Spin-time— human civilization on Mars had either failed entirely or had been in progress for most of a hundred thousand years.
That's roughly the amount of time between the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and yesterday afternoon.
It passed while I was driving home from Perihelion to my rental. It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change. I thought about those lives—those fully real human lives, each one of them boxed into a span of less than a minute as my watch counted time—and felt a little dizzy. Spin vertigo. Or something deeper.
A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars. Their payload packages parachuted back to Earth and were retrieved before morning.
* * * * *
I saw the results before they were made public.
This was a full week after the Prometheus launches. Jason had booked a 10:30 appointment at the infirmary, subject to breaking news from JPL. He didn't cancel the appointment but showed up an hour late with a manila envelope in his hand, clearly anxious to discuss something not related to his medical regimen. I hurried him into a consultation room.
"I don't know what to tell the press," he said. "I just got off a conference call with the ESA director and a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats. We're trying to put together a draft of a joint statement for heads of state, but as soon as the Russians agree to a sentence the Chinese want to veto it, and vice versa."
"A statement about what, Jase?"
"The satellite data."
"You got the results?" In fact they were overdue. JPL was usually quicker about sharing its photos. But from what Jason had said I guessed someone had been sitting on the data. Which meant it wasn't what they'd expected. Bad news, perhaps.
"Look," Jason said.
He opened the manila folder and pulled out two composite telescopic photos, one atop the other. Both were images of Mars taken from Earth orbit after the Prometheus launches.
The first photograph was heart-stopping. It was not as distinct as the framed image! had put up in the waiting room, since in this one the planet was far from its closest approach to Earth; the clarity it did possess was a testament to modern imaging technology. Superficially it didn't seem much different from the framed photo: I could make out enough green to know that the transplanted ecology was still intact, still active.
"Look a little closer," Jason said.
He ran his finger down the sinuous line of a riverine lowland. There were green places here with sharp, regular borders. More of them, the more I looked.