A warning chime sounded in the suit helmets on her final words. The spray that held the phages at bay was thinning. The woman stared around her at the barren landscape, seeing changes there invisible to the boy.

She took his hand. “You can’t stay here much longer, things are getting worse. We have to make plans. No, not for Jupiter. Jupiter is a giant, it would crush even you. Come on. We have to go back down.”

“In a minute.” He turned his head, to scan the whole sky. “Where’s the other one? I can’t see it.”

“Because it’s not so bright as Jupiter.” She pointed to a star whose light had a leaden gleam compared with its neighbors. “There you are. That’s Saturn. It’s big, but not so big as Jupiter.”

“But I can go there?”

“You can go. There, or maybe Jupiter.” She laughed again, at some secret joke. The platform was beginning its slow descent into the dark shaft. The circle of microphages began to creep in. She painfully straightened her rachitic spine. “Oh, yes, you can go. And one day, my dear, you will go to one or the other. And then they’ll pay, all of them, for what they’ve done to us.”

1

GANYMEDE, YEAR 2O97, SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

It was hard to say which was worse: waiting for Seine-Day to arrive, or enduring the torrent of hype that preceded the event.

Alex Ligon stared at the output that filled the two-meter display volume of his Ganymede office. In that display the solar system was evolving before his eyes. The year showed as 2098, ticking along a steady daily tally of status: population, economic activity, material and energy production and use, and transportation and information flow between worlds. Any statistic was available for the asking. And every statistic, he knew from past experience, was likely to be wrong. For anything beyond a week, the predictions steadily diverged from reality.