“Thanks.”
“You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”
She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”
“Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”
“Yes. And the other five years?”
“Are the years you spent on Mir.”
She nodded. “You know about that?”
“It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”
She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.
“Thank you, Thales.”
“It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.
5: London
Bella Fingal was in the air above London when her daughter first brought her the bad news from the sky.
Bella had been flown in across the Atlantic, and her plane was heading for Heathrow, out in the suburbs to the west of central London. But the pilot told her the flight path would see them over-fly to the east first and then come back west along the path of the Thames, into the headwinds, and on this bright March morning the city was a glittering carpet spread out for her. Bella had the plane all to herself, one of the new scramjets, a fancy chariot for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother.
But she really didn’t want to be making this trip. The funeral of James Duflot had been bad enough; coming to the grieving family’s home would be worse. It was however her duty, as Chair of the World Space Council.
She had wandered into this job almost by accident, probably a compromise choice by the supra-governmental panel that controlled the Space Council. In a corner of her mind she had thought that her new post would be pretty much an honorary one, like most of the university chancellorships and nonexecutive directorships that had come her way as a veteran of the sunstorm. She hadn’t imagined getting shipped across the planet to be plunged into messy, tearful situations like this.