“The human sensorium remains a mystery, doesn’t it, Mikhail?”
“Yes, it does.”
Out of the corner of his eye Mikhail spotted movement. He turned away from the sun. When his faceplate cleared he made out a light, crawling toward him through the lunar shadows. It was a sight almost as unusual, for Mikhail, as the face of the troubled sun.
“It seems I have a visitor. Thales, you’d better make sure we have enough hot water for the shower.” He began to pick his way back down the trail, taking care to plan every step in advance despite his mounting excitement. “This looks like it’s going to be quite a day,” he said.
3: Royal Society
Siobhan McGorran sat alone in a deep armchair. She had her personal softscreen unrolled on her lap, a cup of rather bitter coffee on the occasional table at her side, and her phone clamped to her ear. She was rehearsing the lecture she was to give to an audience of her most distinguished peers in less than half an hour.
She read aloud, “ ‘2037 promises to be the most significant year for cosmology since 2003, when the basic components of the universe—the proportions of baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy—were first correctly determined. I was eleven years old in 2003, and I remember how excited I was when the results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe came in. I suppose I wasn’t a very cool teenager! But to me, MAP was a robot Columbus. That intrepid cosmology probe was sent off in the hope of finding a dark-matter China, but en route it stumbled over a dark-energy America. And just as Columbus’s discoveries fixed the geography of Earth forever in human minds, so we learned the geography of the universe in 2003. Now, in 2037, thanks to the results we anticipate from the latest Quintessence Anisotropy Probe, we—’ ”
The room lights blinked, making her stumble in her reading.