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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 honor 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.

    J ackie Bcnacerraf didn’t know what to expect of JPL. She certainly didn’t rely on the descriptions from her mother, the famous spacewoman.
    She drove. her hired car out along the Glendale Freeway, out of downtown LA, along tree-lined roads. She drove through swank suburbs, following the softscreen map in the car, and was surprised when she rounded a turn, and came upon JPL.
    At first glance JPL could have been any reasonably modern corporate or college site, maybe a hospital: it was spread over two hundred acres, nestling in the eroded, green-clad shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains, the blocky office buildings interspersed with Southern California palms. She caught glimpses of some kind of campus inside the security fences, fountains and trees.
    But the roads here were called Mariner