Anticopernicus Read Free Page A

this, our overcrowded world—she went back to work. She flew a dozen shuttle runs up-and-down, landing in a slowmo gout of dust in the deadeye middle of Copernicus’ crater.
    Then she took a contract for a Mars flight, a two month there-and-back. Delivering barnacles, no less. Great slabs of barnacles, to be seeded into half a dozen lakes and—whatnot, not-what, stabilise, or add texture, or begin to filter out particulates, or something. It was a three-crew job, and her colleagues were: an elderly man called Maurice Sleight and a young woman called Ostriker. The launch was busy, of course, and then she had to pilot a flight liaison with a chunk of ice: Ange could concentrate on doing her job and forget everything else. Then there was a hitch; their iceblock, though tagged with the appropriate codes, turned out to be not their iceblock at all. They had located it quickly, grappled it without difficulty and had decanted only a small percentage, but then there was a lot of angry chatter on the feed that threatened a lawsuit. So they had to put it back in the orbit in which they found it, and it was an awkward manoeuvre decoupling, and setting it in a clean orbit. And then they had to burn more fuel than Ange liked lining themselves up with the proper ice-piece. Maurice scowled. Ostriker said: it’s all idiotic, such a waste of time ... ice is ice. Why couldn’t we just swap? But that wasn’t the way it worked; and so Ostriker and Maurice began over again decanting the slush into the tanks, and Ange made sure the proper remittances were sent off to claim compensation from the tagging company—it had been their foul-up, after all, not theirs; and even if the claimable amount was small, better that they cover it.
    —It’s good, said Maurice, in his sepulchral voice. This way, we get the unluck out of the way early.
    He was referring to the widespread fliers’ superstition: that each trip into space was allotted one piece of unluck by the Fates. It might happen early in the voyage or late, it might be trivial or catastrophic, but it would come. To suffer a minor glitch early on was, accordingly, a good thing. Ange nodded, and got on with her work.  She doubted that a miscataloging incident counted as the voyage’s unluck, although she would be happy if it did. Indeed, she had a curious relationship to superstition. As a rational and self-contained individual she understood it was all nonsense, of course. Yet it was more than simply the cultural inertia of generations of pilots and shipcrew that made her follow the traditions to the letter. She sometimes wondered if individuals such as she, the ungregarious, the loners, were more likely to be superstitious than other people. The sociable individual at least had the crowd as a buffer between themselves and the unyielding, pitiless indifference of the universe: friends, family, lovers, acquaintances. The locust in the middle of its folding aerial blanket of fellow beings. But the loner had to rely on herself to develop such mental strategies as might bolster her mind against the dark.
    At any rate, whilst never doubting that it was a trivial matter of confirmation bias, Ange nonetheless observed that each of her voyages was structured around one major moment of unluck, small or large.
    The correct ice was loaded at last, and they were set. So, with a last roll around the Earth they inserted themselves and made their way to Mars. Once they were in plain flight, they had nothing but spare time. Maurice withdrew to his cabin to meditate. Ange didn’t like to question the particularity of his religious observation, but he was evidently devout. Ostriker, on the other hand, showed distressing signs of wanting to be Ange’s friend, and loitered about her as she went through her routines, and gabble and chatted.
    —The latest communication from the Cygnics is that, apparently, they’re not from Cygnus after all. So we’re not supposed to call them
that
anymore.
    —Really,