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days, astronomers had talked about “first light”—the fresh view through a brand-new optical instrument. Zoe hadlooked at Isis through every kind of optical instrument, barring her own eyes. Now she wanted that direct view, her own personal first light.
    Instead, she had spent three days in the IOS’s infirmary under useless observation and a week haunting her assigned cabin while waiting for a place on the duty roster. Ten days from decantation, ten days without orders, agenda, or more than a brief word from management. She had seen to date only the gently concave walls and steel floors of her cubby and the recovery ward in Medical. The sole official communications she had received were a list of meal hours, an access code, her residence number, and a name badge.
    Consequently, Zoe summoned her courage and scheduled an appointment with Kenyon Degrandpre, the outpost manager. She was awed at her own impertinence. Probably she should have talked to her section chief first . . . but no one had told her who her section chief was or how to find him.
    The Isis Orbital Station had been assembled from the shells of early model Higgs spheres in a ring-of-pearls configuration. The maps posted on the corridor walls reminded Zoe of the benzene rings illustrated in chemistry texts, with the outpost’s fusion bottles and heat exchangers projecting like complex side chains from the symmetrical core. On the morning of her appointment with Degrandpre, Zoe left her tiny cabin at the bottom of Habitat Seven and walked the ring corridor a kilometer spinward, nearly half the total circumference of the IOS. The ring corridor smelled of hot metal and cycled atmosphere, like a Kuiper habitat, but without the ever-present tang of ice in the air. Bulkhead doors loomed like massive guillotine blades; the gangways were narrow and possessed neither charm nor windows. This place was not as emotionally and culturally blank as Phoenix had been, but neither was it a typical Kuiper world, full of color and noisy with children. The Terrestrial esthetic prevailed: linear functionality, enforced by strict cargo limitations.
    Windows were a luxury, Zoe supposed. According to the IOS plan she’d reviewed on her terminal, the project manager’s officepossessed one of the station’s few accessible direct-view windows, a wedge of three-inch-thick polarized glass set into the exterior wall. The rest of the station’s windows were tiny ports cut into the docking bays, an area for which Zoe was not yet authorized. But that was irrelevant, she told herself. She had business with Degrandpre. The window was just . . . a perquisite.
    From the name, she had expected someone almost Family—weren’t there Degrandpres among the Brazilian landholders?—but Kenyon Degrandpre was not a handsome or an imposing man. A manager of some rank, but never Family. His head was too long, his nose too flat. Zoe’s experience with the upper echelons of the Trusts had taught her that handsome managers might be capable of a certain generosity; ugly men—although Degrandpre didn’t quite fit that description either, at least not by Terrestrial standards—were more likely to read regulations and nurse grudges. She knew for a fact, had known all her life, that rigid personalities were a staple in the bureaucracies of the Trusts. But surely the man who managed the Isis Orbital Station, in effect the Isis Project itself, must be more flexible. Mustn’t he?
    Maybe not. Degrandpre raised his big head briefly and waved Zoe to a chair, but his attention remained on his desktop.
    Zoe stood near the window instead. It wasn’t much of a window. She supposed the brutal payload limitations of the Higgs launchers made even this small luxury prohibitively expensive. Still, here was her first genuinely direct view of the planet below. Unmediated light, Zoe thought excitedly.
First
light.
    The IOS had just crossed the planet’s