Today would have been his father’s sixtieth birthday. Sergei père had been principal bassist for the St. Petersburg Symphony. He’d died 15 years ago, from multiple aggressive cancers. It happened to a lot of Russian men his age. He’d been a young teen at the time of Chernobyl, living in Kyiv.
Vera, Sergei’s mother, was a beautiful young singer when she married his father. She promptly retired, at twenty-three. Never a pleasant person, Vera grew more unpleasant as her looks faded. When his father got his diagnosis, she immediately filed for divorce, moved out, and took up with one of his colleagues in the woodwinds. She said, “I have to protect myself.” Sergei himself was sixteen, an only child.
Two months later his father was dead. Sergei filed for an extension on the apartment, and was turned down. He’d been playing the part of the rebellious punk nekulturny, which didn’t help. (His band was called Alyona Ivanovna, after Raskolnikov’s victim in Crime and Punishment.)
They sold his father’s instruments. Vera took most of the proceeds, but Sergei’s own share kept him going for a drunken while. He couch-surfed with friends for most of a year. He had scholarships and grants and no other options. So he straightened up, and blazed almost contemptuously through math, compsci, and astrodynamics. He had his kandidat nauk at twenty-three. But there were no jobs, not in Russia, and competition in the EU and U.S. and India was fierce.
So he switched tracks, took commercial astronaut training, and ended up in Uber’s NSLAM Division: Near Space Logistics and Asset Management. The work was menial—glorified trash collection and traffic management—but the pay was good, and he liked being off-Earth.
NSLAM employed about twenty astronauts, in shifts, to staff its two inflatable habitats. Apart from the Chinese and European space stations, theirs was the only ongoing human presence in orbital space. All told there were several hundred astronauts worldwide, working for nations or militaries or private industry, but few stayed in orbit.
Sergei was in the hab for three or four months at a time, then back on Earth for the same. Up here he sat in his cubby and remotely managed ion-thrust drones to deorbit space debris, or to refuel satellites. The drones would be out for weeks or months at a time on their various missions.
Once in a great while he left the hab in a spacecraft, to work on more complex projects. One such task, still ongoing, was dismantling the International Space Station. It was decommissioned in 2024 and sold to NSLAM in 2027. They were still salvaging parts—recycling some, selling some on eBay as memorabilia. He made a side income from that.
But crewed missions were rare, because they used so much fuel, and that was fine with Sergei. He liked being off-Earth but he didn’t like leaving the hab. There were too many ways to die in space. Debris, for one. NSLAM tracked one million objects one centimeter or larger. Smaller untracked objects numbered over a hundred million. And it was all moving up to 7 times as fast as a bullet, carrying 50 times the kinetic energy. A fleck of paint had put a divot the size of a golf ball in a Space Shuttle back in the day. The habs were made of dozens of layers of super-kevlar and foam, which flexed and absorbed small impacts, but they were still vulnerable to larger objects.
Then there were solar flares. There was usually sufficient warning, but unprotected astronauts had died. Even inside, he wasn’t crazy about the minimal shielding in the habs. During serious solar events, he’d seen flashes behind his closed eyelids. Often he felt like he was following his father to the same early grave.
Petersburg drifted out of view across the northern horizon as the hab orbited south. They’d be back in 90 minutes, but farther west, as the Earth rotated under them.
Below, a meteor flashed over the blackness of the Baltic Sea. Nearer the Earth’s limb, over Finland, a green veil of aurora flickered. He’d see Izumi in Helsinki next week; his shift was almost done.
He swiveled and opened the cupola hatch. Cold LED light streamed in from the central shaft. He pushed gently to propel himself feet first down the shaft.
She’d hugged him goodbye, kissed him, and said:
Who will take care of your heart and soul?
He shrugged.
She pointed at him. You will. Promise me.
He’d promised, but he wasn’t sure he knew how. He could take care of himself, but that was mere survival. The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.
As he drifted past Boyle’s cubby he heard his name called. He grabbed a stanchion.
Sergei’s job title was orbital supervisor, which made him the most important person on the hab, responsible for the launch registry, collision avoidance alerts, and flight plans. But Boyle, the shift boss, was his superior. Competent enough, Boyle tended to see nothing beyond his position, so Sergei played his own to type: the stolid Ukie who kept to himself and loved his wode-ka. In truth Sergei hadn’t seen the Ukraine since his father moved them to Petersburg in 2010, and his drink was single malt. Talisker 18 Year, for preference.
What’s up, Geoff?
We’re going to have a visitor. A civilian.
Civilian? Why is he up?
He’s Gideon Pace.
Gideon Pace was Uber’s CEO. He was one of the world’s ten or twenty newly minted trillionaires. The exact number changed daily with the markets, but they were still rare as unicorns, already persistent as myth. This tiny cohort controlled about 5 percent of the world’s wealth.
Uber ran a diverse portfolio of businesses on Earth. Package delivery, autonomous transport, data archived in DNA—all hugely profitable.
NSLAM was an indulgence, a pet project of Pace’s. He was a space nut who wanted a presence out here at any price. So far, Sergei knew, that presence had bled oceans of money, and not a few lives. But now governments were signing on to underwrite the core mission of cleaning up space debris—enough to have launched a second hab.
All four crew turned out to greet Pace and his pilot: Boyle, Sergei, Kiyoshi, and Sheila. Kiyoshi and Sheila had coupled a few weeks into the shift. Sergei liked Kiyoshi; he was a jazz fan, and had hipped Sergei to Kenny Barron. Sheila, the hab medic, was a petite Canadian blonde with chiseled features. She looked like Vera in her youth, which put Sergei off getting to know her. She’d cropped her hair close to keep it from floating in a halo around her head. Sergei himself shaved his; he hated their no-rinse shampoo.
Their visitor had a weasel’s face: dark straight hair in bangs, pinched cheeks, thin sloped nose, pointed dimpled chin, eyes slanting slightly upward. About Sergei’s age, but he looked younger.
Fantastic! Fantastic! I’ve been in space before, but only suborbital. I had to see this for myself.
Welcome to NSLAM Hab One.
You must be Sergei. Chief Boyle tells me you’re the most experienced astronaut here.
He wasn’t looking quite at Sergei. Sergei guessed he was wearing augmented contacts with a headsup display, clocking Sergei’s vitals and recording everything.
Sergei dialed back his English to a cute and unthreatening level.
You gather data on me.
Of course.
Right now. In real time. What don’t you know already?
Ah, I see. Well… how you are. I don’t know that. How are you?
Sergei put on a blank look, but it didn’t approach the blankness of Pace’s.
Pace smiled thinly. It’s what humans do, Sergei.
How would you know? Sergei almost said, but didn’t. Pace’s headsup probably picked up the subvocalization; his smile twitched.