Chapter One

Chapter one

The spheres of heav'n

One man in a sphere of brass.

One man alone in the vacuum of space.

One man hurtling toward solid rock at forty meters per second-fast enough to kill him, to end his mission here and now, to cap a damnfool end on a long and decidedly damnfool life. To leave his children defenseless.

In the porthole ahead is the planette Varna, his destination, swathed in white clouds and shining seas, in grasslands, in forests whose vertical dimension is already apparent against the dinner-bowl curve of horizon. Not planet: planette. It looks small because it is small, barely twelve hundred meters across. Condensed matter core, fifteen hundred neubles-very nice. The surface workmanship is exquisite; he sees continents, islands, majestic little mountain ranges jutting up above the trees. Telescopes, he realizes, don't do justice to this remotest of Lune's satellites.

The man's name is Radmer, or Conrad Mursk if you're old enough. Very few people are old enough. Radmer's own age would be difficult to guess-his hair is still partly blond, his weathered skin not really all that wrinkled. He still has his teeth, although they're worn down, and a few of them are cracked or broken. But even in zero gravity, as he kicks and kicks the potter's wheel that winds the gyroscopes which keep the sphere from tumbling, there's a kind of weight or weariness to his movements that might make you wonder. Older?

To be fair, the air inside the three-meter sphere isn't very good. Cold and damp, it smells of carbon dioxide, wet brass, and the chloride tang of spent oxygen candles. Old breath and new-the only way to refresh the air is to dump it