The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”

“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”

“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”

“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the second half of the trip.”

The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no. You only need to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips you should coast through the middle, to save fuel.”

The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.

The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean liners.”

The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”

The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Centauri. Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.” He raised his cup. “Cheers.”

1

Nirgal got in a rhythm and kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a pilgrim, half worshiper half god.

A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out running around. Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmarineris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake. For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear it. He only ran.