Slipstream
Dear Susannah
Once more into the abyss. This is the land of the White Queen, forever winter with no sign of Aslan on the prowl. Except that we didn’t get here through the back of a wardrobe, though the sense of dislocation could not be greater if we had. Colder than the Russian winter that so shocked me in training. I have no wish at all to go Outside again, to brave the absolute zero of deep space. But Out I must go, on an excursion to the surface of a world so cold it makes an arctic mid-winter look balmy by comparison.
The descent. This is the one stage of the mission that concerns me the most, the one where things could go seriously wrong very quickly. If they do, it will be out of my hands. Once again, I am just a passenger. Tanya will pilot the module to the surface, controlling its descent on four gimballed retro rockets. Retro. How apposite that word seems for a mission that is retro in every aspect of its design. We are using a mixture of Apollo and space shuttle technology, all cobbled together for a 21st century mission by a civilisation that lost the knack for human space travel decades ago. We had to go back to the history books to build this ship, back to blueprints and archives.
In design terms the Lander is more or less the same machine that Neil and Buzz piloted down to the surface of the Moon. Maybe we should have gone back to those six Luna bases and salvaged all that abandoned hardware, got it to fly again. Several of the capsules are still on display in various museums (one in London and another in Washington, as best I can remember). We should have reclaimed those museum pieces, too. The technology is scarcely less advanced than what we’re using now. In a way I’m time travelling, re-enacting the past.
The Lander is larger than its predecessor, and room enough to sit down rather than stand. Apart from that it’s more or less the same. We’re going down in the Spider, descending on the most tenuous of threads, hoping that the engines will work again after a prolonged cold soak of indeterminate length on the surface of Hyperion. If they don’t fire again, if they remain as cold as the surrounding vacuum, then the mission will come to an end there and then, at least for the two of us. With no way to return, we will be the first of all humans to live and die on the surface of another world.
Tomorrow we’ll land on the surface, terra incognita. The plan looks good on paper but will it work? Again, I find myself wondering at my inclusion in this elite group. As always, the population of Earth will be looking over our collective shoulder when we land (if they haven’t forgotten about us by now, or found distraction elsewhere; I hear 2-D movies are becoming popular again and of course celebrity culture — the celebration of all that is cheap and tacky — never really went away).
I have no pithy or memorable words prepared for the occasion, no "One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind." I shall leave that to my companion. Her words will go down in history and rightly so. It will be enough that I am there somewhere on those illustrious pages and for those pages to recall that I did my best at journey’s end.
My best to find you again, my love.