Chapter One
The Whisper in Band Seven
The dawn came to Meridian Station the way it came every twenty nine and a half days: sideways, without mercy, and lasting a fortnight.
Priya Sharma watched it arrive from the observation cupola with her tea bulb cooling in her hand, as the first hard line of sunlight crawled down the western wall of Crater Daedalus B and set fire, one by one, to the dishes. There were one hundred and twelve of them out there, standing in the grey dust in their neat kilometre grid like a field of patient white flowers, and the terminator line lit them the way a verger lights candles, without hurry, in order, as though each one had to be asked.
Three years, and the sight still emptied her head of everything small. That was the far side's great export, she had decided. Not data. Perspective.
"You're up early," said Ingrid Halvorsen, from the galley hatch, in the flat Norwegian calm that ran Meridian Station more effectively than any regulation. "Or late. With you the distinction has stopped being scientific."
"Calibration window. The array's mine till oh nine hundred."
"The array is the agency's till oh nine hundred," said Ingrid, sailing past with her coffee, "and yours in the sense that a cathedral belongs to the one who cannot stop sweeping it. Eat something, Sharma."
