Julian date 2459539, Monday, eight forty.
She woke on the sofa, under the coat she hadn't folded last night. The phone lay on the tea table, face down.
She turned it over and looked first at the call record: two hundred fifty-two seconds. Then she checked for new missed calls. None.
The paper notebook lay open beside the keyboard, on the Beijing page. The two lines written after midnight were still there: 6:00, 252. Below them she had left three blank lines; her pen tip had dotted each of the three, and written nothing.
The hiss in her right ear was higher than yesterday. She swallowed once; it didn't go down.
At nine twenty, Old Tang sent one: ten o'clock, a meeting at the academy, video, Wangshu-7. Sit in on it.
She wrote back: what does it have to do with me.
He wrote back: one of the payloads is a low-frequency receiver. In 2016 they came through here for the on-orbit calibration review. Sit there, say nothing.
She said: all right.
She thought the receiver through once. At the half-day meeting she had asked one question: that stretch of background beyond the heliopause—how do you plan to separate instrument floor from sky. The man who answered was named Wei.
The note by that name in her contacts read: 06, 25 m, feed hoist.
At ten sharp, seven boxes on the screen. She counted: two without cameras on, one dark but with someone coughing inside it.
The engineering side spoke for twenty minutes. What she wrote down follows.
Wangshu-7: launched October 2009, Jupiter gravity assist February 2011, design life twelve years, thirty-seven days past it. Current heliocentric distance 46.7 astronomical units; one-way light time six hours twenty-eight minutes twenty-three seconds.
Julian date 2459537, Saturday, 14:07 Beijing time: the last complete telemetry frame received.
After that, three tracking passes: Sunday 02:00, Sunday 14:00, Monday 02:00. Three stations: Jiamusi 66-meter, Kashgar 35-meter, Neuquén 35-meter. None of the three received.
Uplink calls per the contingency plan: twenty kilowatts, three data rates rotated, one hundred forty-seven calls in all.
Someone asked: the beacon.
Answer: the low-gain omnidirectional antenna's beacon is being listened for too. Nothing.
The same man asked: low gain is omnidirectional.
Answer: it is omnidirectional.
No one asked again.
Nine days earlier an on-orbit software maintenance had been performed; the spacecraft computer's version went from 4.2.1 to 4.3.0, one uplink load. Three tracking cycles of normal data after the upgrade.
Conclusion: preliminary finding, a configuration anomaly following the software maintenance; the spacecraft has lost attitude pointing; disposal per the contingency plan is under way.
She copied the last sentence down, and when it was copied read the words "preliminary finding" once more.
Someone asked: has it been reproduced.
Answer: a hardware-in-the-loop simulation is running on the ground; so far it has not reproduced.
Someone asked: then the mechanism.
Answer: the preliminary finding is not affected.
She pulled the paper notebook over and wrote five terms in the corner: localization exact, mechanism clear, problem reproduced, measures effective, lessons extended. Under the second and third she drew lines.
Someone asked a question with nothing to do with the meeting—would the materials be issued afterward, their archiving required paper.
The last page of the materials was disposal, in three steps: one, continue uplink calls, no fewer than six a day; two, blind-send commands along the timeline and let the spacecraft execute its preset sequences on its own; three, the three stations rotate through spiral scans of the sky, four hours each per day. A root-cause report within thirty days.
She copied the three steps down and drew a line under the third.
The last sentence before the meeting broke up: Wangshu-8 status normal. Launched 2018, now 16.4 astronomical units from the Sun, this morning's telemetry parameters complete.
She copied that sentence down too.
After the meeting she did a thing that wasn't hers to do: for the day Wangshu-7 went silent, she ran through everything on the Kashgar side that could be checked.
Sun: that day's ten-point-seven-centimeter radio flux, eighty-two solar flux units; no flare records all day; no X-class flares.
Ionosphere: total electron content over Kashgar for those three days within the year-on-year range; small wobbles of four percent on the days either side.
Receiving: the 35-meter's system noise temperature that day normal, servo logs normal, no pedestal limit, no abnormal downtime.
Wind: maximum that day 9.4 meters per second, below the antenna's operating limit.
She wrote the four items on one sheet and put a check after each. This was her own trade; it went smoothly. When it was done she remembered that these were not the things that truly needed asking.
She wrote Lu Weiming, asking the same thing as before: those 1970 paper records in Shanghai—photographs.
He answered fast: next week. The storeroom is being sorted out; an application has to go in first. He added one line: the meaning of that set of his isn't the Sun. It's that it's the only continuous sequence running from the late sixties down to today.
She wrote back: all right.
At three in the afternoon she called Wei Xiangdong.
Five rings.
He said: hello.
She said: Zhou Yan. The one who hoisted the feed with you on the 25-meter, in '06.
Two seconds of quiet at the other end. He said: I remember. Your grip was stronger than mine.
She said: I want to look at your last frame.
He said: what are you looking at that for.
She said: I'm running down an instrument fault. What I want is the low-frequency receiver's column.
He said: nothing's wrong with that column.
She said: then give me the whole frame.
He said: the whole frame can't be sent.
She said: photograph the screen.
He said: wait.
Forty minutes later, three photographs came.
The first was a stretch of the parameter table. She counted: twenty-six rows visible on screen, the nineteenth row flagged yellow.
The second was the detail for that row. Attitude-determination residual, roll axis. Last-frame value 0.05015 degrees, tolerance 0.05000 degrees. Out by three thousandths.
The third was a screenshot of the review statement: last-frame parameters, 1,276 in all; out of bounds, one.
She looked at the three photographs three times through.
One thousand two hundred seventy-six parameters, like the 1,276 joints of one person's body. In the last frame only one joint moved outside its own range, and by three thousandths. The other 1,275 all sat in their own sockets.
She wrote back: do you have the same parameter for the two years before.
He said: that has to go through the process.
She said: put it through.
He said: then wait. Don't hope for much.
The next morning at 11:06 he sent plain text, no header, no signature. Seventy-three rows of numbers, one point every ten days, from 0.0412 to 0.05015.
She pasted the seventy-three rows into a spreadsheet and drew a line. The line went up, with wobbles in the middle, the wobbles small, and the last point crossed the horizontal line at the top.
She computed the slope: over two years, up 21.7 percent, 10.3 a year on average.
She sent one more: the factory specification for gyro bias stability.
A long time passed before he answered: 1.5 percent a year.
She wrote back: then the two numbers don't match.
He wrote back: the factory spec belongs to the factory. Twelfth year in orbit, nobody's measured it since. Don't you take that number out and make something of it.
She said: I won't say anything.
She wrote the two numbers side by side on paper: 10.3, 1.5. Between them she wrote nothing.
She saved the plot into 3t, no new folder.
In the afternoon Hu Yisu put his head in.
He said: Shijie, I asked about that word again.
She said: which word.
He said: the one on the March 2004 page. Old Qiao has changed to a new pair of reading glasses; still can't make it out. He says either someone from another station wrote it, or someone from this station—in both cases he can't recognize the hand.
She said: understood.
He said: Kramer said two things in the group today. The first, asking again for the 1,042 version. The second: the way things stand now, whoever holds the complete data is the last one who hasn't spoken.
She said: what did you answer.
He said: I didn't answer.
She said: don't.
He stood there and didn't leave.
She said: anything else.
He said: I dreamed about that graph last night. Four thousand three hundred eighteen edges; I counted them in the dream, and past twelve hundred it all went to mush.
She said: did you wake up.
He said: I woke up.
She said: finish running yesterday's batch of residuals.
He said: the direction of the pathways still can't be seen. Polarization gives you the line, not which way the current runs.
She said: then don't look yet.
He said: that's you saying it, or her.
She said: her.
He said: oh.
The other thing she had Hu Yisu check: how many times solar-system deep-space probes had lost contact.
He used a public mission-status table and set his own criteria: beyond five astronomical units from the Sun, over the past thirty years, twenty-seven probes in all. Unplanned termination or early loss of contact: six.
Of the six, three had clear engineering conclusions: propellant leak, battery-string failure, clogged attitude-control thruster.
The other three read: cause undetermined.
She asked: what eras were the three undetermined ones.
He said: one from the eighties, two from the nineties. The onboard computers of that time were far simpler than now.
She said: what can these six tell us.
He said: they can't tell us anything.
She said: why not.
He said: sample size of six.
She looked at that phrase a while. She said: into the memo?
He said: no.
She said: no.
The letter in the mailbox titled with the single word "Shoulder" was still there. Last modified: 2459483.793. She clicked the cursor into the recipient field, looked at the empty box, and closed it.
Old Tang sent: the station-office form, fourteen days overdue now.
She wrote back: understood.
Old Tang: this time it's landed at the institute office. Don't pretend it isn't there.
She wrote back: I'm not pretending.
On page three of that form, the data-sharing table had eleven rows; two still stood empty: raw voltage records, clock files. That morning she had worked out the media once more: eight generations of tape, twelve terabytes a reel, forty-one terabytes about four reels, six after desensitization. She computed that number twice; twice the same. When it was done she did not fill it in.
She started typing "those two rows I can't fill in," got halfway, and deleted it.
At dusk she sent Vienna a letter, two lines: today a deep-space probe lost contact; officially attributed to software. In the last frame exactly one parameter out of bounds, by three thousandths.
The reply was slow in coming, and came in three lines.
One. The loss of an engineering system is not an observation.
Two. You now hold two things. One you have a number for; one you don't. Do not put the two together.
Three. Third line: do not ask me whether it is.
She read it through and laid the phone face down on the desk.
She sent Las Campanas one as well, a single sentence: a machine has stopped talking at forty-six point seven astronomical units; the officials say software.
Mateo answered slowly, two lines of English. The first: I have a machine here that doesn't talk either. The second: I fixed it for three years; in the end it was the sensor's cable.
She sent back three letters: lol.
He wrote back: you are laughing wrong.
Past seven, Eli caught her in the corridor.
He said: heart of the dish—two more came to the gate yesterday afternoon.
She said: what did they ask.
He said: about Wangshu-7. Whether our antennas here had ever received it too.
She said: what did you tell them.
He said: I told them we've only got dishes here, no ships.
She laughed once. When the laugh was done she said: that's right.
He said: of course it's right. He took two steps forward and turned back: your laugh is ugly—stop it.
She said: oh.
At 8:04, Zhou Yao sent a link.
One sentence under the link: is this one of yours?
She opened it: a news item, "lost contact" in the headline. The first comment asked whether it had something to do with that Xinjiang investigation.
She wrote back: not ours.
The other end sent back one word: oh.
She typed a line: what time is it there. Deleted it.
Typed another: what did you write on that note. Deleted it.
In the end she sent: the ninth one came. Well drawn.
No reply came.
At night she opened the summary table of the 31,000 events once.
The cursor stopped at the table's lower edge, on the stretch at 2459537. She stopped perhaps five seconds, did nothing, closed it.
After closing it she sat there and thought about nothing. That is the truth: for that stretch she thought about nothing.
In the tank the water was twenty degrees. Lao Wu lay flat against the glass, claws up. She counted the notches on the driftwood: three; the third no deeper. The shell still the old one; the ring of whitening at the rim still there.
She dropped in two pellets.
On the phone, one from Dr. Shen, sent at noon: the booth is free Wednesday morning. Coming or not.
She replied: another day.
The fourteenth time.
At nine forty she dialed the Beijing number.
The number you have dialed cannot be connected at the moment.
At eleven twenty, a second call. The same voice.
She set the phone down, wiped the water from beside the tank, and turned the paper notebook to the Beijing page. The three blank lines were still there.
At twelve fifty, the third. The same voice.
She sent Old Tang one: can Old He be reached.
Old Tang answered fast, fast as if he too were awake: I've tried the landline; no one picks up. An old man's affairs—don't go crowding in on them.
She wrote back: mm.
Old Tang: those things in your hands I can't read, and I don't want to learn to. If he truly had something, he would come out on his own.
She wrote back: mm.
Into the three blank lines on the Beijing page she wrote three numbers: 12, 18, 24.
After the three numbers, still blank.
She turned the page, started a fresh one, and wrote a line: Wangshu-7, 2459537, 14:07, 46.7, 6h28m23s.
The next line: 1276, 1, 0.3%.
She capped the pen, took the cap off again, and at the very bottom of the page wrote one number.
0.3.
Then she turned off the desk lamp.