Chapter One ~ Inspiration

Even as a child, Julia Simons' long term goals were easy to define. She wanted to go to space. By the time she was fourteen she had whiled away long afternoons reading science fiction in which intelligent people--usually men in those early days--conducted the orderly business of exploring and settling other planets. Even as she rejected the limited roles the books offered her--as either mother to the new race or a pleaser of men--in her imagined future, Julia became an astronaut or a scientist.

Although her dreams pointed her to space, she was a strict rationalist, and had little patience for those who spoke of aliens and travel to distant stars. She rejected interstellar travel as impossible in the foreseeable future and focused instead on the solar system. It was her earnest wish that humanity would explore and then settle the asteroids and the other planets, and that obsession guided her intellectual pursuits. She excelled in the sciences and virtually ignored the humanities. She was fond of saying that science would get her to space, while the humanities could merely brag about it afterward.

By the time Julia was in high school and bored by her teacher's introduction to physics and chemistry, she began to sneak into classes at Brentwood University, no more than a mile away. Of course, her obsessions took a toll on her social life, and instead of the parties the movies told her she was missing, she trounced all comers in the chess club and joined the debating society at Brentwood.

Her interest in men notwithstanding, her sharp wit and what was interpreted to be eclectic and obscure interests worked against her dating life. There were few potential mates who Julia found interesting enough to talk to, and her obsessions about the state of NASA's funding and the problems with the Apollo missions drove even those hardy few away. Undaunted, Julia left high school without a diploma in order to attend Brentwood's accelerated science program. There she shared her classes with other high school students who were considered to be gifted and Julia got her first taste of the social setting that was to be her chosen career.

So that she'd be ready for asteroid mining she devoted her attention to robotics and metallurgy, but when research on Mars indicated it might still house traces of life, she turned her considerable talents to astrobiology. She focused on biology and organic chemistry until advances in aerospace engineering and materials science pointed to reusable rockets.

As Julia moved from her teenage years to adulthood, her original dreams were informed by the space programs of her time. She wanted to be on the team that ensured humanity would be walking on the moon again. She wanted to work with those who would make sure that the preparation for a trip to Mars would not just be a short flag-planting drive-by to satisfy nationalist ambitions. Ultimately, beyond her own desires to contribute to her fellow humans leaving the cradle, she wanted to ensure that humanity didn't become extinct on Earth.

She threw herself into her work and soon her hundreds of hours of research paid off. Her projects were Mars-focused, as infuriated by the casual way most books about Mars ignored its inhospitable environment to focus on stories of loss and rescue, she did a chemical analysis of perchlorate to see how difficult it would be to grow plants in the Martian soil. She studied planetary dynamos and even took to recording the aurora in the northern winter, her fingers stiff with the cold as she took photos of the northern lights that won her a photography prize. Her labeling of her photos notwithstanding--with names like ionosphere after solar storm, and Carrington 2027--she caught the attention of the engineering department.

"I understand you want to study planetary exploration?" Although smoking had been forbidden on campus, Neilson was partial to cigars in his closed office. It was a form of boot camp, the endurance of the vile smoke, but Julia had dreamed of the methane lakes of Titan. Even Neilson couldn't compete with that.

"I think it's time engineers began to work on a plan to get us back into space."

Her barb hit its target. She was quoting his complaints at the Planetary Society, although she lay the blame at his door instead of NASA's like he had after many meetings with disgruntled space agency retirees.

"And how do you suggest we do that?" Behind his sharp look there was a yet another patronizing male professor. "NASA is closed for business. Haven't you heard?"

"The agency needs sound ideas. Not an endless money pit of unworkable ideas and pet projects. There are still people who remember when we last went to the moon. It's right over there." She pointed over her shoulder.

Neilson glanced out the window, confirmed that she was right about the location of the moon and decided to take more time to instruct the young lady on her role in science. "We have the best men working on this. I don't think you need to trouble your pretty head about it."

"That's the problem. Those are the best men. We'll have to do better."

After she left his office Neilson sat for so long looking at the door that he had to relight his cigar. "Feminist movement. Worst thing that ever happened in this country," he told the smoke-stained paneling.

Julia studied engineering in her undergraduate. O'Neill's wheel would need a competent builder, she told herself, and terra-forming required knowledge of construction. She kept her aspirations secret and her head down, stubbornly working her way through aerospace engineering and Biosystems. She didn't trouble herself that the grades in class had as much to do with gender as they did competence. She was there for the parchment and the information. The rest of it, the hobnobbing with fools, she could do without.

Graduating as the first woman who had forced the academy to accept her engineering degree, Julia's ambitions could have been dashed immediately. It had started to become obvious what others, some not very subtly, had tried to tell her. A female engineer was as welcome as a shark in a wading pool. The screaming bathers might seem comic at first, but Julia's applications to engineering firms uncovered the mess that was the misogynist result.

Undaunted, Julia went back to university to study environmental science, with a specialization in Biosystems engineering. She worked on the Santa Barbara arcology, and the biosphere project, where her more radical ideas passed the litmus test of human habitation. She was responsible for the living air and water purification system. Disdaining the traditional mechanical approach to purification, she was often heard to ask, "Do you know how many years of engineering it would take to improve a million years of evolution?"

The Santa Barbara archology went on to become the standard for archologies. Even while the United States outlawed them--citing the fanatics who called it thousands of heretics living in sin--the rest of the world embraced the technology. Julia could have had a lucrative career replicating that work for the rest of her life if she'd patented it. As it was, she gave the Biosystems approach to the world by registering it with Creative Commons. Soon Vietnam and China, Japan and Russia were building projects using her ideas and, she was relieved to see, improving on her design.

From the outside, some thought her interest in space had waned. They said it was merely an obsession of her youth, like riding horses and wearing jean shorts. Julia said little about it, but her archology work on closed systems of air and water purification were all part of a bigger plan.

When she returned to get a PhD in astrophysics, with a minor in astrobiology, her mother despaired of ever holding grandchildren. "What man wants a woman smarter than him?" her mother had asked. Her father had merely looked thoughtful.

Strangely, despite his silence, her father was supportive of her career. While she was still in high school she asked if he thought she could become an engineer. His reply had been overwhelmingly positive: "If anyone can do it, you can," he had said, his hand on the steering wheel of the Olds that only Julia could keep going. "You've got a head on your shoulders. You can do anything you put your mind to."

"What do you think about what mum says about men not liking intelligent women," Julia had asked, for at that time she had still concerned herself with the opinions of others.

Her father's reply was refreshingly straightforward, "They can go to hell. There are smart men too, and some of them aren't going to be happy unless they find a smart woman." Julia's father had left school at fourteen, and his undiagnosed learning disabilities had plagued him his entire life. His scholastic difficulties had made him an advocate of education, and his was the most unflagging support that Julia found on her path through the male-dominated science programs of the university system.

Julia married after her PhD, although her mother's not-so-secret ambition to become a grandmother was never satisfied. Instead, Julia looked to space, and her astrophysicist husband, Larn Quando, shared her desire if not her direct goal. They became famous in astrobiology circles, as he took her ideas to their theoretical conclusion, and she preached for a practical return to the moon and the settlement of the asteroids.

When the first broadcasts came back from the publicity stunt--as Julia thought it it--that was the first Martian colonist's attempt to survive, she listened like everyone else. Jack's one-way mission was meant to test their delivery systems, and he'd embraced his fate wholeheartedly. She feared for the man's sanity, and as his reports became sporadic and then ceased altogether, she wasn't cheering. The experiment had run its course, but she could think of a hundred improvements. At least one of those was sending more than one person.

In her home office, Julia drafted workable plans to hollow out asteroids and install a biosphere in their core. She designed space stations that looked like huge wheels, and generation ships built out of asteroids and comets, carrying their own power and wending their way between the stars. Although she was a private visionary, Julia was determined to see at least some of humanity's most inspiring dreams come to fruition. Accordingly, when NASA was resuscitated after the second resource war, she joined the team and began to work on the Mars project.