Near Northampton, England, 2011

Mike hummed to himself as he set the polycarbonate blank into the milling machine, a nameless chant as old as the hills. He checked the CD version one last time and pressed the button. What remained was to wait.

This blank would either become smallsinger's bowl or a piece of trash - it depended on how well he'd set the machine up. The second bowl would be for spiritworm, since it had to go nine thousand miles by courier before the consecration. His own bowl would be last. There were four blanks, but there would only ever be three bowls like this.

All initiates, the three had been introduced online by a fourth, whitestar, an ex-pat Brit living in France. He knew their street names and had apparently been at the same remote sensing conference as spiritworm once, but they thought of each other in terms of the tags they used for the list.

Mike was shadowjumper and, like whitestar, tended to assume the role of communicator and facilitator. A few months ago he'd travelled to Lille on the Eurostar to meet the young man and thank him for the introduction. They'd hit it off immediately and sat for hours in a small bar, talking and drinking far too much.

Two weeks later, a limited edition lithograph of his "Bowl of Night" had arrived at his street address. Mike had had to repaint the main room in his flat to give it pride of place on the wall. He was still trying to figure out a suitable response - a fourth bowl was not it, nor would whitestar have wanted to intrude.

The machine had turned the blank into a tiny dish about eight centimetres in diameter and two deep. It was now starting to polish it.

This bowl had started out as a joke between the three of them. Smallsinger, a soil scientist, was working on one of the "areology" projects connected with the Mars:One habitat. They'd started discussing how the ritual calendar would look with two crescent moons. As a result, Mike had translated the table of offsets for The Bowl for the phases of the two moons against the stars as seen from Mars:One.

The machine had polished the bowl crystal clear. The base was about five millimetres thick, for balance, the edge thinned to a precise half-mil radius - it had to be possible to drink from the thing without injury.

They knew that any pattern would work, just as timings for Phobos and Deimos worked on Earth - they'd tried on several occasions with extremely satisfying results. But the first ever bowl-maker probably worked to the limits of her accuracy: so would they.

Mike had got as far as finding a silversmith willing to discuss the commission as a surprise for the women when there'd been a sudden change of plan. Six months ago smallsinger had been selected as part of the rotation crew for Mars:One.

Now the machine was engraving a filigree of fine lines and pits around the edge. Those on the lip were milled as precise grooves - the only valid symbol for a sight line is a sight line.

A very private celebration had ensued, each in a favourite bar, cell-phones linking them more closely than if they'd been physically together. After a couple of wines, spiritworm had decided to take the afternoon off and had suggested a joint project.

She and smallsinger would revise the celebration liturgy to use water - homage to Heinlen and the Church of All Worlds - if he could refine the numbers to CNC standards and persuade his pet machine to make an unbreakable bowl.

Embarrassingly, the project had taken several months, but he'd still beaten the women to it, even if it had meant spending four hours extra at work every night for the last three weeks. A first draft of the words had only arrived in his email yesterday.

He released the bowl from the machine. It felt just right in his hand. One down, two to go.

Time, while he waited, to discuss the liturgy. As he dialled spiritworm's mobile, he wondered idly if the first bowl-maker could have imagined how far it would travel. Probably, he thought. It was written in the stars.