2
The shuttle was a pulsed fusion rocket, and they would reach Earth the day after tomorrow. And in a decent gravity the whole time, except for during the somersault.
All manner of things were changing because of this sudden shrinkage of the solar system. One small result was that Venus was no longer needed as a gravity handle for rocket travel, and so it was coincidence only that had Zo’s shuttle, the Nike of Samothrace, passing fairly near to the shaded planet. Zo joined the rest of the passengers in the big skylight ballroom to look at it as they passed. The clouds of the planet’s superheated atmosphere were dark; the planet appeared as a gray circle against the black of space. The terraforming of Venus was proceeding apace, the whole planet in the shade of a parasol, which was Mars’s old soletta with its mirrors repositioned so that they did just the opposite of what they had done in front of Mars; rather than redirect light onto the planet, they reflected it all away. Venus rolled in darkness.
This was the first step of a terraforming project that many people deemed mad. Venus had no water, a stupendously thick superheated carbon-dioxide atmosphere, a day longer than its year, and surface temperatures that would melt lead and zinc. Not a promising set of initial conditions, it was true, but people had begun to try anyway, humanity’s reach continuing to exceed its grasp, even as its grasp became godlike; Zo thought it was wonderful. The people who had initiated the project were even claiming it could happen faster than the terraforming of Mars. This was because the complete removal of sunlight had profound effects; the temperature in the thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere (ninety-five bar at the surface!) had been dropping by five K a year for the last half century. Soon the “Big Rain” would begin to fall, and in just a couple hundred years the carbon dioxide would all be on the planet, in dry-ice glaciers covering the low parts of the surface. At that point the dry ice was to be covered by an insulating layer of diamond coating or foamed rock, and once sealed off, water oceans would be introduced. The water was going to come from somewhere else, as Venus’s natural inventory would cover it to a depth of a centimeter or less. The Venusian terraformers, mystics of a new kind of viriditas, were currently negotiating with the Saturnian League for the rights to the ice moon Enceledus, which they hoped to drive down into Venusian orbit and break up in successive passes through the atmosphere. This moon’s water once rained onto Venus would create shallow oceans over about seventy percent of the planet, entirely covering the wrapped carbon-dioxide glaciers. An atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen would be left in place, some light would be let through the parasol, and at that point human settlements would become possible, on the two high continents Ishtar and Aphrodite. After that, they would have all the remaining problems of terraforming that Mars had been dealing with, and they would also have the very long-term, specifically Venusian projects of removing the CO2 ice sheets from the planet somehow, and also imparting enough spin to the planet to give it a reasonable diurnal cycle; for the short term, days and nights could be established using the parasol as a giant circular venetian blind, but in the long run they did not want to rely on something so fragile. With a quiver she imagined it: some centuries hence, a biosphere and civilization established on Venus, the two continents inhabited, the beautiful Diana Rift a fair valley, billions of people and animals— and then one day the parasol knocked awry, and ssssss, a whole world roasted. Not a happy prospect. And so now, even before the massive flooding and scouring of the Big Rain, they were trying to lay metallic windings as physicalized latitude lines around the planet, windings that would, when a fleet of solar-powered generators were placed in fluctuating orbits around the planet, make the planet in effect the armature of a giant electric motor, the magnetic forces of which would create the torque that would increase the planet’s spin. The system’s designers claimed that, in about the same time it would take to freeze out the atmosphere and drop an ocean, the impetus of this “Dyson motor” could speed Venus’s rotation enough to give the planet a weeklong day; so there they would be, in perhaps three hundred years, down on the transmogrified world, planting crops. The surface would be massively eroded of course, and still very volcanic, with carbon dioxide trapped under the seas ready to burst out and poison them, and weeklong days cooking and freezing them; but there they would be nevertheless, everything stripped, raw, new.
The plan was insane. It was beautiful. Zo stared up through the ballroom ceiling at the gibbous gray globe, hopping from foot to foot in her excitement, in her horror and admiration, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little dots of the new asteroid moons that were home to the terraforming mystics, or perhaps the coronal arc of a reflection from the annular mirror that used to be Mars’s. No luck there— only the gray disk of the shaded evening star, the signet of people who had taken on a task that recontextualized humanity as a kind of god bacteria, chewing away at worlds, dying to prepare the ground for later life— dwarfed most grandiosely in the cosmic scheme of things, in an almost Calvinistic masochist-heroism— a parodic travesty of the Mars project— and yet just as magnificent. They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything.
• • •
Even visit Earth. Steaming, clotted, infectious, a human anthill stuck with a stick; the panic pullulation ongoing in the dreadful mash of history; the hypermalthusian nightmare at its worst; hot, humid, and heavy; and yet still, or perhaps because of all that, a great place to visit. And Jackie wanted her to check in with a couple of people in India anyway. So Zo had taken the Nike, and would later catch a Mars shuttle from Earth.
Before she went to India to talk to Jackie’s contacts, however, she made her regular pilgrimage to Crete, to see the ruins that here were still called Minoan, although in Dorsa Brevia she had been taught to call them Ariadnean. Minos had been the one to wreck the ancient matriarchy, after all, so it was one of the many travesties of Terran history that the destroyed civilization should now be named after the destroyer. But names could be changed.
She wore a rented exoskeleton, made for off-world visitors oppressed by the g. Gravity was destiny, as they said, and Earth had a lot of destiny. The suits were like birdsuits without wings, conformable bodysuits that moved with one’s muscles while providing some undersupport; body bras. They did not entirely ease the effect of the planet’s pull, for breathing was still an effort, and Zo’s limbs felt heavy within the suit, so to speak, pressed down uncomfortably against the fabric. She had gotten used to walking around in the suits on previous trips, and it was a fascinating exercise, like weight lifting, but not one that she liked very much. Better than the alternative, however. She had tried that too, but it was a terrible distraction, it kept one from really seeing, really being there.
So she walked around the ancient site of Gournia, in the peculiar, somewhat submarine flow of the suit. Gournia was her favorite of all the Ariadnean ruins, the only ordinary village of that civilization to have been found and excavated; the other sites were all palaces. This village had probably been a satellite of the palace at Malia: now a warren of waist-high walls made of stacked stones, covering a hilltop overlooking the Aegean. All the rooms were very small, often one meter by two, with alleys running between shared walls; little labyrinths, yes, and very much like the white-washed villages that still dotted the countryside. People said that Crete had been hard hit by the great flood, as the Ariadneans had been by theirs following the explosion of Thera; and it was true that all the pretty little fishing harbors were flooded to one extent or another, and the Ariadnean ruins at Zakros and Malia entirely drowned. But what Zo saw on Crete was an everlasting vitality. There was no other place on Earth she had seen that had handled the population surge as well; everywhere small whitewashed villages clung to the land, like beehives, covering hilltops, filling valleys, and surrounded by crops and orchards, with the dry knobby hills still sticking out of the cultivated land, in sculptured ridges rising to the central spine of the island. The island’s population had risen to over forty million, she had heard, and yet the island still looked much the same; there were just more villages, built to match the pattern not only of the existing ones but of the ancient ones like Gournia and Itanos as well. Town planning with a continuity five thousand years old, continuity with that first peak of civilization or final peak of prehistory, so tall as to be glimpsed even by classical Greece a thousand years later, enduring by oral transmission alone as the myth of Atlantis— and then also in the shapes of all their subsequent lives, not only on Crete, but now on her Mars as well. Because of the names used in Dorsa Brevia, and that culture’s valorization of the Ariadnean matriarchy, the two places had developed a relationship; many Martians came to Crete to visit the ancient sites, and there were new hotels near all of them now, built on a slightly larger scale to accommodate the tall young pilgrims, visiting the holy places station to station— Phaistos, Gournia, Itanos, Malia and Zakros under the water, even the ridiculous “reconstruction” at Knossos. They came and saw how it had all begun, back in the morning of the world. Zo too— standing in the brilliant blue Aegean light, straddling a stone alleyway five thousand years old, she felt pouring into her the reverberations of that greatness, up through the spongy red stones underfoot and into her own heart. Nobility that would never end.
• • •
The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta. Well, that wasn’t really fair. But Calcutta itself was definitely Calcutta. Fetid humanity at its most compacted; whenever she went out of her room Zo had at least five hundred people in her field of vision, and often a few thousand. There was a frightful exhilaration in the sight of all this life in the streets, a world of dwarfs and midgets and other assorted small people, all of whom saw her and clumped like baby birds to a parent who could feed them. Although Zo had to admit that the clumping was friendlier than that, composed more of curiosity than hunger— indeed they seemed more interested in her exoskeleton than her. And they seemed happy enough, thin but not emaciated, even when they were clearly permanently camped on the streets. The streets themselves were co-ops now, people had tenure, swept them, regulated the millions of little markets, grew crops in every plaza, and slept among them too. That was life on Earth in the late Holocene. After Ariadne it had been downhill all the way.
Zo went up to Prahapore, an enclave in the hills to the north of the city. This was where one of Jackie’s Terran spies lived, in the midst of a jammed dorm of harried civil servants, all living at their screens and sleeping under their desks. Jackie’s contact was a translator programmer, a woman who understood Mandarin, Urdu, Dravidian and Vietnamese, as well as her Hindu and English; she also was important in an extensive eavesdropping network, and could keep Jackie informed concerning some of the Indian-Chinese conversations about Mars.
“Of course they both will send more people to Mars,” the heavyset woman said to Zo, after they were out in the compound’s little herb garden. “That’s a given. But it does look like both governments feel they have their populations in a long-term solution. No one expects to have more than one child anymore. It’s not only the law, it’s the tradition.”
“The uterine law,” Zo said.
The woman shrugged. “Possibly so. A very strong tradition, in any case. People look around, they see the problem. They expect to get the longevity treatment, and they expect to have a sterility implant at that time. And in India, anyway, they feel lucky if they get the permits to remove the implants. And after having one child, people expect to be sterilized for good. Even the Hindu fundamentalists have changed on this, the social pressure on them was so great. And the Chinese have been doing this for centuries. The longevity treatment only reinforced what they had already been doing.”
“So Mars has less to fear from them than Jackie thinks.”
“Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the overall strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in some Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.”
“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”
“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much weaker than before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in America, Russia, Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in the next few months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so that the woman could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.
“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had crawled into the exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a drag. Some people said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure to be convinced of their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very definition of exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home. She unplugged her wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that perfect middle way, that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity of Mars.