“Yes, I remember that now.”
“But I did not anticipate that you would become so disoriented. May I suggest that–”
“I don’t want any suggestions,” Karim said, then called up his next scenario.
He followed a path of white flagstones past a grove of slender willows. Greta was waiting for him outside a small pavilion. As he came up to her, she took his arm. They kept to the path that led to the edge of the island, passing a greenhouse and then another pavilion. Five people sat at one of the tables under the pavilion, sipping tea from cups and eating from a large bowl of fruit. One man raised his hand to Karim and Greta, silently inviting them to join the group; Karim smiled and shook his head.
Overhead, the wide disk of yellow light at the center of the dome that covered the island was growing dimmer; the silver light of evening would soon be upon them. This artificial island, and the others that now drifted in the upper reaches of Venus’s atmosphere, had been built on vast platforms made of metal cells filled with helium and had then been enclosed in impermeable domes. Not many people lived on this island, no more than a few hundred, and there were even fewer on the other islands, but more would come, more of the specialists and workers needed for the next stage in terraforming the planet below.
The path ended at a low gray wall, about one meter high, that marked the edge of the island. This wall now encircled the entire island, but Karim could recall coming to the island’s edge years ago, just after arriving here from Earth, to peer through the transparent dome at the darkness beyond: Venus cloaked in the parasol’s shadow. There had been no wall then, only the blackness, and for a moment he was suddenly afraid that he might step off the island’s edge and through the dome, to fall through the thick and poisonous clouds. The wall had been built to prevent that feeling of vertigo that so many of the first arrivals had felt, and Karim now often took evening walks to the island’s edge with Greta.
Another team, a group of engineers, was scheduled to arrive here soon; Karim had heard that several hours ago, just after first light. They were already inside the space station that orbited Venus, where the freighters and passenger torchships from Earth docked. From the station, a shuttlecraft would carry them to the one Venusian island that functioned as a port, where they would board an airship bound for this island. Here, in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, helium-fueled dirigibles were the most convenient form of transportation between islands.
“ ... vulnerable,” Greta was saying, and he had the odd sensation that she was reading his thoughts.
Karim turned toward his wife. “What were you saying, my dear?”
She gazed at him in silence with her long dark eyes, then said, “Our airships are useful, but they also leave us vulnerable. Consider this – we can only leave these islands on shuttlecraft, and can only travel to Earth from our Venusian space station. That means a risk of being completely cut off from Earth at two points, our island port and at the space station, and then we’d have only our airships, which have to remain in the atmosphere. We could be trapped here, cut off completely from the outside.”
“That’s a possibility,” Karim said, distressed that she would spoil the mood of their stroll with such concerns, “but a very distant one. We’ve built enough redundancy into our systems to–”
“I wasn’t thinking of a systems failure,” Greta said. “I was thinking of a siege, or a blockade.”
Karim almost laughed. “A blockade?” He shook his head. “But why? For what possible reason? The Mukhtars want only success for this project.”
“Yes, that’s true at the moment. But what if those who follow us here begin to hope for a looser hand on the reins? We’re here to make a new world, and part of that is allowing this world to develop in its own way. We’re terraforming a planet, probably one of the most revolutionary undertakings of our species, so we shouldn’t be surprised if that provokes people to entertain rebellious ideas in the future. Some here already talk of being free from many of Earth’s restrictions. The Mukhtars might not care for such independence, and they could easily enforce their will. All they would have to do is cut us off completely by allowing no shuttlecraft to enter or leave our port.”
“They wouldn’t risk destroying their own project,” Karim objected, “not after spending so many resources on getting us this far.”
“But they wouldn’t be destroying the project. The parasol would still shade Venus, and seeding the atmosphere could proceed. All they’d have to do is wait out the island settlers, who would eventually have to bow to Earth’s will or else face a slow death, and it would be a slow death, Karim. We could survive for a while on greenhouse crops, and the life-support systems can be maintained, but sooner or later crucial components of our systems would fail, ones the islanders would be unable to replace. After all of the sacrifices Earth has made for this project, to ensure that their culture will take root on another world, do you really believe that they will ever let us go our own way?”
She was voicing some of his own fears. He pressed his hands against the dome, felt the surface yield, and found himself sitting in a chair, his hands gripping the armrests.
“Where am I?” he called out.
“Aboard the Beverwyck,” a voice replied, and then he remembered. “I suggest,” the AI continued through his band, “that you reset your mind-tour specifications, Mukhtar Karim. You can enjoy your scenarios while still remaining somewhat aware that you are experiencing a mind-tour. You do not have to put yourself into a temporary amnesia, to forget that you are living here and not there.”
“Ah, but then the experience would not be nearly as convincing.”
“It does not have to be convincing, only diverting.”
“I prefer the sense of reality.” In his scenarios, however briefly and imperfectly, he could capture the conviction that the terraforming he dreamed of could succeed. He needed to hold to that conviction even more now.
Karim had suggested that, after the welcoming ceremony and his meeting with the mayor of New York City, he and Greta invite Lauren, her brother Zack, and her bondmate Roberto to dine with them at the New World Trade Center’s rooftop restaurant.
“No, Karim,” Greta had replied. “Forgive me, but I don’t think that would be at all appropriate. It might offend some people’s sensitivities. There are certain episodes in our history we’ve never forgotten, even if they did happen over a century and a half ago.”
He understood, given the long memory of his own people, and had settled for giving the Beverwyck’s owners the day off and permission to use his credit while they dined at the restaurant by themselves.
A small city hovercraft was sent to take him and Greta to City Hall. The mayor, Donata Grenwell, met them with three members of the city council, then led the Mukhtar to her office while the council members took Greta on a tour of the building. Karim and the mayor sipped coffee while Donata spoke of the city’s need for more engineers to design and supervise the construction of more dikes, and for more physicians and vaccines against the viruses and tropical diseases that afflicted so many in New York. Karim assured her that the Council of Mukhtars would do everything possible to help her.
Donata Grenwell stood up, and seemed about to lead him to the door, then hesitated. “I wish–” she began as she adjusted the scarf around her head that she had worn in deference to his people’s customs.
“Yes?” he said, waiting.
“I wish there was something else to do besides just shoring up what we have, repairing the damage.” She gazed at him steadily with her pale gray eyes, then looked away. “How we used to push ourselves in the old days. I’d hear the stories from my grandmother – she was just barely old enough to remember. Always on the move, she said, always impatient, knowing nothing would stay the same from one year to the next, always having to keep up with everything and be fast on your feet, always having something to look forward to and be optimistic about. That’s how it was for us once.”
“I understan
d,” Karim murmured.
“But the Council of Mukhtars has more important things to worry about,” Mayor Grenwell said. “You have to keep things going and keep them from getting any worse, and if we manage to accomplish that much, it’ll be a job well done.”
“God willing,” Karim said, “but I wonder if we can do that without also looking forward and dreaming of something new.”
The mayor arched her brows, looking surprised, then showed him to the door.
Two aides to the mayor took him and Greta on a short tour of the lower Manhattan waterways and canals. Their watercraft, a small flatbottomed boat with a canopy to shade them from the sun, wound its way among canals crowded with waterbuses, gondolas, and motorboat taxis; a police boat carrying five officers followed them. The air smelled of sulfur and brine; the shouts of the vendors who had set up shop on docks and small barges were nearly drowned out by the sound of the traffic. Occasionally a small personal motorcraft sped past the slower vessels, rocking Karim’s boat in its wake. The steep cliffs of high-rise apartment buildings and commercial establishments loomed on either side of the canals. The beaches south of Brooklyn had been lost to the rising sea before the dikes and seawalls had been raised on higher ground, and the oceans were also gaining on lower Manhattan. As long as the water could be channeled into canals, and the buildings here remained accessible to workers and residents, better to expend their ever scarcer resources elsewhere; so Donata Grenwell had told him.
They arrived at the pier near the plaza of the New World Trade Center before noon, but already the hot weather of late March was making Karim sweat under his white ceremonial robe and headdress; the humid air seemed as thick as soup. Even Greta, who had grown up in such a climate, looked uncomfortable as she dabbed at her pale damp face with a handkerchief. Karim picked up the wreath of lilies he had brought with him and stepped onto the dock, with Greta just behind him. The wreath had been his wife’s recommendation, and now he felt the rightness of her advice.
The police in the boat behind them disembarked; the lieutenant walked with Karim and Greta across the wide plaza toward the glassy buildings on the other side. Other people were gathered in the plaza, some talking among themselves, but most silently watching him and his party pass. Karim was nearly at the memorial, a latticework of metal and twisted beams that surrounded a black wall bearing thousands of names, when the apparition he had been expecting to see began to take shape.
The hologram flickered into existence, and then he saw the two tall towers, translucent and ghostly, take form behind the shorter structures that had replaced them. Karim thought he heard a sigh from the people nearest him. He looked up at the towers, imagining for a moment that they might become solid, that he would be able to enter them and climb up to where they seemed to graze Heaven.
Karim whispered a prayer, then knelt to lay the wreath at the base of the memorial.
Shading Venus with a parasol had cooled the planet enough for a steady rain of carbon dioxide to begin. Over the next century and a half, oceans had formed until much of the low-lying Venusian surface was covered with carbon dioxide seas.
It’s only a beginning, Karim thought. If the planet was kept in the parasol’s shade, the precipitating carbon dioxide would change from rain into snow and ice. He thought of people living on the surface, enclosed in domes like those that covered the islands floating in the Venusian atmosphere, looking out at a dark frozen world that would not be a new Earth, but only a prison.
Even as that thought came to him, he found himself looking through the transparent wall of a dome at a plain of ice illuminated only by the light from inside this dome and another that glowed in the distance. Suddenly angry, he struck the dome with his fist. Why had he come to this settlement only to imprison himself?
But he knew the answer to that question. The alternatives he and his fellow Earthfolk faced were fairly stark. They could live here, gaining a precarious foothold on Venus until they solved the new set of problems the terraforming project had presented, or they could return to an Earth growing ever hotter and ever more unlivable.
Earth, he thought, might eventually resemble the Venus that had existed before terraforming began, with its oceans boiled away, an atmospheric pressure great enough to crush an unprotected man and temperatures hot enough to melt metals. He imagined feeling such heat even as he gazed out at Venus’s icy wastes.
“Karim,” Greta said.
He opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed in a darkened room; his beard seemed damp. Greta leaned over him; strands of her graying hair had slipped from under her scarf. The air around him had grown so warm that he was sweating under his light cotton robe.
“The homeostat wasn’t working,” Greta went on, “but Zack fixed it just a few minutes ago. The temperature in our rooms should be back to normal in less than an hour. By the way, he and the others told me that they very much enjoyed dining in the city today.” She spoke in Anglaic, as she always did when they were alone; her Arabic was fluent without having ever become truly eloquent or poetic. She moved closer to the edge of the bed and gently slipped his band from his head. “You were to rest, not lie here accessing cyberminds.”
“I was taking another of my mind-tours.”
“Are you all right?”
“Just a bit disoriented,” he replied. “Where are we?”
“The Beverwyck’s just north of the George Washington Bridge. Zack decided that we should stop at the docks here for the night. We’ll leave before sunrise, before the traffic gets too heavy. I hope you’ll be able to keep away from your mind-tours long enough to enjoy a view of the Palisades.”
“I wonder if that view will be as impressive as the one I saw in a mind-tour some time ago,” Karim said as the remembered image of a ridge of unbroken rock came to him. That simulation had been of the Palisades as they might have appeared four hundred years ago, but the waters had risen since then, creeping higher up the sides of the cliffs.
“Mind-tours.” Greta sat down on the bed and reached for his hand. “I’ve never seen you so caught up in such entertainments. You’ve had your band on during almost every free moment we’ve had since we landed in Washington.”
“I haven’t been seeking mere diversion, Greta. I’m still exploring my terraforming scenarios.”
“Venus. I see.” For a moment, he expected her to voice the objections he had heard from her before. “I could tell you to give up such hopes,” she continued, “but you wouldn’t listen to me anyway, and maybe I’m no longer so sure of my reasons for arguing against your dream in the past. The effort would be costly, but that has to be measured against the possibility of making an entirely new habitable planet for ourselves. It might be better to leave Venus alone in order to learn what we can about it, but we’d also learn much about that world during any terraforming project.”
“There is the possibility of failure,” Karim murmured.
“Of course. There always is. Still, we could fail at making Venus another Earth and yet make many important advances in technology and science. We might even learn enough to restore Earth’s ecology many centuries from now. And–” She was silent for a while. “I think it will be easier for you to know that you never have to doubt my loyalty.”
“If I push too hard,” he said, “you know what the consequences will be.”
“I don’t care about exile. I don’t care even if they force us to move to some desolate place with just enough to keep us alive, because if the Council punishes you simply for dreaming, there isn’t much hope for any of us anyway.”
“My dear–”
“I just wish that you wouldn’t keep escaping this way.”
“It’s not an escape,” he said, “at least not entirely. You seem to have gained more faith in my dream at the same time I’ve been in danger of losing some of my own. I’m trying to regain my convictions, Greta. I’m afraid that some of the other Mukhtars’ doubts have begun to creep into me.”
“I hope not, Karim.” She clutc
hed his hand more tightly. “I don’t want to see what you would be like without your dreams.”
To seed the atmosphere of Venus with microorganisms that would break down the carbon dioxide was a formidable task, but the biologists working on the Venusian islands had lived up to Karim’s expectations. After enough failures to dampen even his confidence, a team of biologists headed by his wife had developed new strains of red and green algae that were capable of ingesting the sulfur dioxide of Venus’s rains, and also a strain of cyanobacteria that could survive without sunlight while oxygenating the atmosphere. Greta’s report had minimized the frustration and expense of all the failed strains, all of the bioengineered microorganisms that had shown early promise only to fail and die in the lethal atmosphere.
Years had passed since the first seeding, and the new aerial ecosystem of algae and bacteria had survived, even thrived. Karim still saw the same familiar darkness outside the translucent dome of his island station, and the misty acidic rains continued to fall, condensing as the planet cooled, but changes had already been measured: small decreases in the level of sulfur dioxide in the rains and the presence of more iron and copper sulfides, of more carbon dioxide broken up into carbon and oxygen.
The biologists had begun their bioengineering of new strains of algae at about the same time as a team of engineers, under the direction of Hassan Tantawi, had begun to aim giant tanks of solid compressed hydrogen at Venus from their station orbiting Saturn. As oxygen was freed by the changes in the Venusian atmosphere, hydrogen would be needed to combine with the oxygen to form water. But setting up the Saturnian station and building the giant skyhooks that siphoned off the hydrogen had taken too great a share of the project’s resources. Karim was beginning to worry that some on the Council of Mukhtars might halt the process of terraforming at its current stage. They would never admit openly that the project had grown too costly, that they might put an end to its work altogether; the Council was much more likely to make noises about “suspending operations temporarily” and “conducting more studies.” The Mukhtars would tell themselves that something could still be learned from what had already been accomplished.
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