But amid all this antiquity the shield swallow was definitively something new.
Standing at this window, at first Jocelyn had to point it out to Hank; the swallow was an elusive sight. So polished were its enormous wings that you could only see them by the reflections they cast, shimmering images of the brilliant sun – save when the swallow swam across the face of the planet, when the graceful forms were like cut-outs against the brilliance of the clouds. “She’s riding on the pressure of the sunlight itself,” Jocelyn murmured. “You know, those wings, sheets of monomolecular carbon, weigh no more than a gram each. The body isn’t much more than that.”
“She’s hardly anything, then,” Hank said.
“You could crumple her up in your fist.”
“But she seems smart.”
“So she does. She has to be smart, she’ll spend most of her life keeping her place in the shield-flock out at the first Lagrange point. Which is a position in space out between Venus and the sun –”
“I know that,” said Hank, a little piqued. She always hesitated before admitting any ignorance to her mother; she lived with her father, she didn’t see much of Jocelyn, and she always wanted to make the right impression. She said tentatively, “I know the shield will cast a shadow. A big shadow that will cool down the whole of Venus.”
“Well, that’s the idea,” Jocelyn said, and she ruffled Hank’s hair. “And you, and with any luck I, might get to see the outcome, in a few hundred years’ time.”
Hank looked down on the sunlit clouds again, and imagined them cast into darkness and cold. “But I guess I don’t see why you need to do it.”
Jocelyn sighed. “No, and neither did the boards of governance and oversight, from the UN and the Stewardship on downwards to every polder council on Earth, it felt like, with those damn Conservers protesting wherever we went... You see, Hank, Venus is a problem. Humans are moving out into space in a big way – the way we always planned to before the Bottleneck. But where are we to go? In space, when it comes to places to live, you’ve got the Moon, you’ve got Mars – and you know that people are starting to think about how to turn Mars into a liveable world.”
“Terraforming,” Hank said carefully.
“That’s the idea. You can do that on Mars, but Mars will always be small, cold, lacking in volatiles – I mean, the stuff that air and oceans are made from. But at least you could live there now, under some dome. Not on Venus, though. You couldn’t live here. Even though Venus is actually much more like Earth – same kind of size, made of the same stuff.”
Hank snorted. “It doesn’t look like it from here.”
Jocelyn laughed. “Well, okay. But if Mars’s problem is that it’s too cold, Venus’s problem is that it’s too hot. You see those clouds? Top of an ocean of air, and most of it carbon dioxide.”
“The stuff I breathe out?”
“Yeah. So much air, in fact, it’s more like an ocean. Actually Earth has about the same amount of carbon dioxide as Venus, but back home it’s all weathered – I mean it’s locked up chemically in the rocks, mostly limestone. Venus used to be like Earth, once. But it overheated, there was a greenhouse effect, the carbon dioxide all baked out of the rock, and even the ocean water molecules broke up and the hydrogen was lost to space... After all that, Venus was hot and dry. The air pressure down on the ground is a hundred times what it is on Earth, or in this hab, and the temperature is hundreds of degrees. Honey, there are rivers of molten rock! So you think anybody could ever live down there?”
Hank wrinkled her nose. “Needs a lot of work.”
Jocelyn laughed. “Spoken like a true Poole. Yes, a lot of work. If you want to make Venus liveable, you’ve got to get rid of all that air. Or almost all of it, ninety-nine per cent. How? Come on, think of ways.”
Hank was used to being tested by Jocelyn. There were always clues, though, in her mother’s challenges. “Couldn’t you put it back in the limestone, like on Earth?”
“Good answer: weather it out. But to do that you’d have to break up the ground to a depth of kilometres, right across the planet. That’s even if you had enough water, which you don’t because it was all lost, remember. And even then, if the world stayed hot the carbon dioxide would just bake out of the rock again.”
“Don’t trees split up carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen, that you breathe? You could use that. Plant stuff to grow and absorb it all.”
“Another good try. Couldn’t plant trees, though. Some kind of engineered bug, maybe. But even if you did, there’s just too much air. You’d end up with a hundred-metre-thick layer of carbon all over the planet, and about sixty Earth atmospheres worth of oxygen. And you know what would happen then? Whoosh! The whole planet would burn up, and you’d be back where you started. And it would likely take thousands of years even to get that far. I want to do it faster than that.”
“Lift it off, then. All the air. The way they scoop helium and stuff out of Jupiter.”
She shook her head. “Another good try. Too much energy. You’d need the equivalent of six trillion megatons... Sorry, that’s a little archaic; that’s the language of bombs. And besides – here’s the thing, Hank – you don’t really want to throw away all the carbon that’s locked up in the cee-oh-two. Venus has the solar system’s biggest lode of carbon outside of Earth itself. Carbon is good, carbon is useful. Not just for living things –”
“You’re talking about nanotechnology.”
“Right. Good. The shield-swallows, for instance, are made of engineered carbon. You want to keep the carbon, mine it maybe, use it for nanotech or whatever, not just throw it away.” She winked at Hank. “You could even manufacture food, here on Venus. The other ingredients you need are here: hydrogen, nitrogen. Food from Venus, exported to Earth! That’s an old dream, I can tell you. And since most of humanity has been fed by slop made out of the last of the oil shale for the last four hundred years – I should know, I grew up eating the stuff – it’s actually commercially viable.
“And that’s what my scheme is all about. You just freeze out the Venusian air, and cover it over. You can do that relatively quickly and easily, and you’re left with a place you can live up top, and a mine of carbon down below that you can deal with in time. Of course I’m not planning to make Venus liveable like Earth, that can come later. But the key is she’ll become useful – and soon, so that we get a quick return on investment.”
She smiled, looking into the far distance beyond the window, a calculating expression that always made Hank feel uncomfortable. Jocelyn’s hair was long but pulled back into a compact bun, black with not a trace of grey; her skin was pale, smooth, but with an odd tightness around the eyes, which gave her a look of tension. Hank knew her mother was one of the oldest human beings alive, her body a test-bed for AntiSenescence, for ever-developing life-extension technologies. She didn’t exactly look old, but she didn’t look young, either.
When she wore that expression it was always as if she had forgotten Hank was even here.
The shield-swallow came floating by the window again.
Jocelyn seemed to relax. “She acts like she’s curious. Maybe she likes you.”
“Maybe.”
“You know, people associate us Pooles with big clumsy engineering projects. Ever since Michael Poole Bazalget and his polar clathrates. But when I was your age, or thereabouts, I saw the launch of Grey Poole’s first Outriggers. You know, the uncrewed antimatter rockets, the near-lightspeed interstellar probes? First year of the twenty-fifth century, two hundred years ago, another milestone year. There was a lot of controversy about all the energy we spent on that – but every damn probe worked, and the results from the target stars have trickled in ever since. Beautiful, delicate ships, like thistledown. And when you get down to it the whole project was an expression of confidence – a programme that was going to take so long it proved we had a faith in our own future. Why, people were already starting to live longer than they ever had before, and the world was at last comi
ng out of the worst of the climate troubles. Now I’m told that my plan to freeze Venus is another big, clumsy, grandiose folly. But what I’m achieving it with is something as delicate as that.” She pointed at the swallow. “Which is why I wanted you here, you know, to see this. You could give her a name, if you like.”
“What name?”
“How about Henrietta, like you?”
“My name is Hank. I can’t even spell Henrietta.”
Jocelyn laughed. “Sorry about that. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But she’ll soon be lost in a crowd, of trillions... We have to do this, you know. Never mind terraforming Mars – some day we’re gonna have to fix the Earth itself, not just stabilise it. And to do that we need to learn how to engineer planets, on a massive scale. You got to start somewhere.” She glanced at a chronometer. “Okay, I have meetings. You got a busy day?”
It was only an hour after breakfast. Hank had precisely nothing to do until the next meal. “I sure do,” she said politely.
“Catch you later, then.” Jocelyn hurried away.
Alone, Hank peered down at the planet, imagining what she would see if those gleaming clouds could be peeled away: a land covered by plains of lava, twisted and torn by the heat. Rivers of rock. Incredible! And she had heard that people already lived down there, not on the lava-hot ground, but in the clouds, in big floating cities like airships. Which sounded fun to her, compared to this smelly old space station anyhow. Surely Venus was too interesting to be reduced to just a big lump of carbon...
The swallow flew past her window once again, and she was entranced.
JOCELYN LANG POOLE emerged from a crowd, hurrying across the Promenade, evidently seeking her daughter, and with Pierre, Hank’s son, in tow. Micro-cameras swarmed around Jocelyn’s head like fireflies. Well, this was Sunset Day, the day towards which Jocelyn and her planetary engineers had been building for fifty-six years already – fifty-six years since the creation of the first swallows, to this moment when the L1 shield would close up at last. Of course there would be cameras.
But Hank had her own deadlines. She deliberately turned away and, softscreen in hand, continued her quietly spoken discussions with her staff.
In half-opened exosuits, they were gathered at a port. From here they looked out through the semi-translucent hull of Pangad at stately dirigibles and smaller powered craft, suspended in shining air, patiently seeking access to the station to offload yet more samples of a precious, unique and horribly threatened biota.
Pangad was a flying eggshell, an ovoid a kilometre across floating in the Venusian sky, with a medium-sized city cupped on its expansive floor and circled at the equator by this Promenade with its transport and access facilities. The view was always spectacular – but even now it was not as it had once been. For months already, if not years, the space shield had grown dense enough to block a significant percentage of the sunlight, and the city had grown darker, as had the clouds it inhabited.
And today, as always now as the Sunset deadline approached, the Promenade was a swarm of activity. Hank herself hadn’t slept for four days – four Earth days, nearly a full breeze-day aboard Pangad. But for all their elaborate preparations and for all their frantic work, Hank was senior enough to know how horribly limited all their conservation efforts were in the face of this monumental discontinuity.
And in the middle of all that here came Jocelyn Lang Poole. A woman whose clumsy patchwork rejuvenations now made her look younger, in a waxwork kind of way, than Hank herself at sixty-six: Hank’s own mother, come to inflict an extinction event on an entire planet. Hank was tempted to just turn her back, to focus on the work. But Pierre was calling her, in a reedy twelve-year-old voice that was on the cusp of breaking, and he at least didn’t deserve such treatment. So for the sake of her son Hank forced a smile.
“Here you are,” Jocelyn said as she approached. She was dressed in a snappy-looking business suit. “Pierre’s been telling me all about the Outrigger probe that reported back from Delta Corvi – a very strange swarm of planets out there...” She ruffled Pierre’s hair, a gesture that obscurely irritated Hank. “Can’t see this little guy floating around in a box in the clouds all his life. The stars for you, eh, little buddy?”
And Hank was freshly irritated that Pierre blushed at this attention from his famous grandmother. As evenly as she could she said, “Get out of here, Pierre. I know you have your chores to do, like everybody else.”
Chastened, resentful, he snapped, “Yes ma’am,” and ran off.
Jocelyn looked after him wistfully. “Cute little guy.”
“You barely know him, Mother. What the hell are you doing here? Today of all days. I’m surprised you weren’t lynched as soon as you set foot on the Promenade.”
Jocelyn seemed nonplussed. “Oh, come on, Hank, lighten up. I wanted to be with my family today – to mark a triumph, not the end goal, but a key milestone, after fifty years’ work the end of the beginning –”
“Save the soundbites for somebody who gives a damn.” Not for the first time in her life Hank sought the words to communicate her feelings to Jocelyn. “Look, Mother, the people here care about Venus. This is their home...”
And a surprisingly generous home it was.
The lethal ground far below might glow in the dark, but up here, in the cloud decks fifty klicks or so high, the temperature was down to a little above Earth-normal, the air pressure was little more than Earth’s sea level, and you could float around in a balloon the size of Manhattan: in fact you could inhabit the lift envelope itself, since breathing air was a lift gas here. People had come here in the first place for the science, of course, but such was the appeal of the place that many had stayed on to have their kids, and grandkids – they just lived here. That was pretty much Hank’s story. She had never been able to get Venus out of her imagination since that close encounter with a shield-swallow in orbit, more than a half-century ago, and she’d had to come back.
But it was Venus itself that had captivated her, not her mother’s grim visions of carbon mines. For, up here in the clouds – the real reason she was here – there were other inhabitants than humans.
Jocelyn, of course, was dismissive. “So it’s a home. There are other homes. You could be in an arcology on Earth and it would feel much the same, right? Besides, even when Sunset falls the cities won’t be immediately threatened. Sure, you’ll be in the dark, but you spend two days out of every four in the dark anyhow, right?”
Though Venus turned at a creakingly slow and retrograde pace, yielding a sunrise-to-sunset interval of a hundred and seventeen days, the cloud cities like Pangad were blown around the world by high-speed winds, taking just four Earth days to finish a circuit: a ‘breeze-day’.
“Plenty of time to get out of here in an orderly fashion.”
“But that’s not the point, damn it,” Hank snapped back. “I know the atmosphere’s not going to snow out in a couple of days –”
“More like a couple of centuries –”
“Mother, we’ll survive. But the native life won’t. It’s photosynthetic. Lives off the sunlight you’re blocking out.” Jocelyn’s expression was blank, and Hank knew she had withstood barrages of this kind of objection in endless review committees since her freeze-down project had first been mooted, but Hank felt motivated to try to make her see, even so. “And it’s very old, Mother. The native life. It has to be. It must have formed when Venus was young, and Earthlike. The big heat-up took a couple of billion years: time for life to form in those early oceans, and then to retreat to the clouds when the ground became too hot – to this layer, where conditions are as Earthlike as anywhere beyond the home planet itself –”
“Earthlike? Clouds full of sulphuric acid? Don’t talk to me about Earthlike. I have a share in the corporation that developed the shielding for the hulls of your precious balloon towns. What the hell kind of life is it, anyhow? Just a bunch of bugs in the air –”
“There’s more to it than that. There has to
be. We still don’t know how they survive up here; they feed off sunlight and the materials of the clouds, of course, but there has to be some means of transporting trace elements up from the surface. It’s more than just ‘bugs in the air’. I think I’ve seen evidence of behaviour on a large scale. Much larger. There are patterns – visible in some wavelengths of light, if you look down at the clouds from above – the Venusian cloud bugs cooperating, somehow, on scales larger than continents. That’s my speciality, as you ought to know. I think I was inspired as a kid by seeing your shield-swallows and the way they were designed to swarm –”
Jocelyn shook her head. “You’re as bad as those weaklings on Mars, who are holding up the terraforming programme for the sake of life forms they thought they saw in the winter dry-ice snowstorms... I built a shield in space, twice the diameter of this planet. That alone has taken fifty years to put together, peeling the swallows off of that damn tethered asteroid one by one –”
“A shield that’s killing a world.”
In fact, in the gathering shadow of the shield, already the atmosphere was disrupted on a heroic scale, with dumped heat causing tremendous storms, and the air’s structure breaking down. From space the planet looked dimpled, storm-wracked, and Hank and her workers could see it in the finest detail of the cloud communities: the disruption of delicate nutrient flows, of life cycles fragile to the point of invisibility.
“And it’s all because you have to be so damn hasty. Oh, I know why it has to be that way. Time’s passing, isn’t it, Mother? And fashions change. Your Venus project is becoming stranded, a relic from a different age, an embarrassment, an anachronism. You need to keep hurrying to get it done before approval is withdrawn. And all the lives you meddle with – mine, too. It was conscience that drew me back here, you know. After you brought me out to see the beginning of it as a kid, I could never get Venus out of my head. You disrupted my whole life.”
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