Jocelyn studied her blankly. “That’s a price worth paying, frankly. Everything you’ve got you owe to me. And days like today are what it’s all been about. Leaving my mark. As my mother left her mark, and her father... all the way back to Grey Poole and the Outriggers, even old Michael Bazalget in the twenty-first century.”
Hank folded her arms. “Leaving your mark. Even if there’s some better course for Venus, a better way – if it takes too long for you to be around to get the credit, you’d reject it, right? You’re sacrificing a whole world, a whole biosphere, just to get your name plaque nailed to the wall of the Poole family mausoleum.”
Jocelyn thought that over, shrugged, and grinned, almost girlishly. “Well, is that so wrong?”
Hank glowered at her mother, wordless. Then she turned and went back to work.
Just an hour later, the sky went dark, all at once, as Jocelyn Lang Poole shut out the sun.
WHEN JOCELYN DESCENDED to the science base on the summit of Maat Montes, visiting her family for the first time in decades, she was, as usual, interested in nothing but her own agenda. In this particular case it was the trouble, as she saw it, that grandson Pierre was cooking up in his experimental shelter out on the ice of the Phoebe Ocean.
And so, as Hank gave her the customary tour of the Maat base, Jocelyn showed not even polite interest in all Hank herself had achieved down here on the surface of Venus, astonishingly no less than a hundred and eighty-six years after Sunset Day. No interest in the big wildlife-reserve shelters Hank and her team had managed to erect down here in these latter years, after conditions had become a little less ferocious – no interest in the lab work being done here, though Jocelyn showed some curiosity about the hab’s engineering, stomping around as she did in the exoskeletal frame that now supported her increasingly fragile body of more than four hundred and fifty years’ vintage.
“You may have started it, Jocelyn,” Hank said. She’d given up calling her ‘Mother’ more than a century ago; when your own son passed his hundredth, relationships kind of levelled out across the generations. “With Sunset Day, I mean. But down here we had to live through it. And it was a long, slow process, I can tell you. The balloon cities lasted a few decades, the air took that long to cool, but we were sinking the whole time, down, down. Then after about sixty years it got cold enough for the carbon dioxide rains to start, and we’ve had more than a hundred years of that. So we came down to the ground and pitched camp. You know why here, why Maat Montes? Because it’s the second highest location on the planet, after Maxwell up in the north...”
Venus had a strange terrain, mostly flat lava plains broken by a few continent-like highland regions: Ishtar Terra up in the north the size of Australia, and here, Aphrodite Terra, at the equator. None of this had mattered a damn to any human being aside from theoretical planetologists until the searing heat began to recede, and the carbon dioxide air to thin, and the ground became accessible. But when those who had remained with Venus sought somewhere on the surface to settle, the higher ground, where the heat and air pressure was always marginally less, was a good idea.
And even more so when the carbon dioxide rains had started. At first the falling liquid had hissed and sizzled and evaporated quickly from the still-warm ground, or had soaked into the basaltic plain of the lowland. But gradually the land had become saturated, and puddles had formed, and then lakes, which had then joined up into a rising sea... The colony gave a good view of the rising ocean, which would eventually cover something like eighty per cent of the planet’s surface, and Maat Montes would become an island.
Then, just a decade or two ago, the cold got deep enough to cause the ocean to start to freeze, from the bottom up.
“Even so, it was still damn hot. We had to reinvent everything we did, from scratch. Did you know that the surface used to be so hot that it would melt the solder on a circuit board? And every engine we ran ate fuel like it was going out of fashion.”
Jocelyn thought that over. “High ambient temperature. Low thermodynamic efficiency.”
“The Carnot cycle, yeah. But we hung on, and survived, most of us. And I think we did some useful work...”
But Jocelyn cared nothing for the display samples from the experimental ‘metal-snow mine’ near the very summit of Maat’s highest peak. Once, in Venus’s most ferocious days, there really had been a superhot snow of metallic compounds that would settle out on the higher ground: tellurium, iron pyrites. You could easily prospect for such reflective stuff with radar, and for the last century or so shipments of the stuff to Earth and the offworld colonies had been an unexpected, commercially viable success. And Jocelyn was interested even less in the studies Hank and her team were making in the big blister domes, cramped as they were, of the lifecycles of the native Venusian life: a biota now extinct save in a few reserves like Hank’s.
“We haven’t got the room to replicate a lifecycle that spanned a cloud layer tens of kilometres deep,” Hank said sourly. “But we’ve confirmed some of my earlier guesses. The bugs really did cooperate on a planetary scale. They were locked into global cycles of mass and energy, just like Earth. A Venusian Gaia...”
Just as Jocelyn’s shield-swallows worked cooperatively in a great flock, swimming in the sunlight to maintain their disc of shadow twenty-five thousand kilometres across, so the Venusian acid-cloud bugs had worked for aeons, leaching the air chemistry selectively, and even moving in coordinated ways to adjust the very weather. Great lightning storms would be tended, nurtured, assembled; such was the energy gathered that the storms had even reached down to the ground under its layer of soupy, sluggish carbon dioxide, and stirred up dust and rubble that, thrown into the air, helped seed the clouds with acid rain, and with the trace nutrients needed by the bacterial life. “When the world heated up the bugs had billions of years to evolve mechanisms like this, and they used that time well. But now –”
Jocelyn snorted. “But we didn’t even understand it until it was all gone, and now it’s all extinct and in a museum like the tyrannosaurs and the mammoths, and yada. I only came down here to see what that punk kid Pierre is up to out on my ice.”
“Your ice?”
“Well, who else’s?”
“The rover garage is over this way. And he’s no punk kid, by the way.”
Jocelyn grunted as she clanked her way alongside her daughter to the lock. “Sure. I follow his career – I’ve seen his presentations. Looks a hell of a lot better than I did at that age. Better medicine than when I began with AntiSenescence. I always told you so. You kids don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Maybe, but you’re still around to complain about it, aren’t you?”
“Hmmph. That’s good genes. And maybe it’s just as well that I’m still here to stop him screwing up my programme with this stuff from the Outrigger report, this alien nanobug crap from Beta Pegasi. We shouldn’t have anything to do with that. This is our system – these are our worlds. Whatever we do, it needs to be a human endeavour. Human. Not a playground for some damn alien tech...”
“Here’s the airlock. You didn’t bring a pressure suit?”
Jocelyn raised her arms with a whir of servo motors. “Look at me. What the hell kind of suit is going to fit over this?”
“This is the frontier, Jocelyn. We’re belt and braces about safety here –”
“You are. You know when the last death through pressure loss was? Neither do I. So shut your yap and let’s get on with it.”
SO MOTHER AND daughter exited from the base.
They crossed the frozen surface of the decades-old Phoebe Ocean in a small tractor-tread rover, the way lit only by the rover’s flood lamps. Hank was in an open suit, with Jocelyn and her exoskeleton cluttering up the cabin. Ahead lay nothing but pale, glimmering carbon dioxide ice, and the sky above was black as night, the remnant air still too thick to allow even a glimpse of the stars.
Much of the young ocean was still liquid, of course – and the rain continued – but in shallowe
r stretches, such as here, near the Aphrodite coast, there was already sheet ice, the ocean frozen solid to its base. And on that ice, already visible in the lamps of the rover, was the small shelter where Pierre Poole Rollins was conducting his already famous experiments using carbon dioxide slush from Venus and nanotech from the star Beta Pegasi...
Or so Hank understood, anyhow. Just as Pierre seemed to find it hard to talk to her these days – hell, these decades – so Hank found it hard to communicate with her own mother, on any level. They were all in strange territory, she thought – Jocelyn especially, as one of the first of the truly long-lived – enduring an unprecedented overlapping of historical timescales with individual ambitions and lifespans. Why, it was already nearly two and a half centuries since the inception of Jocelyn’s Venus project: a length of time similar to that separating the birth of the Industrial Revolution and Michael Poole’s pioneering Arctic-clathrate stabilisation project. How were you supposed to build an ongoing career through all of that? And while the Venus project had gone through its slow phases, human society had itself evolved, with the ages of deprivation into which Jocelyn had been born an increasingly remote memory. Now, on Earth, even the polders, post-climate-collapse political unions of necessity, had faded in significance compared to a reborn-UN world government. In space, meanwhile, as an interplanetary culture slowly matured, the Moon had already gained a cautious independence... Amid all this, Jocelyn’s crude, ugly manipulation of Venus seemed increasingly out of its time. And yet, as Jocelyn had probably anticipated from the start, the project had a sheer physical momentum that made it practically unstoppable.
But now Hank’s own son, two-centuries-old Pierre, because of his plan to introduce alien elements into the carbon mines of Venus, was at loggerheads with Jocelyn: in the path of the family juggernaut...
As the rover drew up to the lock Hank felt a kind of shudder, transmitted through the frame.
It was a kind of intrusion. She was forced to focus on her driving, turning aside from thoughts of her family. Unease flickered. After decades, centuries, it was easy to forget that this was an alien world, a world inimical to humanity. Venus was volcanically active, enthusiastically so, mainly because it had no tectonic plates to shove around and vent off a little heat energy, as Earth did. In fact it was believed that most of the planet had been resurfaced by lava, perhaps a mere half-billion years earlier. Maat Mons, Hank’s home, was itself a volcanic artefact, a shield mountain the size of Hawaii.
All of Jocelyn’s tinkering with the atmosphere hadn’t made a jot of difference to the restlessness of the deep rocks. Venus was still Venus. And, just because in the few centuries humans had been in residence on the surface itself there had been no geological calamities or catastrophes, it didn’t mean Venus was, or would ever be, safe. Hence, for Hank, the belt and braces.
But the shudder passed, and Jocelyn, intent as usual on her own concerns, seemed to have noticed nothing at all.
ONCE THE ROVER had docked with the shelter, Jocelyn led the way in through the lock.
Pierre was alone today, working before a partitioned-off area. He glanced around at his visitors, his mother and grandmother, nodded perfunctorily, and turned back to his work – or tried to. Jocelyn made straight for him and began to interrogate him about Beta Pegasi.
Hank followed more circumspectly. Pierre, after all nearly two hundred years old himself, had grown into a solid, competent, senior figure. But, Hank often thought, his manner and expression had been hardened by his life as an outsider. He had grown up on a frontier, and then developed a career as a fringe academic. He did have something of the look of Jocelyn, though, Hank thought, short, dark, heavy, the look of the Pooles. As, no doubt, did she.
Pierre was wearing a pressure suit, Hank noted, but without gloves or hood to hand. Not regulation, to say the least, but she knew this was Pierre’s own habit of a grumpy old age; like his grandmother he thought excessive safety precautions just got in the way. Hank profoundly disagreed. But it didn’t seem the right moment to mention it.
Instead she said, “Look at us. Elderly grotesques. A new human dynamic, three bitter old farts each locked in their own heads, yet separated still by generations. And yet, you know, when they write up the family history we’ll be remembered as the Pooles who worked here, together, for better or worse. We’ll be the Venus generations.”
But nobody was listening.
Jocelyn seemed distracted by a new display Pierre or a colleague had set up, a hologram turning slowly in the air, right at the dome’s geometric centre: a glimmering, sparkling ball. Hank knew this was a representation of the object that an Outrigger probe had found orbiting Beta Pegasi, a red giant star about two hundred light years away. It was a ball of crystalline carbon the size of a small moon – it was a kind of huge diamond, really – described by some as a “hive-like accretion”. Perhaps it was geological; perhaps it was a construct of living things, like a termite nest; perhaps it was an artefact; perhaps it was itself alive. The Outrigger was not equipped to eliminate any of these possibilities. Still, the samples it had taken and analysed of the substance of the structure had yielded tantalising results.
As Pierre was trying to explain, more or less patiently, to his grandmother.
“Look, the whole point of your big freeze was to remove all that carbon dioxide from the air and stow it away in a place it can be mined later. Fine. What I’m telling you is that this gives usa better capability to do just that...”
He led the way to a clear partition wall, beyond which Hank saw a lab bench, manipulation gear, microscopic and other assay gear. Nothing very remarkable, though softscreen images glowed with hints of complex, fool-the-eye structures. But somewhere in there, Hank knew, sealed away, was alien life, or maybe an artefact of that life, and she wasn’t sure which was the stranger possibility.
Life or not, it was all the same to Jocelyn. “It’s not human, damn it, better capability or not.”
Pierre shrugged. “So? Look at what it does. It creates a kind of rock – that’s not a bad analogy – from carbon and oxygen...”
Hank knew something of the theory. It was as if the unknown aliens had made carbon atoms do what silicon atoms did naturally. Silicon, a closely related element to carbon, had an atom that could neatly bond to four oxygen atoms, forming a highly stable tetrahedron. And those tetrahedra could be combined like construction-toy pieces to make a variety of super-stable mineral forms: rock, such as quartz. The carbon atom, though so similar to silicon in many ways, was too small to make decent tetrahedra that way... unless you manipulated it, or forced it...
Pierre held out a handful of white dust. “We still don’t know how they do it, Grandmother. But this is the result.”
“It looks like chalk.”
He smiled tightly. “That’s what the engineers have started to call it. But it’s not chalk, it contains no calcium... Perhaps it is like chalk in that it seems to be created by living things, however. This is just carbon and oxygen – carbon dioxide forced into a form like a silicate rock, and just as stable. And, Grandmother, the – agents – that do this, which we created following the recipe sent back by the Beta Pegasi Outrigger, don’t just make cee-oh-two dust and rock. Alive or not, they self-replicate. Enthusiastically! In principle, all we need to do is throw a handful of these entities into every body of liquid carbon dioxide on the planet, and into the air, what’s left of it, and the result will be a world covered by this stuff. Easily mined, and unlike the dry ice that will be the end result of your process, dense, stable –”
“And easily shipped,” Hank put in, “to anywhere that’s short of carbon. Which is most places aside from Earth.”
Pierre said, “We could even be creative. I mean, we could make the chalk smart as it deposits out of the air, the oceans. Think of it – we could have it bank up as it forms, into valleys, hills – even cities, towers, lakes. A new world just coalescing out of the carbon dioxide... Well. That’s the dream,” he said finally.
“That’s the nightmare,” Jocelyn snapped back. “Because, whatever this is, it’s alien. Can’t you see it? Look – we’re not going to sit in this one solar system forever. And we’re going to encounter alien life out there – not just this nano crap – alien tech, alien minds. Faced by that overwhelming reality, how are we to retain the essence of our humanity? By living off what we build ourselves, what we make. Not this way.”
“But we’ve already been manufacturing polymers rich in carbon dioxide for centuries. Maybe we’d have come up with this kind of tech ourselves in a few decades anyhow –”
“Look, kid, this isn’t some obscure philosophical point. The problem is our future as humans.”
Pierre faced her with a kind of weary defiance, and Hank recognised the habitual nature of the argument, like two old boxers who knew each other too well. “No, Grandmother. The problem is that it’s not your idea. These days we’re trying to find more subtle ways to do things, such as this molecular-level transformation of the carbon dioxide. Later generations will see your big freeze as a typical Poole intervention, gross, clumsy, self-aggrandizing and ill thought out –”
“How do you know? What do you know about later generations?”
“I’m one of them –”
How the argument would have unfolded Hank would never know. Because at that moment the world exploded.
WELL, NOT QUITE. Although it felt that way to Hank. It took her some time, later, to piece together the events of those few seconds.
In a way, it had all been the fault of Jocelyn Lang Poole. She was certainly the one who paid the price.
One problem with all the carbon dioxide slush Jocelyn had lain down across the planet was that it was unstable: liable to rapidly volatise if heated. And on Venus there were plenty of hotspots. Luckily there had been no major geological issues anywhere near any human settlement, not since Sunset Day. Even this time it had only been a minor event, a bubble of magma stirring beneath the battered surface, a slight crack in the ground, venting gas...
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