Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  “So let’s get started. I’m game.”

  “Tell me something first,” he says, leaning forward to look me in the eyes. The intensity of his gaze is startling. “What are you doing with your lenses? What is that activity I see?”

  “Life-logging,” I say, feeling the usual disorientation that comes from talking about life-logging while I’m life-logging (and now I’m life-logging about life-logging about life-logging—argh).

  “But there is no Air here,” he says, pointing out the obvious. “There’s just the local network in Hieronymus.”

  “That’s okay. What doesn’t trickle through now I can upload later.” I watch him closely for signs of disapproval. Some old people are weird about me chronicling our intersections—as though anything I think or say can make the slightest difference to them. “Sample. Analyze. Speculate. Preserve. That’s what you said, right? You do it with bugs, I do it with my life. Are you cool with that?”

  “I am very cool with that, Natasha.” Grandpa nods, tapping the fingers of his right hand against his leg. “Birdie did the right thing, sending you here.”

  Great, I think, expecting a lecture. His house, his rules. I have to lump it before I’m allowed to go home et cetera. “Call me, Tash. Everyone does.”

  “Everyone is wrong, then. Drink your tea. There is time for a tour, I think, before the end of the world.”

  “The what?”

  “I will explain.”

  “IMAGINE TWO MEN,” he tells me as he leads me through Hieronymus’ cramped chambers and tunnels and assigns me a berth the size of my suitcase. Does that mean I’m spending the night here? I hope not. The toilet is unspeakable. Unloggable. I’ve deleted the images to spare the innocent.

  “Two men utterly at odds...”

  One deck is entirely devoted to tanks of nutrient fluids in which samples from the Venusian clouds are growing. I see misty tendrils of green and blue, waving in gentle currents.

  “The first man stands outside nature, content to monitor and record without intervention: do no harm is his motto. The second seeks understanding through probing and experiment, believing that he is part of nature. Life cannot harm life, he believes. All things transform.”

  Hieronymus’ underside is a hangar full of junk designed to dangle, scoop, swing, and occasionally fly through the Venusian atmosphere. Here, the sulfuric smell is strongest. And here Grandpa displays his fastidious side. Everything is efficiently cleaned and stowed. As he walks me around the space, his hands lightly tap the surfaces and edges of random things. I’m left with the impression that he could navigate this space blind, if he had to. Probably he has entrusted his life to some of these odd-looking machines, just as he trusts his life to the aerostat every minute of every day. Landing for repairs is not an option.

  “When two men of opposing principles engage over the same territory, conflict is inevitable.”

  “Jeez, enough already, Grandpa. If you think only men disagree with each other, come back to Earth and meet my friends.”

  He huffs and ascends a ladder right up to the top of the aerostat. I put aside my quite reasonable objection to follow. He can move quickly when he wants to.

  The uppermost level, where the gondola at its widest point meets the underside of the air sac, is an observation deck. All of the windows are real, those that aren’t switched to virtual. Grandpa doesn’t use lenses. He says they itch.

  “My aerie,” he says, holding out his arms, and I obediently look around.

  The view is pretty cool. It’s afternoon on Venus, which lasts a full Earth day when you’re following the air currents at this altitude. From where I’m standing I can see clouds through a gap in the clouds, and clouds below, clouds above, and clouds on all the virtual windows surrounding us. Clouds of every shape and shade of white imaginable, some stretched into thin, straight lines, some bunched up into vast arcs and columns. When I read ‘clouds’ in a description of Venus before coming here I pictured the ones at home, but this is something else entirely. On cloud-world, there are clouds to spare. It’s clouds all the way down.

  There’s one exception: a dark hole in some of the windows, marring the otherwise perfect view.

  “What’s that?” I ask, pointing.

  “That,” he says, “is the Eye.”

  “Of the storm?” I shift uneasily away from the nearest image. The thought of a Venusian tornado is slightly terrifying. Also, it seems to be looking back at me.

  “In a sense.” Grandpa takes a seat in front of an old-fashioned ship’s wheel and folds his arms. “What you see is the work of my worst enemy.”

  “The other dude from your quaint little parable, I presume. The one who likes to get his hands dirty?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. You might appreciate his sense of humor. There is a thing called the Bosch reaction—”

  “As in Hieronymus Bosch, of this place?”

  “No, Carl Bosch, but therein lies the pun. The Bosch reaction pits hydrogen against carbon dioxide, producing elemental carbon and water. Do you see where this is going?”

  “Not really. Oh, wait, isn’t the atmosphere of Venus mostly carbon dioxide, which is why it’s so hot?”

  “Largely so, yes. The greenhouse effect gone wild is the usual analogy. Get rid of the carbon dioxide, and things would be very different.”

  “Huh. You’d need lots of hydrogen, I bet.”

  “Indeed. Vast amounts. You would have to harvest a gas giant or electrolyze an ocean to come remotely close.”

  “That’s a lot of balloons.” I process a mental image of every kids’ party I’d ever been to, times a zillion. Which prompts another thought: “Wait, couldn’t you just fab it?”

  “If you had a fabber big enough, or enough of them, and enough power to run them. Yes, a grandiose fool might think so.”

  I look at the image then back at my grandfather. A zillion parties worth of hydrogen spewing forth into a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, causing a rain of water and... Would that look something like this?

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was.”

  “All to turn Venus into a big swimming pool?”

  Grandpa shrugs.

  “And what about your bugs? Where will they live if the clouds go away?”

  He shrugs again. “You are not asking the most pertinent question.”

  “Oh, yeah, okay.” The bugs aren’t the only things floating in this atmosphere. “What happens to us?”

  “We crash, I guess.”

  I’ve gotta say, Grandpa seems pretty relaxed about it all. Me, not so much.

  THE END OF the world. It’s a big deal. I should be worried about that, I suppose, but mainly I just don’t want to die.

  “Send me home.”

  “Are you certain this is what you want?”

  “Of course! This goes way beyond cruel and unusual. It’s practically homicidal.”

  I climb, march, and stomp my way back to the booth, where Grandpa obediently keys in the codes required to override the usual block on interplanetary d-matting. I take a deep breath as the mirrored door closes and I brace myself for losing another eleven minutes of the universe’s usual programming.

  But nothing happens. There’s no flash of light as scanning starts, no slight bump as my atoms start moving again at the other end. The door simply opens and there’s Grandpa waiting for me with a hangdog expression.

  “Lines are cut,” he explains. “We are quarantined until it’s over.”

  I’m furious, but not with him. “Completely cut?”

  “Yes. We can’t even call your parents.”

  Serves them right, I think. They’ll be worried sick. “What does OneEarth think this is, a disease?”

  “It is a contagion of sorts. Moral. Ideological. Hubristic. When some madman changes a world simply because he can, one must draw a line.”

  I brush past him, feeling weak in my knees, and drop into the now-welcoming deckchair. “Can he really do this? Is it even
possible?”

  “My enemy has seeded a section of the Venusian atmosphere with a custom-made Bosch reactor that is designed to replicate itself, which it has been doing faithfully ever since activation. The result, the Eye is limited now only by the amount of air it can suck in. At any moment I expect it to reproduce.”

  “Two eyes?”

  “Then four, then eight.”

  “Ah, man.” I know the story about the rice grains and the chessboard. We are so stuffed.

  “Who is this guy, anyway? Doesn’t he believe in asking permission?”

  Grandpa looks tired, as if he’s been grappling with these very questions himself. “I think he is making a point about capacity and culpability... After all, we nearly destroyed the Earth. What’s to stop us destroying another world? This is a pretty good place for a demonstration. Venus, population one.”

  “Normally.” I feel a bilious sinking in my gut, like the aerostat is already dropping out of the sky. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die full-stop, but I definitely don’t want to die here.”

  “Nor shall you, Natasha, if I have anything to say about it. Don’t cry.” He reaches out and takes my hands. It’s like touching old snake skin, soft with oil and crisscrossed with irregular diamonds. The fact that he has lived long enough to have hands like these makes me feel somewhat reassured. “Hieronymus has endured the atmosphere of Venus longer than any other vessel. It will weather this final storm.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Together, we can make it perfectly ship-shape.”

  Ship-shape? That’s an odd phrase, until I remember the details of the Bosch reaction. Hydrogen plus carbon dioxide equals carbon plus aitch-two-oh—

  “We’re not going to crash land. We’re going to splash down.”

  “You’re a smart girl, Natasha. You and I, we’re going to be the first people to sail on Venus.”

  IF WE DON’T drown first.

  That’s my mantra as we meticulously check Hieronymus for leaks, starting at the stern and making our way slowly to the fore. (Are they the right terms? I can’t look them up. Curse you, Air-less Venus!) We have plenty of time. For all the horrific power of the Eye, which is growing in magnitude every minute, its effects take time to spread. One of the virtual screens on the upper deck shows thick rivers of carbon dioxide being sucked into the center of the storm and waves of water vapor radiating outwards. I slave my lenses to it, giving me a window into the death of an old world. It looks like a wound.

  Grandpa whistles while he works, and why not? Our circumstances are perfectly surreal. To get into the spirit, I paint a skull-and-crossbones over the ship’s wheel on the upper deck. When (not if, I tell myself) this log is uploaded, everyone will know that I went down in style.

  Storm winds strike Hieronymus, setting it rocking from side to side. Atmospheric pressure is already falling—by a tiny amount where we are, but falling nonetheless. I imagine us diving with increasing speed into a brand-new ocean, only there’s no ocean yet, just the first hints of rain falling in the Eye’s boiling heart. Rain. On Venus. When it hits the superheated rock it blasts immediately back into steam. How long until everything cools down enough to support liquid water is anyone’s guess.

  We have time to rest, anyway. I curl my legs up in my tiny berth with a sleep-mask on and concentrate on not throwing up, or screaming, or wishing I could go back in time and take back my stupid jokes, or whatever madness is gripping me that particular moment. I can hear Grandpa whistling again. Is that The Pirates of Penzance? Maybe he’s not so bad, now I’ve had time to reflect.

  Eventually I nod off and dream about being at a birthday party where someone’s making cake in a fabber as fast as I can eat it. And I can eat it pretty fast. Zap! Cream sponge. Zap! Custard tart. Zap! Chocolate meringue. Down my gullet it all goes, barely touching the sides.

  I sneeze awake feeling nauseous and hungry at the same time. Somewhere, I can smell toast.

  It’s Grandpa. He’s upstairs munching on a Vegemite and cheese sandwich, staring at the virtual screens. There are three Eyes now, the one at the night-side equator and now one at each pole. Night has fallen for us. There are no visible stars.

  “We’ve descended a kilometer,” he says without looking around. “I could try bringing us up, but what’s the point? Eventually we’ll run out of air.”

  The dream stirs in my mind. “Can’t we fight this? I mean, seed anti-Eyes turning everything back the way it was. Could that work?”

  He turns to face me, and I try not to dwell on the fact that he appears to have doubled in age overnight.

  “Maybe,” he says. “If we had time to design and field test prototypes...”

  I sag. “Stop right there. I know what ‘maybe’ means. I have parents.”

  “Do not despair, Natasha. I promised that you would come to no harm.”

  “But this isn’t—”

  “Natural? Fair? Right?” He shrugs. “These concepts do not apply where monsters are concerned. What if this is more than just a cautionary tale about the power of our technology? Molding nature in our image is what we humans do, after all. Perhaps my enemy believes that he is acting for the greater good by creating another world for humanity. Don’t our needs trump those of mere bugs?”

  “A back-up planet... seriously?”

  He shrugs. “By my calculations, if the Bosch reaction continues unchecked, some three quarters of this world will be covered in water. Not as deeply as Earth, but covered nonetheless. A new biosphere will form, one that humanity can seed if it chooses to. In a generation or two, people might live here. The long day will take some getting used to, and it’s possible that extreme weather might continue to put paid to my enemy’s long-term plans—but if you can change an atmosphere wholesale, why not a planet’s rotation? Where does it end? Once it has begun, who can stop it?”

  Hieronymus lurches like my mood. I sit cross-legged on the floor and gnaw at my fingernails.

  “Is he still here?” I say. “Your enemy?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You said earlier: ‘population one’. He should at least stick around to watch.”

  “That would be the admirable thing, would it not?” Grandpa sighs. “When people set themselves above nature, they put their very humanity at risk. Perhaps my enemy has fallen victim to his own critique.”

  I think of all my friends. They’ll jump at the chance to swim in a brand new ocean, no matter what it cost.

  “If we don’t fight him, he’s going to win, you know. Once it’s done, no one’s going to want to change it back.”

  “Maybe not. And soon it will seem perfectly natural that Earth has a watery twin, just as we once imagined it to be. Maybe in the distant future, when we have no need of worlds or water, some brave soul will mount a cause to restore its original nature. They will uncover my patterns and introduce them to new clouds. What has been done will be undone... and I will be vindicated.”

  His attention wanders off into fantasy-land, I think at first.

  “Four,” he says. “There are now four Eyes.”

  I turn to look at the screens, hollowness spreading through my chest. A new hole has opened up not far from us. That explains the rising turbulence.

  It’s happening fast now.

  “Come,” he says, “let me show you how to operate this old boat. You might as well learn something while we move to a safer vantage point.”

  HIERONYMUS STEERS LIKE a sack of eels. I tell myself it’ll handle better in water, but who am I kidding? Going from aerostat to hydrostat (is that even a real word?) is unlikely to improve its mood.

  From afar we watch what looks like a black, volcanic cone rise up from the center of the first Eye. It’s the graphite byproduct of the Bosch reactors, piling up en masse. Thunderheads gather about its waist, shooting out blue sheets of lightning. Fearing what might happen if another Eye opens below us, we decide to strive for greater altitude, first by expanding the air sac and then by reducing the
weight of the gondola. To do that, Grandpa enlists my help to chuck things out of the hangar into the roiling clouds below.

  That means donning a pressure suit, black with bright yellow highlights, which makes me feel like a proper spacegirl.

  “Are you sure you won’t need this stuff again?”

  My voice is loud behind the faceplate. His crackles in my ears.

  “No.”

  “I suppose you can fab it again anyway, if you do.”

  An inactive drone spins downward into mist, scooting suddenly to the left as wind takes it. Then it is gone as though it never existed.

  “Every mountain deserves a name,” I tell Grandpa. “If we name it after you, that’ll really stick it to the bad guy.”

  “There is already a Mount Hudson in Chile.”

  “Chile’s a long way from here.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  “Hmmmm. ‘Mount Sixsmith,’ then. That doesn’t sound so bad. And this way we can have Mount Onesmith, Twosmith, Threesmith, and so on, depending on how many of these things we end up with.”

  “The ‘six’ in ‘Sixsmith’ is not a number, Natasha,” he says. “It refers to sickles.”

  “Whatever. It can mean anything we want, here. We’re the first official inhabitants of New Venus. What we say goes.”

  “Perhaps. Language is, after all, no exception to the rule All things transform.”

  “As your enemy says? Well, maybe he isn’t a complete idiot.”

  I maneuver a heavy engine closer to the open hatch, grunting with every heave. Grandpa watches through the sealed inner door. He’s the brain of this operation, I’m the brawn. The suit is doing a great job of evaporating my sweat, but I’m still hot. I haven’t wrestled like this since Saxon Vargas took me out on our last date. I bare my teeth, wishing I could’ve dumped him like this.

  Kick. The engine goes over. I don’t follow its descent, just fold up with hands on my knees, gasping for breath.