by Neil Clarke
There was always some scrap of gas on the moon—trapped from the solar wind, baked from its dust, perhaps even belched from the early, now longdead volcanoes. When Apollo descended, bringing the first men, its tiny exhaust plume doubled the mass of the frail atmosphere.
Still, such a wan world could hold gases for tens of thousands of years; physics said so. Its lesser gravity tugs at a mere sixth of Earth’s hefty grip. So, to begin, you sling inward a comet bearing a third the mass of all Earth’s ample air, a chunk of mountain-sized grimy ice.
Sol’s heat had robbed this world, but mother-massive Earth herself had slowly stolen away its spin. It became a submissive partner in a rigid gavotte, forever tide-locked with one face always smiling at its partner.
Here you use the iceteroid to double effect. By hooking the comet adroitly around Jupiter, in a reverse swingby, you loop it into an orbit opposite to the customary, docile way that worlds loop around the sun. Go opposite! Retro! Coming in on Luna, the iceball then has ten times the impact energy.
Mere days before it strikes, you blow it apart with meticulous brutality. Smashed to shards, chunks come gliding in all around Luna’s equator, small enough that they cannot muster momentum enough to splatter free of gravity’s grip. Huge cannonballs slam into gray rock, but at angles that prevent them from getting away again.
Earth admin was picky about this: no debris was to be flung free, to rain down as celestial buckshot on that favored world.
Within hours, Luna had air—of a crude sort. You mixed and salted and worked your chemical magicks upon roiling clouds that sported forked lightning. Gravity’s grind provoked fevers, molecular riots.
More: as the pellets pelted down, Luna spun up. Its crust echoed with myriad slams and bangs. The old world creaked as it yielded, spinning faster from the hammering. From its lazy cycle of twenty-eight days it sped up to sixty hours—close enough to Earth-like, as they say, for government work. A day still lazy enough.
Even here, you orchestrated a nuanced performance, coaxed from dynamics. Luna’s axial tilt had been a dull zero. Dutifully it had spun at right angles to the orbital plane of the solar system, robbed of summers and winters.
But you wanted otherwise. Angled just so, the incoming ice nuggets tilted the poles. From such simple mechanics, you conjured seasons. And as the gases cooled, icy caps crowned your work.
You were democratic, at first: allowing both water and carbon dioxide, with smidgens of methane and ammonia. Here you called upon the appetites of bacteria, sprites you sowed as soon as the winds calmed after bombardment. They basked in sunlight, broke up the methane. The greenhouse blanket quickly warmed the old gray rocks, coveting the heat from the infalls, and soon algae covered them.
You watched with pride as the first rain fell. For centuries, the dark plains had carried humanity’s imposed, watery names: Tranquility, Serenity, Crises, Clouds, Storms. Now these lowlands of aged lava caught the rains and made muds and fattened into ponds, lakes, true seas. You made the ancient names come true.
Through your servant machines, you marched across these suddenly murky lands, bristling with an earned arrogance. They—yourself!—plowed and dug, sampled and salted. Through their eyes and tongues and ears, you sat in your high station and heard the sad baby sigh of the first winds awakening.
The station was becoming more than a bristling canister of metal, by then. Its agents grew, as did you.
You smiled down upon the gathering Gray with your quartz eyes and microwave antennas. For you knew what was coming. A mere sidewise glance at rich Earth told you what to expect.
Like Earth’s tropics now, at Luna’s equator heat drove moist gases aloft. Cooler gas flowed from the poles to fill in. The high wet clouds skated poleward, cooled—and rained down riches.
On Earth, such currents are robbed of their water about a third of the way to the poles, and so descend, their dry rasp making a worldwide belt of deserts. Not so on Luna.
You had judged the streams of newborn air rightly. Thicker airs than Earth’s took longer to exhaust, and so did not fall until they reached the poles. Thus the new world had no chains of deserts, and one simple circulating air cell ground away in each hemisphere. Moisture worked its magicks.
You smiled to see your labors come right. Though anchored in your mammoth station, you felt the first pinpricks of awareness in the crawlers, flyers and diggers who probed the freshening moon.
You tasted their flavors, the brimming possibilities. Northerly winds swept the upper half of the globe, bearing poleward, then swerving toward the west to make the occasional mild tornado. (Not all weather should be boring.)
Clouds patrolled the air, still fretting over their uneasy births. Day and night came in their slow rhythm, stirring the biological lab that worked below. You sometimes took a moment from running all this, just to watch.
Lunascapes. Great Grayworld.
Where day yielded to dark, valleys sank into smoldering blackness. Already a chain of snowy peaks shone where they caught the sun’s dimming rays, and lit the plains with slanting colors like live coals. Sharp mountains cleaved the cloud banks, leaving a wake like that of a huge ship. At the fat equator, straining still to adjust to the new spin, tropical thunderheads glowered, lit by orange lightning that seemed to be looking for a way to spark life among the drifting molecules.
All that you did, in a mere decade. You had made “the lesser light that rules the night” now shine five times brighter, casting sharp shadows on Earth. Sunrays glinted by day from the young oceans, dazzling the eyes on Earth. And the mother world itself reflected in those muddy seas, so that when the alignment was right, people on Earth’s night side gazed up into their own mirrored selves. Viewed at just the right angle, Earth’s image was rimmed with ruddy sunlight, refracting through Earth’s air.
You knew it could not last, but were pleased to find that the new air stuck around. It would bleed away in ten thousand years, but by that time other measures could come into play. You had plans for a monolayer membrane to cap your work, resting atop the whole atmosphere, the largest balloon ever conceived.
Later? No, act in the moment—and so you did.
You wove it with membrane skill, cast it wide, let it fall—to rest easy on the thick airs below. Great holes in it let ships glide to and fro, but the losses from those would be trivial.
Not that all was perfect. Luna had no soil, only the damaged dust left from four billion years beneath the solar wind’s anvil.
After a mere momentary decade (nothing, to you), fresh wonders bloomed.
Making soil from gritty grime was work best left to the microbeasts who loved such stuff. To do great works on a global scale took tiny assistants. You fashioned them in your own labs, which poked outward from the station’s many-armed skin.
Gray grew a crust. Earth is in essence a tissue of microbial organisms living off the sun’s fires. Gray would do the same, in fast-forward. You cooked up not mere primordial broths, but endless chains of regulatory messages, intricate feedback loops, organic gavottes.
Earth hung above, an example of life ornamented by elaborate decorations, structures of forest and grass and skin and blood—living quarters, like seagrass and zebras and eucalyptus and primates.
Do the same, you told yourself. Only better.
These tasks you loved. Their conjuring consumed more decades, stacked end on end. You were sucked into the romance of tiny turf wars, chemical assaults, microbial murders, and invasive incests. But you had to play upon the stellar stage, as well.
You had not thought about the tides. Even you had not found a way around those outcomes of gravity’s gradient. Earth raised bulges in Gray’s seas a full twenty meters tall. That made for a dim future for coastal property, even once the air became breathable.
Luckily, even such colossal tides were not a great bother to the lakes you shaped in crater beds. These you made as breeding farms for the bioengineered minions who ceaselessly tilled the dirts, massaged the gases, filtered the tinkling st
reams that cut swift ways through rock.
Indeed, here and there you even found a use for the tides. There were more watts lurking there, in kinetic energy. You fashioned push-plates to tap some of it, to run your substations. Thrifty gods do not have to suck up to (and from) Earthside.
And so the sphere that, when you began, had been the realm of strip miners and mass-driver camps, of rugged, suited loners . . . became a place where, someday, humans might walk and breathe free.
That time is about to come. You yearn for it. For you, too, can then manifest yourself, your station, as a mere mortal . . . and set foot upon a world that you would name Selene.
You were both station and more, by then. How much more few knew. But some sliver of you clung to the name of Benjan—
—Benjan nodded slightly, ears ringing for some reason.
The smooth, sure interviewer gave a short introduction. “Man . . . or manifestation? This we must all wonder as we greet an embodiment of humanity’s greatest—and now ancient—construction project. One you and I can see every evening in the sky—for those who are still surface dwellers.”
The 3D cameras moved in smooth arcs through the studio darkness beyond. Two men sat in a pool of light. The interviewer spoke toward the directional mike as he gave the background on Benjan’s charges against the council.
Smiles galore. Platitudes aplenty. That done, came the attack.
“But isn’t this a rather abstract, distant point to bring at this time?” the man said, turning to Benjan.
Benjan blinked, uncertain, edgy. He was a private man, used to working alone. Now that he was moving against the council he had to bear these public appearances, these . . . manifestations . . . of a dwindled self. “To, ah, the people of the next generation, Gray will not be an abstraction—”
“You mean the moon?”
“Uh, yes, Gray is my name for it. That’s the way it looked when I—uh, we ah—started work on it centuries ago.”
“Yes you were there all along, in fact.”
“Well, yes. But when I’m—we’re—done,” Benjan leaned forward, and his interviewer leaned back, as if not wanting to be too close, “it will be a real place, not just an idea—where you all can live and start a planned ecology. It will be a frontier.”
“We understand that romantic tradition, but—”
“No, you don’t. Gray isn’t just an idea, it’s something I’ve—we’ve—worked on for everyone, whatever shape or genetype they might favor.”
“Yes yes, and such ideas are touching in their, well, customary way, but—”
“But the only ones who will ever enjoy it, if the council gets away with this, is the Majiken Clan.”
The interviewer pursed his lips. Or was this a he at all? In the current style, the bulging muscles and thick neck might just be fashion statements. “Well, the Majiken are a very large, important segment of the—”
“No more important than the rest of humanity, in my estimation.”
“But to cause this much stir over a world that will not even be habitable for at least decades more—”
“We of the station are there now.”
“You’ve been modified, adapted.”
“Well, yes. I couldn’t do this interview on Earth. I’m grav-adapted.”
“Frankly, that’s why many feel that we need to put Earthside people on the ground on Luna as soon as possible. To represent our point of view.”
“Look, Gray’s not just any world. Not just a gas giant, useful for raw gas and nothing else. Not a Mercury type; there are millions of those littered out among the stars. Gray is going to be fully Earthlike. The astronomers tell us there are only four semiterrestrials outside the home system that humans can ever live on, around other stars, and those are pretty terrible. I—”
“You forget the Outer Colonies,” the interviewer broke in smoothly, smiling at the 3D.
“Yeah—iceballs.” He could not hide his contempt. What he wanted to say, but knew it was terribly old-fashioned, was: Damn it, Gray is happening now, we’ve got to plan for it. Photosynthesis is going on. I’ve seen it myself-—hell, I caused it myself-—carbon dioxide and water converting into organics and oxygen, gases fresh as a breeze. Currents carry the algae down through the cloud layers into the warm areas, where they work just fine. That gives offsimple carbon compounds, raw carbon and water. This keeps the water content of the atmosphere constant, but converts carbon dioxide—we’ve got too much right now—into carbon and oxygen. It’s going well, the rate itself is exponentiating—
Benjan shook his fist, just now realizing that he was saying all this out loud, after all. Probably not a smart move, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Look, there’s enough water in Gray’s deep rock to make an ocean a meter deep all the way around the planet. That’s enough to resupply the atmospheric loss, easy, even without breaking up the rocks. Our designer plants are doing their jobs.”
“We have heard of these routine miracles—”
“—and there can be belts of jungle—soon! We’ve got mountains for climbing, rivers that snake, polar caps, programmed animals coming up, beautiful sunsets, soft summer storms—anything the human race wants. That’s the vision we had when we started Gray. And I’m damned if I’m going to let the Majiken—”
“But the Majiken can defend Gray,” the interviewer said mildly.
Benjan paused. “Oh, you mean—”
“Yes, the ever-hungry Outer Colonies. Surely if Gray proves as extraordinary as you think, the rebellious colonies will attempt to take it.” The man gave Benjan a broad, insincere smile. Dummy, it said. Don’t know the real-politic of this time, do you?
He could see the logic. Earth had gotten soft, fed by a tougher empire that now stretched to the chilly preserve beyond Pluto. To keep their manicured lands clean and “original,” Earthers had burrowed underground, built deep cities there, and sent most manufacturing off-world. The real economic muscle now lay in the hands of the suppliers of fine rocks and volatiles, shipped on long orbits from the Outers and the Belt. These realities were hard to remember when your attention was focused on the details of making a fresh world. One forgot that appetites ruled, not reason.
Benjan grimaced. “The Majiken fight well, they are the backbone of the fleet, yes. Still, to give them a world—”
“Surely in time there will be others,” the man said reasonably.
“Oh? Why should there be? We can’t possibly make Venus work, and Mars will take thousands of years more—”
“No, I meant built worlds—stations.”
He snorted. “Live inside a can?”
“That’s what you do,” the man shot back.
“I’m . . . different.”
“Ah yes.” The interviewer bore in, lips compressed to a white line, and the 3Ds followed him, snouts peering. Benjan felt hopelessly outmatched. “And just how so?”
“I’m . . . a man chosen to represent . . .”
“The Shaping Station, correct?”
“I’m of the breed who have always lived in and for the station.”
“Now, that’s what I’m sure our audience really wants to get into. After all, the moon won’t be ready for a long time. But you—an ancient artifact, practically—are more interesting.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.” Stony, frozen.
“Why not?” Not really a question.
“It’s personal.”
“You’re here as a public figure!”
“Only because you require it. Nobody wants to talk to the station directly.”
“We do not converse with such strange machines.”
“It’s not just a machine.”
“Then what is it?”
“An . . . idea,” he finished lamely. “An . . . ancient one.” How to tell them? Suddenly, he longed to be back doing a solid, worthy job—frying a jet in Gray’s skies, pushing along the organic chemistry—
The interviewer looked uneasy. “Well, since you won’t go there . . . our
time’s almost up and—”
Again, I am falling over Gray.
Misty auburn clouds, so thin they might be only illusion, spread below the ship. They caught red as dusk fell. The thick air refracted six times more than Earth’s, so sunsets had a slow-motion grandeur, the full palette of pinks and crimsons and rouge-reds.
I am in a ramjet—the throttled growl is unmistakable—lancing cleanly into the upper atmosphere. Straps tug and pinch me as the craft banks and sweeps, the smoothly wrenching way I like it, the stubby snout sipping precisely enough for the air’s growing oxygen fraction to keep the engine thrusting forward.
I probably should not have come on this flight; it is an uncharacteristic self-indulgence. But I could not sit forever in the station to plot and plan and calculate and check. I had to see my handiwork, get the feel of it. To use my body in the way it longed for.
I make the ramjet arc toward Gray’s night side. The horizon curves away, clean hard blue-white, and—chung!—I take a jolt as the first canister blows off the underbelly below my feet. Through a rearview camera I watch it tumble away into ruddy oblivion. The canister carries more organic cultures, a new matrix I selected carefully back on the station, in my expanded mode. I watch the shiny morsel explode below, yellow flash. It showers intricate, tailored algae through the clouds.
Gray is at a crucial stage. Since the centuries-ago slamming by the air-giving comets, the conspiracy of spin, water, and heat (great gifts of astro-engineering) had done their deep work. Volcanoes now simmered, percolating more moisture from deep within, kindling, kindling. Some heat climbed to the high cloud decks and froze into thin crystals.
There, I conjure fresh life—tinkering, endlessly.
Life, yes. Carefully engineered cells, to breathe carbon dioxide and live off the traces of other gases this high from the surface. In time. Photosynthesis in the buoyant forms—gas-bag trees, spindly but graceful in the top layer of Gray’s dense air—conjure carbon dioxide into oxygen.
I glance up, encased in the tight flight jacket, yet feeling utterly free, naked. Incoming meteors. Brown clouds of dust I had summoned to orbit about Gray were cutting off some sunlight.