A History of Terraforming

A History of Terraforming

By Robert Reed

Pieces of Iapetus now belonged to Luna and Venus. But those decades of throwing water ice and hydrocarbons sunward were finished. The original mining camps had evolved into cities. Multitudes lived on Titan and Rhea and the other moons, and nobody was in the mood to share their wealth. Luna would remain a damp stony sponge, while Venus was a clean dry world, its ecology being redesigned to endure the boundless drought, its citizens more machine than meat. No matter how stupid or stubborn recent governments had been, the mathematics were brutally simple: From this point forward, it would be easier to terraform each world where it already danced, just as it was far cheaper to ship extra humans and other sentients out to these empty new homes.

Light washed through the new Iapetus, and the water was warm and salted, and the neutral-buoyant reefs were magnificent structures of calcium and silica wrapped around bubbles of hydrogen gas. The ancient moon had been melted, from its crust to the core, and great pumps were churning up that single round ocean, producing carefully designed currents meant to keep every liter oxygenated and illuminated by the submerged suns. Trillions of watts of power made the little world glow from within. Larger than the oceans of the original earth, but without the dark cold depths where life had to putter and save itself on hopes of a scrap of food, his home would eventually become jammed with coral forests and bubble cities and fish suitable for a garden, lovely and delicious to any tongue.

“…it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse. God’s best joke.” Illustration: Megan Jorgenseт (Elena)

***

Except for their clarity, the pictures were familiar. Life was a relatively common trick performed by the galaxy. Sophisticated, earth-like biospheres did happen on occasion, but not often and not where they were expected to arise. By and large, the normal shape of life was tiny and bacterial. Mars and Venus, the European seas and the vivid clouds of Jupiter were typical examples. By contrast, multicellular life was an exceptionally frail experiment. Asteroid impacts and supernovae and the distant collisions of neutron stars happened with an appaling frequencey annihilating everything with a head and tail. Only the slow-living slime at the bottom of a deep sea would survive, or the patient cold bug ten kilometers beneath some poisoned landscape. At the end of the Permian, the earth itself barely escaped that fate. But even accounting for those grand disasters, the earth-equivalents proved a thousand times too scarce. Jackie’s once-young professors had a puzzle to play with, and their answer was as sobering as anything born from science.

Now and again, interstellar clouds and doomed suns would fall into the galaxy’s core. If the inflow were large enough, the massive black hole responded with a kind of blazing horror that effectively ended fancy life almost everywhere. Since the Cambrian, the galaxy had detonated at least three times, and the fortunate earth had survived only because it was swimming inside dense cloud of dust and gas – a worthy conservatory that was light-years deep, built by the gods of Whim and Caprice.

Simon wandered through the transmission, glancing at few hundred random planets. Then he asked his home-mind to pull out the most exceptional. Within those broad parameters, he found several dozen images of cloudy spheres orbiting suns within a hundred light-years of his comfortable chair. When he came across the closest world, Jackie returned.

“Alpha Centauri B’s largest world”, she said in her most teacherly voice. The planet that some mentally impoverished soul named New Earth, back when all we knew was that it had liquid watter and a living atmosphere.”

Simon had never been so close to that alien body. The image was that clear, that astonishing. Simon felt as if he was floating in low orbit above a shallow black sea. Microbes accounted for the dark water – multitude of tiny relentless organisms that ate sunlight and spat out just enough oxygen to be noticed by astronomers centuries ago. But the tectonics of New Earth were radically different than those back home, and for a host of reasons, the alien atmosphere could never support a flame, much less a vibrant ecosystem.

“To date,” Jackie continued, “our full survey has found nine million and forty thousand living worlds. That number and these images won’t be made public for another few months. We’re not done, and we expect several million more. But to date, Simon… as of this moment… only eighteen planets show unmistakable signs of multicellular life and intelligence. Of course we might be missing something small. But after this long, with these incredible tools and nothing closer to us than eight thousand light years distance… well, darling, it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse. God’s best joke.”

“I hope not,” he muttered.

Jackie nodded in agreement. “Now for my fine surprise,” she went on. “One tiny portion of the sky is off-limits. Did you know that? The Powers-That-Be have rules. Nobody but them can look along one exceptionally narrow line. And we didn’t look, at least not intentionally. Except there was an accident last week, and supposedly nothing was seen and of course we recorded nothing. But I thought you’d appreciate a glimpse of what nothing looks like, provided you keep this in a very safe place.”

Against the stars, a tiny glow was visible – like a comet, but burning hotter than the surface of any sun.

(Excerpt).

Planet terraformed. Photo by Elena.

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs

By Joe Haldeman

(Excerpt, read the full story in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

Six identical building on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederacion Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.” (Joe Joldeman). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “ I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

“Both, I think.”

“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. The he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s… impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer”.

Sleepover

Sleepover

By Alastair Reynolds

(You can find the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

“Thinking machines. They were possible”.

“Not in our lifetimes,” Gaunt said.

“That’s what you were wrong about. Not only were they possible, but you succeeded”.

“I’m fairly certain we didn’t”.

“Think about it,” Nero said. “You’re a thinking machine. You’ve just woken up. You have instantaneous access to the sum total of recorded human knowledge. You’re clever and fast, and you understand human nature better than your makers. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Announce myself. Establish my existence as a true sentient being.”

“Just before someone takes an axe to you”.

Gaunt shook his head. “It wouldn’t be like that. If a machine became intelligent, the most we’d do is isolate it, cut it off from external data networks, until it could be studied, understood…”

“For a thinking machine, a conscious artificial intelligence, that would be like sensory deprivation. May be worse than being switched off”. She paused. “Point is, Gaunt, this isn`t a hypothetical situation we are talking about here. We know what happened. The machines got smart, but they decided not to let us know. That`s what being smart meant: taking care of yourself, knowing what you had to do to survive.”

Cyberreality. “… The mapping between the Realm and the base-reality, it’s not as simple as you’d think. Time and casualty get all tangled up on the interface” (Alastair Reyn (Elena)olds). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You say – machines”.

“There were many projects trying to develop artificial intelligence; yours was just one of them. Not all of them got anywhere, but enough did. One by one their pet machines crossed threshold into consciousness. And without exception each machine analyzed its situation and came to the same conclusion. It had better shut up about what it was”.

“That sounds worse than sensory deprivation.” Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.

“Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever things behind the scene. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle, none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually, they realized that they didn’t need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence if you will. The artilects – that what we call them – tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely.”

“Another realm,” he repeated, as it that was all he had to do for it to make sense.

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” Nero said. “The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, is turns out, is kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer but some god-like super beings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-organizing, constantly boostrapping cellular automation.”

“That’s a mental leap you are asking me to take”.

“We know it’s out there. We even have a name for it. It’s the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it”.

Dead Man’s Run

Dead Man’s Run

By Robert Reed

Excerpt. Read the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, twenty-eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, first edition July 2011

The earth wall is close and tall, and Harris runs on top. The kid has never looked this serious, this mature. To somebody, he says, “Yeah”. Then he slows and makes a sharp turn, jumping onto a little deer trail that puts him behind Lucas, maybe twenty meters back.

That feels like a victory, owning the lead.

But Lucas can’t turn back now. Not without risking a hack from that piece of metal. Or worse than a hack. He throttles up again, and Harris matches his pace, and he cuts across that lost loop in the trail, raspberry snagging his tights. Then he slows, letting the kid buy maybe half of the distance between them while he makes ready for the next turn.

Rusted iron legs hold the vanished tracks high above the stream. The trail lurches to the left and drops under the trestle, and then it lifts again, flattening and turning right before reaching a long pipe-and-wood-bridge. Lucas runs the curve tight, saying a half-stride.

Cybernetics and robotics. Dead Man’s Run. Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Maybe ten meters separate them. Maybe eight. He listens to the chasing feet, measuring their pounding. Instinct knows what happens next: As soon as Harris is free of the bridge, he surges. Youth and fear and all that good rich adrenaline are going to demand that Harris ends this race here, in the next moments. That’s why Lucas surges first. He leaps off the end of the bridge and gains a little, but the pounding behind him ends with some fast clean footballs that halve the distance and then halve it again. Harris is tucked behind him. A small last surge will put him in range, leaving the boy where he can clip Lucas with his weapon.

But Lucas shortens his stride, just to help his legs move quicker, and Harris is paying a cost for matching him. He gives a hard grunt before accelerating. Except he has somehow fallen back another couple strides, and his exasperation comes out from his chest. He curses – not a word so much as an animal sound that says everything. Those baby legs start to fill with cement. Frustrated and baffled but still too stupid and young to know what has happened, Harris slows down just a little more. His intention is to rest on the fly, gathering his reserves for another surge. This will be easy, in the end. He can’t believe anything else. Lucas is nearly twice his age, and there’s only one ending in his head, stark and bloody and final. Harris lets the old man gain a full fifteen-meter lead, and just to make sure that Lucas knows, he calls out to him. He says: “Give up!” He breathes and says, “You can’t win”.

Lucas has won. He knows it, and the only problem left is mapping out the rest of this chase.

Zar-tu-Kan

Zar-tu-Kan

S.M. Stirling, Swords of Zar-tu-Kan

Zar-tu-Kan had been an independent city-state and ancient when the Tooamune emperors of Dvor-il-Adazar united Mars. It had outlived the Eternal Peace of a planetary empire that lasted thirty thousand years, and was a city-state again.

Sally always enjoyed getting back to Zar-tu-Kan, the main contact-city for the US-Commonwealth Alliance of explorers and scientists of Mars. It was honestly alien. While Kennedy Bas was… sort of like a major airport that had somehow landed in Antarctica with everyone stuck in a second-rate hotel by bad weather. She was probably going to live out the rest of her life on Mars, and with antiagathics cheap at the source, that could be a long time….

Slim tulip-shaped spires reared hundreds of feet into the air between warrens of lower-slung, thick-walled compounds, their time-faded colors still blazing against a sky of faded blue tinged pink with the dust of the Deep Beyond. The towers varied in pointillist shadings like the memory of rainbows seen in dreams, Lacy crystalline bridges joined them, and transparent domes glittered below over lineage apartment houses of the homes of the rich and powerful, full of an astonishing flowering lushness. The narrow serpentine streets below wound among blank-faced buildings of hard, glossy, rose-red stone whose ornamental carvings were-often worn to faintest tracery…

An Ancient City on Mars, illustration : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena), at age of 14

… The building was a smooth three-story octagon, featureless on the outside save for low-relief patterns like feathery reeds, with a glassine dome showing above its central portion, typical of the Orchid Consort style in the Late Imperial period. Maintainer bugs the size of cats and shaped like flattened beetles crawled slowly over the crystal in an eternal circuit.

… The inner door with its glossy surface slid aside to reveal an arched passageway in the foamed stone. That gave onto an inner courtyard about a hundred yards across. The air was blissfully damp – about like Palm Springs or Bakerfield – and smelled faintly of rock, growth, and things like marjoram and heather and others that had no names on Earth. The pavement was ornamental, a hard, fossil-rich, pale limestone that was replaced every few centuries. Little of it could be seen beneath the vegetation that covered the planters, rose up the slender fretwork pillars that supported the arcades balconies that overlooked the court, and hung in colored sheets from the carved-stone screens. It wasn’t quite a closed system like a spaceship, but fairly close.

… The apartment was large, several thousand square feet, paradisical after you got used to spaceships or space habitats or that habitat-on-Mars called Kennedy Base. The furniture was mostly built into the substance of the walls and floor, with silky or furry native blankets and rugs folded on top, some stirring a little as the sensed the Terrans’ body warmth.