It was a long trip. Kiran lay there thinking. He could feel the worms writhing all over him. When he freaked out and hyperventilated, the helmet and suit seemed to be able to take it. Eventually he always had to calm back down. There were water and food tubes that would come out of the neck of the suit to where he could suck on them, and though the food was a paste, it was very sustaining. He was not too cold or too hot. The sensation of movement over him was disconcerting, sometimes horrible. This must be what it was like to be dead and buried. The worms would eat you. Or it was like the purification rites in certain festivals—in the Durga-puja, for instance, in which you were steeped in ash or manure until it was time for the cleansing. He liked that holiday. So here he was. As he had to eat and drink, then shit and pee, all in this suit, he was for the moment pretty much like the worms. We are poor forked worms on this Earth, his grandfather used to say. Birds pick us off.
As time passed he went entirely weightless. He had heard it took five days to ascend. It seemed longer. He began to get bored. When he felt a jolt upward, and then light flooded the dirt and the lid disappeared, he struggled up as carefully as he could, thinking the worms in the box were fellow travelers who deserved no harm. “Careful!” he commanded the people helping him out of the box, and Swan laughed at him.
She led him to a little bathroom. Once out of his suit, he showered. In the hot water he thought, Ah yes, this is the cleansing. Next came the purification; what would it be? Was this woman who had seized him a manifestation of Durga, mother of Ganesh—also sometimes manifested as Kali?
“You look good,” Swan said when he emerged from the bathroom. “Not too traumatic?”
Kiran shook his head. “Time to think. Where to next?”
Again she laughed. “This ship is going to Venus,” she told him. “I’m on my way to Mercury, so I’ll drop you off.”
Kiran said, “Isn’t Venus a Chinese place?”
“Yes and no,” Swan said.
Kiran persisted: “So I become Chinese?”
“No. There are all kinds of people there. My friends will give you an ID. After that, anything can happen. But Venus is a good place for you to start.”
They were traveling in a terrarium called the Delta of Venus, an ag asteroid dedicated to growing food for Earth—mostly enhanced rices but also other crops that liked it warm and wet. The internal gravity felt like Earth; Kiran couldn’t detect the famous Coriolis push to the side.
They spent their days out in the upcurving fields, working alongside water buffalo, tractors, canal boats, and many other workers, most of them passengers. After an hour the work became hard on the back, and as the passengers—some of them only a little taller than the rice sprouts, while others were taller than giants, which was at first startling to see—sloshed up and down the rows, they talked to pass the time. Complaint and desire to be elsewhere were natural themes. “I’m festivalled out.” “I’ve tried them all.” “The only place terraforming matters is on Earth, and they’re terrible at it.” “It’s all turning out to be face business.” “We could have taken the Grindewald and gone mountain climbing. The Mönch, the Eiger, the Jungfrau, they’ve reproduced every damn crack.” “I’d rather go in an aquarium and swim around. Live with a mermaid for a week.”
Beachworlds were wonderful, all agreed. With Earth’s beaches gone, the ones inside aquaria were much beloved.
Others advocated cloud forest worlds; these were visits to arboreal heaven and an earlier stage of primate life. “Such bliss to be a monkey!”
Someone said, “Or a bonobo. I wish I had gone on a sexliner.”
This broke a little dam of reticence and brought the talk immediately around to sex on those sexliners, which were often designed to look like Caribbean resorts. Dionysian dances, perpetual tantric orgies, Kundalini panmixia, everyone had a story. One of them said mournfully, “I could have spent the whole trip in a touchy-feely box, and here I am wielding a hand hoe.”
“Touchy-feely box?” Kiran couldn’t help asking.
“You get in a box that has holes cut in it about as big around as your hand, and then people reach in the holes and do what they want.”
“I’m surprised people would do that.”
“Lines always seem pretty long, for both inside and outside.”
“I should have thought of the worms that way,” Kiran said to Swan. “Could have been happy all the way up that elevator.”
“I’d rather be in here than in one of those,” someone else called. “Farms are sexy! All this fertilizer!”
Many groaned at this. It was not a joke that resonated.
Someone else said, “Last time I was on a sexliner, this group of bisexuals ran out to the pool, about twenty of them, all with the biggest tits and cocks you ever saw, and all of them with erections, and they got in a circle one behind the next and plunged into the one in front of them and away they went. It was like when you see insects clumping together on a summer day, keep fucking till they fall to the ground.”
This brought on quite a silence until someone said heavily, “Wish I had seen that,” which got the others laughing, or loudly protesting that any such image had ever been put in their heads. “I’m just saying,” the witness insisted. “These things happen. It’s a regular sport.”
And it seemed to Kiran that after the talk about sexliners the rice planting hurt less. And when these people were done for the day and back at the dorm, it seemed like the farm might turn into a sexy place after all. There was a look in people’s eyes Kiran thought he recognized.
Extracts (5)
Take raw Venus. CO2 atmosphere of ninety-five bar, temperature at surface would melt lead, hotter even than Mercury’s brightside. A hellish place. On the other hand, .9 g, and just a tad smaller than Earth. Two continental rises on the surface, Ishtar and Aphrodite. Earth’s sister planet. There’s real potential here for a great new creation.
Take one Saturnian ice moon—Dione will do fine. Dismantle with Von Neumann self-replicating excavators, cutting it into chunks about ten kilometers on a side. Attach mass drivers to the chunks and send them down to Venus.
While doing this, build a round sunshield of lunatic aluminum, very thin material, only 50 grams per square meter and yet still totaling 3 x 1013 kilograms, the largest thing ever built by humans. Concentric strips give the sunshield flexibility and allow it to tack up into the solar wind to hold its position at the L1 point, where it will shadow Venus entirely. Deprived of insolation, the planet will cool at a rate of five K a year.
After 140 years, the CO2 atmosphere will have rained and snowed to the surface and frozen as a layer of dry ice. Scrape all the dry ice that landed on Ishtar and Aphrodite down to the lowlands, being careful to keep a smooth surface. While clearing off the continents, release another suite of Von Neumann self-replicating chemical factories designed to break oxygen out of the frozen CO2; these will create 150 millibars of oxygen for the atmosphere, in about the same time it takes for all the CO2 atmosphere to freeze. A purely oxygen atmosphere would be too flammable, so add a buffer gas, preferably nitrogen, to make a more stable mix. Titan may be oversubscribed for its excess nitrogen, so be prepared to seek substitutions. Argon mined on Luna would also serve in a pinch.
When you have the oxygen you want, and the dry ice all flat on the lowlands, cover the dry ice with foamed rock, so that the CO2 is a completely sequestered feature of the lithosphere.
Now take the chunks of Dione you have been saving and crack them against each other in the oxygen-and-buffer atmosphere at the correct height to create steam and rain. This will add back to the planet some heat, which at this point has been taken below the human-friendly range. Possibly some light can be let through the sunshield if needed to help heating. It will only take two years for the greater part of the impact water to rain and snow onto the surface, so be ready to work fast.
The water on the surface after this Dione infusion will be equal to about 10 percent of Earth’s water. It will be freshwater
; salt to taste. The water will cover 80 percent of Venus, which is much flatter than Earth, to an average depth of 120 meters. If deeper seas are preferred, but also a maximum amount of land, consider digging an oceanic trench with some of the Dione impactors. Remember this will complicate the CO2 sequestration if you choose to do it, so make adjustments accordingly. If it is done carefully, however, Venus could ultimately end up with about twice the land surface that Earth has.
At this point (140 years freezing and preparation, 50 years scraping and poaching, so be patient!) you might think that the planet is ready for biological occupation. But remember, combining the Venusian year of 224 days with its daily rotation period of 243 days, you get a screwball curve (retrograde motion, sun rising in the west) in which the solar day for any particular point on the planet is 116.75 days. Tests have long since determined that that’s too long for most Terran life-forms to survive, tweaked or not. So at this point, two main options have been identified. First is to program the sunshield so that it lets through sunlight to the surface and then blocks it off again, flexing like a circular venetian blind to make a more Terran rhythm of night and day. This would make it easy on the new biosphere, but would require that the sunshield work without fail.
The second option would call for another round of impactor bombardments, this time striking the surface of the planet such that their angular momentum spins the planet up to something like a fifty-hour day, which is considered within the tolerance limit for most Terran life-forms. The problem with this option is the way it would delay occupation of the planet’s surface, by its release of a considerable amount of the sequestered dry ice under the foamed rock layer. Biosphere establishment would have to be put off for another two hundred years, effectively doubling the time of terraformation. But there would be no further reliance on a sunshield. And a properly constituted and maintained Venusian atmosphere could handle full sunlight without greenhousing or other spoilage.
Which option you choose is your preference. Think about what you want in the end, or, if you don’t believe in endings, which process you prefer.
KIRAN AND SHUKRA
A few days later they were approaching Venus. Kiran was pleased to see Swan joining him on the ferry ride down. She wanted to talk to a friend; she would introduce Kiran to him, then be on her way.
There were no space elevators on Venus, because the planet rotated too slowly for such a system to work. So their ferry sprouted wings, and as they tore down through the atmosphere the windows torched yellow-white. They landed on a huge runway next to a domed city, then got into a subway car, and came up from that short ride into the city. There they found what seemed like the entire population in the streets. Kiran followed Swan through the crowds, and in a side street they went up some stairs into a little Mercury House, set over a fish shop. They dropped off their bags, then went back out to join the crowd.
The faces of the city were mostly Asian. People shouted, and in the din no one could hear well, so they shouted even louder. Swan looked at Kiran and grinned at his expression. “It isn’t always like this!” she shouted.
“Too bad!” Kiran shouted back.
Two big ice asteroids were apparently headed for a collision at the upper edge of the new Venusian atmosphere, roughly above the equator. This city, Colette, was three hundred kilometers north of the collision, and would therefore be quickly enveloped in a downpour. The rain would not stop for a couple of years, Swan said, after which they would let a little light through their sunscreen and have more ordinary weather.
But first the big rain. Crowds stood around them waiting for it, singing and cheering and shouting. And right at midnight the southern sky lit up white, then incandescent yellow, then all the reds ever seen. The inside of the city looked briefly like they were seeing it in the infrared. The noise of the cheering was stupendous. Somewhere a brass band was playing—Kiran spotted the musicians, on risers across the square—several hundred trumpets, French horns, baritones, trombones, tubas, all the euphoniums, everything from miniature cornets to alphorns, playing immense dissonant chords that blatted in the air and shifted ceaselessly toward harmonies that never came. Kiran didn’t know whether to call it music; it sounded like they played without a plan. The effect was to make people shout and howl, leap and dance. They were making their sky.
Within the hour a wild rain had erased the stars and was drumming onto the dome as if trying to wash it away. They might as well have been at the bottom of a waterfall. The city’s lights bounced off the dome glass and came back somehow liquefied, so that shadows ran over people’s faces.
At some point Swan squeezed Kiran’s upper arm in a manner very like the way he had hers the night they had met. He felt the pressure, he knew what she meant; his blood burned up and down from the spot she held. “All right already!” he shouted to her. “Thank you!”
With a little smile she let him go. They stood in the streaming light, the dome a dim milky white over them. The roar of voices was like waves breaking on a beach of cobbles. “You’ll be all right?” she said.
“I’ll be fine!”
“So now you owe me.”
“Yes. But I don’t know what I can give you in return.”
“I’ll think of something,” she said. “For now, I’ll introduce you to Shukra. I worked for him a long time ago, and now he’s moved into some very high circles here. So if you work for him and do your best, and he likes you, then you’ll have your chance. I’ll give you a translator to help you.”
Back in Colette’s Mercury House they ate a breakfast, then Swan took Kiran across town to meet her friend Shukra. He proved to be a middle-aged man with a round cheerful face under a shock of white hair.
“Sorry about Alex,” he said to Swan. “I enjoyed working with her.”
“Yes,” Swan said. “Seems like everyone did.”
She introduced Kiran: “I met this young man when I went out to Jersey, and he got me out of a mess. He wanted a job, and I thought he might be someone you could use.”
Shukra heard this impassively, but Kiran could see from the bunching of his eyebrows that he was interested. “What can you do?” he said to Kiran.
“Construction, retail, janitorial, bookkeeping,” Kiran said. “And I can learn fast.”
“You’ll need to,” Shukra said. “I’ve got jobs that need doing, so we’ll get you into something.”
“Oh,” Swan said, “and he needs papers.”
“Ah,” Shukra said. Swan met his gaze without flinching. Now she was going to owe him, Kiran saw. “If you say so,” he said at last. “You are my black swan. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Swan said.
After that she needed to get out to the spaceport to catch her flight. She took Kiran aside and briefly hugged him. “I’ll see you again.”
“I hope so!” Kiran said.
“It will happen. I get around.” She smiled briefly. “Anyway, we’ll always have New Jersey.”
“Lima,” he said. “We’ll always have Lima.”
She laughed. “I thought it was Stockholm.” And gave him a kiss on the cheek and was gone.
Extracts (6)
The economic model of the space settlements developed in part from their origins as scientific stations. In this early model, life in space was not a market economy; once you were in space, your housing and food were provided in an allotment system, as in Antarctic scientific stations. What markets existed tended to be private unregulated individual enterprises in nonessential goods. Capitalism was in effect relegated to the margin, and the necessities of life were a shared commons
exchange between Earth and individual space colonies was on a national or treaty-association basis, thus a kind of colonial model, with the colonies producing metals and volatiles, knowledge useful for Earth management, and later on, food
once the space elevators were in place (first at Quito, 2076) traffic between Earth and space increased by a factor of a hundred million. At that point the sol
ar system became accessible. It was too big to inhabit rapidly, but the increasing speed of space travel meant that over the course of the twenty-second century the entire solar system came within easy reach. It is not a coincidence that the second half of this century saw the beginning of the Accelerando
the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils
one of the most influential forms of economic change had ancient origins in Mondragon, Euskadi, a small Basque town that ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual support. A growing network of space settlements used Mondragon as a model for adapting beyond their scientific station origins to a larger economic system. Cooperating as if in a diffuse Mondragon, the individual space settlements, widely scattered, associated for mutual support and
supercomputers and artificial intelligence made it possible to fully coordinate a non-market economy, in effect mathematicizing the Mondragon. Needs were determined year to year in precise demographic detail, and production then directed to fill the predicted needs. All economic transactions—from energy creation and extraction of raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to consumption and waste recycling—were accounted for in a single computer program. Once policy questions were answered—meaning desires articulated in a sharply contested political struggle—the total annual economy of the solar system could be called out on a quantum computer in less than a second. The resulting qube-programmed Mondragon, sometimes called the Albert-Hahnel model, or the Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model, could be
if everyone had been working in a programmed Mondragon, all would have been well; but it was only one of several competing economies on Earth, all decisively under the thumb of late capitalism, still in control of more than half of Earth’s capital and production, and with its every transaction tenaciously reaffirming ownership and capital accumulation. This concentration of power had not gone away but only liquefied for a while and then jelled elsewhere, much of it on Mars, as Gini figures for the era clearly reveal