5.3
18 July
Thalia Buoyant Island
Southern Stratosphere
Venus
Standing on the edge of the island, Frédéric captured a 3D video of the late-afternoon cloud tops, tinged with orange and hints of pink, then panned around to show the Ship, the solar array, and Thalia Village.
“This is Thalia, our home,” he said into the tablet’s microphone. “As most of you probably know by now, these domes and towers are made of diamond, and they are actually lighter than air, because the air of Venus is made of carbon dioxide, which is three times heavier than the oxygen and nitrogen inside the buildings. If it weren’t attached to the carbónespuma—the hydrogen-expanded graphite foam pavement—each building would float on its own, like a helium balloon on Earth! It’s only people and plants, machines and furniture, et cetera that weigh the island down.”
He turned the camera around to point at himself, because his joiners liked to see his face, especially with the breathing mask on. “Most everything we need comes from the atmosphere. In addition to diamond, we make CHON, plastics, whatever the situation calls for.” He reached down and touched the carbónespuma with his hand, pushing on it to show the springiness. “This is H2-foamed graphene, which holds everything up. Ten million cubic meters of it, to be precise, although the edge crawlers”—he reoriented to show one of the spidery, human-sized robots, about a hundred meters away, loudly sucking in atmosphere and laying down a ten-centimeter-wide stripe along the perimeter—“add another two cubic meters every minute. The island gets bigger, so we can put more things on it, including more people.”
He stopped the recording, because even a few seconds of 3D video was going to take hours to transmit. But people were getting tired of his 2D still images; they wanted more. They wanted to feel involved, and he wanted that for them as well.
He walked back toward the center of the island, underneath the solar array and between the buildings, to the Well, where his father and Basilio and Diego were getting ready to bring up the trawler—the actual reason Frédéric was out here today.
“Okay for me to record you?” he asked.
The question was a formality that they mostly ignored; Julian Ortega waved in his direction, okay, okay, while keeping his eyes on the winder. Basilio and Diego were very intently focused on the cable itself.
Basilio called out, “Trawler in sixty seconds, guys.”
Frédéric started recording.
“Trawler in thirty seconds. Fifteen seconds. Trawler is in the Well.”
And then the trawler was rising up out of the Well, with its bucket and scoop.
“Ready to stop!” Diego called out. Then: “Stopping.”
“No broken teeth,” Frédéric said, putting himself in the view. “That’s the advantage of scraping up sand instead of rocks!”
Then, when his father dumped the bucket into the waiting catch basin, Frédéric said, “Looks like a full load of sand. That’s a lot more material than we normally pull up. Tohias is going to analyze this, and see if it’s better raw material for us. I can tell you now, that sand is a lot darker than I was expecting, which means it’s not just quartz. We’ll see!”
“I like your enthusiasm, guy,” Julian called over his shoulder, “but you should be in school.”
“Yes, Father,” Frédéric said, and stopped the recording.
An hour later, Frédéric stopped by the minerals processing room to record a video of Tohias. “How is the sand, Mr. Mayor? Is it everything you hoped?”
But instead of answering, Tohias said, “I’m not comfortable with what you’re doing, here, Frédéric. It’s good to see how engaged you are with this project, truly, but you are not authorized to speak for this community. If you’re serious about this, we’d need to put forward a motion in the next town meeting. Until then, I’m going to have to ask you to stop.”
To which Frédéric said, with the recording still running, “Boo. I’m not speaking for the community. This is my personal social media account, and any funds I’m raising are for my own personal use. There’s no law against that, here or on Earth.”
Tohias raised an eyebrow. “You’re taking money from people? Earth money? Earth people?”
“Um, yes, sir.”
“Seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? What use do you have for Earth money, mmm?” His voice was suspicious, but also curious. After a long pause, he asked, “How much do you have?”
“Almost ten million dollars,” Frédéric said carefully.
Tohias blinked, and said nothing for several seconds. Then: “For what?”
Very cautiously, Frédéric said, “A resupply mission. You’re the only person I’ve told. The only Venusian person.”
Tohias was shaking his head. He busied himself with the furnace controls, and slid open the window for a moment to look at something inside, red hot and bright. “That would cost a lot more than ten million dollars, Frédéric. A lot more.”
“I know,” Frédéric said. “That’s why I’m hiring staff, to raise the rest of the money.”
Again, Tohias said nothing for a long time. Not looking up. Frédéric cut the recording, because at this point it was just a waste of limited memory space.
“I’m not quite sure of the exact organizational structure yet,” Frédéric said. “That’s another thing my people are figuring out.”
“What people, exactly?” Tohias asked.
“Right now, just a lawyer, and a lot of joiners providing ideas. Some of them even say they want to move to Thalia, when the time is right. But I’m going to have to hire some engineers to design the mission, and publicity people to expand my media footprint.”
After another long gap, Tohias said, “Amazing. That’s amazing, Frédéric. You did all this on your own? You’re, what, sixteen?”
“Almost, sir.”
Finally, Tohias looked up and met his gaze. “I will pay you the highest compliment a man can give, Frédéric: you remind me of myself.”
“Don’t get the council involved,” Frédéric said, trying not to sound like he was pleading. “Too many cooks will ruin the stew. I feel like I’m taking a chance, just talking to you.”
“You are,” Tohias agreed. “There are all kinds of ways I could shut this down. I could revoke your comms access.”
“I know.”
“I could confiscate that old tablet of yours.”
“I know, or you could put it to a vote. That would wreck it, for sure.”
“Not necessarily,” Tohias said, “though I understand your concern. Still, ours is not a culture of secrets. You’re going to have to open up about this at some point, and the longer you wait, the less understanding people are going to be.”
“I know.”
After yet another long pause, Tohias said, “You need a champion.”
“Yes.”
“If people thought you were doing this with my help and blessing . . .”
Frédéric nodded. “They wouldn’t even have to vote on it. Call it a school project. It is a school project. Do you have any idea how much I’ve learned?”
“It certainly appears to be educational,” Tohias agreed, “though you may have learned less than you think. There are nasty surprises, always, where money and human beings are concerned. Mmm. I’ve seen my share. But I don’t think you’re asking for my help.”
“No, sir. Not at this time.”
“I do know a little bit about these matters,” Tohias said, now looking around him at the minerals processing room, and through the living ceiling at the blue sky, slowly softening toward sunset colors. “I can, for example, put you in touch with the same engineers who designed the missions that brought us here.”
“One of them has already contacted me, sir.”
“Oh. I see.”
After another long gap, Tohias said, “I have some Earth money, too, you know. More than ten million dollars, and all of it going to waste. I want you to know, Frédéric, it’s not so easy to tell people what to do, when you’re ten light-minutes away. I don’t know if you remember, but I used to have a company, called SkyBric. I owned it, outright, no shareholders to answer to, and I tried to run it from here, after we’d all moved to Thalia. That did not work. Within six months, my people were telling me the company was bankrupt, with no real explanation. I still don’t know exactly what happened, or where all those resources went. The lawyers I hired were . . . unsuccessful. I worry constantly, that our charitable foundation may meet with a similar fate.”
He looked as pained and earnest as Frédéric had ever seen him.
“People are crap, Frédéric. Not all of them, but too many.”
“You didn’t have witnesses,” Frédéric said. “I do.” But he didn’t like the way that sounded—too snotty, too full of himself—so he added, “But I understand what you’re telling me. I’ll be careful, and I’ll tell you what’s happening. So you can help me if I’m about to make a mistake.”
Still looking pained, Tohias said, “You certainly do seem to be succeeding in making something happen. Making anything happen, where I—where all of us—have arguably failed. That’s interesting. And if you fail, we’re no worse off than we were before. Very interesting. I’m inclined to let you proceed.”
Let me? Let me? Frédéric felt a spasm of anger, but what he said was, “Thank you, sir.”
He shuffled for a moment, angry and nervous, then gestured at the trawler’s catch basin, still half full of gray-brown sand.
Finally, he said, “There is one thing you can do to help me right now, today. My joiners are very interested in trawler yields, and the extraction process. They’re interested in everything. Can you please give a demonstration, on camera?”
“All right,” Tohias said. “Sure.”
The sand was better than basalt; from the current load, Tohias ended up extracting nearly a full kilogram of metal, plus a hundred grams of polysalt, and so much gritty soil starter that Frédéric’s mother wasn’t quite sure what to do with it all.
“It’s a good thing to have more minerals,” Wilma Ortega said, on camera, as she blended some of the starter into a load of sewage and garbage and plant stems. The sewage had already been through a couple of processing steps, and didn’t smell like much. “But we don’t want to make sudden changes in the growth medium. Plants are like people, suspicious of change. If we spook them, they’ll go into a survival mode, and put less energy into fruit and seeds. I’ll start a few test beds on this mix and see how it goes. Probably they’ll be happy, if we give them time and do it gently.”
“Very interesting,” Frédéric said, panning his camera around the greenhouse dome. There were several other women in here, working at various mysterious tasks.
“Here on Venus,” he said, “women don’t work outside, or in the minerals processing room or the factory. They work the gardens and orchards, and the CHON synthesizers. Just like our primitive ancestors.”
He couldn’t help laughing at his own joke.
“We’re all on the same team,” she said. “The work is plenty hard for all of us.”
Changing the subject, Frédéric said, “Mateo tells me we actually have a sewage surplus at this point.”
Wilma Ortega laughed at that. “We are full of shit, yes. CHON chow comes from the atmosphere.”
Then, at Frédéric’s puzzled look, she said, “If we only eat plants and vat meats, it all recycles through our butts and right back into the gardens. But we like CHON, don’t we? Everybody likes something sweet, something bready, don’t we?”
“I know I do!” Frédéric said, putting his face into the frame for a moment.
“Well, every gram that we pull out of the atmosphere, or the ground for that matter, is outside of that endless circle. Even the plants are pulling atoms from the air, and energy from sunlight. So the soil mass has been expanding for some time. That’s been a good thing. It took a long, strenuous time to build the soil up to where it is now. You see this beautiful soil?”
She gestured at one of the tomato beds, so Frédéric stepped closer to it, and ran his fingertips through the top layer of dirt there.
“Nice,” he said, because it pretty much looked like farm dirt you’d see on Earth. Or potting soil.
“But it’s true,” said Wilma Ortega. “Soon we’re going to have to start dumping sewage down the Well, because there’s nowhere else to put it. It’s not a precious resource anymore. Especially if Tohias brings more of this soil starter.”
“Dumping sewage on the planet?” Frédéric asked, in mock horror.
“There’s nothing but rocks down there,” she said, in reasonable tones. “Half a billion square kilometers of nothing but very hot rocks. Some organic matter will not hurt Venus one bit.” Then: “It won’t help, either.”
Frédéric seconded that: “We’re not here to terraform the planet. That would take thousands of years, even if we had the technology. Venus will remain as she is, except people live here, now, on a little island in the sky.”
He did his best to project excitement, and he did not have to fake it. He was done faking it; through the eyes of his joiners, he was able to see even the most mundane aspects of his life as pieces of a grand adventure. The people of Thalia were poor by any reasonable measure. So poor that even dirt was precious to them—even sewage. By any reasonable measure, they needed help. But he was coming to realize that they were interesting and, moreover, that that interest was a product he could sell. Or, more properly, a free show he could put on, like a street musician gathering donations in an overturned hat.
“Terraforming!” Wilma laughed, then walked over to knock on the side of the dome. “Who needs another Earth, when you’re cradled in diamonds?”