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CHAPTER TEN

In Which Worlds Are Critiqued

In a crazy-ambitious kind of way, Conrad could see it made sense: the moon was too small and light to retain an atmosphere of its own. But the moon’s gravitational attraction—like that of any object—dropped off with the square of the distance from its center, so that compressing the surface down to forty percent of its current elevation would sextuple gravity’s pull there. Yielding an Earth-normal gravity of 1.00 gee, and ensuring that the atmosphere was truly stable, even over geological spans of time. Talk about terraforming!

Fortunately Luna did not lack for oxygen, and as for the light metals which life required, why, Luna’s crust was richer than any of the colony worlds—richer even than Earth itself. For organic molecules to exist, there would of course need to be a huge importation of hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon. But once this was done it would be possible to construct a soil so deep and so fertile that the new world—with a surface area equal to that of China or Australia—could easily support a billion people even at a colonial-or-worse level of technology.

Moreover, thanks to conservation of angular momentum, reducing the moon’s diameter would also speed up its rotation, so that its “day” would shorten from 29.5 Earth days to a more hospitable 4.92 days. Indeed, Conrad immediately suggested crushing just a wee bit less, so that the day would work out to exactly 5.00 Earth days, or 120 hours. He’d had his fill of goofy clocks and calendars on Sorrow, and the decrease in surface gravity that would result—a mere 0.02 gee, according to Bruno’s office wall—would inconvenience no one.

“An excellent suggestion,” the king said, with approval and relief in his voice. “I see we’re in good hands. In any case, the way is paved for such an endeavor by the engineering of large planettes, by the terraforming of Mars and Venus, and of Sorrow and Gammon and Pup. And in truth a squozen moon is more suitable than those colony worlds in a variety of ways. Locked tight against their red-dwarf stars, those three are metal-poor and radiation-rich, and their days are very long. We can do better by design than by astronomical accident. But I forget myself. I don’t have to tell you this, who have seen it all firsthand.”

He was leading Conrad toward the fax gate, and at first Conrad assumed he was being dismissed. Bruno had what he wanted—a leader for this bizarre project—and now he was getting back to his own work. But apparently, the sales pitch wasn’t over quite yet, for the king murmured something to the fax gate and stepped right through it alongside him.

They came out on a warm, windswept mountaintop under a sprawling canopy of stars. This was some kind of scenic overlook at a mountain’s summit: a flat, circular depression lined with a wellstone emulation of the surrounding rock. A winding stone staircase led downward, to a cluster of wellglass buildings ringing the mountain farther down. There were no other peaks in view, and a few hundred meters below the buildings was a layer of cloud that hid the ground, making it impossible to tell how high this mountain was.

Not very, Conrad thought at first, from the dry thickness of the air and the dim, twinkly look of the stars. Must be close to sea level, or even . . . But no, the air was too thick, and didn’t smell right, and it occurred to him suddenly that this was Venus, not Earth.

Nor was that his only surprise. The fax had produced two Palace Guards along with the bodies of Bruno and Conrad—one in front of them and the other appearing behind as they stepped away from the print plate—and when Conrad turned his head and saw them he nearly yelped out loud. He shouldn’t be surprised to find the king traveling in the company of his royal bodyguards, but there’d been Palace Guards in the Barnard colony as well, and in the events leading up to the Children’s Revolt, and they had certain . . . unsavory associations for Conrad. That hulking silhouette was a symbol of danger, of impending unavoidable pain.

A curse rose unbidden to his lips, and though he managed to keep it silent, his heart rate jumped. Damn!

“Venus,” Bruno said, spreading his arms as if he owned the place. Which he did, Conrad seemed to recall, as majority shareholder or some such. “The day is long here as well—fully twenty-eight hundred hours from dawn to dawn—and this world is also a geological nightmare which periodically liquefies broad swaths of its own crust. There is no way to curb its immense volcanic activity, its immense and continual outpouring of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Thus, terraforming has become an unending process, which will never make anything but the highest mountaintops habitable to humans unless we engineer a special Venusian strain.”

That’ll be the day, Conrad thought, for the Queendom, unlike the colonies, expressly forbade biomods until they’d been thoroughly studied and vetted, their full consequence plumbed. “Tinkering produces monsters,” the Queen had said on more than one occasion, “who cannot grasp the humanity they’ve lost. Can the fall of the colonies be completely unrelated to this truth? If we’re to be free and happy, it’s necessary that we avoid such self-destruction.” Rather an extreme position, Conrad thought, but there you had it.

“Anyway,” Bruno said, “the sun is damnably hot here during the long days. As a result, people venture outdoors mainly at night, if then. And does this not undermine the very purpose of terraforming? Immorbidity does not imply omnipotence, alas. We were ambitious in ever thinking this place could be tamed by such as we.”

“Maybe Venus could be crushed,” Conrad suggested. “That would speed up its rotation. You’d have to remove a lot of mass to keep the gravity tolerable, but you could make a moon with it. Hell, you could get two viable planets out of it, and if you set up the eclipses properly they’d shelter each other from the noonday sun.”

“Ho!” Bruno chortled dryly. “What have I pulled from this hat of mine? An architect of worlds, indeed! Your ambition does you credit, lad, but there isn’t money enough in all the universe for a scheme as mad as that. If you can imagine such a thing, I’m actually running short of funds. I, yes! I’ve built thirteen starships out of my own pocket, and each of them cost as much as the entire Nescog and provided not one penny in returns. Some corners of society may be richer for the investment, but I myself am not.

“My coffers have slowly recovered from the shock, but your squozen moon will set me back a thousand years. Think of the energies we must deploy, the masses we’ll shift! And here you speak to me of lifting half the weight of a planet, against the planet’s own gravity, and then crushing it all! That’s twenty times the project you have before you, lad, and the project before you is the largest since Marlon’s Ring Collapsiter.”

He paused a moment, though, tugging his beard and pinching his chin, and finally said, “Still, the suggestion has merit. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile I have more to show you, for Venus has not been our only disappointment.”

The fax took them next to a low hilltop overlooking a village in the middle of a rusty plain, with steep red cliffs rising up on either side, just beyond the horizon.

“Savage Mars,” Bruno said, “turns out to have none of Venus’ rages and sorrows, and in truth human beings have discovered no gentler world anywhere, except the Earth. He needed a bit of air, a bit of warmth to get him going again, but Mars never forgot how to live. Thriving, though, has always eluded him, for he’s a scarred old soldier whose energies are long spent. The warmth of Sol touches this place with a quarter of its Earthly intensity, and the core of the planet is dead and cold and solid. Nor is there enough heavy hydrogen in the poles for economical fusion. So deutrelium is imported, and solar power stations throughout the Queendom beam their energies here. Without this input, this net inward flux of foreign energy, the cities of Mars would grind to a chilly halt. It’s a fine world for poets and dilettantes, gardeners and gamers, but industry must look elsewhere for its shelter and comfort.”

The king eyed Conrad curiously. “Unless you’ve, er, got some suggestions for this place as well?”

Conrad shrugged. He wasn’t exactly a font of spontaneous genius. He said to the king, “There’s always tidal heating, right? On Sorrow it was the only thing keeping the core molten. If Mars had a large, close moon . . . Well, wait a minute. Imagine a water moon, larger than the planet itself, with no solid surface or center. It doesn’t weigh as much as rock, but it could still exert a strong tidal force. And it would act as an enormous lens, gathering light from the sun and heating up. It would radiate in the infrared, and Mars’ gravity would pull it into a teardrop shape that should direct more than half the emissions toward the planet. Right?”

“Hmm,” Bruno said, thinking about that. “Possibly. But would it be stable over geologic time? I suppose it might!”

“Or we could move the planet,” Conrad added lamely. “Closer to the sun.”

The king laughed at that. “I see thinking small is not among your faults. Long ago, I’d thought to give the squozen moon project to Bascal, but in truth he was never suited. He was a political creature, and started a revolution instead.”

So did I, Conrad answered silently. For he was just as guilty as Bascal, or nearly as guilty, in getting the Children’s Revolt moving.

“And he clawed his way to the stars,” Bruno mused, staring down at the village and the red desert plains beyond it, “through my pocketbook. And there he met his end.”

At that poignant sentiment, Conrad asked, “Sire, what will you do with the image of Bascal? The one in Newhope’s memory?”

“I don’t know,” the king answered. “If my son is dead then this thing, this recorded entity, must be more a caricature than a copy. We could overlay it on his childhood fax archives and see what happened, but . . .”

“But tinkering produces monsters?”

“Indeed. And so does hardship, of which you had plenty out there in the dying colonies. I’m sick with guilt about that, lad, and I’m not eager to compound my past errors. Some people are more inclined to monsterdom than others. But I do mourn for the little boy, the Poet Prince who used to putter around Tongatapu on that noisy little scooter of his. What a happy lad, what a joy to behold! Already containing within him the sprouts of wickedness, or poor judgment. Even before the time of Newhope’s departure, he’d become a stranger to us. A dangerous one.”

“You’re going to let him die? Your own son?” Conrad couldn’t help feeling a little bit horrified, after he’d gone to the trouble of preserving that damned message. If it was the only record of Bascal’s adult life . . . God, it must be a wrenching decision. If it were up to Conrad, what would he do?

“We don’t know his fate,” the king said sadly. “We only suspect it. And this so-called cousin of his, this Edward Bascal Faxborn, is an alternate expression of the boy I raised. ‘King Eddie of Wolf’ they call him, in tones of true friendship. I’ve never met the man outside a self-aware transmission, but is he not also my son? A better version? A different set of choices?”

The king moped for a few seconds, the Martian breeze twisting in his long hair. “Someday, perhaps, when we’ve universe enough to contain him, we can dare to unleash that spirit again. But for now I suspect we’re better off leaving him where he is. If it’s a kind of murder to postpone his resurrection, I’ll invite you to join in the conspiracy. Will you do me the favor, Architect, of forgetting this conversation? I don’t want his mother finding out.”


Conrad’s next stop was Luna itself—specifically the small domed city of Copernicus, nearly dead-center on Nearside, which was to be the site of his temporary headquarters, until by his command the ground started shaking and cracking and falling in on itself and the surface became uninhabitable.

“How exactly do we accomplish this?” he’d asked the king, for there were already detailed cross-sectional blueprints of the squozen moon, showing exactly where the surface must lie, and how the dense subsurface must be layered in order to maximize the world’s utility to its future inhabitants. Toxic metals were to be buried deep—the moon had an excess of nickel and arsenic—and useful ones were to wrap the planette like foil, in layers easily accessible from surface mines. Deeper, a third of the way down to the core, there’d be a layer of di-clad neutronium supported by pillars of monocrystalline diamond.

“How?” the king asked, as though the question had never occurred to him. “I should think you would tell me.”

Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any huge hurry; Conrad was given two hundred years to complete the task, and a budget of trillions to get it started. Still, Bruno’s tour around the solar system, ending back in the remoteness of Maplesphere far out in the Kuiper Belt, had been a long one. Subjectively they were gone for just a few minutes, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and most of the Nescog was incapable of exceeding it. Invisibly, the journey had chewed up nearly a day in transit times, during which the evacuation orders had been broadcast to Lunar citizens, along with Conrad’s name and face.

As a result, his materialization in the Copernicus town square was greeted by no small number of shouts and dirty looks from the hundreds of people assembled there. Ah, yes: the people of Luna.

The moon’s gravity was too low for the planet-born and too high for the space-born. Too high also for practical low-gee manufacturing, and the place couldn’t compete with Mercury for solar energy, or with the asteroids for mineral accessibility, or with anyplace for remoteness from the traffic lanes and comm chatter of Earth. So industry here was even scarcer than on Mars, and with no carbon or hydrogen of its own, Luna wasn’t exactly a garden spot.

And yet, in Conrad’s day it had ironically been one of the most expensive places to live in all the Queendom. As a result, it attracted a small population of fierce eccentrics who loved its vast lifeless spaces, its laissez-faire attitudes, its quaint little crater-domed towns. People who could afford to pay! Lunatics, yes, who looked down on the crowded Earth with thumbed noses. Oh, how happy they would be at the news of their eviction!

“Developer,” one woman called out to Conrad as he exited the fax. On her lips, the word was definitely a curse. “Trillionaire! Dirty robber baron,” said someone else.

Looking around, Conrad decided that the Lunar domes, too, held a lot more people than they used to. The only uncrowded place he’d yet seen was Maplesphere itself—hardly representative of society as a whole.

“What’s wrong with the moon we have now?” demanded a red-haired man in reedy tones. And with a shock, Conrad realized he was looking at humanity’s greatest playwright, Wenders Rodenbeck, who had penned such classics as Uncle Lisa’s Neutron and Past Pie Season. Under other circumstances, Conrad would have been pleased to shake the man’s hand, to sit down with him over a mug of hot tea and chitchat about the ways of the world. But Rodenbeck—a noted opponent of terraforming—had brought an angry mob with him, and Conrad figured this might not be the best time. In a glance around the square, half a kilometer beneath the town’s domed roof, he could even swear he saw the hooded, translucent figure of Death out there at the back of the crowd. When he looked again, though, the apparition was gone.

“I didn’t start this project,” Conrad called out to the mob, for all the good it would do. “Your king has simply hired me to take a look at it, to alleviate the crowding problems and provide a home for billions.”

That went over well. The crowd groaned and shouted and cursed.

“Listen,” Conrad said. “You’ll be compensated for the fair value of your property here, and as far as I’m concerned you can continue to occupy it for as long as it’s safe—probably several years, while we’re getting the project logistics in order.”

“Go back to Barnard!” someone shouted, and Conrad answered angrily, “I wish I could, sir. How very rude. How many of your friends have died forever?”

Presently, a group of men in heavy but helmetless spacesuits pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and Conrad, fearing violence, briefly wished the Palace Guards were here. Or at least the local police, who on Luna were renowned for their courage and skill. But the leader of the men said to him, “Mr. Mursk, I’m Bell Daniel, the president of Lunacorp Construction.”

“You’re hired,” Conrad said at once. “Your first assignment is to find me an office, away from this mob.” Then, thinking about it, he added, “It might also be a good idea to start digging a hole.”

“Um, okay. What sort of hole, sir? How deep?”

“All the way through,” Conrad told him.

Only much later would it occur to him that he had missed his chance to see the moon—the old, the original moon—in the skies of Earth, before King Bruno’s proclamations had begun the long, slow process of crushing it.


“Call Xmary,” he told the wall of his new office, just as soon as he stepped inside. The network took a few fractions of a second to figure out whom he meant, and the light of his signal itself took a second and a half to reach the surface of Earth. But presently her face appeared, framed against clouds and sky, green grass and oceans.

“Conrad,” she said, “where have you been? Three days you’ve been gone, and no message?”

“Sorry,” he told her. “A lot has happened. It turns out I’m a trillionaire. Also I met the king, and I have a job. Oh, and my parents say hi.”

Xmary nodded impatiently. “That’s nice, dear. We’re under attack.”


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