2312

Downstream from the dam a short new glacial valley would be exposed. This would revegetate just as the other little green parts of Greenland had at the end of the ice age, ten thousand years before. Swan knew just how the U-valley would turn from bare gray rock into a fellfield biome, having induced it to happen in many an alpine or polar terrarium. Without assistance it would take about a thousand years, but with some gardening the process could be shortened a hundredfold: just add bacteria, then moss and lichen, grasses and sedges, and after that the fellfield flowers and ground-hugging shrubs. She had done it; she had loved it. From now on things here would every summer be exfoliating, flowering, casting seed; every winter it all would tuck into its subnivean world happily, and then struggle through the thaw and melt of a new spring, the really dangerous time. The ones that didn’t make it through the tough spring would provide food and soil for the ones that came after them, and on it would go. The Inuit could garden that if they wanted to, or let it go its own way. Maybe try different things in different fjords. How Swan would love to do that. “All right, maybe I need to become an Inuit,” she muttered at Z, staring at the map spread before them. She saw that Greenland itself was a whole world, and her kind of world-empty-therefore no one mad at her.

After dinner Swan went back outside and stood with Zasha above the great gap of air, under the huge dome of the sky. Out in the wind, oh the wind, the wind… The broad glacier below her-upstream a white shatter-downstream a blue gap-then a lower and smoother white sheet, rushing off to the sea. On the low wall of the dam she could now make out machines, running back and forth on both its top and its sides, looking a little bit like spiders, in fact, weaving a web so dense it was solid. The mountain ridges anchoring the two ends of the dam would wear away before the dam did, one of the engineers had said. If another ice age ever came, and the Greenland ice cap piled farther into the sky and overflowed this dam, the dam would still be there and would reemerge in the next warm period.

“Amazing,” Swan said. “So terraforming can be done on Earth!”

“Well, but Greenland is more like Europa than Europe, if you see what I mean. You can do it here because there are only a few locals, and they like the plan. If you were to try this kind of thing anywhere else…” Zasha laughed at the thought. “Like they could use this technology and polder New York Harbor, drain the bay down so that Manhattan was above water the way it used to be. You could make the whole area like a Dutch polder. Not even that difficult, compared to some things. But the New Yorkers won’t hear of it. They like it the way it is!”

“Good for them.”

“I know, I know. The fortunate flood. And I love New York the way it is now. But you see what I mean. A lot of good terraforming projects just won’t ever get approved.”

Swan nodded and made a face. “I know.”

Zasha gave her a brief hug. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in China. That must have been awful.”

“It was horrible. I really don’t like what I’m seeing this trip. In different ways we seem to have offended almost everyone on Earth.”

Zasha laughed. “Did you ever think it was otherwise?”

“Fine,” Swan said, “maybe so. But the thing is, now we have to find who attacked Terminator.”

“Interplan is the organization that has the closest to a total human database, so hopefully they will manage to find them.”

“What if that doesn’t work, what then?”

“I don’t know. I think it will work, eventually.”

Swan sighed. She wasn’t sure Genette’s team could do it, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Zasha gave her a look. “I’m not having fun anymore,” she explained.

“Poor Swan.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think so. But look, just go help gather the new inoculants for Terminator. Do your job, and let Genette and Interplan do their jobs.”

Swan was not happy with this either. “I can’t just leave it. Something’s going on. I mean, I was kidnapped, damn it, and asked a lot of questions about Alex. You said she didn’t trust me at the end, but what if I knew something I didn’t know was important?”

“Did they ask you about things on Venus?”

Swan thought it over; something had been triggered. “I think maybe so.”

Zasha looked worried. “There’s some strange stuff happening on Venus. When they get to the next stage of their terraforming, a lot of the planet will open to new settlements, and that’s causing fights to break out. Real estate wars, in effect. And these strange qubes Alex started us looking for, we’re finding more and more of them. They seem to be coming from Venus, and they often show up around New York. We’re not sure what it means yet. So, but just go help get the inoculants together. That’s not as easy as it used to be.”

“They just need to replace what we had before.”