2312

The new light from the Vulcanoids sparking now in the skies of Titan had already started temperatures in the remaining atmosphere to rise, and the surface was therefore subliming faster than before. The tented cities in the highlands now had some of the most violent weather anywhere. From the inside of the city tents, the Titans watched clouds rising in thunderheads that sheered off horizontally some five kilometers up, where jet streams decapitated them. Sunlight before had been one one-hundredth of that striking Earth, making the whole planet seem about as bright as an ordinary room; now, with its beamed and reflected additions, it was fifty times brighter than it had been naturally, and was said to resemble the light on Mars, which the Martians said was the best light of all. In truth the human eye could adjust to a huge range of incoming light, and very little would serve for seeing, as had been the case here before the mirrorlight arrived. Now however the Titanic landscape positively glowed, and as its orbit and day were both sixteen days long, the sunsets, when they tinted the clouds to every shade of mineral glory, burnished the sky for some eighteen hours at a time.

With the new influx of light, the full terraformation of Titan seemed very promising. They could capture and export the methane and ethane; spread foamed rock to make islands on the ice; use heat from the ocean below to warm the atmosphere; melt water lakes on their islands of rock and soil; landscape the islands, introduce bacteria, plants, animals; heat the air enough to get melted seas on the glacier surfaces; hold the atmosphere inside an ultrathin bubble; and light everything with the sunlight sent up from the Vulcanoids. The Titans looked out their tent walls with sharp anticipation. My oh my, they said. If we can just keep our shit together here we’re gonna make this a real nice place.

SWAN AND GENETTE AND WAHRAM

It was in one of the famous Titanic sunsets that Swan saw Wahram, crossing the gallery deck to greet her and Inspector Genette. She ran to him and embraced him, then let him go and looked at him, feeling shy. But he gave her that brief smile of his, and she saw that all was well between them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder-especially, she thought, absence from her.

“Welcome to our work in progress,” he said. “You see how the Vulcan light is helping us.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “But is it enough light to heat you? Can you get up to biosphere temperatures, wouldn’t that be almost two hundred K higher?”

“The light alone can’t do it. But we have an interior ocean that averages about two hundred eighty K, so heat per se is no problem. We’ll shift some of that heat out to our air. And with this extra light helping, it’ll be fine, even more than fine. There will be gas balance problems, but we can work them out.”

“I’m happy for you.” She looked up at the immense thunderheads over the tent, flaring orange and salmon and bronze. Above the clouds, brilliant chips of light blazed in a royal-blue sky, chips bigger and brighter than any stars: a few of the gathering mirror solettas, she assumed, redirecting the Vulcan light to Titan’s nightside. The huge thunderheads, lit by the sun from one side and mirrors from the other, looked like marble statues of clouds. The sunset was going to last a couple of days, they told her.

“Beautiful,” Swan said.

“Thanks,” he said. “This is my real home, believe it or not. Now let’s grab the inspector and go for a walk. We want to talk to you in confidence.”

“Is everyone else here?” Genette asked him when they approached.

Wahram nodded. “Follow me.”

T he three of them donned suits and left the spaceport city, called Shangri-La, by way of a gate at the northern end of the city tent. They walked a few kilometers north on a broad track, ramping gradually up a tilted glaciated plain to an overlook. Here a broad flagstoned area made a kind of open plaza, overlooking an ethane lake. The metallic sheen of the lake reflected the clouds and sky like a mirror, so it was a stunning plate of mixed rich color, gold and pink, cherry and bronze, all in discrete Fauvist masses; really nature had no fear when it came to spinning the color wheel. The reflections of the new mirrors in the lake were like chunks of silver, swimming in liquid copper and cobalt. True sunlight and mirrored sunlight crossed to make the landscape shadowless, or faintly double-shadowed-strange to Swan’s eye, unreal-looking, like a stage set in a theater so vast the walls were not visible. Gibbous Saturn flew through the clouds above, its edge-on rings like a white flaw cracking that part of the sky.