2312

“What do you mean? Wouldn’t that take spinning the planet up to some kind of day-night?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“The only way there is,” one said. “A heavy meteor shower at a tangent.”

“The very late heavy bombardment,” someone called from the jokesters’ table.

“But wouldn’t that wreck the surface you have?” Swan said. “Blast away the foamed rock, the CO 2, the atmosphere-everything you’ve done?”

“Not everything,” the first one said. “We’d just keep hitting the same spot. Things would just be… disarranged.”

“Disarranged!”

“Look, we don’t like this idea. We’ve fought this idea of spinning it up. We all have.” Gesturing around the room at the others there. “But Lakshmi and her crowd have been arguing it could work without too much disruption. Just one more short deep ocean trench, and ejecta to the east of it. Other areas would suffer too, especially around the equator, but not so much that we would kill the bacteria we have out there now. And it wouldn’t release more than a couple percent of the buried CO 2.”

“But wouldn’t it take a few hundred years of heavy bombardment to get the spin you wanted?”

“The idea would be to spin it to about a hundred-hour day. We think most Terran life-forms can tolerate that. So it would only take a hundred years.”

“Only a hundred!”

A new voice: “What these people are arguing is that we did it too fast the first time.” This particular speaker, an old person, eyes alive in a weathered face like a mask, sounded a little regretful, a little disgusted. “Did it too much like Mars! Took the way of the sunshield because it was fast! But once you have it, you have to keep it. You depend on it. And now people can see what could happen to it. So Lakshmi will win. The vote will go for bombardment now.”

“In the Working Group, you mean?”

“Yes. We’ll have to stay in shelters, or even retreat into sky cities, or even go back home for a while. Wait until things calm down again.”

Wahram, who had rolled over and joined them, said, “But what will you bombard it with this time? You won’t be taking any moons and cutting them up.”

“No,” the old one said. “That was part of the going too fast. But there are many Neptunian Trojans to be sent down.”

“Aren’t the Tritons developing those?”

“There are thousands of them. And they are all Kuiper belt captures. We could replace from the Kuiper belt, if the Tritons want. So nothing need be lost as far as Neptune is concerned. The Tritons already agree to the principle.”

“Well,” Swan said, baffled. She didn’t know what to say. She regarded their faces, so grim and irritated. “Is it what the people here want? Can you tell?”

They looked at each other. The first said, “There’s a network of cadre layers, like the panchayats in India. And everyone is talking. There’s only forty million of us here. So-the Working Group will hear from us and from everyone. But in fact the idea was already gaining traction. Now with this thing, people see the need. Lakshmi has won.”

L ater, when Swan was alone back in her room at the hospital, there was a tap at the door, and in came Shukra with Swan’s young friend from Earth, Kiran. She greeted them happily, immediately cheered by the sight of their faces, so vivid and real. Shukra, whom she had worked with a million years ago; Kiran, her newest friend-now they had the same look on their faces, serious and intent. They sat down by her bed and Swan poured them glasses of water.

“Listen to the youth here,” Shukra said, tipping his head at Kiran.

“What?” Swan said, alert to trouble.

Kiran put a hand up as if to reassure her. “You told me when you brought me here that there were factions. That’s turned out to be true, and it’s even kind of a little underground civil war, you could almost call it.”

“Lakshmi,” Shukra said heavily, as if this would explain everything. “He got involved with her.”

“Is that bad?” Swan asked. “I mean-I’m the one who told him to try her.”

Shukra rolled his eyes at this. “Swan, you were here a hundred years ago. You should know that things have changed since then. Tell her,” he said to Kiran.

“I started moving stuff and carrying messages for Lakshmi,” Kiran said, “and Shukra saw that was happening, and got me to look closer into what I was seeing when I did things for her.”

“He was bait,” Shukra said with a hard smile, “and she took it. But probably she knew he was bait.”

Kiran nodded, with a look at Swan that seemed to say Look what you got me into here. He said, “There’s a new coastal town that Lakshmi’s team is developing, it’s definitely her place, and it’s set too low for some reason. People thought she might want it drowned later on for an insurance scam or something like that. Anyway, they’re doing something funny in that town. I think maybe they’re making androids or something. Robots made to look like humans, you know?”

“I do know,” Swan said. “Tell me more.”