2312

They spent their days out in the upcurving fields, working alongside water buffalo, tractors, canal boats, and many other workers, most of them passengers. After an hour the work became hard on the back, and as the passengers-some of them only a little taller than the rice sprouts, while others were taller than giants, which was at first startling to see-sloshed up and down the rows, they talked to pass the time. Complaint and desire to be elsewhere were natural themes. “I’m festivalled out.” “I’ve tried them all.” “The only place terraforming matters is on Earth, and they’re terrible at it.” “It’s all turning out to be face business.” “We could have taken the Grindewald and gone mountain climbing. The Monch, the Eiger, the Jungfrau, they’ve reproduced every damn crack.” “I’d rather go in an aquarium and swim around. Live with a mermaid for a week.”

Beachworlds were wonderful, all agreed. With Earth’s beaches gone, the ones inside aquaria were much beloved.

Others advocated cloud forest worlds; these were visits to arboreal heaven and an earlier stage of primate life. “Such bliss to be a monkey!”

Someone said, “Or a bonobo. I wish I had gone on a sexliner.”

This broke a little dam of reticence and brought the talk immediately around to sex on those sexliners, which were often designed to look like Caribbean resorts. Dionysian dances, perpetual tantric orgies, Kundalini panmixia, everyone had a story. One of them said mournfully, “I could have spent the whole trip in a touchy-feely box, and here I am wielding a hand hoe.”

“Touchy-feely box?” Kiran couldn’t help asking.

“You get in a box that has holes cut in it about as big around as your hand, and then people reach in the holes and do what they want.”

“I’m surprised people would do that.”

“Lines always seem pretty long, for both inside and outside.”

“I should have thought of the worms that way,” Kiran said to Swan. “Could have been happy all the way up that elevator.”

“I’d rather be in here than in one of those,” someone else called. “Farms are sexy! All this fertilizer!”

Many groaned at this. It was not a joke that resonated.

Someone else said, “Last time I was on a sexliner, this group of bisexuals ran out to the pool, about twenty of them, all with the biggest tits and cocks you ever saw, and all of them with erections, and they got in a circle one behind the next and plunged into the one in front of them and away they went. It was like when you see insects clumping together on a summer day, keep fucking till they fall to the ground.”

This brought on quite a silence until someone said heavily, “Wish I had seen that,” which got the others laughing, or loudly protesting that any such image had ever been put in their heads. “I’m just saying,” the witness insisted. “These things happen. It’s a regular sport.”

And it seemed to Kiran that after the talk about sexliners the rice planting hurt less. And when these people were done for the day and back at the dorm, it seemed like the farm might turn into a sexy place after all. There was a look in people’s eyes Kiran thought he recognized.

Extracts (5)

Take raw Venus. CO 2 atmosphere of ninety-five bar, temperature at surface would melt lead, hotter even than Mercury’s brightside. A hellish place. On the other hand, 9 g, and just a tad smaller than Earth. Two continental rises on the surface, Ishtar and Aphrodite. Earth’s sister planet. There’s real potential here for a great new creation.

Take one Saturnian ice moon-Dione will do fine. Dismantle with Von Neumann self-replicating excavators, cutting it into chunks about ten kilometers on a side. Attach mass drivers to the chunks and send them down to Venus.

While doing this, build a round sunshield of lunatic aluminum, very thin material, only 50 grams per square meter and yet still totaling 3 x 10 ^ 13 kilograms, the largest thing ever built by humans. Concentric strips give the sunshield flexibility and allow it to tack up into the solar wind to hold its position at the L1 point, where it will shadow Venus entirely. Deprived of insolation, the planet will cool at a rate of five K a year.

After 140 years, the CO 2 atmosphere will have rained and snowed to the surface and frozen as a layer of dry ice. Scrape all the dry ice that landed on Ishtar and Aphrodite down to the lowlands, being careful to keep a smooth surface. While clearing off the continents, release another suite of Von Neumann self-replicating chemical factories designed to break oxygen out of the frozen CO 2; these will create 150 millibars of oxygen for the atmosphere, in about the same time it takes for all the CO 2 atmosphere to freeze. A purely oxygen atmosphere would be too flammable, so add a buffer gas, preferably nitrogen, to make a more stable mix. Titan may be oversubscribed for its excess nitrogen, so be prepared to seek substitutions. Argon mined on Luna would also serve in a pinch.