2312

In any case there was endless work to be done, almost all of it outside Colette, in the perpetual blizzard that the Big Rain had turned into. Thick drifts of snow were landing on the new dry ice seas before the latter had been completely covered with foamed rock, and this was creating a problem. Every day big teams had to go out and operate gargantuan bulldozers and snowplows to clear the snow off the dry ice, so that foamed rock brigades could then cover the ice before more snow fell on it. It was said that the foam job would take ten more years to finish, but Kiran had also heard one year, and someone else said a hundred years. No one knew for sure, and with his belt it was hard to follow the discussions at the dining table after meals, when sometimes workmates would try to do the calculations themselves on their wristpads. Ten years kept coming up. Talk about dead-end jobs! He needed to improve his Chinese.

At night he slept in a dorm. This was the most interesting part, because people were packed in on long mattresses that his belt called matrazenlager- essentially mattresses as long as the room, with numbers on the headboards marking nominal slots for people, a situation leading to a fair bit of sex in the dark, sometimes even including him. Then up in the morning, eat in a cafeteria, get in a line to get sent out onto the endless plain in rovers, or put in helicopters the size of aircraft carriers to be carried out to the dry ice sea to operate bulldozers, waldoes, snowblowers (the so-called dragons), super-zambonis, and ice cutters much like the asphalt- and concrete-cutting vehicles back in Jersey, but a hundred times bigger. After a few weeks he could operate any of these. They weren’t very complicated; really you told the AI what to do for the most part. It was like being captain of a ship. A day’s work by a team of a thousand would clear many square kilometers of dry ice, and on the horizon the black moving buildings that spread the foamed rock followed inexorably. The far shore of this part of the ice sea was said to be six hundred kilometers away.

Then for a matter of some weeks he worked in a monumental waldo, kicking free what they called stegosaur plates, then carrying them over to the bed of a giant truck. Waldo work was always demanding-it was full-body movement, like dancing-not physically hard, but as it magnified your every motion, it required very close attention and focus to move the waldo in just the way you wanted it to go. So it could be interesting work or just a matter of lifting and carrying, but either way it left you fried.

At the ends of these days he tried to work on his Chinese. No one he met spoke English, so his little translation belt was his best teacher, but it was hard. He would say things to it and then listen to the translation and try to say it back. But when he said it back in Chinese, and it translated what he’d said back into English, it never came out right. He said, “My radar is broken,” in exactly the Chinese he thought he had heard, and it translated back to him “immediate open air meeting.” He tried “Where do you live?” and it came back as “Your lotus has interpolated.”

“If only!” he said, laughing bleakly. “I’d like my lotus to interpolate, but how?”

Clearly he must be sounding crazy to the people he talked to. He was doing something wrong, but what?

“It is a hard language,” one of his dorm mates said when he complained. He tried to memorize that properly.

As it was, his translator was his best friend. They talked a lot. He hoped to start getting more out of it soon. Saying “hello” and “how are you?” and such was working better and better with the people he interacted with. And they were getting friendlier about talking slow.

The workers continued to chip away at the monumental tasks set before them, tasks thousands of times bigger than similar jobs on Earth. But if the job was shoveling snow, was that a good thing?

Once he sent a message to Swan to say he was glad to hear she had survived the attack on Terminator, and in it he mentioned that he never saw Shukra anymore. A message came back a few weeks later: Try Lakshmi. With a Venusian cloud address.

He looked into this and found that Lakshmi was a name that caused people to go silent and look away. A big power, based over in Cleopatra; an ally of Shukra’s, or an enemy-people didn’t really know, or didn’t want to say.

So: maybe Swan wanted to shift her informant to a place closer to the action. Or maybe she was just trying to help.

Or maybe he was just on his own.

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