On Callisto the tent town built to this plan was called Lake Geneva; this was where the Martian delegation went to meet with the various leaders and policy groups of the Jovian League. As usual Zo accompanied the delegation as a minor functionary and observer, looking for opportunities to convey Jackie’s messages to people who could discreetly do something about it.
This particular meeting was part of a biannual series the Jovians held to discuss the terraforming of the Galileans, and so a good context for Jackie’s interests to be expressed. Zo sat at the back of the room next to Ann, who had decided to sit in on the meeting. The technical problems of terra-forming these moons were big in scale, but simple in concept. Callisto, Ganymede and Europa were being dealt with in the same way, at least at the beginning: mobile fusion reactors were out roaming their surfaces, heating the ice and pumping gases into early hydrogen/oxygen atmospheres. Eventually they hoped to create equatorial belts where gathered rock had been crushed to create ground over the ice; atmospheric temperatures would then be kept near freezing, so that tundra ecologies could be established around a string of equatorial lakes, in a breathable oxygen/hydrogen atmosphere.
lo, the innermost of the Galileans, was more difficult, but intriguing; rail-gun launchers were firing large missiles of ice and chaldates down to it from the other three big moons; being so close to Jupiter it had very little water, its surface made up of intermixed layers of basalt and sulfur — the sulfur spewing out onto the surface in spectacular volcanic plumes, driven by the tidal action from Jupiter and the other Galileans. The plan for lo’s terraformation was more long-term than most, and was to be driven in part by an infusion of sulfur-eating bacteria into hot sulfur springs around the volcanoes.
All four of these projects were slowed by the lack of light, and space mirrors of tremendous size were being built at Jupiter’s Lagrange points, where the complications of the Jovian system’s gravitational fields were reduced; sunlight would be directed from these mirrors to the equators of the four Galileans. All four moons were tidally locked around Jupiter, so their solar days depended on the length of their orbits around Jupiter, ranging from forty-two hours for lo to fifteen days for Callisto; and whatever the length of their days, they all received during them only four percent as much sunlight as the Earth. But the truth was that the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth was stupendously excessive, so that four percent was actually a lot of light, when it came to visibility — seventeen thousand times as much as the full moon on Earth — but not much heat, if one wanted to terraform. They therefore were cadging light any way they could; Lake Geneva and all the settlements on the other moons were located facing Jupiter, to take advantage of the sunlight reflected from that giant globe in the sky; and flying “gas lanterns” had been dropped into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, clusters of them igniting some of the planet’s helium3 in points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a second; the fusion burns were suspended before electromagnetic reflecting dishes that put all the light out into the planet’s plane of the ecliptic. Thus the banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanterns wandering its face.
The space mirrors and the gas lanterns together would still leave the settlements with less than half the sunlight Mars got, but it was the best they could do. That was life in the outer solar system, a somewhat dim business all around, Zo judged. Even gathering that much light would require the manufacture of a massive infrastructure; and this was where the Martian delegation came in. Jackie had arranged to offer a lot of help, including more fusion behemoths, more gas lanterns, and also Martian experience in space mirrors and terraforming techniques generally, through an association of aerospace co-ops interested in obtaining more projects now that the situation in Martian space was largely stabilized. They would contribute capital and expertise, in return for preferential trade agreements, supplies of heliunij culled from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, and the opportunity to explore, mine, and possibly join terraforming efforts on Jupiter’s clutch of smaller moons, all eighteen of them.
Invested capital, expertise, trade; this was the carrot, and a big one. Clearly if the Galileans accepted it, the tendrils of association with Mars would be there, and Jackie could then follow that up with political alliances of various sorts; and pull the Jovian moons into her web. This eventuality was as clear to the Jovians as it was to anyone, however, and they were doing what they could to get what they wanted without giving too much in return. No doubt they would soon be playing the Martians off against similar offers from the Terfan exmetas and other organizations.
This was where Zo came in; she was the stick. Public carrot, private stick; this was Jackie’s method, in all phases of life.
Zo revealed Jackie’s threats in tiny indirect glimpses, to make them seem even more threatening. Brief meeting with officials from lo: the ecopoetic plan, Zo said to them, casually, seemed far too slow. It would be thousands of years before their bacteria chewed the sulfur into useful gases, and meanwhile Jupiter’s intense radio field, which enveloped lo and added to its problems, would mutate the bacteria beyond recognition. They needed an ionosphere, they needed water, it was possible they even needed to think about pulling the moon out into a higher orbit around their great gas god. Mars, home of terraforming expertise and the healthiest wealthiest civilization in the solar system, could help them with all that, give them special help. Or even discuss with the other Galileans the notion of taking over the project, in order to bring it up to speed.
After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice Galileans: in cocktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, walking in groups along Lake Geneva’s signature lakefront promenade, under the sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates from lo, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.
Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the grassy streets of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape outside the tent gave an indication of its nature — a glacier covering a whole world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.
On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake’s ice bottom, tinted yellow by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinprick lanterns.