Overall control of the great global eco-rebuilding project had been put in the metaphorical hands of Thales, the only one of the three great artificial minds to have survived the sunstorm. Bisesa was confident that the ecology Thales was building would prove to be durable and long lasting—even if it wasn’t entirely natural, and could never be. It was going to take decades, of course, and even then Earth’s biosphere would recover only a fraction of the diversity it had once enjoyed. But Bisesa hoped she would live to see the opening up of the Arks, and the release of elephants and lions and chimpanzees back into something like the natural conditions they had once enjoyed.
But of all the great recovery projects, the most ambitious and controversial of all was the taming of the weather.
The first stabs at weather control, notably the U.S. military’s attempts to cause destabilizing rainstorms over North Vietnam and Laos in the 1970s, had been based on ignorance, and were so crude you couldn’t even tell if they had worked. What was needed was more subtlety.
The atmosphere and oceans that drove the weather added up to a complex machine powered by colossal amounts of energy from the sun, a machine depending on a multitude of factors including temperature, wind speed, and pressure. And it was chaotic—but that chaotic nature gave it an exquisite sensitivity. Change any one of the controlling parameters, even by a small amount, and you might achieve large effects: the old saw about the butterfly’s wing flap in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas had some truth.
How to flap that wing to order was a different problem, however. So mirrors were to be launched into Earth’s orbit, much smaller siblings of the shield, to deflect sunlight and adjust temperature. Arrays of turbines whipped up artificial winds. Aircraft vapor trails could be used to block sunlight from selected parts of the Earth’s surface. And so on.
Of course there was plenty of skepticism. Even today, as Eugene described his work, Mikhail said, a bit too loudly, “One man steals a rain cloud; another man’s crops fail through drought! How can you be sure that your tinkering will have no adverse effects?”
“We calculate it all.” Eugene seemed bemused that Mikhail would even raise such points. He tapped his forehead. “Everything is up here.”
Mikhail wasn’t happy. But this had nothing to do with the ethics of weather control, Bisesa saw: Mikhail was jealous, jealous of the contact her daughter had made with Eugene.
Bud put his arm around Mikhail’s shoulders. “Don’t let these youngsters get to you,” he said. “For better or worse they aren’t as we were. I guess the shield taught them that they can think big and get away with it. Anyhow it’s their world! Come on, let’s go find a beer.”
The little group fragmented.
Siobhan approached Bisesa. “So Myra has grown up.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I almost feel sorry for the boy—although I don’t think this new breed is in any need of sympathy from the likes of us.” She glanced at Eugene and Myra, tall, handsome, confident. “Bud’s right. We got them through the sunstorm. But everything is different now.”
“But they’re hard, Siobhan,” Bisesa said. “Or at least Myra is. To her the past, the time cut off by the storm, was nothing but one betrayal after another. A father she never knew. A mother who left her at home, and came back crazy. And then the world itself imploded around her. Well, she’s turned her back on it all. She’s not interested in the past, not anymore, because it failed her. But the future is there for her to shape. You see confidence in her. I see a diamond hardness.”
“But that’s how it has to be,” Siobhan said gently. “This is a new future, new challenges, new responsibilities. They, the young ones, will have to take those responsibilities. While we stand aside.”
“And worry about them,” Bisesa said ruefully.
“Oh, yes. We will always do that.”
“I couldn’t bear to lose her,” Bisesa blurted.
Siobhan touched her arm. “You won’t. No matter how far she travels. I know you both well enough for that. Some things are more important even than the future, Bisesa.”
Thales spoke smoothly in Bisesa’s ear. “I think the ceremony is about to begin.”
Siobhan sighed. “Well, we know that,” she snapped. “Do you ever miss Aristotle? Thales has this annoying habit of stating the bleeding obvious.”
“But we’re glad to have him even so,” Bisesa said.
Siobhan linked Bisesa’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go see the show.”
50: Elevator
Bisesa and Siobhan walked through the marquee to an area at the center of the rig. The children swarmed forward, at last distracted by something more interesting than each other.
The center of attention was an object like a squat pyramid, perhaps twenty meters tall. Its surface had been coated with marble slabs that gleamed in the sun. This unassuming structure was to be the anchor point for the Space Elevator, a line of nano-engineered carbon that would lead all the way up from the Earth to geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand kilometers high.
“Look at that lot.” Siobhan pointed upward. The clear blue sky was filling up with airplanes and helicopters. “I wouldn’t want to be flying around when thousands of kilometers of bucky-tube cable come uncoiling down into the atmosphere …”
The Prime Minister of Australia clambered, a bit heavy-footed, up a staircase to a podium right at the apex of the flat-topped pyramid. She held up a sample of the cable that was even now being cautiously dropped into Earth’s atmosphere. It was actually a broad ribbon, about a meter wide but only a micron thick. And she began to speak.
“A lot of people have expressed surprise that Australia was chosen by the Skylift Consortium as the site for the anchor of the world’s first Space Elevator. For one thing it’s a common myth that you have to anchor an elevator on the equator. Well, the closer the better, but you don’t have to be right on it; thirty-two degrees south is close enough. And in many other ways this is an ideal spot. Out here in the ocean we’re very unlikely to suffer lightning strikes or other unwelcome climatic phenomena. Australia is one of the most stable places on Earth, both geologically and politically. And we’re just a short hop away from the beautiful city of Perth, which is anticipating its role as a key hub in a new Earth—space transportation network …”
And so on. It was always this way with space projects, Bud had once told Bisesa, a mix of bullshit and wonder. On the ground it was always turf wars and pork-barrel politics—but today a cable from space really was to be dropped above the heads of this preening throng: today, in the sunshine, an engineering feat that would have seemed a dream when Bisesa was a child would be completed.
Of course the Elevator was just the beginning. The plans for the future were astonishing: with space opened up at last, asteroids would be mined for metals, minerals, and even water, and solar power stations the size of Manhattan would be assembled in orbit. A new industrial revolution was about to begin, and with the flow of free energy up there in space the possibilities for the growth of civilization were unbounded. But the heavy industries that had done so much harm in the past, mining and energy production among them, would now be transferred off the planet. This time Earth would be preserved for what it was good for: serving as the home of the most complex ecosystem known.
The shield, the first great astronautical engineering project, was already destroyed, though fragments of it would forever be cherished in the planet’s museums. But the confidence that the project’s success had given had not been lost.
Space, though, wasn’t just about power stations and mines. The sunstorm had bequeathed strange new worlds to humankind. Traces of life on Mars, dormant for a billion years, were now being discovered all over that world. Meanwhile a new Venus awaited a human footstep. Almost all of that planet’s suffocating coat of air had been conveniently blasted away. What was left was sterile, slowly cooling—and terraformable, some experts claimed, capable of becoming, at last, a true sister to Earth.