5
"Father," I spoke up, "I do not understand. Why smash up perfectly good planets?"
"Perfectly good? Ha!" His laugh was dark and twisted, and made him look angry. And I saw a hint of that demon in his eyes, again.
"'Perfectly good' is what I hope to make them! Mars is a frozen wasteland and Venus, a boiling ball of poisonous gases. With a proper amount and the right kinds of water locked in each ice world, and in as little as a few hundred years time after impact, our two neighboring planets will begin the process of terraforming. All by themselves. Why we could warm Mars and cool Venus and maybe help our people grow beyond the limits of this slowly strangling planet before we completely destroy it."
Then he began a speech I hadn't heard before, and although I understood only some of it, still it didn't matter. I loved hearing Father talk. He had a way of painting pictures with words that seemed logical and compelling, and now I was his sole audience. He was animated like I'd never seen. I let him go on, and nodded occasionally.
"Until now, with all the wealth of the world, the best we could manage was to send a few brave pioneers to a meagre little outpost on Mars. And Venus? Completely beyond our power to sustain even a robotic landing for more than a month before the pressure and gases crushed and corroded our best materials. Compared to the power of the planets, our technology is immature. But so is Humanity. Poverty, overpopulation, pollution. And especially war. All the time, war. In every generation. Setting us back perhaps thousands of years more from where we should be as a species. Generations from now, people will curse us for how we ruined this jewel of an oasis in the middle of literally nothing."
I had never thought of war that way before. The histories always made it seem so, oh, I don't know, glorious somehow.
"Every prediction of settling Mars has been wrong so far," he continued. "It looks like we may never get to the planets in large enough numbers to make colonies viable. That's my greatest fear. It could take a thousand years or more before we have solved our bickering long enough to afford a genuine attempt at settling other planets. But if we can survive until then, I think my new planets could be ready. Imagine what we could do with two new worlds! We could take people and plants and animals of all sorts. New Earths for new civilizations! But we have to learn how to survive until then, and of that I am not optimistic."
He paused. Father liked to think big but this sounded like anime to me, and even children know anime isn't real.
"But if Mars and Venus are so different," I asked, "how can you make them both like Earth?"
"That is exactly the right question!" He seemed genuinely delighted and his spirits lifted immediately. "Let me explain."
He motioned with his arm. The blank wall in front of his desk lit with a pop, and the yellow room lights dimmed.
The Solar System was on display, with the planets lined up in their orbits around a fiery sun. The asteroid belt was a smoky region beyond Mars, and a gray cloud of what looked like gas, hung far out in the distance, beyond the giant planets.
He waved his hand and the scene was overlaid with a series of spiraling loops, each studded with a small, silver spacecraft. With another wave of his hand, the whole thing set in motion.
It was beautiful, moving through space in living circles like that. Our point of view changed to keep pace with one of the little spaceships. First we looped around the inner planets, faster and faster, then arced out past the gas giants at the edge of the Solar System.
Everything was labeled with floating ideograms, and numbers kept running time and distance in the sidebar. The scene moved through such amazing distances and passed so many exotic worlds, I forgot everything else.
"Near the edge of our Solar System," Father continued, "fifty times farther out than from here to the Sun, is the Kuiper Belt. Sort of like the asteroid belt..."
"Between Mars and Jupiter?" I asked, instantly ashamed that I finished Father's sentence.
But Father was pleased. "Yes! The Kuiper Belt is like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but much, much larger. And it lies in a very stable place at the Outer Edges, where the debris left over from the birth of the Solar System has had time to settle. Now, our destination is the Kuiper Cliff, a drop-off of icy rocks in the Kuiper Belt where the really big, really pure ice planetesimals reside. Once it arrives, a craft like this would sniff out an ice ball of just the right size —perhaps half the size of the Moon, or so — and with an Earth-like ratio of heavy to light water. Likely there will be some methane and ammonia, also various trace elements. I have designed a very nice sniffer for them," he said, and he tapped the side of his nose and smiled.
I smiled back, pretending to understand it all and hoping he wouldn't notice. I didn't want to seem slow and disappoint him. I was just a child, after all.
"Once in position, gravity will begin its magic. The tug effect is small but quantifiable and completely predictable. The craft will be designed with just enough mass to nudge the ice worlds, ever so slowly, ever so precisely, always correcting for error, into a trajectory that will bring them to the inner Solar System. Specifically the two planets most suitable for terraforming, Venus and Mars. It would take vast time, and would need a dependable artificial intelligence to do the aiming."
"Artificial intelligence, Father?"
"Smart driver. Like in your Hundred Clicker. It's sort of my special interest."
Right, I thought, dredging up a memory. I think he mentioned that once before.
"I had calculated that it would take a little over one thousand years for the first ice world to enter the inner Solar System, and I designed its approach to strike Venus a glancing blow, just enough to get that slowly spinning planet moving again in a reasonable orbital rotation."
He pointed to the simulation, and I glanced over just in time to see a close up of a flaming snowball smash into the side of a giant tan-and-gray striped marble, hanging in deep black emptiness. Fireworks spurted from its side as much of the planet tore away, escaping gravity, only to be recaptured in an oblong orbit.
"The impact ejecta plume would coalesce rather quickly. In little over one hundred years, the force of gravity would shape it into an Earth-like moon, but much smaller."
A red hot ring, with a big lump on one side, formed around Venus in the display. The lump was spinning and swallowing up the glowing embers. And, with every orbit in the high speed simulation, it slowed and darkened.
"This new moonlet should stabilize Venus's backward spin — did you know Venus spins backwards? — and the injection of such a mass of water ice should interrupt the greenhouse effect, allowing Earth-like conditions to begin forming within another few hundred years. According to my best trajectories, in as little as a thousand or fifteen hundred years time, Venus would be habitable to humans."
Father waved at the wall and the circles widened a bit. A new path appeared.
"Another ice planet could be aimed at Mars. But its trajectory would be designed to enter the Martian atmosphere on a more direct approach, breaching the mantle and re-igniting that planet's near-dead core."
A vast explosion rocked the red world in Father's simulation. A jet of hot rock and lava shot straight up, like the spurting geysers of Hailuo Valley, but far, far greater.
"This would likely awaken enough of the planet's magnetic field to give the newly forming atmosphere a little protection against the relentless solar wind. Then, oceans would form! There is already a vast amount of water locked below the planet's surface, and the heat and pressure of the cometary impact should release it. The theory is: vaporize enough of the right kind of rock in a condensate corridor and you precipitate oceans. For Mars, there isn't really a need for another moon."
He paused and looked over at me. He was finally getting around to his point.
"Do you know, Young Moon, I have been drawing circles too? Oh yes, all based on the mathematics of my plan. It looks like we are making much the same circles, you and I. Once again, either you are looking inside my mind or I inside yours."
It was true. We did often know what the other was feeling. I could usually guess if he was on his way home and I was mostly right, and he could sense if I was hurt or sad and would reach out to me. I don't know how we knew. We just did, and I cherished that special bond we had.
"Look here. This display shows the various trajectories I have been calculating. Usually the most efficient path takes the longest time, but not always." he said. "Now watch."
He touched his thumb and forefinger together and most of the circles faded out, until only one set was left.
"This is my current best trajectory. The one with the most efficient path to success."
He pressed his fingers together one more time. "And this you might recognize."
My drawing dissolved in! The one I gave him. It was mostly a mass of random circles, but several heavier ones stood out. I had drawn over them, again and again, and the blackness of those lines dominated the page.
"Fifty percent," Father said to the air, and my drawing became translucent, like onion-skin. He rolled his thumb over his fingertip to rotate the drawing layer. With his cupped hand, he reached out and moved my circles to overlap his, then he pinched his fingertips to resize it precisely to scale.
The two sets of circles aligned almost perfectly.
Almost.
"I'm sorry Father," I interrupted quietly. "My circles are a bit different, aren't they?"
"Exactly!" he shouted. Shouted! I never, ever heard Father speak loudly, before. "Your circles were the inspiration to investigate new paths that I had overlooked, using a complex series of gravity assists from the gas giants. The new routes are promising and could bring our ice worlds into the inner Solar System much sooner than I had thought possible. We could be living on Venus and Mars perhaps hundreds of years sooner, thanks to you, my daughter." He smiled at me and the warmth of it filled me with pride.
"But this particular alignment won't happen again for two centuries. To take advantage of it I'd have to launch both craft within the next twelve years or so, and that hardly seems possible. This will all just have to remain a thought experiment, for now."
He sighed and went silent, pondering his grand idea.
Then, speaking in a low voice, mostly to himself, he said, "But if I could launch in time, and if I had a bit of extra force out there. A kickstart of some sort. To get the ice moving really fast, well then we could get there even sooner than that."
"What's a kickstart Father?" I asked, but he was somewhere else now, examining my circles, swiping and rubbing and tapping his fingers, sending his silvery space craft through the Solar System on impossible adventures. I'd never seen him so... alive! And he seemed to think I had something to do with it all.
After a time, he turned to me. He looked right at me — right into me — and I blushed deeply.
"Every day," he said, "the Record is full of news of the latest water wars or riots among refugee groups. Even our simplest games teach us to attack and defend rather than cooperate and grow. It so often seems the world is full of nothing but trouble and death. Until this moment. Now, it looks like it just might be possible for us to move into our new homes before our dear Earth becomes completely uninhabitable. And as destructive as we are, even humans would take millions of years to destroy two new planets."
There was a scale to his vision that scared me, but it was thrilling, too.
"Very well, Father," I said, suddenly feeling very grownup. "I'll let you have my circles, if they'll help. But I want to be there with you. If you find a way to make any of this real, I want to see it happen."
Father was stunned for a second. I don't think he expected any actual demand from his only daughter, let alone a negotiation. It was certainly not the way he raised me. But it was the way Mother did.
His face softened and his thin lips stretched into a smile.
"Agreed!" he said, with a laugh. "Young Moon, you shall be my muse. We will send our Kali to the Kuiper Cliff to sniff out ice worlds, and together we will save Humanity."
"Kali?" I asked.
"Mythology, my dear," Father explained. "Ancient Hindu goddess." He turned and looked straight at me, and some of the demon fire was back in his eyes. "Kali was the destroyer of worlds and the bringer of life."
And with that, he waved off the wall display, rolled the pocket door open wide, and we walked passed the slowly spinning globe Mars, out of his study and into the wonderful smells of supper.