new spin, tropical thunderheads glowered, lit by orange lightning that seemed to be looking for a way to spark life among the drifting molecules.
All that you did, in a mere decade. You had made “the lesser light that rules the night”
now shine five times brighter, casting sharp shadows on Earth. Sun rays glinted by day from the young oceans, dazzling the eyes on Earth. And the mother world itself reflected in those muddy seas, so that when the alignment was right, people on Earth’s night side gazed up into their own mirrored selves. Viewed at just the right angle, Earth’s image was rimmed with ruddy sunlight, refracting through Earth’s air.
You knew it could not last, but were pleased to find the new air stick around. It would bleed away in ten thousand years, but by that time other measures could come into play.
You had plans for a monolayer membrane to cap your work, resting atop the whole atmosphere, the largest balloon ever conceived.
Later? No, act in the moment—and so you did.
You wove it with membrane skill, cast it wide, let it fall—to rest easy on the thick airs below. Great holes in it let ships glide through, but the losses from those would be trivial.
Not that all was perfect. Luna had no soil, only the damaged dust left from four billion years beneath the solar wind’s anvil.
After a mere momentary decade (nothing, to you), fresh wonders bloomed.
Making soil from gritty grime was work best left to the micro-beasts who loved such stuff. To do great works on a global scale took tiny assistants. You fashioned them in your own labs, which poked outward from the Station’s many-armed skin.
Gray grew a crust. Earth is in essence a tissue of microbial organisms living off the sun’s fires. Gray would do the same, in fast-forward. You cooked up not mere primordial broths, but endless chains of regulatory messages, intricate feedback loops, organic gavottes.
Earth hung above, an example of life ornamented by eleborate decorations, structures of forest and grass and skin and blood—living quarters, like seagrass and zebras and eucalyptus and primates.
Do the same, you told yourself. Only better.
These tasks you loved. Their conjuring consumed more decades, stacked end on end.
You were sucked into the romance of tiny turf wars, chemical assaults, microbial murders, and invasive incests. But you had to play upon the stellar stage, as well.
You had not thought about the tides. Even you had not found a way around those outcomes of gravity’s gradient. Earth raised bulges in Gray’s seas a full twenty meters tall. That made for a dim future for coastal property, even once the air became breathable.
Luckily, even such colossal tides were not a great bother to the lakes you shaped in crater beds. These you made as breeding farms for the bioengineered minions who ceaselessly tilled the dirts, massaged the gases, filtered the tinkling streams that cut swift ways through beds of volcanic rock.
Indeed, here and there you even found a use for the tides. There were more watts lurking there, in kinetic energy. You fashioned push-plates to tap some of it, to run your substations. Thrifty gods do not have to suck up to (and from) Earthside.
And so the sphere that, when you began, had been the realm of strip miners amid mass-driver camps, of rugged, suited loners… became a place where, someday, humans might walk and breathe free.
That time is about to come. You yearn for it. For you, too, can then manifest yourself, your Station, as a mere mortal… and set foot upon a world that you would name Selene.
You were both Station and more, by then. How much more few knew. But some sliver of you clung to the name of Benjan—
Benjan nodded slightly, ears ringing for some reason.
The smooth, sure interviewer gave a short introduction, portentous and grim—typical Earther. “Man… or manifestation? This we must all wonder as we greet an embodiment of humanity’s greatest—and now ancient— construction project. One you and I can see every evening in the sky—for those who are still surface dwellers.”
3-D cameras moved in smooth arcs through the studio darkness beyond. The two men sat in a pool of light. The interviewer spoke toward the directional mike as he gave the background on Benjan’s charges against the Council.
Smiles galore. Platitudes aplenty. That done, came the attack.
“But isn’t this a rather abstract, distant point to bring at this time?” the man said, turning to Benjan.
Benjan blinked, uncertain, edgy. He was a private man, used to working alone. Now that he was moving against the Council, he had to bear these public appearances, these…
manifestations… of a dwindled self. “To, ah, the people of the next generation, Gray will not be an abstraction—”
“You mean the Moon?”
“Uh, yes, Gray is my name for it. That’s the way it looked when I—uh, we all—started work on it centuries ago.”
“Yet you were there all along, in fact.”
“Well, yes. But when I’m—we’re—done.” Benjan leaned forward, and his interviewer leaned back, as if not wanting to be too close. “it will be a real place, not just an idea—where you all can live and start a planned ecology. It will be a frontier.”
“We understand that romantic tradition, but—”
“No, you don’t. Gray isn’t just an idea, it’s something I’ve—we’ve—worked on for everyone, whatever shape or genetype they might favor.”
“Yes, yes, and such ideas are touching in their, well, customary way, but—”
“But the only ones who will ever enjoy it, if the Council gets away with this, is the Majiken Clan.”
The interviewer pursed his lips. Or was this a he at all? In the current style, the bulging muscles and thick neck might just be fashion statements. “Well, the Majiken are a very large, important segment of the—”
“No more important than the rest of humanity, in my estimation.”
“But to cause this much stir over a world which will not even be habitable for at least decades more—”
“We of the Station are there now.”
“You’ve been modified, adapted.”
“Well, yes. I couldn’t do this interview on Earth. I’m grav-adapted.”
“Frankly, that’s why many feel that we need to put Earth-side people on the ground on Luna as soon as possible. To represent our point of view.”
“Look, Gray’s not just any world. Not just a gas giant, useful for raw gas and nothing else. Not a Mercury type; there are millions of those littered out among the stars. Gray is going to be fully Earthlike. The astronomers tell us there are only four semiterrestrials outside the home system that humans can ever live on, around other stars, and those are pretty terrible. I—”
“You forget the Outer Colonies,” the interviewer broke in smoothly, smiling at the 3-D.
“Yeah—ice balls.” He could not hide his contempt. What he wanted to say, but knew it was terribly old- fashioned, was: Damn it, Gray is happening now, we’ve got to plan for it. Photosynthesis is going on. I’ve seen it myself—hell, I caused it myself—carbon dioxide and water converting into organics and oxygen, gases fresh as a breeze. Currents carry the algae down through the cloud layers into the warm areas, where they work just fine. That gives off simple carbon compounds, raw carbon and water. This keeps the water content of the atmosphere constant, but converts carbon dioxide—we’ve got too much right now—into carbon and oxygen. It’s going well, the rate itself is exponentiating—
Benjan shook his fist, just now realizing that he was saying all this out loud, after all.
Probably not a smart move, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Look, there’s enough water in Gray’s deep rock to make an ocean a meter deep all the way around the planet. That’s enough to resupply the atmospheric loss, easy, even without breaking up the rocks. Our designer plants are doing their jobs.”
“We have heard of these routine miracles—”
“—and there can be belts of jungle—soon! We’ve got mountains for climbing, rivers that snake, polar caps, programmed animals coming up, beautiful sunsets, soft summer storms—anything the human race wants. That’s the vision we had when we started Gray. And I’m damned if I’m going to let the Majiken—”
“But the Majiken can defend Gray,” the interviewer said mildly.
