Glemp nodded. “A domed colony on Mars would have to contain everything needed to sustain a technological human civilization, which means farms, water systems, air recycling, factories, resource extraction and processing plants. It would have access to local resources outside itself, but would otherwise be much like a habitat adrift in space. A closed, finite system, ever at risk of complex and catastrophic failure. You could imagine running such a thing for a few years, but how long?”
They talked on, each of them coming up with examples of long-term technological continuity, such as the Dutch managing land reclaimed from the sea for centuries. But Glemp’s point was well made, Patrick thought. It was hard to imagine maintaining a machine as complex as a space station or a domed ecosphere over more than a few lifetimes.
Glemp said, “What we humans need is room. A world like Earth, big enough that it is effectively infinite in terms of resources. If Mars were Earth-like-”
“But Mars isn’t Earth-like,” Kenzie said. “Even Earth won’t be Earth-like in a few more years. So what are you saying, Jerzy? That we ought to make Mars Earth-like?”
“The word,” Jerzy Glemp said, smiling, “is terraforming. To make a world like the Earth.”
And they talked about that. Once again there were studies by NASA and various earlier thinkers on how Mars could be made into a smaller sibling of Earth, with air thick enough to breathe, and an ocean pooling in the great basin of Hellas, and pine trees braving the flanks of Mons Olympus. It quickly emerged that to build such a new world you would have to import most of the “volatiles,” in Jerzy’s term, that Mars was lacking right now. There were schemes to do that, such as by deflecting comets and crashing them into Mars’s surface..
This time it was Patrick who put a stop to the discussion. “You’re describing a program of engineering that would span the solar system, and would take centuries.”
“Millennia, probably,” Glemp murmured.
Kenzie thumped his fist onto the table. “It would be easier to terra-form Earth. ”
“And that,” Jerzy Glemp said enigmatically, “has been considered. Ask the Russians.”
Kenzie shook his head. “Let’s not go into that. ”
Patrick had heard something about mysterious behavior by the Russians in space. In the summer of the previous year, 2024, the year Moscow was abandoned, there had been a brief flurry of ICBM launches from the Russian heartlands. US intelligence analysts had triggered an alert. But the missiles had flown into space, never touching down. Some analysts thought the Russians had simply dumped their weapons stock before the flood reached it. Others had developed elaborate and exotic conspiracy theories. If anybody in the American administration knew the truth-if anybody in this room knew-they weren’t sharing it with Patrick.
Kenzie leaned back and locked his fleshy fingers behind his head. “We’re stuck, aren’t we? We agree we need a new Earth. But there are no new Earths in the solar system. We’ve exhausted our options.”
Liu Zheng said patiently, “We have exhausted Category One. Category Two remains.”
Jerzy Glemp grinned. “The stars.”
Kenzie pushed his chair back. “Christ, before we get to that I need a cigarette. I know, I know. But I quit quitting after I lost my first thousand acres of seafront property to the flood. Hey, Joe, can you rustle up more coffee?”
As they broke, Kenzie went out to smoke and the others milled around the refreshed coffeepot.
Patrick approached Liu Zheng, who stood alone, politely waiting for the coffee. “You’re a long way from home,” Patrick said tentatively.
“As are many of us,” Liu said, but he smiled.
“How did you come to be in the US?”
“When the floods came, my family was driven from our home in Shanghai. I was twenty. We lived in a refugee colony in Zhejiang province. I was able to pursue a career. Then came the draft.”
“The draft?”
“For the coming war with the Russians and Indians, over the high ground of central Asia. I did not wish to fight in such a futile and wasteful conflict. My family paid for me to come to America. I was fortunate that, thanks to the aptitude tests administered in the processing center, I came to the attention of Dr. Glemp.”
“You’re more than a commodity, man. More than a set of skills.”
“Am I? None of us is anything without land, Mr. Groundwater. Room to stand, a place to lie. If you have that, and I do not, you can do what you like with me. So it is here, just as at home.”
“Well, maybe.” But Patrick felt a new determination burn in him that that fate was not going to befall Holle. “So you have a wife at home, kids?”
“A wife,” he said. “When I fled I had to leave her. Her family would not release her to come with me. I am not sure if she wanted to anyway. Fleeing is shameful.”
“Is it? More shameful than sitting there until you’re drowned out?”
“China is different, Mr. Groundwater. We have a cultural continuity going back to what is known in Britain as the Bronze Age. We, our ancestors, have survived many calamities before, fire, flood, plague, invasion. Always the essence of China has endured. Many cannot believe that it will not be so this time, that the flood is a terminus.”
“But you think it is.”
“I am an engineer, not a climatologist. But I understand enough of the science to believe that, yes, this is the end of China, and of the world. So here I am.”
Kenzie came bustling back into the room.
As they walked back to the table Patrick asked Liu, “Do you still hope to bring your wife here someday?”
“It is a dream. But to find her in the great chaos of the flood, even if she survives, and to bring her here-it may be easier to fly to the stars, Mr. Groundwater.”
10
Liu opened the discussion of his “Category Two.” He brought up graphs and tables and artists’ renderings of exotic worlds. Liu said, “Like many other programs, the work of ‘planet-finding’ was pretty much curtailed by the flood. That is, using advanced telescopic and photographic techniques, including telescopes in space, to detect and study the planets of other stars. Nevertheless several hundred such ‘exoplanets’ were found before the flood came, and more have been found since. And of these, several dozen are like Earth. They have masses similar to Earth’s, and appear to have water oceans-”
“Some of them have life,” Jerzy Glemp said, grinning. “We know that from atmospheric signatures-oxygen, methane. Spectroscopic records of photosynthetic chemicals.”
Patrick was stunned. “We found life on other planets? I didn’t know that.”
Kenzie said dryly, “These days the news agenda tends to be dominated by domestic issues.”
“Think of the irony,” Jerzy said. “We finally discovered life beyond Earth just as we are becoming extinct on Earth itself.”
Liu said, “These worlds are ‘Earthlike’ only in as much as they are more like Earth than Mars is, say. Nevertheless-”
“Nevertheless,” Kenzie said, “if one of them was floating around the solar system we’d fire our kids over there like a shot. Correct? So how far away are these things?”
Jerzy Glemp shrugged. “Well, there’s the rub. The nearest star system is Alpha Centauri-four light-years away. That’s a distance hard to grasp. It’s around forty trillion kilometers. A hundred million times further away than the moon is from Earth.”
Kenzie waved that away. “And the nearest Earth-like world? How far to that?”
Liu said, “The nearest reasonable candidate is sixteen light-years away.”
“Oh, that all? OK, so how do we get there? I’d guess from our previous discussion about the domes on Mars that you guys wouldn’t think we could run a space mission, unsupported, of more than a few years. A decade, tops. So that’s the timescale. Have I got that right? So how do we get to the stars in a decade? I take it chemical
