matrix moist. Then add your bacterial inoculant and turn up the heat to around three hundred K. The matrix will rise like yeasted dough as it becomes that most delicious and rare substance, soil. (Those wanting a fuller explanation of how to make soil are referred to my bestselling All About Dirt.)
With a soil base cooked up, your biome is well on its way. Succession regimens at this point will vary, depending on what you are looking for at climax. But it’s true to say that a lot of terraria designers start out with a marsh of some kind, because it’s the fastest way to bulk up your soil and your overall biomass. So if you are in a hurry to occupy, this is often a good way to start.
When you’ve got a warm marsh going, either freshwater or salt, you are already cooking good. Smells will rise in your cylinder, also hydrological problems. Fish, amphibian, animal, and bird populations can be introduced at this point, and should be if you want maximum biomass growth. But here you have to watch out for a potential danger: once you get your marsh going, you may fall in love with it. Fine for you, but it happens a bit too often. We have too many estuarine biomes now, and not enough of the other biomes we are hoping to cook out here.
So try to keep your distance at this point; keep a depopulate marsh, or stay away from it during this part of the process. Or join a trading scheme in which you trade asteroids when they are at the marsh point, so that you come into a new one wanting to change things, unattached to what’s already there.
With the hefty biomass created by a marsh, you can then build up land using some of your excavated materials, saved on the surface of the asteroid for this moment. Hills and mountains look great and add texture, so be bold! This process will redirect your water into new hydrologies, and this is the best time to introduce new species, also to export species you no longer want, giving them to newer terraria that might need them.
Thus over time you can transform the interior of your terrarium to any of the 832 identified Terran biomes, or design an Ascension of your own making. (Be warned that many Ascensions fall as flat as bad souffles. The keys to a successful Ascension are so many that I have had to pen another volume, How to Mix and Match Biomes! now available.)
Ultimately you will need to make many temperature, landscape, and species adjustments, to get to the kind of stable climax community you want. Any possible landscape is achievable; sometimes the results are simply stunning. Always the entire landscape will be curving up around you, rising on both sides and meeting overhead, so that the look of the land will envelop you like a work of art-a goldsworthy inscribed on the inside of a rock, like a geode or a Faberge egg.
Obviously it is also possible to make interiors that are all liquid. Some of these aquaria or oceanaria include archipelagoes; others are entirely water, even their walls, which are sometimes refrozen transparently so that in the end when you approach them, they look like diamonds or water droplets floating in space. Some aquaria have no air space in their middles.
As for aviaries, every terrarium and most aquaria are also aviaries, stuffed with birds to their maximum carrying capacity. There are fifty billion birds on Earth, twenty billion on Mars; we in the terraria could outmatch them both combined.
Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And there are also the heavily agricultural terraria, farmworlds devoted to producing what has become a very large percentage of the food feeding the people of Earth.
These facts are worth noting and enjoying. We cook up our little bubble worlds for our own pleasure, the way you would cook a meal, or build something, or grow a garden-but it’s also a new thing in history, and the heart of the Accelerando. I can’t recommend it too highly! The initial investment is nontrivial, but there are still many unclaimed asteroids out there.
WAHRAM AND SWAN
Although no doubt they were simply the result of an engineering response to an engineering problem, regarded as an aesthetic matter the Mercurial launching gyres were interesting. A maglev tube twisted in a cone set on its point, increasing in size as it rose. The tip of the cone was secured to a platform that moved in a circle, about the size of the widest part of the cone. The movement of the platform exaggerated very effectively the force of acceleration on the ferries as they were being magnetically thrown up the tube. Thus the ferry they were in had them seated sideways to the ground, but as it careened around and up, their floor became most definitely down, and then with dizzying speed they were launched into space, going so fast that if there had been an atmosphere they would have burned to a crisp the moment they left the tube. The effect as seen from the spaceport resembled some kind of antique carnival ride. From inside the ferry it proved to be a quite serious acceleration, very near the maximum allowed in commercial travel, which was 3.5 g.
Swan Er Hong had strapped herself into the seat beside Wahram just before takeoff, grimacing apologetically at the cliche of her lateness. Now she leaned toward him to look out the little window at the rapidly receding craterscape of her home world. Quickly the land changed from a plane to a ball, a thin crescent of it bathed in sunlight, the gibbous nightside black. Mercury was an interesting place, but Wahram was not unhappy to leave; despite the locals’ best efforts to spruce it up with art, the landscape was a cindery clinker. And the truth was that when he was inside its marvelous gliding city, the sudden blink of illumination on high points to the west always reminded him of the sun, following them relentlessly, always about to burst over the horizon and torch everything.
Their ferry was going to catch the terrarium Alfred Wegener, which was moving so fast that the ferry would have to make another long three-g burn to catch up. During this time, Wahram shifted his seat into bed mode and endured like everyone else. Across the room Swan groaned and curled around herself on her bed. Wahram forbade himself to think about the studies that had been made on the effect of g-forces on the human brain, delicate goo that it was, trapped without much padding inside its hard prison walls. Then the Wegener caught them and reeled them in with a final little squish of g, as if to emphasize the problem.
After that Wahram and the other passengers had to adjust to the sudden weightlessness, and pull themselves from the ferry into the terrarium’s dock, then through the neck and down broad padded stairs to the cylinder floor.
The interior space in the Wegener was pretty substantial, about twenty kilometers long and five across, spun to a one-g equivalent. The great majority of the interior space was park, with a few small towns scattered mostly fore and aft. The mix of savanna and pampas was very attractive, Wahram thought as he walked toward the first village, looking up at the land overhead. Grass prairie and patches of forest arched like a giant Sistine Chapel overhead, a Sistine on which Michelangelo had painted a version of Eden-a savanna, the first human landscape, appealing to something very deep in the mind. Although terrarium topology always made Wahram feel as if he were inside a map that had been rolled into a tube. As one looked along the longitude line one occupied, the land always appeared as a long U-valley, with nearby trees topped by higher, more distant trees, tilting toward the valley bottom in a curve of ever-steepening parkland, up to vertical side walls, as in certain great glacial U-valleys-but then the walls continued up and folded over, breaking past verticality in a manner very distinct to the eye. Above that line the landscape was simply overhead, and quite undeniably upside down. As now, for instance, when beyond a cloud he saw the tops of a sheet of flocking birds, flying over the surface of a lake hanging directly over his head.
Wahram went to a little Saturn House in the first town, called Plum Lake, and checked in. They kept a restaurant in the ground floor, so he signed up for kitchen duties (he liked all the simplest chores), and after showering he took a walk around the town. It was a handsome place, with a lakefront and a hill, and a tram station at its eastern end. Trams ran through parkland to the other towns. The central plaza was full of Venusians, presumably on their way home: tall broad-shouldered young Chinese, for the most part, with intent eyes and big smiles. They were working on Venus hip deep in dry ice, doing dangerous things. Wahram engaged in similar work when he was home on Titan, but Titan had only. 14 g, and this had often saved him from little accidents; Venus, at. 9 g, impressed him as dangerous.
