evidence of particularly rich seams of mineral ores near the surface. A paucity of asteroids in this system, too.”
Wilson folded his arms. “I don’t get it. These are indicators of what?”
“That somebody used up the easily available resources-the oil, the easily mined ores, even off-world resources in the asteroids. And then they died out, or went away. We might find direct evidence one way or the other when we start doing some real archaeology down on the surface.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of sand to sift.”
“My God,” Holle whispered.
“I know,” Kelly said. “It’s not good for us. But isn’t it wonderful?” And, just for a moment, it was as if they were Candidates again, marveling together over some wondrous bit of scholarship. But they weren’t here for scholarship today.
Somebody called, “And what about the obliquity? I thought that was the big problem.”
Venus allowed herself a rueful smile. “I was saving the best until last.”
She brought up a fresh display. This showed Earth II and its sun, 82 Eridani. The diagram wasn’t to scale, planet and star looking like two light-bulbs, and the planet’s orbit was a glowing yellow circle around the sun. The planet’s rotation axis showed as a glowing splinter pushed through its bulk, a splinter that pointed almost directly at the sun.
Venus said, “As the planet goes around the sun, the axis keeps pointing the same way-just as for Earth. You can see the consequences.” She tapped a key and the planet zipped around its star, keeping its axis pointing in the same direction in space. Earth II’s year was about the same as Earth’s, so after six months the north pole would be plunged into shadow, while its south pole was in the light. “Earth’s obliquity, the tilt of its axis, is about twenty- three degrees, compared to Earth II’s ninety. Life on Earth evolved to cope with moderate seasonality. Here you have the most severe seasonality you can imagine.
“Every part of the planet except an equatorial strip will suffer months of perpetual darkness, months of perpetual light. Away from the equator you’ll suffer extreme heat, aridity, followed by months of Arctic cold-we estimate the surface temperature will drop to a hundred degrees below across much of the space-facing hemisphere, and there’ll be one hell of a blanket of snow and ice. Even the equator would be a challenge to inhabit, for even at the height of summer in either hemisphere the sun would be low, the heat budget minimal, the climate wintry.”
Venus restored the image of the planet, the tilted-over world with its friendly looking continents. Now she made the image accelerate through a simulation of its seasonal cycles. Ice crusted the continents, only to clear and leave them desiccated, brick red. “We can’t survive this,” she said. “Oh, maybe we could adapt to one extreme or another. But not to these swings, year on year, from baking aridity to an Antarctic chill. Our plants, our animals, couldn’t cope with it either. The only possible habitation would be on the equator, but there’s very little equatorial land, a few islands and a slice of the Belt… We lucked out. We couldn’t see the rotation axis from Earth. We couldn’t have predicted these features.”
She fell silent. Her audience, in silence save for the wriggles of children, gloomily watched as her toy planet suffered its cycling seasons.
Theo Morell surprised Holle by calling down, “You say this wasn’t visible from the Earth. OK. But you must have been aware of some of these problems, particularly the axis thing, from further out. You’ve spent the last ten years looking out of that cupola of yours.”
“Yes, I-”
“When did you know Earth II was going to be a bust?”
Venus glanced at Wilson, who shrugged and looked away. “Around two years ago. The data started hardening then-we’d had some suspicions. Two years ago I was sure enough to take it to Wilson, for instance.”
Mentioning Wilson was a way to bring herself into his protection, Holle realized. But the mood in the chamber was switching, through shock and disappointment to a kind of anger. Theo shouted, “And you kept them a secret, these ‘suspicions’ of yours?”
Wilson stepped in. “That was all we had. Suspicions. We needed to get here to confirm it all. And besides, we couldn’t exactly change course. You know that you can’t control a warp bubble from the inside. Now is the right time to deal with this, and here we are doing just that, everything out in the open.” He turned to Venus. “You still have the floor. What do you recommend?”
She looked up, her face set. “That we can’t live here, on Earth II. The journey isn’t over. We have to go on. Sorry, but that’s it.”
There was a moment of shocked silence. Then people started shouting, pointing at Venus as she stood defiantly by her model, surely wishing she was back in the sanctuary of her cupola.
We have to go on, Venus had said. But, Holle wondered, thrilled and awed, go on to where?
71
Wilson stepped to the center of the stage and bellowed, “Shut up! I’m speaker, remember, so stop talking.” That raised an ironic laugh, and broke the mood a bit. Wilson said, “One at a time. Elle.” He pointed to Elle Strekalov, standing by on a catwalk. “You worked with Venus on all this stuff. What have you got to say?”
“That I don’t agree,” Elle called down. Holle immediately wondered if Wilson had called her first knowing she would dissent from Venus. “Maybe we can make a go of it here. Venus, you said yourself that there’s at least some equatorial land we could colonize. Otherwise we could consider strings of rafts-”
Paul Shaughnessy hooted. “Rafts? If we wanted to live on rafts, we could have stayed on fucking Earth.”
“You illegals should have,” somebody called back, and there was a rumble of anger, the usual tensions barely suppressed.
“One at a time,” Wilson growled. “Go on, Elle.”
“OK, not rafts. We need to get down there and understand how the native life survives-because survive it does, we can see that. For instance, trees. Because the ice melts off annually the depth of any freezing would be shallow, maybe two or three meters. You could imagine a tree with long roots tapping into water and nutrients deep down beneath the frozen surface. Needle leaves like a conifer that it never sheds. Some kind of transpiration adaptation for the dry months. We could gen-eng trees from Earth to live that way,” Elle insisted. “As for animals, their crucial feature is mobility. We could develop migratory herds from our stock. The Belt especially is a north- south corridor which the herds could use to escape the aridity and the freezing, going wherever the climate was temperate in a given month.”
Masayo called, “And what about the people? Will we have to migrate too?”
“No,” Elle said defiantly. “We could seek shelters where we could over winter and over summer, ride out the extremes. Caves, maybe.”
“Caves?” Paul Shaughnessy called. “Rafts, now caves?”
Elle pressed on, “Look, this planet is not uninhabitable. There are places where the growing season is longer than it was on Earth-though you have to wait that much longer for the next season to come around. With time, with a program of genetic modification, of continent-wide seeding, of building or adapting suitable shelters, and maybe ultimately a degree of terraforming-”
Venus said, “We won’t have the resources to achieve all that, even assuming it’s possible. We’ll be fighting for survival from the day we land.”
Wilson said, “Anybody else?”
Holle waved her own hand. “Venus-you said we couldn’t stay here, we had to go on. So where do we go?”
Venus smiled. “Thank you, Holle. Look-during the interstellar cruise we extended the deep sky survey begun on Earth, searching for habitable planets as far as we can see. We thought it was one of the greatest legacies we could leave for the next generation. And that’s how we came up with this-an alternative destination.”
