strangely lit metal, until the crunch of stones under his booted feet. You’re down. Now, you can turn and look. How it would have been. Should have been.
Antti Selkokari stepped out onto the frozen world.
Within twenty paces, the house was a ghost. Another ten, and it was gone. Antti was embedded in white from the surface of his skin to infinity. He looked around, suddenly cold and fearful in the knowledge that he had let his need to be admired by his grandson push him into folly. Pale fronds of trees swam momentarily through the nothing. He checked the compass. It pointed true. It pointed home. He struck out into the mist.
“Hiii! Hey! Here, boy!” he called. “Come on, where are you, you stupid mutt?”
No sign, no sound. He half-hoped that it was drowned already. It would wash up with the thaw, recognizable only by its blue plastic webbing collar. Thing-that-was-a-dog. Let it go. Your kitchen is warm, there is coffee, and you are no Mars explorer. Anything lost in this is dead.
But Yuri, he told himself. How can I tell him this and retain any honor?
Another reading on the compass, another tentative shuffle forward into the featureless white. Every footfall a test. Will it bear me. Is it rotten to its blue heart?
On Mars, there are craters silted so full of dust they cannot be seen on the surface. They wait, drowning traps of red, like buried ant-lions.
Lost in remembrance, Antti realized with a shock of cold that he had been walking without thought. He flipped open the compass. The needle was spinning, swinging wildly from point to point, hunting for home and unable to find it.
Antti Selkokari tapped the compass.
Still the needle swung.
He closed the compass, opened it again, hit it with the heel of his hand, held it upside down, shook it, shook it like he would a dog that had pissed on his dining table, pressed it up to his ear as if it might tell him the reason for its betrayal. Still, it lied. It would not tell the way home. Antti was lost. The ice held no footprints, no track back.
“Hello!” Antti shouted. “Hello! Can you hear me!”
The ice fog took his words, smeared them, returned them as whispering echoes. Echoes. Nothing in this dimensionlessness should echo.
“Hello!”
Hello hello hello hellooo hellllooooo said the echoes, in voices not his, that did not die away, but whispered on, into a mumble of conversations half heard, from another room, another universe.
Hello?
Against sense, Antti spun toward the voice so clear behind him.
Is anyone there? Who is that?
The voice was at once out there in the white and inside his head, speaking in his own Estonian and another language he did not recognize.
“Who is this?” Antti asked, and heard his own voice speak in two places, two languages, two worlds. He frowned, a thickening of the fog, a curdling of the white, a solidity, a shape. A shadow, moving toward him across the ice plain. The white swirled, and a man walked out of it.
White on gold. A line, a crack. Peer into it: a sliver of eye, a line of cheek, the corner of a lip. A face under the gold. Pull out: the crack is a hairbreadth in a curve of gold: another step’s remove, and the golden arc is the laminated visor of a pressure-suit helmet. Reflected in the visor, a landscape curved like an image in a state fair hall of mirrors. Where visor seals to helmet, the golden landscape curves away to nothing. There are hills mirrored here on either side; they slide off into nothingness, the mere suggestion of altitude. Optical lies: in truth, they are vast rim-walls, kilometers high. This same distortion gives undue prominence to the objects at the center of the field of vision. Immediate foreground: an insectlike vehicle, spiky with antennae, huge balloon wheels at the end of each of the six sprung legs. Behind it, a squat brick structure, incongruously like a Hopi pueblo, down to the satellite dish on the flat roof. Its location only adds to the likeness: a wide, dry plain of wind-eroded stones. Beyond, and dwarfing the little adobe home, a hovering saucer, keeping its station a handful of meters above the ground with twitches of its nacelle-mounted fans. The distortion of the reflection thrusts the logo on the aircraft’s nose into focus: ROTECH. It has colleagues, they hold tight formation across the valley floor as far as the visor reflections allow seeing. And beyond the flotilla of airships, and dwarfing them as they dwarf the house, the house the vehicle, the vehicle the man, the man the scratch etched by some accident in his helmet visor, the pillar. It is surely stupendous. It is buttressed like the roots of a rain-forest tree: tiny flakes of dirt cling to them. There are other pueblos, hanging from the lower slopes, insignificant as grains of salt. An airship drifts across the sheer face of the tower. It is tiny and bright as a five pice coin. Follow the huge structure up until it curves away off the edge of the visor. Look beyond: like the airships, this pillar is one of a mass. The floor of this vast canyon is forested with thousands of pillars, three kilometers high.
Pull out again, in a long, astronomical-scale zoom. The pressure-suited figure is just one of many, human and machine. The machines outnumber the humans in number and variety. The valley floor is a hive of machine species. There are high-stepping nanofacturing robots, pausing to stab proboscises into the surface and release swarms of nanoassemblers. There are surveying machines, exchanging heliographs of laser light. There are great orange worm machines, burrowing deep in the regolith, chewing dead red rock into pumice. There are planters and fermentories-great, slow, sessile things-gulping in carbon dioxide atmosphere by the ton and reacting it with water and wan sunlight into organic matter. Living stuff. The stuff of worlds. There are the fleets of heavy-lift LTAs-the man in the suit is marshaling them on some precision maneuver-and smaller, nimbler sky-craft, zipping between the big slow dirigibles on their priority missions. There are track layers and road builders and brick makers and patient little spider machines that mortar them into the neat adobes for the humans. There are machines that build machines and machines that service machines and machines that program machines and machines that repair machines and everywhere is the green circle logo and sigil of ROTECH. Remote Orbital Terraform and Environmental Control Headquarters. Swarming machine life calls green out of the red; tentative, fragile plantations of gene-tweak grasses and mosses. Beneath human perceptions, the cleverest, the most important machines, the nanoassemblers, fuse red sand into silicon pillar. On the scale of planets, other hives of machines extend primeval run-water channels into canals to carry water from the thawing north pole to the terraformed lands of Grand Valley. A flash of light: eighty kilometers up in low, fast orbit, a vana, a spinning mirror of silver polymer, frail as a hope, rolls its focus on to its true target; the northern polar cap. The scale of the work in this four-thousand kilometer rift valley only becomes apparent at this kind of altitude. To the northwest the forest of towers rise above our ascending point of view. Their tops open out into branches, those branches into twigs, bare, waiting. To the east the towers are still growing, one kilometer, two kilometers. Farther east still, trillions of assemblers swarming in the subsoil are pushing the great root-buttresses out of chaotic mesa-lands of Eos and Capri. The wave of construction passes down the chasm like a slow, silicon spring. Another glitter of light, not from an orbital mirror this time, but sun catching the edge of the world roof, five kilometers above the wind-shaved hills of Coprates. Above it now, climbing fast. The world roof flows from the east like a river of glass that falls into red emptiness.
How to terraform Mars. Easy. Stick a roof over Valles Marineris. Real greenhouse effect. By the time it is complete, it will be visible from Earth, a bright white mote in the eye of the ancient red war god.
Higher now, past the littler, lower moon. Keeping precise pace with it on the other side of the planet is the SkyWheel, the spinning ground-to-orbit space-cable. All the humans, all the machines that build the bases and plants and the machines, were spun down this cable. But the real work of terraforming, the RO in the ROTECH, is done from orbit. Up beyond the vanas and the supercores, weaving a magnetic cocoon around this tectonically dead, defenseless world, are the orbital habitats and factories and mass drivers of the planetary engineers and terraformers. By the time humans can walk unclad under the Grand Valley roof, they will form a ring around the planet, a band of satellites. The night will glitter with them.
All in a construction worker’s visor; reflected.
Ashwin Mehta edges the heavy-lift flotilla in over the construction site. His belly sensors and satellite uplinks to ROTECH’s moon ring redoubt could guide him in with laser precision but human atavism endures. The gloved hands wave him down, and he follows. Spinners skitter clear. The winds that howl the full length of the rift valley have buried the load with sand: Ashwin’s trim-fans sweep it clear as he maneuvers with millimeter precision. He feels the lift cables go out of him: it is a physical, pleasurable sensation but not one for which his flesh body has an
