she said, Of course. Channel opened. Go ahead, Bella. Edna, its me. Listen, dear, I have a new mission for you. I need you to go to Mars...
As she spoke, she glanced at her calendar. Only months were left. From now on, she sensed, whatever happened, the tension would rise, and the pace of events accelerate inexorably. She only hoped she would be able to exercise sound judgment, even now.
PART 4 DECISIONS 47: OPTIONS
July 2070
Yuri came running in. He spread his softscreen out on the crew table. At last I got the stuff downloaded from Mir...
The screen began to fill up with images of worlds, blurry photographs, and blue-green pencil sketches.
Wells Stations Can Two, the house, had one big inflatable table, used for crew meals, conferences, as a work surface. The table was modular; it could be split up into two or three. It was another bit of confinement psychology, Myra understood. The crew didnt even have to eat together, if they chose not.
Right now all the bits of the big table were pushed together. For days it had been used as the focus of a kind of unending conference. Yuri was trying to make sense of the alternate-Mars images Bisesas phone had slowly, painfully returned through the low-bandwidth Eye link. Ellie was slaving over her analysis of the Eyes gravitational cage. Only Hanse Critchfield wasnt working on some aspect of the Q-bomb threat, insisting he was more use with his beloved machines.
And Myra, Alexei, and Grendel Speth, with comparatively little to contribute, sat glumly at the scuffed table, cups of cool low-pressure coffee before them.
There was a sense of shabbiness in this roundhouse on Mars, Myra thought, compared to the expensive, expansive, light-filled environs of Cyclops. Yet, as Athena kept assuring them, they were at the focus of a response to a danger of cosmic proportions. The detonation in the asteroid belt had been visible on all the human worlds. Much of Earth had shut down, a civilization still traumatized by the sunstorm huddled in bunkerlike homes, waiting.
But time was running out. And on Mars there was a sense of rising panic. The Earth warship Liberator was now only days away, and they all knew why it was coming.
All right, Yuri said. Heres what weve got. As I understand it, the consensus among us is that the Mir universe contains a set of time-sliced samples. A showcase of solar life at its optimum on each world.
All Sols children at their prettiest, Grendel said. But it cant last. I mean, both Venus and Mars must have reached their peak of biodiversity in the early days of the solar system, when the sun was much cooler. As best anybody can tell, the Mir sun is a copy from the thirteenth century. That sun is too hot for these worlds. They cant last long.
But, Yuri growled, the point is, here are the worlds of the solar system as they were in the deep past. The question is how they got from past to present, what happened that made them as they are today. Now, look at Venus. We think we understand this case, he said. Right? A runaway greenhouse, the oceans evaporating, the water broken up by the sunlight and lost altogether...
Once Venus had been moist, blue and serene. Too close to the sun, it overheated, and its oceans evaporated. With the water lost to space Venus had developed a new thick atmosphere, a blanket of carbon dioxide baked out of the seabed rock, and the greenhouse effect intensified until the ground started to glow, red-hot.
A horror show, but we understand it. For Venus, our models fit, said Yuri. Yes? But now we turn to Mars. Mars was once Earthlike; but, too small, too far from the sun, it dried and cooled. We understand that much. But look at this.
He displayed contrasting profiles, of the ancient Mars on which they stood, and the young Mars of the Mir universe. The northern hemisphere of ancient Mars was visibly depressed beneath the neat circular arc of its younger self.
Something happened here, Yuri said, his anger burning. Something hugely violent.
Myra saw it. It must have been like a hammer to the crown of the skull, a tremendous blow centered here, at the north pole. It had been powerful enough to create the Vastitas Borealis, like a crater that spanned the whole of the northern hemisphere.
They all saw the implication, immediately. A Q-bomb, Alexei said. Scaled to Marss mass. And directed here, at the north pole.