don’t know of anything since the Big Bang.’ He studied her. ‘We’re measuring the symptoms here. Guessing at a cause isn’t so easy.’
‘A cause?’
‘A purpose, then. Something has taken Venus apart. It seems to have transformed the planet’s own mass-energy to use against it.’ He grinned, uneasily. ‘We’re speculating. Maybe there is something out there that doesn’t like planets, deep gravity wells. Something that prefers thin matter clouds. Like the primordial cloud from which the Solar System formed in the first place.’
‘Something? You make it sound as if this was somehow deliberate.’
He didn’t reply to that.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’re on Hawaii. We should have ice cream. You want some ice cream?’
She shrugged, indifferent, and he went anyway.
After the Venus event Alfred had come here to the islands to work at the observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Up there, the air was so rarefied it was as clear a sky as anywhere on Earth, but human lungs only received forty per cent of their normal intake of oxygen. Nobody slept at the summit; the astronomers came down four thousand feet every dawn to sleep over at Hale Pohaku.
Alfred had come down to meet her. Monica knew there was no way she would be able to tolerate the summit conditions.
Thus, death was already closing in on her, already cutting the options available to her, the circles closing in. She would never see another mountain top.
Bullshit, she thought.
She tried to focus on Hawaii.
This island, Oahu, was dying too, though a little more slowly than she was. It had bloomed out of the sea in a fiery birth, amid gouts of lava and steam. But every year erosion dragged it down towards the water, and there was nothing, no process, to restore it.
It had happened before. There was a flaw in Earth’s mantle here, a great plume of magma which had welled up steadily for a hundred million years. It had generated Oahu; right now the Big Island was over the plume, and was being pushed towards the sky by that lithic fountain. But the relentless sliding of the tectonic plates beneath the Pacific would eventually, in a few million years, take the Big Island away from the plume. The volcano at its heart would die, and the island would be abandoned to the forces of erosion.
Thus there was a chain of dying islands tailing off to the north-west, Oahu and Kauai and Niihau, and beyond that a trail of corpses, nameless undersea mountains, each of which had once been a paradise of forests and beaches, just like this one.
Somehow it seemed an appropriate place to come to talk about the death of Venus.
Alfred returned, bearing two immense cones of ice cream. He was wearing a broad, floppy hat, a garish shirt, and shorts that made his legs look as if he had spent ten years in space.
They found a seat, and ate up the ice cream companionably.
Small talk: How are Garry and your grandkids? Fine, Alfred, when I get to see them … he’s flying out of Edwards now … I don’t think Jenine is enjoying life as an Air Force wife …
She let her attention drift. A part of her mind was already composing the report she would have to pass up to the Administration.
She wondered about telling the President about the funny physics results. Was it appropriate to include something so exotic, something nobody yet understood, something it wasn’t even possible yet to check?
On the other hand, she thought bleakly, suppose Alfred’s wilder speculations have some bearing on reality. If there is something loose in the Solar System, something transforming, something powerful enough to destroy a planet like Venus – won’t it be seen immediately in terms of a threat to the Earth?
And if it was a threat, how could they possibly deal with it, even recognize it?
‘You know,’ Alfred was saying around his ice cream, ‘no matter what the other implications of this event, one thing’s for sure.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve lost Venus. Forever. Although I suppose the truth is we lost it a long time ago, when the first space probes got there. I’m old enough to remember –’
‘You’re younger than me, Alfred.’
‘– when Arrhenius’s theory was still the paradigm. He thought the clouds were water droplets. The land was choked by swamps. A hothouse, with amphibians and dinosaurs and cave men. Even later, when it became clear from the spectroscopic evidence there was no water in the cloud tops, we still thought there might be a loophole. Maybe a world-spanning ocean of Perrier water. Or seas of oil. Why the hell not?
‘But when the Mariners got there, what they found was a big disappointment.’ He shook his head. ‘But it needn’t have stayed that way. All those stupendous schemes to terraform Venus the fringe types cooked up. You’d have to block out the sun, and let all that carbon dioxide liquefy, strike it with comets to spin it up and bring in water –’
She laughed. ‘What bull.’
‘But just think what you’d finish up with. A planet much more like Earth than Mars could ever be: continents called Aphrodite and Ishtar, oceans called Guinevere and Niobe; even enough geological activity to sustain a biosphere for billions of years.’ He sighed. ‘It was always remote. But it was possible. Maybe that is why Venus was put in the Solar System in the first place.’
She eyed him. ‘As a place for us to colonize?’
‘Why not? But now, it’s gone. Taken from us …’
‘You sound as if you’re mourning. Mourning a planet.’
‘A whole world has died here, Monica. Everything we could have learned from it, all its future possibilities lost, for all time. A world. What more appropriate object of mourning is there? … Maybe we ought to hold a wake. A global wake.’
She shivered, despite the warmth of the day. She was aware of Alfred watching her with barely concealed concern, but she had no time for that.
She looked around the bright sky for Venus, but it was either below the horizon or lost in the glare.
4
Henry Meacher flew British Airways direct into Edinburgh.
His ticket was for what BA called World Traveller Class, which meant, essentially, steerage. Henry found himself in a middle seat in the central bank of four, a long way away from the 747’s tiny windows. The stewardesses, expertly encased in make-up, were all anorexic-slim English girls with what he thought of as cut-glass accents; they walked as if their orifices were all sewn up. The distant communal video screen showed a BBC news round-up preceded by a tourist’s-eye view of the alleged ancient beauties of Britain; a little menu card told Henry he would be eating a roast beef dinner – American beef – and, later, a traditional English breakfast.
Henry buried his face in
