for a moment, Garroway was utterly lost. It looked like Earth, with those piercing, sapphire blues and swirls of cloud-whites. But the sun was all wrong, far too tiny, far too brilliant, a spark, not a disk.
For just a moment, he wondered if something had happened to the sun during his long sleep. Then he wondered if he’d misunderstood the captain, that this Eris was not the frigid dwarf planet in Sol’s outer system, but an Earthlike world of some other, utterly alien star.
“That can’t be Earth’s sun,” he said, squinting at the pinpoint. “It’s way too bright.” He could see a distinct bluish tinge to the intense white of its glare.
“No, sir,” Schilling told him. She smiled.
“And since when do tiny little icebox planetoids have their own atmosphere and water?”
“Terraforming has come a long way, General,” Schilling told him. “That’s not Sol. It’s Dysnomia.”
“Dysnomia.” He blinked. In his day, Eris had been an ice, rock, and frozen methane worldlet 2500 kilometers in diameter, about eight percent larger than, and 27 percent more massive than, Pluto. Discovered in the early twenty-first century, it had a highly inclined, highly eccentric orbit, but he couldn’t remember the exact numbers without his implant. He knew the place was cold, though, down around twenty-five Kelvins or so, a scant twenty-five degrees above zero absolute. Dysnomia had been a tiny satellite of Eris, like Pluto’s Charon, but smaller, a rock only 150 kilometers across.
“The Eridian satellite,” Schilling told him. “About five hundred years ago, they planted a quantum converter on it and turned it into a microstar. It’s tiny, but it’s only about thirty-seven thousand kilometers from the planet. Orbits once in fifteen standard days. The converter provides enough heat to warm Eris, and the nanoforming matrix is doing the rest.”
“You’re losing me, Captain. They turned a 150-kilometer asteroid into a star, and then … what? Nanoforming?”
“Terraforming, using nanoreplicators and assemblers. Breaking methane, ammonia, and water ice into water, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.”
“And the star goes around the planet, instead of the other way around?”
“Exactly. Eris still rotates beneath it, though, and has a day …” She paused, closing her eyes as she checked a data base through her implant, “of twenty-eight hours and some.”
He looked into the achingly beautiful blue of the planet’s crescent. “Terraforming a planet doesn’t happen overnight. How long before people are living there?”
“Oh, they’re living there now. Not many … a few hundred thousand. Mostly military at this point. Most of them are Eulers, actually, in the Deeps. The atmosphere won’t be breathable for another few centuries, and the storms are still pretty bad, but they started colonizing it as soon as stable continents emerged from the world ocean.”
“Continents.”
A globe appeared in the air as Schilling sent a request through her implant, blue and brown, without cloud cover.
“Three main continents,” she said, and each highlighted itself on the projection in turn as she named it. “Brown, Trujillo, and Rabinowitz. Those were the discoverers of Eris, way back when. Two minor continents over here … Xena and Gabrielle.” She paused, then frowned. “Strange. No data on where those names came from.”
Garroway thought about this as Schilling led him to a table and two chairs that seemed to grow out of the deck as they approached. The technology had changed, and changed tremendously if Humankind was able now to create stars, even small ones. That was only to be expected, of course. Human technology had been in a rapidly upward-lunging, almost logarithmic curve since the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
He took one of the chairs, as Schilling sat in the other. She placed one hand, palm down, on a colored patch on the table. “What would you like to eat?”
“Captain, I have no idea. Choose something for me.”
A white, plastic hemisphere materialized in front of each of them; seconds later, the hemispheres evaporated, revealing their meals. Garroway wasn’t sure what it was—there was something that might be meat, something else that might be starchy, a third thing that was brilliant green—but he decided not to ask questions. The stuff was edible—in fact, delicious—whatever it was, and that was all he needed to know for the moment.
Other Marine personnel were in the mess hall as well, though the cavernous room was not close to being filled. The others kept their distance, however, though he saw numerous glances and curious stares. He found himself trying to listen in on conversations at the nearest tables. He was curious. How much had Anglic changed in eight centuries? Did they even speak an Anglic-derived tongue, now, or had the vagaries of history brought some other language to the fore?
Again, he decided to wait rather than bombard Schilling with questions. While he could hear voices, the nearby conversations seemed muffled, somehow, and he suspected that some sort of privacy field was blanketing the compartment.
Thirty minutes or so later, he leaned back, watching his empty plate dissolve back into the table surface. “Well, if that was a sample of the food in the forty-first century, I could get to like this time.”
“You’ll like it more with your implant.”
“Eh?”
“You’ll find nanotech is a part of just about everything now, including what you eat. And your implant has programs that let you respond in subtle ways to nano-treated food. Speaking of which … here.” She handed him a small inhaler. He hadn’t seen where she’d been carrying it on that painted-on uniform, and wondered if she’d materialized it out of the table the same way as she’d summoned their meals.
“What’s this?”
“Your new implant. We needed you to get a meal into your stomach first, so the implant nano has some raw material to work with. Just press that tip into a nostril and touch the release.”
He followed her directions. A warm, moist puff of air invaded his sinuses, and he tasted metal.
“The nano is programmed to follow the olfactory nerve into the brain,” she told him. “It knows where to go, and will begin chelating into imbedded circuits almost immediately. You’ll find yourself coming back on-line within an hour or two. Full growth will be completed within twenty hours or so.”
“That’s good.” He was still feeling shaken at the emptiness he felt without an e-connect. Damn, what had people done before cerebral implants? “And this’ll be better than my old one, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. A lot. You’ll be amazed.”
“I don’t know. Takes a lot to amaze me. What about Lofty?”
She cocked her head again. “?‘Lofty?’ Who—”
“My essistant. Personal secretary and Divisional AI. Named for Major Lofton Henderson.”
“Oh, I see. Your personal software has all been backed up in the facility network. You’ll get it all back with the download. Who is Major Henderson?”
“Check
