The End of Eden (Water Worlds 1)

Chapter 5

5

"Father," I spoke up, "I do not understand. Why smash up perfectly good planets?"

"Perfectly good? Ha!" His laugh was dark and twisted, and made him look angry. And I saw a hint of that demon in his eyes, again.

"'Perfectly good' is what I hope to make them! Mars is a frozen wasteland and Venus, a boiling ball of poisonous gases. With a proper amount and the right kinds of water locked in each ice world, and in as little as a few hundred years time after impact, our two neighboring planets will begin the process of terraforming. All by themselves. Why we could warm Mars and cool Venus and maybe help our people grow beyond the limits of this slowly strangling planet before we completely destroy it."

Then he began a speech I hadn't heard before, and although I understood only some of it, still it didn't matter. I loved hearing Father talk. He had a way of painting pictures with words that seemed logical and compelling, and now I was his sole audience. He was animated like I'd never seen. I let him go on, and nodded occasionally.

"Until now, with all the wealth of the world, the best we could manage was to send a few brave pioneers to a meagre little outpost on Mars. And Venus? Completely beyond our power to sustain even a robotic landing for more than a month before the pressure and gases crushed and corroded our best materials. Compared to the power of the planets, our technology is immature. But so is Humanity. Poverty, overpopulation, pollution. And especially war. All the time, war. In every generation. Setting us back perhaps thousands of years more from where we should be as a species. Generations from now, people will curse us for how we ruined this jewel of an oasis in the middle of literally nothing."

I had never thought of war that way before. The histories always made it seem so, oh, I don't know, glorious somehow.

"Every prediction of settling Mars has been wrong so far," he continued. "It looks like we may never get to the planets in large enough numbers to make colonies viable. That's my greatest fear. It could take a thousand years or more before we have solved our bickering long enough to afford a genuine attempt at settling other planets. But if we can survive until then, I think my new planets could be ready. Imagine what we could do with two new worlds! We could take people and plants and animals of all sorts. New Earths for new civilizations! But we have to learn how to survive until then, and of that I am not optimistic."

He paused. Father liked to think big but this sounded like anime to me, and even children know anime isn't real.

"But if Mars and Venus are so different," I asked, "how can you make them both like Earth?"

"That is exactly the right question!" He seemed genuinely delighted and his spirits lifted immediately. "Let me explain."

He motioned with his arm. The blank wall in front of his desk lit with a pop, and the yellow room lights dimmed.

The Solar System was on display, with the planets lined up in their orbits around a fiery sun. The asteroid belt was a smoky region beyond Mars, and a gray cloud of what looked like gas, hung far out in the distance, beyond the giant planets.

He waved his hand and the scene was overlaid with a series of spiraling loops, each studded with a small, silver spacecraft. With another wave of his hand, the whole thing set in motion.

It was beautiful, moving through space in living circles like that. Our point of view changed to keep pace with one of the little spaceships. First we looped around the inner planets, faster and faster, then arced out past the gas giants at the edge of the Solar System.

Everything was labeled with floating ideograms, and numbers kept running time and distance in the sidebar. The scene moved through such amazing distances and passed so many exotic worlds, I forgot everything else.