"A feeble state with great wealth beneath its soil, that is asking for trouble." - David Van Reybrouck
* * *
Few things pleased Morgan more than a Venusian autumn. The sun hung low on the horizon, a shimmering disk in the orange haze, throwing dim shadows onto the grassy, dark yellow ground.
Morgan breathed in the cool, sweet air as he relaxed in the community college's yard. He had twenty free minutes before his next and final class began, which was not enough time to leave, and too long to sit idly.
So Morgan ran. As the school's best track runner, he could never get enough of running. The rhythmic pounding of his feet on the ground was a second heartbeat to him, and the wind cleared his mind as it rushed over his face. At the end of the courtyard, he leaned into a turn, his small, limber form leaning to keep traction on the grass.
When Morgan had finally had enough, he checked the time. He pulled a thumb-sized device from his pocket and flicked it on, causing it to project a sharp blue screen onto the smooth building wall. It showed the weather, the planetary news, his friends' personal updates and the time.
He checked on his friends. Kaliashi had just seen a televised dirt track race and couldn't stop raving about it. Kinshasa, who loved birds, had sent a photograph of a rare specimen, complete with its five-word-long name. A few more people talked about what they had for lunch. When Morgan next checked the time, it was 11:27, time to leave.
Biology class was next. Morgan sat in the small wooden classroom, setting his holograph projector into an arm that stuck up from the corner of his desk. He synched it with the teacher's device, and it projected his textbook onto the polished surface in front of him.
In the four minutes leading up to class, the professor made small talk, but when the time came, she interrupted the flow of gossip by flinging out her hands and saying, "Let's get started." Any other teacher in town would have allowed the gab to die down naturally.
No one spoke over the professor, but Morgan listened with only half his mind, skim-reading the textbook. He perked up once, halfway through the class.
"And this process is part of the reason terraforming went so quickly," the teacher was saying. "Five hundred years ago, they thought we'd still be wearing gas masks now." She meant Earth years, as Venusians still stuck to the tradition measuring time by mother Earth. "But thanks to induced synthesis reactions, once enough hydrogen had been added to the atmosphere, the greenhouse gasses were cleared up in just four generations. And all they had to do was lay down a few strains of algae. Bacteria is powerful."
That was an oversimplification. Much careful work had been done to make the atmosphere admit just the right kinds of light to nurture Earth life, to say nothing of the substitute magnetosphere. The 2,880-hour day-night cycle was a hurdle as well.
As class ended, not a minute early or late, Morgan's body itched for movement. He stood up, breathing deeply, ready to run again. As soon as he was out of the building, he broke into a jog.
The school lay in the center of the town of Bonde Wakulima, and from there, it was fifteen-hundred-meters to the border of town, a run Morgan had been able to make nonstop since he was a child. Today, his destination was the water tower, where his friends gathered for ice cream every Tuesday afternoon.
Over the dusty, cracked asphalt roads, he loped up the hill on the northern side of town, where the braided metal struts held up a great spherical water tank bounded by a walkway. Dark figures sat around it, waving back to Morgan. He could see the bright white of their vanilla ice cream standing out against their earth-tone clothes and black African skin.
