The next day Swan returned to Mqaret’s lab. Again he was in his office staring at nothing. Suddenly Swan realized it was a relief to have something to be angry at.
Mqaret roused himself. “How was your trip out with Wahram?”
“He’s slow, he’s rude, he’s autistic. He’s boring.”
Mqaret smiled a little. “Actually it sounds like you found him interesting.”
“Please.”
“Well, I can assure you Alex found him interesting. She spoke of him pretty often. A few times she made it clear they were involved in things she thought were very important.”
This gave Swan pause, as it was meant to. “Gran, can I have another look around her study?”
“Of course.”
S wan went down the hall to Alex’s room at the end, entered, and closed the door. She went to the one window and looked out at the city, all roof tiles and greenery from this vantage point.
She wandered around the study, looking at things. Mqaret had not yet changed anything. She wondered if he would, and if so, when. All Alex’s things, scattered as always. Her absence was a kind of presence, and again grief stabbed through Swan’s middle and she had to sit down.
After a while she stood and began a more methodical examination. If Alex had left something for her, where would she have put it? Swan could not guess. Alex had wanted always to keep her business offline, out of the cloud, unrecorded, live only, in real time only. But if she had done anything like this, she would have to have figured out some kind of method. Knowing her, it might be a purloined-letter type of thing: a paper note, for instance, right there on her desktop.
So Swan hunted through small stacks of paper on her desk, still thinking it over. If she had had information she wanted Swan to pass along, without Swan necessarily knowing what it was… if there were a lot of data… possibly it would be more than a paper note. And possibly she would want only Swan to find it.
She began to wander the room, talking to herself, and looking closely at things. The room’s control AI would know the room was occupied by only a single person and, with voice and retina, could certainly be set to identify the person.
There was a little toilet room attached to the study, with a sink and mirror, so now she went into it. “I’m here, Alex,” Swan said sadly. “I’m here if you want me.”
She looked into the wall mirror, then into a little oval mirror on a stand next to the sink. Sad Swan’s bloodshot eyes.
A jewelry box next to the oval mirror fell open; Swan jumped back into the wall, then collected herself. She looked in the box. Jewelry tray; take it out; and under it were three small white paper envelopes. All had written on one side In Case of My Death; on the other sides they were marked For Mqaret, For Swan, and For Wang on Io.
Hands trembling, Swan took the one marked for her and tore it open. Two little data tabs fell out. One of them was murmuring, “Swan, Swan, Swan.” Swan put it to her ear, her teeth clenched, tears starting to her eyes.
“My dear Swan, I am sorry you are hearing this,” Alex’s voice said. It was just like hearing a ghost, and Swan clutched her hands over her chest.
The little voice went on: “Very sorry, in fact, because if you’re hearing this, it means I’m gone. My room AI has heard about my death, and it knows to open this box if you come in here alone. It’s the best plan I could think of. Sorry to intrude on you like this, but it’s important. This is kind of an insurance policy, because I’ve got some things going on that need to continue even if I die, and I don’t want to tell anyone else here about them. And really at our age you can go any time, so I’m setting this up. If you’re hearing this, I need your help. Please take the envelope for Wang out to Io and give it to him in person. Wang and I and a few others are working on a couple of very important projects together, and we’ve been trying to keep completely offline with them, which is very difficult to do when we live so far apart. You can help me hugely by taking him his envelope. But please keep the matter entirely to yourself. Also, if you would let your Pauline read the other chip in your envelope and then destroy the chip, that would serve as a secure backup. They both are one-reads. I hate to do even this much. But I know you don’t usually link Pauline to other qubes, and if you would keep it that way, it would be better for our plan. Wang will explain more to you, as will Wahram from Titan. Good-bye, my Swan. I love you.”
That was it. Swan tried to listen to it again, but it was inert.
She put the other tab up to Pauline’s membrane, in the skin at the base of her neck. When Pauline said “Done” she put the inert tabs and the two remaining envelopes into her pocket and went to find Mqaret.
He was in his office, poking around in a 3-D image of what looked like a protein. “Look what I found,” Swan said. She explained what had happened.
“That box was locked,” Mqaret said. “I knew it was her jewelry, and I figured I would run into the key some time or other.”
He stared blankly at his envelope, seeming in no hurry to open it; possibly even a little afraid of it. Swan let him be, went out of the room. “Pauline,” she said after she left, “you got the contents of that tab?”
“Yes.”
“What was on it?”
“I am instructed to convey the information to Wang’s qube, on Io.”
“But tell me just generally what’s on it.”
Pauline did not reply, and after a while Swan cursed her and turned her off.
Both tabs were now inert; Alex’s ghost had departed. Swan was not entirely sorry. The shock of hearing Alex’s voice speaking to her was still causing her to tremble.
She went back into Mqaret’s office. He was white-faced, his mouth a little knot. He looked up at her.
“She gave you something to take to Io?”
“Yes. Do you know what it’s about?”
“No. But I do know Alex had an inner group of especially close associates. Wahram was one of them, and Wang too.”
“And what were they up to?”
Mqaret shrugged. “She spared me that kind of thing. But I could see she thought it was important. Something about Earth, I think.”
Swan thought it over. “If it was important, and she was keeping things off the record, she would have known her death might cause problems. So she left us these little recordings.”
“It was like her ghost,” Mqaret said shakily. “She spoke to me.”
“Yes,” Swan said, unable to say more. “Well… I guess I’m going to take the third envelope she left to Io, like she told me to.”
“Good,” Mqaret said.
“Wahram already asked me to go out there, now that I think of it. And he kept asking if she left us anything for him.”
Mqaret nodded. “He was part of it.”
“Yes. And that inspector too. So I guess I’ll go. But I don’t think I want to tell him about these messages. Alex didn’t say anything about that.”
“He may guess, just by the fact you’re going.”
“Let him guess.”
Now Mqaret regarded her with a sympathetic squint. “You’re going to have to figure things out as best you can. You may even have to step in and do some of the things Alex would have done.”
“How can I do that? No one can do that.”
“You don’t know. Pauline will help you, and maybe this Titan of yours also. And if you have to act in Alex’s place-she would have liked that.”
“Maybe.” Swan was not so sure.
“Alex will have had a plan. She always did.”
Swan sighed, lanced again by the thought of Alex’s absence. These ghostly messages were not even close to an adequate replacement for her. “All right, then. I’ll go out to see this Wang.”
“Good. And be ready to act.”
S wan found out where the offworld diplomats still in town were staying, went to the terrace where the Saturnian delegation had been housed. When she entered the courtyard of the place, she immediately came on Wahram, head down as he conferred with the little police inspector, Jean Genette. The sight of the two of them together gave her a shock, and something in their body language said they were well acquainted. Co-conspirators, by the look of them.
Cheeks burning, Swan approached them. “What’s this?” she demanded. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”
Neither of them at first replied.
Finally the small waved a hand. “Fitz Wahram and I often work together on various system issues. We were just now deciding to visit a mutual acquaintance.”
“Wang?” Swan said. “Wang of Io?”
“Why… yes,” the inspector said, looking up at her curiously. “Wang is an associate of ours, as he was of Alex. We were working together.”
“As I mentioned to you,” Wahram said in his low croak. “When we were coming back from Tintoretto.”
“Yes, yes,” Swan said sharply. “You asked me to join you on that trip, without really explaining why.”
“Well…” The toad man’s broad face was looking a little discomfited. “It’s true, but you see, there are reasons to be discreet…” He looked down at Genette as if hoping for help.
“I’m going,” Swan said, interrupting their glance. “I want to go.”
“Ah,” Wahram said with another quick glance at Genette. “Good.”
Extracts (1)
Take an asteroid at least thirty kilometers on its long axis. Any type will do-solid rock, rock and ice, metallic, even ice balls, although each presents different problems.
Attach a self-replicating excavator assembly to one end of the asteroid, and with it, hollow out your asteroid along its long axis. Leave the wall at least two kilometers thick at all points except for your entry hole. Assure the interior integrity of the wall by coating it with a dura of suitable strength.
As your assembly hollows the interior, be aware that ejection of the excavated material (best aimed toward a Lagrange salvage point, to collect the salvage fee) will represent your best chance to reposition your terrarium, if you want it in a different orbit. Store excess ejecta on the surface for later use.
When the interior is hollowed out, leaving an empty cylinder at least five kilometers in diameter and ten kilometers long (but bigger is better!), your excavator assembly will return to the access hole and there reconfigure itself into your terrarium’s propulsion unit. Depending on the mass of your new world, you may want to install a mass driver, an antimatter “lightning push” engine, or an Orion pusher plate.
Beyond the forward end of the cylinder, on the bow of your new terrarium, attach a forward unit at the point of the long axis. Eventually your terrarium will be spinning at a rotational rate calculated to create the effect of gravity on the inner surface of the interior cylinder so that when you are inside, you will be pulled to the floor as if in a gravity field. This is the g equivalent, or gequivalent. The forward unit will then be connected to the bow of the terrarium by a geared axle, to allow the forward unit not to spin but instead to stay fixed. It will be nearly weightless in this bowsprit chamber, but many functions of the terrarium will go better without the spinning, including docking, viewing, navigating, etc.
It is possible to build an interior cylinder that spins freely inside an asteroid that does not spin-the so-called prayer wheel configuration-and this does give you both an interior with g effect and a non-spinning exterior, but it is expensive and finicky. Not recommended, though we have seen some good ones.
When stern and bow are properly installed and configured, and the asteroid is set spinning, the interior is ready to be terraformed.
Begin with a light dusting of heavy metals and rare earths, as specified for the biome you are trying to create. Be aware that no Terran biome ever began with the simple ingredients you will be starting with on an asteroid. Biospheres need their vitamins right from the start, so be sure to arrange for the importation of the mix you want, usually including molybdenum, selenium, and phosphorus. These are often applied in “puff bombs” set off along the axis of the cylindrical space. Don’t poison yourself when you do this!
After that, string the axis of the cylinder with your terrarium’s sunline. This is a lighting element, on which the lit portion moves at whatever speed you choose. The lit portion of the sunline usually starts the day in the stern of the cylinder, after a suitable period of darkness (during which any streetlights overhead will serve as stars). The lit portion of the line, appropriately bright, then traverses the sunline from stern to bow (or east to west, as some describe it), taking usually the same time as a Terran day, as measured by the latitude of your biome on Earth. Seasons inside your terrarium will be rendered accordingly.
Now you can aerate the interior to the gas mix and pressure you desire, typically somewhere between 500 and 1100 millibars of pressure, in something like the Terran mix of gases, with perhaps a dash more oxygen, though the fire risk quickly rises there.
After that, you need biomass. Naturally you will have in your spice rack the complete genetic codes of all the creatures you intend to introduce into your biome. Generally you will be either recreating some Terran biome, or else mixing up something new, hybrid biomes most people call Ascensions, after Ascension Island on Earth, the site of the first such hybrid (started inadvertently by Darwin himself!) All the genomes for all the species of your particular biome will be available for print on demand, except for the bacteria involved, which are simply too numerous and too genetically labile to categorize. For them you will have to apply the appropriate inoculant, usually a muck or goo made of a few tons of the bacterial suite that you want.
Luckily bacteria grow very fast in an empty ecological niche, which is what you now have. To make it even more welcoming, scrape the interior wall of your cylinder, then crumble the rock of the scrapings finely, to a consistency ranging from large gravel to sand. Mixed with an edible aerogel, this then becomes the matrix for your soil. Put all the ice gathered in your scraping aside, except for enough when melted to make your crumbled rock matrix moist. Then add your bacterial inoculant and turn up the heat to around three hundred K. The matrix will rise like yeasted dough as it becomes that most delicious and rare substance, soil. (Those wanting a fuller explanation of how to make soil are referred to my bestselling All About Dirt.)
With a soil base cooked up, your biome is well on its way. Succession regimens at this point will vary, depending on what you are looking for at climax. But it’s true to say that a lot of terraria designers start out with a marsh of some kind, because it’s the fastest way to bulk up your soil and your overall biomass. So if you are in a hurry to occupy, this is often a good way to start.
When you’ve got a warm marsh going, either freshwater or salt, you are already cooking good. Smells will rise in your cylinder, also hydrological problems. Fish, amphibian, animal, and bird populations can be introduced at this point, and should be if you want maximum biomass growth. But here you have to watch out for a potential danger: once you get your marsh going, you may fall in love with it. Fine for you, but it happens a bit too often. We have too many estuarine biomes now, and not enough of the other biomes we are hoping to cook out here.
So try to keep your distance at this point; keep a depopulate marsh, or stay away from it during this part of the process. Or join a trading scheme in which you trade asteroids when they are at the marsh point, so that you come into a new one wanting to change things, unattached to what’s already there.
With the hefty biomass created by a marsh, you can then build up land using some of your excavated materials, saved on the surface of the asteroid for this moment. Hills and mountains look great and add texture, so be bold! This process will redirect your water into new hydrologies, and this is the best time to introduce new species, also to export species you no longer want, giving them to newer terraria that might need them.
Thus over time you can transform the interior of your terrarium to any of the 832 identified Terran biomes, or design an Ascension of your own making. (Be warned that many Ascensions fall as flat as bad souffles. The keys to a successful Ascension are so many that I have had to pen another volume, How to Mix and Match Biomes! now available.)
Ultimately you will need to make many temperature, landscape, and species adjustments, to get to the kind of stable climax community you want. Any possible landscape is achievable; sometimes the results are simply stunning. Always the entire landscape will be curving up around you, rising on both sides and meeting overhead, so that the look of the land will envelop you like a work of art-a goldsworthy inscribed on the inside of a rock, like a geode or a Faberge egg.
Obviously it is also possible to make interiors that are all liquid. Some of these aquaria or oceanaria include archipelagoes; others are entirely water, even their walls, which are sometimes refrozen transparently so that in the end when you approach them, they look like diamonds or water droplets floating in space. Some aquaria have no air space in their middles.
As for aviaries, every terrarium and most aquaria are also aviaries, stuffed with birds to their maximum carrying capacity. There are fifty billion birds on Earth, twenty billion on Mars; we in the terraria could outmatch them both combined.
Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And there are also the heavily agricultural terraria, farmworlds devoted to producing what has become a very large percentage of the food feeding the people of Earth.
These facts are worth noting and enjoying. We cook up our little bubble worlds for our own pleasure, the way you would cook a meal, or build something, or grow a garden-but it’s also a new thing in history, and the heart of the Accelerando. I can’t recommend it too highly! The initial investment is nontrivial, but there are still many unclaimed asteroids out there.