Ian McDonald - Ares Express

This little red world was never the nearest, but had always been dearest to the hearts and bones of Motherworld. Since before words, in the great songtime of the dry plain, the ancestors of humans had looked up to this the speck of blood where the needle of imagination pricked the sky and invested it with power. An angry star, the eye of a martial god, masculine, stomping and sanguine, armoured in rust. It rose and set on a million lootings, burnings, invadings and besiegings. When the gods died, the warlike aspect was transferred and made concrete in the planet itself. It hung by night, watching, while minds immeasurably superior to man’s drew up plans. The world itself was our red enemy. Even its puny, pumicey moons were demonised. Fear! Terror! Our true enemy is always our neighbour. Naked to our lenses, human imagination had engineered its surface. Whether watered by slow canals, galloped across by green or red barbarians; contemplated by a wistful, autumn people; the little world next one out, unlike the other globes in the system, rocky or smothered with steam, had always possessed a geography. It had regions, landscapes, places. Names were written on its skin. To name a thing has always been to claim possession of it.

It was only when the first space vehicles went out from Motherworld that its humanity realised the long injustice they had committed. This was no war-lord, no red destroyer. Beneath the thin, cold unbreathable atmosphere—no life here, another myth dashed—and the veils of dust was the face of a woman, graceful, refined, strong and mysterious. It had good bones, the little red world.

Here, in the early space days, the ancient and persistent lie of “Motherworld” was exposed. The genders had always bent the other way. A woman must be possessed. A gentle wooing by go-betweens, then the men were sent out from the aggressive bigger blue dot to lay claim to the world next door. They drove round in their machines, put their feet on it, stuck their flags in it, made it theirs. A forced marriage of worlds. After wedding, impregnation. The barren must be made to carry life. The arrogance was monumental, the vision more than its equal. It was a big universe out there, and hostile to clever carbon. But even the technologically extended lives of the golden who controlled the home planet’s immense resources were too short to measure the scale of transforming one world into another. Water gushing down the dried-up riverbeds, spring green blooming across the high plateaulands, waves breaking on the red shores of shallow blue seas: these were visions no amount of their wealth could buy them. Their engineering advisers gave them a quick, flashy, hideously pricey fix: see that great rift valley? Four and a half thousand kilometres long, five kilometres deep? Stick a glass roof over it. Turn it into one mother of a greenhouse. Better still, make it to last. Build it out of diamond. Diamond as big as the Ritz? Phah! Diamond as big as a continent. Good, hard science. Technical and manly.

Fleets of vast, visually chaotic engineering ships were sent into slow transfer orbits to the wife-world. Surface workers surveying the sites watched the thirty-kilometre units move into low orbit and disassemble themselves from their drive-spines. They dropped automated construction modules on Grand Valley day and night for seven weeks.

Pressure-dome hoovervilles mushroomed up the length of the valley floor; as the easterlies clocked off, the westerlies clocked on, new dawn on their hard helmet faceplates. Construction plants drew in megatons of carbon dioxide—all the better for the atmospheric manforming—and by the alchemy of molecular processing, spun it into engineering-grade carbon nanofibre. Diamond trees began to rise from great Mariner rift. Day by day they grew as the assemblers wove carbon; through blinding CO 2fogs, through the hurricane seasons, through the blanketing dust storms when engineers went blind even by their helmet lights and navigated by heavy sonar. Carbon on carbon, molecules locking together. One kilometre, two kilometres they rose. One and a half long years after the engineer-towns, which would one day be the great and civilised cities of the valley, struck their taproots into the cold, dead mantle, two million trunks topped the highest of the canyon mesas and budded into four branches. A forest of diamond grew in the great valley. Out on the high blasted plains, a thousand vitrification plants moved over their immaculately surveyed and levelled sites, fusing silicon sand to trace-doped glass hexagons five hundred metres across. Flotillas of robot aerobodies cautiously shifted the panes into position; even in lower gravity, one warp could have thrown the tensile integrity of an entire canton. They settled on to their bolt-posts; one by one the nuts were tightened while scuttling groutbots filled the gaps with light-permeable expansion mastic. By scabs and scars, like some archaic children’s game of territory and capture, a tessellation of hexagons spread across the canyonlands of Grand Valley. Twenty long-years after the first gaffers had surveyed their sites and threw up their Carbonbergs, the last constructor units disassembled, reconfigured into maintenance mode and buried themselves in the regolith.

As one pundit put it, Grand Valley now ran to thirty trillion carats.

Even as the last roofplates were being bolted into place, a new and noble guild was receiving its letters patent; a nation as individual and caste-ridden as the trainfolk: the Ancient and Pristine Order of Windowcleaners. Only when the glass was spotless , utterly transparent to every spectrum of light, could the ecological engineers be moved in. Nothing Pristine about this order. A grubby crew, these, soily-handed, humusy, stained and muddied. Dirty knees on their pressure suits. It is a work of years to make a soil, yet more to weave an atmosphere, decades longer for a mix of gases to become a self-perpetuating, self-regulating and adjusting homoeostatic system that some people think of as a planetary organism and call Gaia, except that here it was Gaia-in-a-bottle, and needed a different name altogether.

The grunt engineering had been the easy bit. The golden rich fretted long decades—twice as unendurable as those of their homeworld—for the day when the first of the ecoengineers undogged her helmet, lifted it off, took a long, deep breath and found it very good. Few remained of that impatient generation; the last twenty lived out their days in canyonside adobes hunting in pristine parklands under diamond skies. A great oasis, sheltered from the scoring winds and terrifying energies of ROTECH’s larger scale manforming, green on red like a colour blindness test for an entire planet. A strip development that reached round one third of a world. When sunrising and sunsetting flashed from the roof glass tiles, they heliographed across interplanetary space. Watchers on nightside Motherworld would wink and blink the novadazzle out of their eyes. Within their roofed-in world, the ancient rich, spry in the low gravity, observed their night sky fill up with stars: the vanguard of the new generation of planetary engineers seeding themselves across the parking orbits. A scary people, this; less patient even than the greenhouse gardeners, their angel-machines would engineer realities wholesale.

Selah. So be it. Around here, this history began to abut into another Sweetness had recently heard and little more need be said of it, save that beneath the great glass roof, the last of the golden died and their sculpted mesa-chateaux became the cores of the elegant and diverse cities of Grand Valley, a patchwork of four hundred cantonettes and city-states and the densest and most diverse cultural region in the solar system. And that it was the dawn glory of Worldroof that so amazed Sweetness Asiim Engineer, left hanging in her precarious web.