Stephen Baxter: Ark

“The moon is closest,” Kenzie said. “And we’ve been there, we know we can operate there.”

Glemp shook his head. “There have been studies of how you could mine the moon for metals, various minerals, even oxygen. But the moon is a ferociously hostile environment-fourteen days of unfiltered sun followed by fourteen days of dark, no shielding from solar flares and cosmic rays. Crucially, the moon has only a trace of water. Apollo proved that. Water is the key resource for human life. Find water and you have solved most of your problems.”

Liu said, “The asteroids and comets are a possibility. Some of them are rocky, some composed of water ice and other volatiles. Some of them are even rich in organic compounds. Similarly the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn are balls of frozen water. One would not so much land on an asteroid as dock with it. The gravity is very low…”

Kenzie pulled his face. “Let’s cut the Buck Rogers shit. All we ever did in space, in the end, was send a few guys to the moon for a few days at a time. Right? That and send them up to space stations in Earth orbit that were resupplied from the ground. So let’s go for the obvious options, missions we know we can achieve. What’s wrong with Mars? Mars has got water, hasn’t it? All those scrubby little probes NASA sent there found signs of water.”

“Of course,” Liu Zheng said. “There are probably aquifers, certainly permafrost. We could land near the polar caps, where water is exposed at the surface. Mars has other resources, such as carbon compounds-the air is mostly carbon dioxide.”

“Mars is no paradise,” Glemp said. “The air is too thin to allow you to venture outside without a pressure suit. It doesn’t even offer a significant shield against solar ultraviolet-the upper layers of soil are thought to be effectively sterilized because of that.”

Kenzie growled, “OK. But compared to swimming with the asteroids, Mars is a picture I can understand.”

Patrick raised a finger. “But we, our crew, would be living under domes? Would the domes include farms? What if the domes wore out, or collapsed? How many would you need for safety? I mean, I imagine you’re talking decades here-centuries-living under those domes forever …”

Glemp nodded. “A domed colony on Mars would have to contain everything needed to sustain a technological human civilization, which means farms, water systems, air recycling, factories, resource extraction and processing plants. It would have access to local resources outside itself, but would otherwise be much like a habitat adrift in space. A closed, finite system, ever at risk of complex and catastrophic failure. You could imagine running such a thing for a few years, but how long?”

They talked on, each of them coming up with examples of long-term technological continuity, such as the Dutch managing land reclaimed from the sea for centuries. But Glemp’s point was well made, Patrick thought. It was hard to imagine maintaining a machine as complex as a space station or a domed ecosphere over more than a few lifetimes.

Glemp said, “What we humans need is room. A world like Earth, big enough that it is effectively infinite in terms of resources. If Mars were Earth-like-”

“But Mars isn’t Earth-like,” Kenzie said. “Even Earth won’t be Earth-like in a few more years. So what are you saying, Jerzy? That we ought to make Mars Earth-like?”

“The word,” Jerzy Glemp said, smiling, “is terraforming. To make a world like the Earth.”

And they talked about that. Once again there were studies by NASA and various earlier thinkers on how Mars could be made into a smaller sibling of Earth, with air thick enough to breathe, and an ocean pooling in the great basin of Hellas, and pine trees braving the flanks of Mons Olympus. It quickly emerged that to build such a new world you would have to import most of the “volatiles,” in Jerzy’s term, that Mars was lacking right now. There were schemes to do that, such as by deflecting comets and crashing them into Mars’s surface..

This time it was Patrick who put a stop to the discussion. “You’re describing a program of engineering that would span the solar system, and would take centuries.”

“Millennia, probably,” Glemp murmured.

Kenzie thumped his fist onto the table. “It would be easier to terra-form Earth. ”

“And that,” Jerzy Glemp said enigmatically, “has been considered. Ask the Russians.”

Kenzie shook his head. “Let’s not go into that. ”

Patrick had heard something about mysterious behavior by the Russians in space. In the summer of the previous year, 2024, the year Moscow was abandoned, there had been a brief flurry of ICBM launches from the Russian heartlands. US intelligence analysts had triggered an alert. But the missiles had flown into space, never touching down. Some analysts thought the Russians had simply dumped their weapons stock before the flood reached it. Others had developed elaborate and exotic conspiracy theories. If anybody in the American administration knew the truth-if anybody in this room knew-they weren’t sharing it with Patrick.

Kenzie leaned back and locked his fleshy fingers behind his head. “We’re stuck, aren’t we? We agree we need a new Earth. But there are no new Earths in the solar system. We’ve exhausted our options.”

Liu Zheng said patiently, “We have exhausted Category One. Category Two remains.”

Jerzy Glemp grinned. “The stars.”

Kenzie pushed his chair back. “Christ, before we get to that I need a cigarette. I know, I know. But I quit quitting after I lost my first thousand acres of seafront property to the flood. Hey, Joe, can you rustle up more coffee?”

As they broke, Kenzie went out to smoke and the others milled around the refreshed coffeepot.

Patrick approached Liu Zheng, who stood alone, politely waiting for the coffee. “You’re a long way from home,” Patrick said tentatively.

“As are many of us,” Liu said, but he smiled.

“How did you come to be in the US?”

“When the floods came, my family was driven from our home in Shanghai. I was twenty. We lived in a refugee colony in Zhejiang province. I was able to pursue a career. Then came the draft.”

“The draft?”

“For the coming war with the Russians and Indians, over the high ground of central Asia. I did not wish to fight in such a futile and wasteful conflict. My family paid for me to come to America. I was fortunate that, thanks to the aptitude tests administered in the processing center, I came to the attention of Dr. Glemp.”

“You’re more than a commodity, man. More than a set of skills.”

“Am I? None of us is anything without land, Mr. Groundwater. Room to stand, a place to lie. If you have that, and I do not, you can do what you like with me. So it is here, just as at home.”

“Well, maybe.” But Patrick felt a new determination burn in him that that fate was not going to befall Holle. “So you have a wife at home, kids?”

“A wife,” he said. “When I fled I had to leave her. Her family would not release her to come with me. I am not sure if she wanted to anyway. Fleeing is shameful.”

“Is it? More shameful than sitting there until you’re drowned out?”

“China is different, Mr. Groundwater. We have a cultural continuity going back to what is known in Britain as the Bronze Age. We, our ancestors, have survived many calamities before, fire, flood, plague, invasion. Always the essence of China has endured. Many cannot believe that it will not be so this time, that the flood is a terminus.”

“But you think it is.”

“I am an engineer, not a climatologist. But I understand enough of the science to believe that, yes, this is the end of China, and of the world. So here I am.”