Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

“Don’t you know it’s a proposition?”

“Yes; the egg, the book, and the rock,” she said. “Very traditional here. I know you like to think I have my head in the air all the time, but I do pay some attention to what’s going on around me. Carli is a sweet kid.”

“He’s serious, Leah. You can’t ignore him.”

She waved me off. “I can make my own decisions, but thanks for the warnings.”

“It’s worse than that,” I told her. “Have you met Miranda Telios Delacroix?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I think she’s trying to kill you.” I told her about my suspicion that the pirates had been hired to shoot me down, thinking I was her.

“I believe you may be reading too much into things, Tinkerman,” she said. “Carli told me about the pirates. They’re a small group, disaffected; they bother shipping and such, from time to time, but he says that they’re nothing to worry about. When he gets his inheritance, he says he will take care of them.”

“Take care of them? How?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

But that was exactly what the pirates—rebels—had told me: that Carlos had a plan, and they didn’t know what it was. “So he has some plans he isn’t telling,” I said.

“He’s been asking me about terraforming,” Leah said. “But it doesn’t make sense to do that on Venus. I don’t understand what he’s thinking. He could split the carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen and carbon; I know he has the technology to do that.”

“He does?”

“Yes, I think you were there when he mentioned it. The molecular still. It’s solar-powered micromachines. But what would be the point?”

“So he’s serious?”

“Seriously thinking about it, anyway. But it doesn’t make any sense. Nearly pure oxygen at the surface, at sixty or seventy bars? That atmosphere would be even more deadly than the carbon dioxide. And it wouldn’t even solve the greenhouse effect; with that thick an atmosphere, even oxygen is a greenhouse gas.”

“You explained that to him?”

“He already knew it. And the floating cities wouldn’t float any more. They rely on the gas inside—breathing air—being lighter than the Venusian air. Turn the Venus carbon dioxide to pure O2, the cities fall out of the sky.”

“But?”

“But he didn’t seem to care.”

“So terraforming would make Venus uninhabitable and he knows it. So what’s he planning?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” I said. “And I think we’d better see your friend Carlos Fernando.”

Carlos Fernando was in his playroom.

The room was immense. His family’s quarters were built on the edge of the upcity, right against the bubble-wall, and one whole side of his playroom looked out across the cloudscape. The room was littered with stuff: sets of interlocking toy blocks with electronic modules inside that could be put together into elaborate buildings; models of spacecraft and various lighter-than-air aircraft, no doubt vehicles used on Venus; a contraption of transparent vessels connected by tubes that seemed to be a half-completed science project; a unicycle that sat in a corner, silently balancing on its gyros. Between the toys were pieces of light, transparent furniture. I picked up a chair, and it was no heavier than a feather, barely there at all. I knew what it was now, diamond fibers that had been engineered into a foamed, fractal structure. Diamond was their chief working material; it was something that they could make directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere, with no imported raw materials. They were experts in diamond, and it frightened me.

When the guards brought us to the playroom, Carlos Fernando was at the end of the room farthest from the enormous window, his back to the window and to us. He’d known we were coming, of course, but when the guards announced our arrival he didn’t turn around, but called behind him, “It’s okay—I’ll be with them in a second.”

The two guards left us.

He was gyrating and waving his hands in front of a large screen. On the screen, colorful spaceships flew in three-dimensional projection through the complicated maze of a city that had apparently been designed by Escher, with towers connected by bridges and buttresses. The viewpoint swooped around, chasing some of the spaceships, hiding from others. From time to time bursts of red dots shot forward, blowing the ships out of the sky with colorful explosions as Carlos Fernando shouted “Gotcha!” and “In your eye, dog!”

He was dancing with his whole body; apparently the game had some kind of full-body input. As far as I could tell, he seemed to have forgotten entirely that we were there.

I looked around.

Sitting on a padded platform no more than two meters from where we had entered, a lion looked back at me with golden eyes. He was bigger than I was. Next to him, with her head resting on her paws, lay a lioness, and she was watching me as well, her eyes half open. Her tail twitched once, twice. The lion’s mane was so huge that it must have been shampooed and blow-dried.

He opened his mouth and yawned, then rolled onto his side, still watching me.

“They’re harmless,” Leah said. “Bad-Boy and Knickers. Pets.”

Knickers—the female, I assumed—stretched over and grabbed the male lion by the neck. Then she put one paw on the back of his head and began to groom his fur with her tongue.

I was beginning to get a feel for just how different Carlos Fernando’s life was from anything I knew.

On the walls closer to where Carlos Fernando was playing his game were several other screens. The one to my left looked like it had a homework problem partially worked out. Calculus, I noted. He was doing a chain-rule differentiation and had left it half-completed where he’d gotten stuck or bored. Next to it was a visualization of the structure of the atmosphere of Venus. Homework? I looked at it more carefully. If it was homework, he was much more interested in atmospheric science than in math; the map was covered with notes and had half a dozen open windows with details. I stepped forward to read it more closely.

The screen went black.

I turned around, and Carlos Fernando was there, a petulant expression on his face. “That’s my stuff,” he said. His voice squeaked on the word “stuff.” “I don’t want you looking at my stuff unless I ask you to, okay?”

He turned to Leah, and his expression changed to something I couldn’t quite read. He wanted to kick me out of his room, I thought, but didn’t want to make Leah angry; he wanted to keep her approval. “What’s he doing here?” he asked her.

She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

I wish I knew myself, I thought, but I was in it far enough that I had better say something.

I walked over to the enormous window and looked out across the clouds. I could see another city, blue with distance, a toy balloon against the golden horizon.

“The environment of Venus is unique,” I said. “And to think, your ancestor Udo Nordwald put all this together.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean, I guess I mean thanks. I’m glad you like our city.”

“All of the cities,” I said. “It’s a staggering accomplishment. The genius it must have taken to envision it all, to put together the first floating city; to think of this planet as a haven, a place where millions can live. Or billions—the skies are nowhere near full. Someday even trillions, maybe.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Really something, I guess.”

“Spectacular.” I turned around and looked him directly in the eye. “So why do you want to destroy it?”

“What?” Leah said.

Carlos Fernando had his mouth open, and started to say something, but then closed his mouth again. He looked down, and then off to his left, and then to the right. He said, “I . . . I . . .” but then trailed off.