Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

At this signal, the others cracked their own eggs and began to eat. After a moment, Leah laid the decorative shell to one side and did the same. I watched her for a moment, and then cracked my own egg. It was, of course, excellent.

Later, when I was back with the Singh family, I was still puzzled. There had been some secret significance there that everybody else had seen, but I had missed. Mr. Singh was sitting with his older wife, Triolet, talking about accounts.

“I must ask a question,” I said.

Truman Singh turned to me. “Ask,” he said, “and I shall answer.”

“Is there any particular significance,” I said, “to an egg?”

“An egg?” Singh seemed puzzled. “Much significance, I would say. In the old days, the days of the asteroid miners, an egg was a symbol of luxury. Ducks were brought into the bigger habitats, and their eggs were, for some miners, the only food they would ever eat that was not a form of algae or soybean.”

“A symbol of luxury,” I said, musing. “I see. But I still don’t understand it.” I thought for a moment, and then asked, “is there any significance to a gift of an egg?

“Well, no,” he said, slowly, “not exactly. An egg? Nothing, in and of itself.”

His wife Triolet, asked, “You are sure it’s just an egg? Nothing else?”

“A very elaborate egg.”

“Hmmm,” she said, with a speculative look in her eye. “Not, maybe, an egg, a book, and a rock?”

That startled me alittle. “A book and a rock?” TheBruno book—the very first thing Carlos Fernando had done on meeting Leah was to give her a book. But a rock? I hadn’t see anything like that. “Why that?”

“Ah,” she said. “I suppose you wouldn’t know. I don’t believe that our customs here in the sky cities are well known out there in the outer reaches.”

Her mention of the outer reaches—Saturn and the Beyond—confused me for a moment, until I realized that, viewed from Venus, perhaps even Earth and the built worlds of the orbital clouds would be considered “outer.”

“Here,” she continued, “as in most of the ten thousand cities, an egg, a book, and a rock is a special gift. The egg is symbolic of life, you see; a book symbolic of knowledge; and a rock is the basis of all wealth, the minerals from the asteroid belt that built our society and bought our freedom.”

“Yes? And all three together?”

“They are the traditional gesture of the beginning of courtship,” she said.

“I still don’t understand.”

“If a young man gives a woman an egg, a book, and a rock,” Truman said, “I should say this is his official sign that he is interested in courting her. If she accepts them, then she accepts his courtship.”

“What? That’s it, just like that, they’re married?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “It only means that she accepts the courtship—that she takes him seriously and, when it comes, she will listen to his proposal. Often a woman may have rocks and eggs from many young men. She doesn’t have to accept, only take him seriously.”

“Oh,” I said.

But it still made no sense. How old was Carlos Fernando, twenty Venus years? What was that, twelve Earth years or so? He was far too young to be proposing.

“No one can terraform Venus,” Carlos Fernando said.

Carlos Fernando had been uninterested in having me join in Leah’s discussion, but Leah, oblivious to her host’s displeasure (or perhaps simply not caring), had insisted that if he wanted to talk about terraforming, I should be there.

It was one room of Carlos Fernando’s extensive palaces, a rounded room, an enormous cavernous space that had numerous alcoves. I’d found them sitting in one of the alcoves, an indentation that was cozy but still open. The ubiquitous female guards were still there, but they were at the distant ends of the room, within command if Carlos Fernando chose to shout, but far enough to give them the illusion of privacy.

The furniture they were sitting on was odd. The chairs seemed sculpted of sapphire smoke, yet were solid to the touch. I picked one up and discovered that it weighed almost nothing at all. “Diamond aerogel,” Carlos Fernando said. “Do you like it?”

“It’s amazing,” I said. I had never before seen so much made out of diamond. And yet it made sense here, I thought; with carbon dioxide an inexhaustible resource surrounding the floating cities, it was logical that the floating cities would make as much as they could out of carbon. But still, I didn’t know you could make an aerogel of diamond. “How do you make it?”

“A new process we’ve developed,” Carlos Fernando said. “You don’t mind if I don’t go into the details. It’s actually an adaptation of an old idea, something that was invented back on Earth decades ago, called a molecular still.”

When Carlos Fernando mentioned the molecular still, I thought I saw a sharp flicker of attention from Leah. This was a subject she knew something about, I thought. But instead of following up, she went back to his earlier comment on terraforming.

“You keep asking questions about the ecology of Mars,” she said. “Why so many detailed questions about Martian ecopoiesis? You say you’re not interested in terraforming, but are you really? You aren’t thinking of the old idea of using photosynthetic algae in the atmosphere to reduce the carbon dioxide, are you? Surely you know that that can’t work.”

“Of course.” Carlos Fernando waved the question away. “Theoretical,” he said. “Nobody could terraform Venus, I know, I know.”

His pronouncement would have been more dignified if his voice had finished changing, but as it was, it wavered between squeaking an octave up and then going back down again, ruining the effect. “We simply have too much atmosphere,” he said. “Down at the surface, the pressure is over ninety bars—even if the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere could be converted to oxygen, the surface atmosphere would still be seventy times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure.”

“I realize that,” Leah said. “We’re not actually ignorant, you know. So high a pressure of oxygen would be deadly—you’d burst into flames.”

“And the leftover carbon,” he said, smiling. “Hundreds of tons per square meter.”

“So what are you thinking?” she asked.

But in response, he only smiled. “Okay, I can’t terraform Venus,” he said. “So tell me more about Mars.”

I could see that there was something that he was keeping back. Carlos Fernando had some idea that he wasn’t telling.

But Leah did not press him, and instead took the invitation to tell him about her studies of the ecology on Mars, as it had been transformed long ago by the vanished engineers of the long-gone Freehold Toynbee colony. The Toynbee’s engineers had designed life to thicken the atmosphere of Mars, to increase the greenhouse effect, to melt the frozen oceans of Mars.

“But it’snotworking,”Leah concluded.“Theanaerobic life isbeingout-competed by the photosynthetic oxygen-producers. It’s pulling too much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

“But what about the Gaia effect? Doesn’t it compensate?”

“No,” Leah said. “I found no trace of a Lovelock self-aware planet. Either that’s a myth, or else the ecology on Mars is just too young to stabilize.”

“Of course on Venus, we would have no problem with photosynthesis removing carbon dioxide.”

“I thought you weren’t interested in terraforming Venus,” I said.

Carlos Fernando waved my objection away. “A hypothetical case, of course,” he said. “A thought exercise.” He turned to Leah. “Tomorrow,” he said, “would you like to go kayaking?”

“Sure,” she said.