LITMIR.BIZ

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ten years in space.

      They found a seat, and ate up the ice cream companionably.

      Small talk: How are Garry and your grandkids? Fine, Alfred, when I get to see them … he’s flying out of Edwards now … I don’t think Jenine is enjoying life as an Air Force wife …

      She let her attention drift. A part of her mind was already composing the report she would have to pass up to the Administration.

      She wondered about telling the President about the funny physics results. Was it appropriate to include something so exotic, something nobody yet understood, something it wasn’t even possible yet to check?

      On the other hand, she thought bleakly, suppose Alfred’s wilder speculations have some bearing on reality. If there is something loose in the Solar System, something transforming, something powerful enough to destroy a planet like Venus – won’t it be seen immediately in terms of a threat to the Earth?

      And if it was a threat, how could they possibly deal with it, even recognize it?

      ‘You know,’ Alfred was saying around his ice cream, ‘no matter what the other implications of this event, one thing’s for sure.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘We’ve lost Venus. Forever. Although I suppose the truth is we lost it a long time ago, when the first space probes got there. I’m old enough to remember –’

      ‘You’re younger than me, Alfred.’

      ‘– when Arrhenius’s theory was still the paradigm. He thought the clouds were water droplets. The land was choked by swamps. A hothouse, with amphibians and dinosaurs and cave men. Even later, when it became clear from the spectroscopic evidence there was no water in the cloud tops, we still thought there might be a loophole. Maybe a world-spanning ocean of Perrier water. Or seas of oil. Why the hell not?

      ‘But when the Mariners got there, what they found was a big disappointment.’ He shook his head. ‘But it needn’t have stayed that way. All those stupendous schemes to terraform Venus the fringe types cooked up. You’d have to block out the sun, and let all that carbon dioxide liquefy, strike it with comets to spin it up and bring in water –’

      She laughed. ‘What bull.’

      ‘But just think what you’d finish up with. A planet much more like Earth than Mars could ever be: continents called Aphrodite and Ishtar, oceans called Guinevere and Niobe; even enough geological activity to sustain a biosphere for billions of years.’ He sighed. ‘It was always remote. But it was possible. Maybe that is why Venus was put in the Solar System in the first place.’

      She eyed him. ‘As a place for us to colonize?’

      ‘Why not? But now, it’s gone. Taken from us …’

      ‘You sound as if you’re mourning. Mourning a planet.’

      ‘A whole world has died here, Monica. Everything we could have learned from it, all its future possibilities lost, for all time. A world. What more appropriate object of mourning is there? … Maybe we ought to hold a wake. A global wake.’

      She shivered, despite the warmth of the day. She was aware of Alfred watching her with barely concealed concern, but she had no time for that.

      She looked around the bright sky for Venus, but it was either below the horizon or lost in the glare.

      4

      Henry Meacher flew British Airways direct into Edinburgh.

      His ticket was for what BA called World Traveller Class, which meant, essentially, steerage. Henry found himself in a middle seat in the central bank of four, a long way away from the 747’s tiny windows. The stewardesses, expertly encased in make-up, were all anorexic-slim English girls with what he thought of as cut-glass accents; they walked as if their orifices were all sewn up. The distant communal video screen showed a BBC news round-up preceded by a tourist’s-eye view of the alleged ancient beauties of Britain; a little menu card told Henry he would be eating a roast beef dinner – American beef – and, later, a traditional English breakfast.

      Henry buried his face in the Journal of Geophysical Research and tried to ignore all this fake Englishness. It was like a chintz spread thrown over the battered American engineering of the aircraft. Who did they think they were kidding?

      BA irritated him. The Venus scare had caused a huge curtailment in long-haul flights, so every airline was suffering – the rules about every passenger wearing a radiation exposure dosimeter badge had seen to that – but even so the length of queues BA maintained at check-in astounded him. But they pretty much seemed to have a monopoly on direct flights to Britain aside from into London, so BA it was.

      The flight was late leaving Houston Intercontinental. An O-ring on one of the ageing 747’s engines had to be replaced, and the engineers, worryingly, seemed to have trouble finding the right inspection hatch.

      The seat next to Henry was occupied by a USAF airman who was stationed at a base in Suffolk. He was returning with his two kids from leave in Texas, and he was homesick before the Boeing left the ground. ‘The bathrooms in Britain are just disgusting. Even the hotels. They just never heard of sanitary seals. The Germans aren’t so bad with the bathrooms. But the French, my God, one place we stayed there was just a hole in the ground you were supposed to squat over …’ Bathrooms on planes and on trains and in stations and in hotels, bathrooms in Britain and Italy and Greece and Sweden. It was, Henry realized with dismay, nothing so much as an asshole’s travelogue of Europe.

      And after a couple of hours, the plane had metamorphosed, as ever, to a giant, stinking pig-pen in the sky, and every toilet Henry tried had a sticky floor and an overflowing trash can.

      

      They flew out of bright morning light, from the west, towards Edinburgh. Henry peered out a window near the stewardess’ station, and took his first look at Scotland.

      He was descending into the Midland Valley, a broad belt of lowland that stretched from Glasgow to Edinburgh. This was actually what geologists called a graben: a rift, a block of land that had dropped between two faults. He could see the roads from England, to the south, sweeping down out of the hills to the valley floor, which was settled and arable, coated with picture-book fields and towns, though he could see, in some places, the scars left by Venus: failing crops, fields left brown and bare, a portent of troubled times to come.

      But what made this valley different were the extinct cores of old volcanoes that stuck out of the ground, remnants of a volcanism spasm three hundred million years gone. The cones were an uncompromising demonstration of the old geologist’s saw that the stuff that’s left sticking out of the ground is harder than whatever has been worn away.

      And as he descended towards Edinburgh itself he caught a glimpse of Arthur’s Seat, a composite volcano that was the greatest of the volcanic plugs; the buildings of the old city lapped around its flanks.

      He landed at 7.00 a.m. local, having missed an entire night out of his life. A bright early spring day stretched ahead of him, and he felt like a piece of shit.

      

      ‘The name’s Mike Dundas.’

      The kid was waiting for Henry at the departure gate, when he finally got through queuing to have his passport checked.

      Henry shook his hand. ‘We e-mailed. Good to meet you, Mike.’

      Mike took Henry’s bag, a wheeled suitcase, and hauled it away through the terminal towards the car park. Mike was a technician in the University geology department here; he was in his early twenties, with – to Henry’s eye – brutally short-cut hair, a disconcertingly pierced nose, placid blue eyes. He wore the bright Day-Glo sunscreen popular with the young around the world, huge dabs of orange and yellow on his nose and cheeks. His accent was distinctly Scottish, but gentler than Henry had expected – lots of strong r’s, ‘ye’

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