Beyond the Volcano
by Ned Farrar
Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg
“Its name is Hawking Mons, but to those who live in the domed-over crater it’s just the Volcano. I still find it hard to believe that one of the Galaxy’s natural wonders is known by such an ordinary name. Volcanoes aren’t uncommon, after all. Every sizable world has a few. But only Marjolin in the Epsilon Indi system has a Hawking Mons: an extinct shield volcano over 1,000 kilometers broad at its base; towering 56 kilometers high—so tall, it pokes through the blanket of acid clouds which shroud the planet’s surface, like an island emerging from a hot poison sea.
“Marjolin is an Earth-sized, rocky world orbiting too close to its stellar primary to be habitable. Atmospheric pressure at the bottom of its gravity well is equal to what you would find about a thousand meters beneath Earth’s oceans, and it’s hot enough down there to melt lead. But pressure and temperature decrease with altitude, and at the top of The Volcano it is a perfectly pleasant 23 degree Celsius, nice autumn weather back in Washington. It would have been nicer if the creative forces of the Universe had made it breathable too… but that would be expecting too much. It’s almost all carbon dioxide, and at that altitude, even Marjolin’s ultra-dense atmosphere has thinned to what you would find over Earth at say, 15 kilometers.
“Hawking Mons Habitat itself is as remarkable as the Volcano. I’ve seen domed-over craters here on Luna that are as large, we all have. Copernicus is much larger than Hawking Mons habitat, but on Luna, one does not have Earth’s gravity to contend with. On Marjolin, one very nearly does. Nevertheless, the E-Indi Enterprise had decided it was necessary to create a terrestrial-type environment within the system—to be a rest and relaxation station for Oort miners and their support personnel who would be stationed for years at a time in the vicinity of Epsilon Indi. Building the dome on the Volcano seemed the lowest cost solution. Notice I didn’t say most cost-effective. Cheaper doesn’t always mean better, not even when cost is a major consideration.
“It is important you understand this, if what I am about to say is going to mean anything to you at all…”
1
A checkerboard floor paraded with regiments of empty plastic chairs. An odor of cleaning fluid in the air. Somewhere beyond my early morning brain-fog, it was dawn.
I was alone in the ground terminal, the other passengers having all dispersed at the starport to points in the outer system where significant economic activity was taking place. I had made the drop down Marjolin’s gravity well as the only living payload in an automated shuttle pod, arrived only minutes ago…
“…Passenger Shade Sansouci please come to the Controller’s office. Will passenger Shade Sansouci please come to the…”
And already I was being paged.
I hate space travel. Long ago, it was considered adventurous—but that was then, this is now. Now it means bad food, long periods in hyperspace when nothing happens, and stomachs upset from velocity changes during final descent. Add circadian desynchronization to your probable list of aggravations, since every planet has a different length day, and you have the “adventure” of modern space travel. And I since I am senior VP for Crisis Management in Weltverbesserungswahngesellschalt, once I arrive anywhere, I am always immediately rushed into action to deal with the crisis, whatever that happens to be.
Now, after five shunts through hyperspace and an interminable descent from Epsilon Indis Oort Cloud, I at last had my feet firmly planted on terra firma, and of course it was starting just as it always did. I had been hoping this time it might be different. Hawking Mons Habitat’s reputation as a bohemian paradise, whose people the promotional literature describes as “True Sybarites,” had not seemed consistent with the urgently vague coded message which had brought me here.
I obtained directions to the controller’s office from one of the information downlinks in the passenger terminal, and saw with chagrin that it was a SHARATEK model installed and operated by Sharawaggi Information Technologies Group. The whole Hawking Mons project had been one long tangle of administrative disputes between us and the Wags.
The Big Word, as we like to call it, has contracts designing and maintaining ecosystems on dozens of worlds, Marjolin being one. And because Hawking Mons Habitat is so small an enclosed ecosystem, about the size of Rhode Island, the Big Word pretty much runs the whole show. We were government in all but name here, since nothing would live for very long without us.
This made the message which had called me here just that much more unusual. No one screws around with the people who make their air. But I had a feeling that I would soon find Sharawaggi at the bottom of it.
Otis Fremont, our local Ecotechnical Operations Team Leader, was waiting for me in the controller’s office. He had obviously gone native, and was wearing what looked like baggy blue paisley-patterned pajamas. Even at his best, Otis looks like Einstein having a bad hair day. The clothes exacerbated his eccentric appearance. I almost burst out laughing when I saw him, but stopped myself as I saw the controller, sitting bored behind his desk, was similarly dressed. It was I, in my layers of dark Earth-style clothing who looked out of place here. I made a mental note to acquire some local attire after I d settled in.
“Shade! Good to see you again! What’s it been… ten years? How is your lovely wife… ah… Anastasia?”
“Ana and I have been divorced for sixteen years, Otis, remember?” I long ago gave up expecting Otis to remember much of anything outside of his field which was also his passion. A master ecologist of the old school, he could identify thousands of birds by their calls, or walk into a patch of woodlands, name all the different flora by their smell, and know which were sick from what pollutant and how to repair the damage. He could visualize ecosystems holistically without using computers and nonlinear analytic programs. So far as I was concerned, he was as valuable as an ironclad contract with unlimited cost overrun provisions. I’d personally sacrificed—a lot, on one occassion, just to keep him from being stolen away by the competition. But he could seem hopelessly befuddled to anyone else.
“That’s right, I remember now. Your current wife is June.”
“June is my daughter, Otis. She lives with her mother in Chernobyl. I had a fiancée, but that’s over now.”
“That’s right, I remember. June. She’s well?”
“Last time I checked, they both were, and I do hope Lulu is too, but Otis, am I correct in assuming you didn’t call me in just to talk family?”
“Oh no, certainly not, Shade, certainly not. It’s Wag business again. That’s why I wanted to meet you here rather than communicate by hyperlink with Earth or anywhere else. I’m sure they monitor our communications. That is their turf. I expect them to take every advantage.”
This was not paranoia on Otis’s part. Sharawaggi ran all the Habitat’s information systems: the entertainment net, computers, and all communications. Since no real work could be done without their services, they often acted as though they were the de facto government of Marjolin. I was quite prepared to believe their people were monitoring our people’s off-planet communications, probably our intra-office chit-chat as well. But that still didn’t tell me why I was here.
“Otis, what is it that requires my attention?”
“It’s Sharawaggi’s new development plans for the western quadrant. They’ve somehow persuaded the habitat Administrative council to approve a VR Entertainment Complex to be built right in the Soyinka Patera wetlands. The dome has only a few thousand hectares of permanent wetlands. And Soyinka just happens to be the only breeding area of any significant size for the anopheles population in the dome. Redevelop Soyinka, and we will lose for sure. The long-term cascade effect would be considerable. We’ve got to make that clear to the council.”