Uncovering his plate, Henry revealed a pancake under a layer of strawberries. “I’ve been awake for four years. He and I play handball almost every day.”
Elizabeth chewed a small bite thoughtfully. Henry’s face did look older.
“What did you think of my gift?”
Henry touched the side of his face between his eye and ear. Without smiling he said, “For a couple of years I was mad as hell. I’m sorry you reminded me.” His fork separated a strawberry and chunk of pancake from the rest.
Elizabeth tried to meet his eyes. He couldn’t be seriously angry. Without the scar, he looked much better.
He put the fork down, the bite uneaten. “Are you ready for a visit to Laputa? You can check the facilities, and they would be honored if you came down.”
“Laputa?” She relaxed in the remembering, not realizing until then that she’d been tense. After two hundred years, so much could have changed. When she let the doctor hook her to the complicated devices, she had thought about unstable governments, about unplanned celestial events, about changes in corporate policy. Who could guarantee that she’d wake up in the world she’d designed? This was the great leap of faith she’d made when she started the project. The plan for her to see it to the end would be to outlive everyone around her, and the way to do that was to be the test subject for the long sleep. Henry, for obvious reasons, accompanied her. “You really named the workstation that?”
“A city now. Much more than a station. The name was in your notes. I don’t think Jonathan Swift imagined it this way, though.” He pushed his plate away. “It’s quite a bit bigger than the initial designs. The more functions we built in, the more cubic feet of air we needed to keep from sinking into the hotter regions of the atmosphere. It’s the largest completely man-made structure in the solar system. Tourist traffic alone makes it profitable.”
The trip from the carousel to Laputa took a little more than an hour under constant acceleration or deceleration except for a stomach lurching moment midway when the craft turned. Out the porthole beside her seat, she could see Venus’s changed face. Where the sun hit, it was much darker, but the sun itself was darker too, fuzzy and red, partly blocked by the dust umbrella protecting the planet from the heat, cooling it from its initial 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Henry offered a glass of wine. She sipped it, enjoying its crisp edge. Wine swirled in the bottom of the glass. She sipped again, held the taste in her mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. “I don’t recognize this.”
He sat across from her. The wine bottle rested in a secure holder in the table’s center. “It’s an eighty-year-old Chateau Laputa. One of the original bottles of Venusian aperitif. Bit of a gamble. Some of this vintage didn’t age well, but it turns out being thirty percent closer to the sun makes for excellent grapes. They grew them in soil from the surface, heavily treated, of course.” The ferry shuddered. “Upper edges of the atmosphere. We’ll be there soon.”
Through the porthole, Laputa appeared first as a bright red glimmer on Venus’s broad horizon, and as they grew closer, revealing details. Elizabeth realized the glow was the sun’s reflected light. And then she saw Laputa truly was huge; it felt like flying low over the San Gabriels into the Los Angeles basin, when the city opened beneath her. But Laputa dwarfed that. They continued to travel, bumping hard through turbulence until the floating city’s boundaries disappeared to the left and right, and then they were over the structure, their shadow racing across the mirrored surface.
Inside she toured the engineering facilities where they built floating atmosphere converters to work on the carbon dioxide gasses that trapped so much heat. She met dozens of project managers and spoke briefly to a room full of chief technicians. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t act like the groups of upper management she was used to working with. There was no jockeying for position, none of the push and pull of internal politics that made corporate board rooms so interestingly tense. None of the high stakes adrenaline she was so used to. They listened. They took notes. They answered her questions, but they were quiet, attentive. Worshipful, almost.
Henry drove her in a compact electric cart to the physics labs that controlled the steady rain of Kuiper Belt objects bringing water to the planet, even though it still boiled into vapor on the scalding surface. In a large presentation room, dominated by a map of the solar system alive with lights, each representing a ship or a station, the chief geologist finished his speech. A long line of dots representing asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects in transit traced a curved path through the system ending at Venus. “Fifteen years from now, liquid water will exist at the poles. We should have northern and southern hemisphere lakes by the time you inspect again, perhaps the beginning of an ocean if the weather patterns develop according to the models.” He bowed when he finished and kept his eyes lowered.
Everywhere they went, and everyone they talked to treated her with the same deference. Only Henry would meet her gaze. “You are the Elizabeth Audrey,” he said again when she complained. “Maker of worlds. Come with me. I think you’ll enjoy this. We have transport waiting.”
They walked out of a physics lab, leaving behind obsequious scientists and engineers. Henry led, and Elizabeth noticed as she had before that he was a short man. If he were only six or seven inches taller, he might earn more respect. Their next sleep was scheduled for four hundred years. If she talked to the doctors, they could do the work and Henry would not need to be bothered with the decision himself. After all, if he was going to be her sole representative in the future where no one knew her except as the ultimate absentee boss, then he should look the part.
“This is it,” he said as the car sped from between two buildings. He stopped and sat beside her while she took it in. A wall of structures a mile away loomed over a plain, a part of the huge circle that enclosed the space. High overhead, Laputa’s roof arced to the far horizons. The sun glowed sullenly, a red bright spot in the dark sky. Away from the city’s artificial light, red tinted her arms, the metal edges on the car, Henry’s face. She turned her hands over. Even her palms took on a red shade.
“What is this place?”
“Blister Park. Come on.”
As soon as they stepped out of the car, Elizabeth saw. The floor was clear. Beneath their feet swirled the clouds of Venus, almost black in Laputa’s shadow, but far away the city stopped and sunlight came down, illuminating a smoky show of reds and oranges and browns. They moved farther from the car, away from the building, and soon the illusion that they were walking on air seemed almost complete.
Below, in the shadow, bright red and yellow lights twinkled.
“Volcanoes,” said Henry. “Venus was volcanically active before, but our asteroid and comet bombardment to spin the planet provoked eruptions. The atmospheric technicians tell me this is good, though. They use the new chemicals in the air to catalyze out what they don’t want and to create what they do. There will be a breathable atmosphere before they are done.”
“Keeping in mind the improvements in technology, how long until I can walk on the ground unprotected?”
“Still another thousand years or so. If we engineer ourselves instead, it would be much quicker. We need heat tolerance, and a system that uses less oxygen.”
“For the workers, yes. The ones that prepare the way, but Venus will not be complete until it is the planet that Earth should have been.” She could picture it, a surface rich with forests, and an ecosystem in balance, humanity appropriately humble in the face of a world done right.
“But this has a beauty of its own.” Henry moved beside her. The light from below cast shadows on his face.