“You won’t need to.” He led her to a set of double doors. Inside, two lines of exquisitely dressed men and women gave them a hallway to walk through. Many of the people bowed as Elizabeth and Henry passed. Elizabeth still didn’t feel completely focused. A surreal air hovered about the scene. “Madam Audrey,” one man said as he touched the back of his hand to his forehead and bent at the waist. No one else spoke. At the hallway’s end, an ornate set of doors that reached to the high ceiling swung open. Elizabeth slowed. She couldn’t see the other side of the dark room beyond, but it seemed huge, and there was movement in the dark. Lights flooded a stage that she and Henry stepped onto. She shaded her eyes, and the roar began, hundreds of thousands of voices, cheering, cheering, cheering, and they were cheering for her.
Henry leaned in, cupped his hand around her ear. “They arranged for you to become a religion. It’s the only organization that would last long enough to see it to the end.”
The next morning, Elizabeth joined Henry in a vehicle garage where a heavily insulated truck waited for them. “First,” said Henry, “I want to point out that we are going to exit through those doors and into a Venus morning. Thirteen hours from now, the sun will set. Your original plan was for a twenty-four hour day/night cycle, but after four-hundred years of asteroid and comet bombardment, the terraformers saw that we were getting diminishing returns. At some point, each collision produced more problems for them to undo than they were solving, so they decided to stop and leave Venus with a longer day.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I don’t like compromise.” She did feel steadier on her feet than she had yesterday, and climbed into the car before Henry could give her assistance. “What’s second?”
“Best I show you.” He pulled the truck into an airlock. When the outside doors opened, a red, dusty light flooded the bay. Elizabeth slid close to the window. A graded road led into a series of low hills that faded in the hazy red air. The car pulled out of the garage, and for the first time, Elizabeth could see first hand what her efforts had produced. A brisk breeze whipped dust off the road ahead of them.
“Still warm, still too much carbon dioxide, still too much surface pressure, but we’re very close, Elizabeth.” The truck climbed the first hill, and from the top, as far as the dusty air allowed, similar hills reached all around. “The final changes go the slowest.”
In front of them, the morning sun glared red and unbelievably large. The truck lurched through a turn as it ascended a second hill.
“I thought there would be more evidence of the meteor strikes.”
Henry laughed. “Oh, heavens, there is, but it’s all on the equator. We have created a badlands like nothing this solar system has ever seen. Some of the strikes broke the tectonic plates, bringing up rock from thousands of feet below the surface, liquefying, vaporizing, shattering. Venus’ equator regions are already legendary. Anything could get lost there or hide there. It truly is untamable. See this?” He held out his wrist. A shiny black bracelet set with green and yellow stones caught the sun light. “The metal is carbon nanotubes. If you need it made out of carbon, Venus can make it. Every spaceship hull in the solar system is manufactured here. The jewels were mined in the badlands. Ah, we’re here.”
He stopped the truck on the hilltop. Before them, a lake rippled in the wind, filling the valleys so that what she had thought were other hills earlier she could see were islands.
Elizabeth gasped. “Liquid water.”
“Do you want to go fishing?”
“Really?”
Henry rested his forearms on the steering wheel and looked out onto the lake. “Kind of a joke. No, not this time. There are thermophilic shrimp, though, and adapted corals, engineered crabs, modified algaes, mutated anemones, evolved sponges, and dozens of other heat-happy organisms who like water just short of boiling. About the biggest thing out there that we know of is a heat tolerant eel that grows to a foot or so. I’ve been boating at night. Almost all the species we introduced bioluminescence. It makes them easier to keep track of. Blues, yellows, greens. The boat’s wake is a trail of fire.” He sounded meditative. His fingers dangled, nearly touching the dashboard. Elizabeth had never noticed before how strong his hands looked. Calluses marked the fingertips. A line of dark grit was under his fingernails. “On land, we’ve introduce lichens, soil bacterias, nothing complicated. They do best near the lakes. Rain is undependable.”
“How long did you say you were awake before you woke me up?”
He didn’t turn his head. “Six years. I wanted to make sure everything was ready for you.”
She looked at the lake again. A film of black dust piled at the corner of the window like a soot snow drift. The wind picked up, tearing froth off the tops of waves, and it moaned, passing over the truck. Elizabeth couldn’t imagine finding anything attractive in the desolate landscape. Dry, toxic, inhospitable except for the most primitive of life. She pictured its surface in six hundred years, when she awoke. Brush would cover the hills and heather would fill the valleys. Willows would line the bank of this heated lake. What did Henry see in it now?
Henry said, “The doctors are worried about putting you to sleep for so long. Your system didn’t respond the way they would like.”
Outside a bank of clouds moved across the sun, casting the lake and hills into a weird, maroon twilight. Dust devils twirled off the road before beating themselves into nothingness in the rocks higher on the hills. If the wind uncovered a bizarre version of a cow’s skull, dry and leering, by the road, Elizabeth would not have been surprised. Nothing was right about the planet yet. Nothing was done.
“I can’t stay here, Henry. I have to see it to the end.”
Henry nodded, but before he put the truck in gear to take them back to Laputa, he faced her. “Do not try to change me again as we sleep. Do not, ever, be so impertinent again.”
For a second, Elizabeth thought she saw hatred there, just a glimpse that flashed in the back of his dark eyes, and she respected it.
But two weeks later, when it came time to sleep, she met with the doctors. She gave orders. Just a touch, a tweak, a fine tuning. Henry wouldn’t mind, she thought, if he loved her like she knew he did, he wouldn’t mind at all.
In the six-century dream, Elizabeth, watched the rain from comets covering Venus. The water ice started beyond Neptune’s orbit, like ghostly icebergs drifting in space so distant that the sun was merely a bright star among other stars. Gently nudged, they began their long journeys inward, finally, catastrophically for them, exploding into Venus’s atmosphere, contributing water to a planet long without.
Rain fell. It fell in spurts, in squalls, in flurries, in long sizzling sheets that worked their way into cracks beneath the surface, nourishing the alien life planted there, until there came a time when the rain didn’t just fall on rock. Plants grew, their leaves upturned, catching the water as it fell, spreading it to roots.
The rain eroded. Cut through stone. Carried silt. Formed rivulets, creeks, streams, rivers. Gathered in pools, ponds, lakes, seas. Evaporated, formed clouds, fell again.
And then, finally, in the highest of high places, appeared the first snow.
Elizabeth saw herself standing in Venus’s snow, the perfect crystals falling on her bare arms, one by one pausing for a moment as petite sculptures before melting. Snow cleared the dust and smelled crisp as a fresh apple. She ran through the white blanket, splashing her legs as she ran, looking for her brother. Where was he? This was water he could play in. This water wouldn’t harm him. She’d made it safe in her dream. At a lake’s edge, she stopped, looking both directions as far as she could, but he wasn’t there, just the silent snow falling onto the red-tinted water. Each snowflake, when it met the lake, glowed for a second, until the water’s surface itself provided the only light in the dream. Plenty of light to see him if he was there, but he wasn’t.