Blue Mars(182)

“No,” he said. For there were other ferals out there.





Part Eleven



Viriditas





It was a disordered time. Population pressures now drove everything. The general plan to get through the hypermalthusian years was obvious, and holding up fairly well; each generation got smaller; nevertheless, there were now eighteen billion people on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and more being born all the time; and more moving from Earth to Mars all the time; and people on both worlds crying enough, enough!When Terrans heard Martians crying enough, some of them became enraged. The concept of carrying capacity meant nothing before the sheer numbers, the images on the screens. Uneasily the Martian global government did what it could to deal with this anger. It explained that Mars with its thin new biosphere could not sustain as many people as the fat old Earth. It also set the Martian rocket industry into the shuttle business, and rapidly expanded a program to turn asteroids into floating cities. This program was an unexpected offshoot of what had been serving as part of their prison system. For many years now the punishment for conviction of serious crimes on Mars had been permanent exile from the planet, begun by some years of confinement and servitude on some new asteroid settlement. After they had served their sentence it was a matter of indifference to the Martian government where the exiles went, as long as they did not return to Mars. So inevitably a steady stream of people arrived on Hebe, shipped out and did their time, and then moved somewhere else, sometimes out to the still thinly populated outer satellites, sometimes back into the inner system; but often to one of the many hollowed-asteroid colonies that were being established. Da Vinci and several other co-ops made and distributed shareware for starting up these settlements, and many other organizations did the same, for in truth the program was simple. Surveying teams had found thousands of candidates in the asteroid belt for the treatment, and on the best of them they left behind the equipment to transform them. A team of self-reproducing digging robots went to work on one end of the asteroid, boring into the rock like dogs, tossing most of the rubble into space, and using the rest to make and fuel more diggers. When the rock was hollowed out, the open end was capped and the whole thing was spun, so that centrifugal force provided a gravity equivalent inside. Powerful lamps called sunlines or sunspots were fired up in the centers of these hollowed-out cylinders, and they provided light levels equivalent to the Terran or Martian day, with the g usually adjusted accordingly, so that there were little Mars-equivalent cities, and little Earth-equivalent cities, and cities all across the range in between, and beyond, at least to the light side; many of the little worlds were experimenting with quite low gs.

There were some alliances between these little new city-states, and often ties to founder organizations back on a home world, but there was no overall organization. From the independents, especially those occupied mostly by Martian exiles, there had been in the early days some fairly hostile behavior to passersby, including attempts to impose passage tolls on spaceships, tolls so blatant as to resemble piracy. But now shuttles passing through the belts were moving at very high speeds, and slightly above or below the plane of the ecliptic, to avoid the dust and rubble that was only getting worse with the hollowing of so many rocks. It was difficult to demand a toll from these ships without threatening their total destruction, which invited heavy retribution; and so the trend in tolls had proved to be short-lived.

Now, with both Earth and Mars feeling population pressures that were more and more intense, the Martian co-ops were doing everything they could to encourage the rapid development of new asteroid cities. They were also building large new tented settlements on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and most recently Uranus, with Neptune and perhaps even Pluto to follow. The big satellites of the inner gas giants were very large moons, really little planets, and all of them now had inhabitants who were beginning terraforming projects that were more or less long-range, depending on the local situation. None of them could be terraformed quickly, but all of them appeared to be possible, at least to an extent; and some offered the tantalizing opportunity of a complete new world. Titan, for instance, was beginning to come out of its nitrogen haze, as settlers living in tents on the smaller moons nearby heated and pumped the big moon’s surface oxygen into its atmosphere. Titan had the right volatiles for terraformation, and though it was at great distance from the sun, receiving only one percent the insolation that Earth did, an extensive series of mirrors was adding light, more all the time, and the locals were looking into the possibility of free-hanging deuterium fusion lanterns, orbiting Titan and illuminating it further. This would be an alternative to another device that so far the Saturnians had been averse to using, called a gas lantern. These gas lanterns were now flying through the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Uranus, collecting and burning helium, and other gases in flares whose light was reflected outward by electromagnetic disks. But the Saturnians had refused to allow them, because they did not want to disturb the ringed planet’s appearance.