Her chief assistant, Michiko Iki, had taken over direct supervision and had done a superior job—perhaps, Suzy thought, a better job than she herself could have done. Half of her people were already there, handling the other end, and a fair percentage were supervising the transport on this end. Right now her section was handling the least glamorous and most routine part of the job; after the bulk of supplies and personnel had been sent, it would again become a backwater department while she concentrated on energy services. Then she could get back to the theoretical work and experimentation that interested her the most—and which was, after all, the product for which Westrex was paying.
In spite of her pressing and her protests, though, she could find no trace of Marsha Johnson. She realized that the assistant must have been put on ice along with others involved in the incident, but before Suzy’s full reinstatement she didn’t have the clout to find out more, and after it she was far too snowed under with work to press it, and she would have had to press it with Coydt personally, and in spite of the fact that the brigadier had saved her, she had no change of heart regarding the military in general or Security in particular, and her leverage there was as a result nonexistent.
Toby Haller had felt keen excitement at the order to “go” on the project, as he’d had tremendous praise for his work all the way up to the Director Korda himself, yet he’d been there, day after day, week after week, as others in his section were sent forward to their posts and given their assignments while he remained on Titan, having less to do. It was not merely that he was eager to go; the early birds were getting hands-on experience right now on installed 7800’s, and they would have a jump on him for the future—and more influence on overall design as a consequence.
Even his old friends were leaving. Marsha Johnson was gone, although there were rumors of something unsavory in that, and so were Caesar Fanfani and Mark Weinbaum. Lisa Wu was still around someplace, but her job was removing her from any social breaks with what was left of the old gang. It was almost like graduation, where friendships built up over the years are suddenly dissolved in nothing more than vague promises to have a reunion someday, promises seldom fulfilled.
Sari Kittachorn. however, was using her friendship with him and his lack of meaningful work to her advantage. The early planners of Westrex’s scheme for nontechnical colonization, in itself a social experiment, were here now, and while they understood the broad basics of the project, they were hazy on specifics. Haller was asked to brief some of them on his section, since he would be working closest with them.
They were a curious mixture; Arabic-looking men with clipped accents and business suits who had made deserts bloom. East Indian agricultural experts always fighting starvation and fighting a depleted land, and Ibo craftsmen who could handle too much water on the crops. There were urban planners there, too, from places like Accra and Buenos Aires, and from small towns and villages carved out of the most unlikely geographies.
All were amazed and a little awed at the idea that this man thought geology, climatology, and all the other factors big and small into existence just the way he wanted them. She’d paraded so many through now that he’d developed a stock speech of sorts.
“Computers don’t know what the real world is like,” he told them. “They never really have. They go by what we tell them. For centuries we’ve been able to go into a computer and graphically create a convincing, animated, three-dimensional picture of any world we want, obeying any laws we wish. That was child’s play, but it’s basic to understanding what we’re doing, and for a very long time that’s all we could do. It was handy, and sophisticated, for solving all sorts of scientific theory, planning cities and seeing the implication of drainage, irrigation, climate shifts—whatever. Only with the discovery and taming of Flux, however, were we able to take it further, building computers with enormous memory capacity and giving them all the power they needed.
“In a sense, what I do is the same as creating those pictures. We feed in the basics that we must live with—the stability equations to keep our world warm enough and maintain a workable, if static, atmosphere that can sustain us and provide the energy to run our computer network, power network, transport network, and the like—and to self-repair, since even with redundancies built in, we can’t afford failures of any sort here.
“The end objective is to create a world that we can thrive on that is in every way self-sustaining. That means sufficient plant-to-animal ratios to allow us to have our own permanent natural atmospheric processes. We’ll need water, and a climatological system that delivers enough to every place we need it. To maintain our ecosystem we’ll need to create surface soil with exact mineral balances to assure good plant growth and human and animal health. Requirements like these are fed to the computer as ‘givens’—accept, can’t touch. From that point I start playing with the exact form this world should be. Yes?”
“I have used such models all the time in the Punjab,” said someone in the group. “How is this so different?”
“It’s not, except that we create the picture—the appearance of reality—only to keep checking our mistakes and seeing our problems before we have to live with them. Unlike anyplace on Earth, or even Titan, we aren’t troubled with an existing global ecosystem yet, so we can design our own. We aren’t hobbled by existing soil, climate, and moisture conditions, or problems of elevation. We can add or subtract to any of these and hundreds more factors and come up with what we wish we had. Once that model is built and saved in the computer, we can take it one step further. We can draw energy from Flux through the grid and use it to turn energy into matter and other, more useful forms of energy. We can take that theoretical computer model and we can order it to come off the viewing device and become reality.”
“I’ve seen many a nightmare landscape on the view boxes as well, sir,” remarked an Argentine who was in command of, but obviously still new to, conversational English, the majority language and by default the common one for the project and the world. “Can you not also create nightmares with this thing? Real nightmares people must live with, and even in?”
“The possibility’s there,” he admitted, “but that’s why we have bosses and cross-checks. Everything I design goes through not only my computers but many of my colleagues’ as well, and is examined, picked apart, and critiqued worse than a bad novel. It’s an ego-deflating experience, after months of work, to send out a model you have checked and double-checked and lived with like one of your own children and see it hacked to pieces by your associates. Consensus, both of the engineers and their computers, is required before we put anything into practice.”
“Will it be a gray, barren, soulless place like this?” one woman asked him, sounding very concerned. “I admit this is not the vision that sold me on committing myself to this project.”
At the start, it probably will be worse than this,” he responded honestly. “But once we’re in, have set up our equipment, and tested everything to the hilt, then run new models, some from scratch, and reconciled those with the other departments, we’ll begin to shape the place. First there’ll be the computer center and a rather primitive sort of city around it—primitive at first anyway. Then we’ll start developing the region around in a careful manner. These will be experiments—scale models of what we propose to do to the whole planet—and we may make some mistakes we’ll have to live with, but if I’m good enough, they won’t be in my area. The objective is to create four different prototypes around each of the seven Gates and compare notes. Each of them will be self-sufficient in the basics—food, clothing, shelter. When done, they will be almost like little worldlets of their own. These are the Anchor blocks, as we call them—the experimental areas and templates for what will come after.”
“Will there be grayness? I know there’s no sun,” someone asked.
“New Eden is a moon about the size of Titan in an outer orbit around a gas giant almost the size of Jupiter,” he told them. “Gas giants have often been described, with some justification, as stars that failed. We will get no heat from our mother world, but we will get a great deal of light. It’s a different sort of light, because it is almost all reflective and it literally will dominate the daytime sky—perhaps three quarters of the sky at midday—and because, like our own gas giants, it’s banded. We feel that the fact that it’s a bit odd and different is not sufficient to not use it as our primary light source. We have to anyway—anything that big, that close, and that bright is going to light up even dense Flux down to the ground in any event.
“The atmosphere currently is static and artificial, and is designed as a protection against radiation and who knows what else that might come down. We’ve learned a lot from this station here on Titan, including the need to protect ourselves from some things we never before knew existed. Once the Anchors are in enough for us to sit back, live off them, and see how well they work, we’ll clear the air, so to speak, within their boundaries. The sky will be nearly as transparent as Earth’s—and as distorting. An artificial miniature climate will be induced to feed us rainfall and we’ll see how everything works, from drainage to irrigation to drinking and sewage. To you, you will be living in a self-contained and quite pleasant but very tiny world of your own—each Anchor will be. In effect, you’ll be living within a fixed and very real computer simulation. The Anchors will be the best places, by the way, because they’re easy—they’re being designed as ideals, and because of their relatively small areas we don’t have to worry about interaction with the rest of the world. It’s only when we start filling in from Anchor to Anchor and Anchor to Gate that we will get incredibly complex.”
“Will there be oceans when the world is done?” another asked.
“No. We’re dealing in a smaller area than Earth and we have the luxury of being able to distribute our water more evenly. However, there will be some huge lakes—not in the Anchors though—that will look like and serve the functions of oceans, and a tremendous river system. We plan for the great mass of water to be frozen in the polar regions, as on Earth—only on our world, by simply sending current up that grid and converting it to heat, we’ll be able to melt what’s needed and channel it north and south to the life zones when and where needed. Large bodies of water are, however, my specialty, and so far the problem hasn’t been totally solved. It’s possible I may have to add an ocean after all at some point, for climatological reasons, but we’re trying to avoid it if we can, as well as tall mountain ranges. These factors more than anything else can make one place too dry and another too wet. We intend a water area equivalent to two large oceans, but it will be broken up and put where we want and need them.”
“What’s the problem with your big lakes?”