Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [75]
Now her chest felt hollow, though she wasn’t entirely sad to go away. She understood their need to make a new start, recognizing that she and her father would not likely survive the deep bleak winter of the star’s upcoming low cycle. Yes, it was time to try one of the new Klikiss colonies.
Jan joined her at the window, and they stared at Dremen, whose pearly silver clouds reflected sunlight in swirls of cottony softness—much more beautiful than they had ever seemed from ground level. The dwindling globe seemed so small, a child’s bauble cast into the void.
“Look at all those clouds, girl. Plenty of thunderstorms and cold fog. I’m not sorry to be leaving all that behind.”
“Up here the sun seems so bright.”
Jan sighed. “If only those people had seen the wisdom in my solar mirror project, we could have turned Dremen into a warm and perfectly comfortable place. But nobody wanted to make the investment.”
Two years after the hydrogue ultimatum, when Dremen began to realize hard times were ahead, Jan Covitz had gotten it into his head to run for mayor, advocating grandiose and costly solutions to the colony’s weather problems. He had drawn up a plan to erect wide concave mirrors in orbit, whose sole purpose was to reflect sunlight and pump an extra degree or two of temperature into the atmosphere. In his plan, the huge filmy reflectors would be as thin as tissue, coated with a high-albedo layer only a few molecules thick. Dremen could have become self-sufficient, impervious to the longest low-intensity solar cycle.
Though technologically feasible, the plan would have required a large investment, high taxes, and years to complete. Even as a girl, little involved in local politics, Orli had understood that her father’s proposed solutions were unlikely to be adopted.
Jan had lost by an embarrassingly large margin. He’d come home on the night of the elections with a resigned smile, accepting his defeat with good grace. “No surprise that they’re shortsighted, girl,” he had told Orli, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “Too much time studying the ground at their feet and not enough looking up into the sky toward the future.”
And so, once ekti supplies were cut off, along with regular food and fuel shipments from Hansa merchants, Dremen had found itself in a very bad position.
The colonists eventually understood that Jan had been right in principle and were angry at their own failures, but as individualists they did not like to be reminded of them. Though Jan’s disposition was always smiling, even teasing, they still felt him thinking I told you so in every encounter.
Jan might have done better if he’d spent more hours and energy planning the family’s mushroom harvest, but he was a broad-strokes person, fascinated with the big picture instead of the details.
Although he was always looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, more often than not he simply got hopelessly lost. Orli did her best to lay a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow home…
Rlinda Kett was the pilot of their ship. On orders from the Hansa, she flew the Curiosity from planet to planet, picking up volunteer colonists and transporting them to Rheindic Co, the nearest world with a transportal. There, the people would be assembled into large settlement groups, then dispatched to Klikiss worlds that were deemed hospitable to human life.
Captain Kett, a large, good-humored woman who loved to laugh, had pressurized the Curiosity ‘s cargo hold and converted it into a gathering room for the colonists. Her ship had never been designed as a passenger liner and had few amenities for so many people, but the flight to Rheindic Co would not be long, and these