Ishtar Rising Book 1 - Michael A. Martin [3]
True, Saadya had not tamed quite so many harsh worlds as had Seyetik. But then, even the great Seyetik had never set his sights on that mother of all terraforming conundrums: Venus. Which of us, then, Saadya wondered, has the greater ego?
One of the other two men who stood beside Seyetik spoke up. “Ambition is a fine thing, Gideon,” said Dr. Kurt Mandl, the second member of the trio, his Federation Standard colored with a thick Teutonic accent. The rising sun gleamed against Mandl’s bald pate. “For instance, reigniting the fires of Epsilon 119 must have required ambition in no small measure.”
Seyetik cast a wry look at Mandl. “There’s ambition, Doctor, and then there are pipe dreams. Starfleet has been trying to terraform Venus for how long now? Twenty-five years, on and off? Trying to make this hellbeast of a planet habitable would put even my talents to the test.”
“You make a fine argument for a new approach to the problem,” Mandl replied, offering Saadya a fatherly smile. “Perhaps the problem with some of the previous Venusian terraforming notions was that they weren’t sufficiently ambitious.” To the third man, who had not yet spoken, Mandl added, “No offense intended, Carl.”
The man Mandl addressed appeared to have scarcely heard his colleague’s comments, so enthralled was he by his surroundings. He breathed deeply of the air. Then, speaking to no one in particular, he said, “This really is Venus. As it will appear after the terraforming process is finished.”
Saadya enjoyed the awed look on the dark-haired man’s face. This is how Surak might have looked had he lived long enough to witness peace finally breaking out on Vulcan. Or Einstein watching Cochrane accelerate the Phoenix past warp one.
“That’s correct, Dr. Sagan,” Saadya said.
The twentieth-century planetologist squinted at the horizon, examining the brightening sky the way a jeweler might inspect an intricately cut gemstone. “I can’t see any trace of the parasol you must have used to cool the atmosphere down. And you appear to have greatly increased the Venusian rotation rate. I can see that you’re pretty far along in the process. It must have taken millennia to—”
“You’d do best to think of our surroundings as a mere thought experiment rather than a true picture of the final result, Dr. Sagan,” Seyetik said. “Our young host hasn’t pulled off his prospective miracle just yet.”
Carl Sagan trained his curious gaze upon Saadya. “So what we’re experiencing is actually some kind of…simulation?”
Saadya felt his face flush with embarrassment, but he recovered swiftly. “Yes, sir. But it is an extremely accurate one. My staff and I will make it a reality very soon. The key to that reality is dealing with its complexity.”
“Ah,” Sagan said. “Number crunching.”
Saadya nodded, trying to imagine the primitive state of computing during Sagan’s heyday. “To that end, the Bynars on my research team have increased our computational resources by orders of magnitude.”
Sagan looked puzzled. “Bynars?”
“Bynars or no Bynars,” Seyetik said to Saadya, apparently relishing the mellifluous sound of his own voice, “there are some extremely delicate calculations at play here. Needless to say, the state of the terraformer’s art has evolved far beyond the use of giant beach umbrellas and atmospheric bombardments of blue-green algae.” Seyetik’s eyes met Sagan’s as he made this last comment.
Dr. Sagan reddened, but was far too gentlemanly to rise to Seyetik’s bait. Saadya knew well that Sagan had been among the first twentieth-century planetary scientists to seriously advance the notion that Sol’s second planet might be made habitable. Back then, however, the mechanisms available for inducing such large-scale climate change were necessarily both primitive and prohibitively expensive. Sagan’s suggestions that Venus’s superhot atmosphere might be cooled down using giant spaceborne parasols and through the introduction of high-altitude microbes had eventually proved far too slow and difficult to work in actual practice.
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