Ishtar Rising Book 1 - Michael A. Martin [4]
Dr. Sagan smiled back at the older man, seemingly mollified. But he also appeared to be working very hard to ignore Seyetik.
Seyetik looked oblivious to this as he turned back toward Saadya. “Dr. Sagan might be interested in hearing how close your terraforming project came to utter destruction only—How long ago was it? A few weeks?”
Thirty-nine days, Saadya thought, gritting his teeth. He was beginning to regret having programmed the station’s holographic Seyetik simulacrum to be so faithful to the original.
Saadya noticed a moment later that both Sagan and Mandl were looking expectantly in his direction. “I will admit that Project Ishtar has suffered its share of setbacks recently,” he said at length. “What worthwhile scientific enterprise hasn’t?”
Sagan nodded, then resumed scanning the horizon and the distant, snow-bedecked steepness of Mount Maxwell. “The amount of energy you’ll need just to cool down the atmosphere is incredible. The number of megajoules required must be—”
“Billions and billions,” Seyetik said with a smirk.
Sagan sighed. “I never, ever said that. Why does everyone feel obliged to make that same pathetic joke every time they talk to me?”
Saadya felt obliged to steer the conversation back toward matters scientific and technical. “Actually, I’m taking the opposite approach, Dr. Sagan. I’ve chosen to thin the Venusian atmosphere by heating it up, rather than by cooling it down.”
“So you must be planning to thin the atmosphere by blowing most of it off into space,” Sagan said, looking intrigued. “But how?”
“Shaped force fields,” Saadya said.
Sagan seemed disappointed. “Oh. Magic, then.”
“Clarke’s Law,” said Mandl, shaking his head but maintaining a good-natured smile. “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
“But only if that technology actually works,” Seyetik said. “Terraforming Sol Two is no mere feat of legerdemain. It is an act of creation worthy of the gods themselves.”
No pressure, Saadya thought, suppressing a nervous laugh.
Seyetik wasn’t finished. To Dr. Mandl, he said, “But at least there are no hidden indigenous life-forms here on Venus that might compromise the project. Such things put quite a crimp into your terraforming efforts on Velara III, did they not?”
Dr. Sagan looked horrified. A storm cloud crossed Mandl’s face. “There was no way to foresee that,” Mandl said before lapsing into a moody silence not unlike Sagan’s. Saadya had read the papers Dr. Mandl had written nearly a dozen years ago, after the partially terraformed planet Velara III had turned out to be the home of a subterranean species of sentient crystalline life.
Saadya knew all too well that such discoveries were the stuff of a terraformer’s worst nightmares.
Seyetik raised a hand in a gesture of truce. “Forgive me, Dr. Mandl. I know that the scanning technology your team had available then did not permit the detection of the native fauna until it was nearly too late.”
Mandl appeared content to forgive Seyetik’s behavior. “Such are the limits of technology.”
“Technology can be a finicky thing, indeed,” Seyetik said, nodding. “But failures of vision on the part of the powers that be have scuttled more good science than all of technology’s glitches and gremlins combined.”
“The Federation Council,” Saadya said, realizing too late that he had been thinking aloud.
“Exactly,” Seyetik said. He seemed to be warming up to full lecture-hall mode. “Governance is about resource allocation every bit as much as terraforming is. Unfortunately, the Federation has other resource priorities.”
Saadya swallowed hard. “The Council will resume giving the project its full support,” he said, “once the war damage on Betazed is put to rights.”
“Let us all hope so,” Mandl said, nodding sympathetically.
Seyetik mirrored Mandl’s expression, but somehow made it