Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [22]
They had indeed been early explorers, Miles reflected, to arrive and settle before more salubrious worlds were found to render such ambitious projects economically uninteresting, at least if you didn't already live there. But . . . then there were the wormholes.
"On the debit side," Venier continued, "the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was high enough to be toxic to humans, yet insolation was so inadequate that no greenhouse effect, runaway or otherwise, captured the heat needed to maintain liquid water. Komarr was therefore a lifeless world, cold and dark. The earliest calculations suggested more water would be needed, and a few so-called low-impact cometary crashes were arranged, hence we can thank our ancestors for our southern crater lakes." A colorful, though out-of-scale, sprinkle of lights dusted the lower hemisphere of the planet-image, resolving into a string of blue blobs. "But the growing demand topside for cometary water and volatiles for the orbital and wormhole stations soon put a stop to that. And the early downside settlers' fears of poorly controlled trajectories, of course."
Demonstrated fears, as Miles recalled his Komarran history. He stole a glance at Vorthys. The Professor appeared perfectly content with Venier's class lecture.
"In fact," Venier went on, "later explorations showed the water-ice tied up in the polar caps to be thicker than at first suspected, if not so abundant as on Earth. And so the drive for heat and light began."
Miles sympathized with the early Komarrans. He loathed arctic cold and dark with a concentrated passion.
"Our ancestors built the first insolation mirror, succeeded a generation later by another design." A holovid model, again out of scale, appeared to the side, and melted into a second one. "A century later, this was in turn succeeded by the design we see today." The seven-disk hexagon appeared, and danced attendance on the Komarr globe. "Insolation at the equator was boosted enough to allow liquid water and the beginnings of a biota to draw down the carbon and release much-needed O2. Over the following decades, a full-spectrum mixture of artificial greenhouse gases was manufactured and released into the upper atmosphere to help trap the new energy." Venier moved his hand; four of the seven disks winked out. "Then came the accident." All the Komarrans around the table stared glumly at the crippled array.
"There was mention of a cooling projection? With figures?" Vorthys prodded gently.
"Yes, my Lord Auditor." Venier slid a disk across the polished surface toward the Professor. "Administrator Vorsoisson said you were an engineer, so I left in all the calculations."
The Waste Heat Management fellow, Soudha, also an engineer, winced and bit his thumb at this innocent ignorance of Vorthys's stature in his field. Vorthys merely said, "Thank you. I appreciate that."
So where's my copy? Miles did not ask aloud. "And can you please summarize your conclusions for us nonengineers, Ser Venier?"
"Certainly, Lord Auditor . . . Vorkosigan. Serious damage to our biota in the northernmost and southernmost latitudes, not just in Serifosa Sector but planetwide, will begin after one season. For every year after that, we lose more ground; by the end of five years, the destructive cooling curve rises rapidly towards catastrophe. It took twenty years to build the original soletta array. I pray that it will not take that many to repair it." On the vid model, white polar caps crept like pale tumors over the globe.
Vorthys glanced at Soudha. "And so other sources of heat suddenly take on new importance, at least for a stopgap."
Soudha, a big, square-handed man in his late forties, sat back and smiled