“DeSilvo was’ better at claiming credit than doing work,” Norla suggested.
“That’s what I have come to believe. To terraform a planet is to rebuild it completely, in all its myriad complexity. No one man can claim it as his own. Such a thing is too impossibly complicated for one man to be master of it all. The task is too great, and takes too long, for one man to oversee it all, or even comprehend it all. It is a task for generations, a job handed down from parent to child, again and again and again.”
Koffield paused for a moment, and chuckled to himself. “And it was a job that DeSilvo himself had never actually done before Solace. He never thought of himself as an engineer, as a builder, as a doer. He was far too lofty for such things. He was a thinker, a theorizer, an idealizer. He was the one who saw how things ought to be. He put his finger square on all the crucial mistakes made in the past—right back to the beginning, to the disaster of the first Mars terra-forming attempt. He identified the precise points where all the great terraformists had gone wrong.
“So he said’—and he said it often enough, in a grand enough way, that everyone believed him—and came to believe in him. Half a dozen terraforming projects called him in as a consultant, and listened to all he said, and believed him.
“He had never worked, in any capacity, directly on a terraforming job. He had never held responsibility, never been forced to concern himself with the results of his actions—and yet, no one seemed to notice that glaring omission. He was handsome, he was refined, he was elegant. He was charming and had the knack of making his own words sound like wisdom.
“And they all listened, and the more they listened, the more he had to say. His opinion became doctrine. His vague notions became absolutes. His half-thought-out philosophies became unchallenged certitudes.
“The people who actually did the work came to sit at the knee of the man who seemed to know their profession, their vocation, better than they did. They, who remade old worlds into new, listened to the words and took the advice of a man who had never turned over a spadeful of dirt.”
“In other words, he became the grand old man, and no one noticed there was no particular reason for it,” Norla said. “I can think of a few professors from my old school like that.”
“Exactly. I’m not saying he didn’t have skills. He could do the calculations. He did understand the incredibly complicated theory and practice of terraforming. Drop a stack of datapacks about some work in progress in front of him, and he’d master the material, tell you what was working, tell you what was wrong. But DeSilvo was no genius. He couldn’t do what had not been done before. What he could do was find geniuses, and make them feel useful—: which only makes sense, as he used them relentlessly.
“But some people started to notice, and even to whisper to each other, that he was all talk and no action: The Master Worldbuilder had never built a world. And some of the geniuses he hired and used started to mutter about him taking entirely too much credit.
“Then, long, long before I met him, he found the perfect genius to use. One who would not talk back. One who would not elbow her way forward to grab some of the attention. A nice, well-behaved, quiet—and very dead—genius. A genius whose name I am quite sure you never heard. Even on Solace, the world built on Ulan Baskaw’s vision, I’ll wager that it’s difficult—in fact, impossible—to find any reference to her in the public libraries, let alone find any monument to her. And you certainly wouldn’t have heard DeSilvo talk about her.
“DeSilvo found Ulan Baskaw in the reference grids of the Grand Library. She had died centuries before DeSilvo was born, but her work—what there was of it—was still there. Just three books, short books, small ones. The first was of no great consequence, but the second seemed a jewel beyond price. The answer. From it sprang Greenhouse and the SunSpot, and the entire Solace project. And the third turned the answer upside down.”
“The answer to what?” Norla asked.
Koffield laughed, and actually smiled. “The answer to that age-old question, the stumbling block of all terra-forming projects: How do you get something precious, delicate, and rare across a wide and stormy ocean? It turns out the answer is: You don’t. You get it across a small, calm, artificial pond instead. It’s much safer and easier.”
“Now I really don’t understand.”
Koffield shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “For the purposes of my story, Baskaw’s idea, in and of itself, is almost a side issue. Suffice it to say the most challenging part, the limiting factor, of any interstellar terraforming job, was the transport of large numbers of living things, enough to seed a terraformed world, across interstellar space. She found a solution to that problem, a solution that came to be known, in the Solacian system, as Greenhouse and SunSpot.
“Greenhouse was nothing but a barren ball of rock, a satellite orbiting Comfort, a gas giant planet in the outer Solacian system. They built .vast numbers of habitat domes on the surface. They hung SunSpot in an orbit of Greenhouse that matched the Solacian day. SunSpot was— is—a massive fusion generator built into a massive adjustable parabolic reflector that could be focused and aimed, so that none of its light and heat is lost to empty space, but all of it could be directed down to the satellite below. It was, quite simply, the largest spotlight ever built. Once its fusion reaction was ignited, it shone down on the surface of Greenhouse with the same intensity as the local sun provides at Solace. It orbited Greenhouse once a day, providing light and heat to all the habitat domes.
“The domes could be used to build up large populations of whatever living things were needed. Without something like Greenhouse, the terraformers would have to rely on small, fragile breeding groups aboard the operations ships, or on the uncontrolled surface of the planet, that would have to be released at just exactly the right moment, with little or no margin for error. With Greenhouse, the terra-formers could grow a large, resilient, better-controlled, and healthier mixed population of many interacting species that could be held in readiness and sustained until the planet was ready.
“They could fine-tune the relationships, experiment, and adjust before releasing a single specimen into the wild on Solace. More importantly, the living things could be shipped direct from Greenhouse without recourse to the cryogenic or generation-ship techniques required of biota shipped from Earth.
“I could spend days discussing the details of why, but suffice it to say that the Greenhouse technique made logistics so much cheaper and easier that it had the potential to shave the thousand-year job of full terraformation down to only a century or two. Ulan Baskaw never found a way to implement the idea. But DeSilvo found a way—in the Solacian system.”
“And is that why you wanted to go to Solace?”
“Indirectly, yes. But there’s another part of the story I haven’t told you yet. DeSilvo found Baskaw’s book—or at least the datacube that preserved the words of her book— more than four hundred years ago.”
Norla frowned in confusion. “But I thought you said that you had met him,” she protested. “How could he have been alive four hundred years ago? How could he live that long?”
“Because, perhaps, DeSilvo did have one other sort of genius. He was able to convince people of things—starting with his own indispensability. Baskaw’s methods would make it possible to terraform a planet in far less time—but, even so, the task would not be complete within a normal human lifespan. A normal one. DeSilvo decided that his lifespan would not be normal. He went cryo. Repeatedly. In and out of the cryocan, or in and out of temporal confinement, when he could manage it, but mostly in cryo. One year out, nineteen years in, on average. With a lot of Solace’s senior terraforming staff doing the same thing.”
Norla thought of her own revival and shuddered. To go through that time and again, over and over again. The very thought terrified her. But then she was brought up short with the realization that her own chosen career meant she would have to do much the same herself, over and over again. Would she have the st
rength of character for it? Or was she a nonreturnable, a stay-behind? When the time came, would she have too much fear—or too much sense— to go back into the cryocan?
“It’s not as bad after the first time, and your first time was far worse than most,” Kof field said. “The body adapts. It’s never pleasant, but I promise it isn’t always a passage through hell.”
She looked at him in surprise—and then realized it couldn’t have been that hard to read her thoughts at such a time. “They—they say that—but is it true?”
“It’s true enough,” Koffield said. “At least on average. This last revival was pretty bad for me too—maybe because of the dosage exhaustion Phelby was talking about. Or maybe because of something else entirely. I don’t know. We might never know.”
Norla found herself trembling a bit, just thinking about it. “Please—please,” she said. “Don’t talk about it. Talk about something else. Tell me more about DeSilvo—and what he has to do with you. So he took cold sleep over and over again—then what?”
Koffield looked out the porthole, a thoughtful expression on his face. “The idea of taking cold sleep over and over again was probably DeSilvo’s single greatest contribution to terraforming technique,” he said. “That idea, combined with a shortened terraforming process, meant a job of terraforming could be done within a somewhat prolonged human lifetime.
“DeSilvo never got tired of telling people what a revolutionary change it was. And maybe he was right. Look through the history books, and you’ll see how many terraforming jobs failed because the dream died in the third generation, or because the fourth generation* rebelled, or because the fifth was simply so weakened and impoverished by the task that they couldn’t go on. But DeSilvo changed that. There wasn’t any need to enlist or train—or forcibly recruit—generation after generation of specialists.
Just freeze the whole team, and revive the staff you need at any given time.
“It made good sense. Most of the job of terraforming consists of waiting for the effects to become apparent. Drop the seeded algae into the upper atmosphere and allow them to reproduce for thirty years. Shift the orbits of ten or twenty comets so they’ll hit the planet and bring in water, and then wait the hundred years until the last of them hits, and another decade or so for the dust to clear and the atmosphere to restabilize. Set an army of robotic labor to work seeding a desert, and check back in fifteen years to see how they’re doing. Between the times they’re needed, the workers stay in cryo.”
Norla frowned. “But not everyone could do that. There would have to be a certain number of people—probably quite a large number—whose work didn’t allow them to do that—mostly lower-status jobs, I’d guess. Then there would be a certain number who were supposed to sleep and wake, sleep and wake, but who discovered they couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to endure that much cryo. There would be a huge class division, maybe a permanent one. A long-lived upper class that doesn’t get its hands dirty, and a lower class that doesn’t live as long and is expected to do all the dirty work. Assuming that most people who rebuild the planet stay to live on it, that sort of system would have profound effects on the planet’s social structure.”
Koffield laughed. “Quite right. Quite right indeed. Though what you spotted in thirty seconds, it took the social scientists generations to notice—and then they called it an unintended consequence. It shaped Solacian society, down to the present day, judging from the broadcasts I’ve monitored.
“But,-in any event, DeSilvo was convinced he had the One True Way to do terraforming, a plan and a process and a way of working that solved all the old problems and conformed to all of his platitudes and airy theories of ecological esthetics. And he sold the devil out of it to everyone who might be willing to join in the funding—and so they let him have a crack at Solace. And he remade that world, in his own image—and was alive to see—and be lionized—the official inauguratory ceremonies, when Solace was declared habitable, though of course there was still much to do. He was, well and truly, the Grand Old Man at last.”
“And then?”
“And then he discovered there are few places worse than a recently terraformed planet in which to be a Grand Old Man of Terraforming. You never really finish terra-forming a world, after all, any more than you ever really finish building a city—or even a house. There’s always something that needs doing, some change that ought to be made, some mistake to be fixed. Details, fiddling details, and somehow there was always someone who thought he should be consulted, he should decide. But he was interested in grand visions, not detail work.
“Worse than that, Solace was a backwater. No one of any importance went there. Certainly no one of any importance to DeSilvo’s ambitions. Nor had he ever much cared for life on the frontier, for getting mud on his boots and dirt under his nails. Strange tastes in a man who was supposed to be building frontiers for a living, but there it was. So he started looking for an excuse to leave Solace— and then he found an excuse, and he took it.”
“Donating his papers to the Grand Library.”
“Which, by remarkable coincidence, put him back in the Solar System, right at the center of things once again, where he could hold court and welcome admirers, advise students, pose for the cameras—all of that.”
“And that’s when and where you met him,” Norla put in.
“Yes,” Koffield said. “When his triumph at Solace was just a few years old, and my disaster at Glister was only a few months in the past. When he was at the apex of his career, and, in many ways, I was at the bottom of mine. Probably if that hadn’t been true, then I never would have gotten to know him. Never would have gotten swept up by him. Connect all the dots, knock over all the dominoes, and my. guess is that I wouldn’t be here right now.” Koffield looked at Norla closely, as if he were seeing something he had not seen before. “Nor would you, for that matter. The Glisterns would have had to seek their revenge some other way. My apologies.”
Koffield went quiet. Does he blame the Glisterns for what happened to the Dom Pedro IV? she asked herself.. Just when I thought I’d broken through all the silence and the mystery, he starts in with puzzles. She tried to get him talking again. “However it happened, we’re both here now. But what happened with you and DeSilvo?”
Koffield didn’t speak for a time, a long enough time that Norla started to wonder if she had offended him. Koffield just sat there, absolutely still.
At last he spoke. “What happened? I was a fool, that’s what happened. I was a fool, and DeSilvo seduced me just as he seduced everyone else. Except with me he did it not by flattering me, or making a fuss over me, or making it seem like I was special and important. He did it by not knowing—or perhaps simply not caring—who I was.
“There was a grand reception for DeSilvo one night. Not the first in his honor, and not the last. I received a courtesy invitation, on account of my rank. There were a great number of receptions and parties and conferences and dinners held in the Grand Library habitat. Some for fun, or for private socializing, but most with some sort of agenda for someone. And I did not fit most agendas. As you might imagine, therefore, I didn’t receive many invitations, and most of the ones I did get seemed to be the sort where I was supposed to have the good taste to understand that# it would be awkward indeed if I actually accepted or showed up. I knew well enough when I was supposed to send my regrets and thus avoid causing a scene. What I didn’t know about reading between the lines, I learned pretty quickly.
“But the invitation to the party for DeSilvo wasn’t like that. No one called me two hours after it arrived to ask me to take a duty shift so he could go to the same event. None of my fellow officers just happened to stop by to say that this or that politician would be there, broadly hinting that it would be unpleasant if anyone caused a scene.
“So I went. It was the first time I had really been out to that sort of event since—well, since before Circum Central. There were speeches. Some functionary or other got up and told us how wonder
ful DeSilvo was, then handed DeSilvo whatever trinket it was—a plaque, a medal, whatever. Something he could hang in his trophy case. DeSilvo got up and accepted the award, then made his own speech—and it was a very good speech, a very compelling and moving and clever speech, all about how the new terraforming methods were going to revolutionize everything, turn the status quo around, get humanity back on the move. Now we’d be able to expand ten times as fast, to ten times as many worlds. Loud cheers and applause for that remark, and no one stopped to ask if establishing ten times as many underpopulated, isolated, expensive backwaters was such a grand idea.
“I didn’t think of any such questions myself, not that night. DeSilvo was a good speaker, and I got swept up in his words, the same as everyone else there.
“After the speeches, DeSilvo worked the room, smooth and thorough as any politician, making sure everyone there got a special hello, a personal greeting. And it so happened he came to me, and it so happened that, for whatever reason, it seemed as if he took a special interest in me.”
Koffield went silent again, but Norla did nothing, said nothing, to urge him on. Somehow she knew that she could only reinforce this silence, that came at the exact moment when Koffield himself entered the story. She had to wait it out, let the time go by until he had no choice but to speak. This man had built a wall of silence around himself, and only he could pull it down. Never had he revealed the slightest detail about himself. Now he had no choice but to do so.
At last Koffield went on.
“For whatever reason,” he said, “DeSilvo singled me out that night. Maybe he wanted something that he thought I could get for him. Maybe it was that he was a good talent spotter, and sensed, somehow, he could make use of me.
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