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5.5

31 October

Thalia Buoyant Island

Southern Stratosphere

Venus


Almost the whole village was gathered outside, in hats and kaftans, masks and gloves. The cloud deck was high today, only a few hundred meters below the bottom of the island, and the air was technically too acidic for anything but brief exposure, or spacesuits.

But nobody cared. Everyone was looking up, trying to spot an orange dot in the vastness of the blue Venusian sky.

“I’m very proud of you, guy,” Julian said to Frédéric, over the murmur of the crowd.

“I’d wait for a safe landing before you start celebrating,” Frédéric said.

Julian waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t care about that. We have all we need here. Anything extra is . . . extra. Let me be proud of you, okay? You’re a doer. You saw something you could do, for yourself and the people around you, and you did it. That’s how your mother and I started our company back in Colombia, and that’s how we sold it to move to another planet.”

Frédéric’s mother, on Julian’s other side, added, “You come from a long line of doers, little Frito. You make us both proud.”

“Thank you,” Frédéric said. Nothing more; he was both genuinely touched by this show of support, and also afraid of spoiling the video he was shooting. It wasn’t supposed to be about him; it was about this big, important day in the life of the island. If people were ever going to move here for real, they needed to feel immersed in the place itself. They needed to understand that it was as physically and emotionally real as their own hometowns.

Pointing his tablet at the sky again, Frédéric held a hand up on the left side of it, to shield the camera from glare. The days were longer than ever now—a hundred hours, give or take, and it was a matter of some debate which was worse: the daylight or the darkness. But either way, right now Thalia’s long night was over; the Sun was up above the cloud horizon, strong enough for the optical sensors on the landing package to look down and see, hopefully, against the white of the clouds, a gray speck of alien matter. The island.

“I see it!” Juanetta called out, pointing a finger into the sky.

Frédéric reoriented the tablet toward where she was pointing, but did not immediately see anything. Then, taking his face away from the screen and simply looking up, he did see it: the orange and white pie wedges of a tiny parachute, high up in the sky.

“Can you see this?” he asked his joiners rhetorically. “This is something you did. Not me; all I did was ask for help. All of you made this possible, with money and time and . . . enthusiasm. So much enthusiasm! When I first met you all I was in a low place, trapped on this island, and trapped in my own head. You all showed me that Venus is part of the world, not separate from it. You showed me that I could reach out. There was a place to reach out to.”

Frédéric had prepared a speech for this occasion, but it had fled right out of his mind, and he was now winging it, taking whatever nonsense occurred to him and sending it directly to his vocal cords. He hoped it would make sense later, but he knew it didn’t really matter. His joiners were pretty forgiving, and the few who were not, he happily unjoined.

“I can see the package now,” he said. “I don’t know if you can see this, but there’s a little dot underneath that parachute. That’s our landing craft. That’s a ton of structure and four tons of cargo. This island, everything you see here, grew from a seed not much bigger than that. Actually, only ten times the size of that, so try and imagine what a big difference four more tons could make around here. Five more!”

Under pressure from Tohias, Frédéric had relented and let the adults of Thalia vote on what supplies were most needed. It ended up being mostly a lot of titanium and copper, and a few kilograms of rare earth metals that simply could not be obtained here. Other than that, there were a few complete machines, another surgical tube, fifty kilograms of assorted seeds, some useful electronics, and a handful of specialty chemicals that Tohias had never figured out how to synthesize. Plus the structure of the lander itself, which was mostly aluminum and tungsten that would be stripped and melted and put to good use.

Even the parachute—real silk, barfed out by Chinese caterpillars—had properties no Venusian material could match. There were no actual luxury items, though, because what good would that do, to get a fleeting taste of chocolate or cognac and then run out again? Or so Tohias had insisted. Now there was some good, solid adult thinking.

However, Frédéric had non-negotiably set aside ten kilograms for himself, for a new tablet computer, a backup tablet computer, some backup batteries, a camera tripod, some lights and reflectors and microphones, and a pop-up green screen he could assemble anywhere. If his network content had gotten him this far, then even better network content had the potential to get them even further, right? Much of that stuff, or some inferior version of it, could technically be manufactured here on Thalia (especially now), but he did not trust sixty-six percent of the council—i.e., of the voting population of the island—to see it that way and ever allocate the resources.

Also, since there was an entire empty apartment building waiting for new colonists to come and colonize, Frédéric had quietly allocated one of the empty storage rooms to serve as his recording and editing studio. By the time anyone caught onto him, he hoped Thalia’s online presence would be seen as a critical resource, every bit as important as the trawler or the photovoltaic array.

Nearby, Basilio del Campo—Juanetta’s father—was cradling his wife, Noemi. Tohias was cradling his own wife, Candide, and his son, Tabor, who was five years Frédéric’s junior. Julian was cradling Wilma. Everyone was cradling everyone, and Frédéric was surprised that Juanetta hadn’t seized the opportunity to seize him. She seemed too wrapped up in the landing itself.

Almost jealously, he moved behind her and said, “Big day for you?”

“For all of us,” she said, without turning around. “I counted up all the metal on the island, and do you know what I came up with? Three thousand, four hundred kilograms. Can our standard of living be measured that way? If so, it’s about to double. We’re going to have a surplus, for the first time ever.”

You’re welcome, Frédéric thought but did not say. It was just like Juanetta, to not acknowledge him at a moment like this. But he supposed maybe it was a good thing, that she was thinking about the future and the island, and not scheming a way to make him hold her hand.

Stepping forward, he reached out and held hers. The landing package was now big enough and close enough to be clearly visible on the tablet’s screen, and he could aim the camera well enough with only his left hand.

“Is that a rocket engine?” she asked suddenly, for the lander had begun to belch flame, not only from its bottom, but also from one side.

“There should be several on the lander,” Frédéric confirmed.

“Won’t that set fire to the carbónespuma?” she asked, sounding alarmed.

“The engineers say not. Anyway, I think it’s just centering itself over the landing pad. The parachute’s what will actually bring it down.”

A thing that seemed suddenly imminent; the lander was now visible as a contraption of legs and springs and circular feet, with a sort of barrel on top that held all the cargo. Just exactly like the CAD drawings the engineers had sent him. And even though its terminal velocity was much lower than it would have been on Earth, it was still coming down faster than a person could walk.

“Are you seeing this?” Frédéric asked his joiners again. “You probably can’t feel the excitement in the air here, but I will tell you, nothing like this has ever happened to us before. Look! Look, there it is, a thing manufactured on Earth and flung across the heavens, because one young man asked nicely. Incredible!”

And then the lander was below the level of the radio tower, and then below the tops of the greenhouse domes and the apartment buildings. And then with a gentle thump it was down—really down—and a circular ripple expanded through the carbónespuma beneath everyone’s feet, firmly marking the occasion.

“Earth and Venus are one people,” Frédéric said, and cut the video.


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