"My life's work is done." Atlas Morrog gazed out the spaceship's kilometer-long observation window, his face like a weathered mountainside. "I've achieved my final goal."
   On the other side of the glass was black vacuum. A beige half-disk reflected sunlight too bright to stare at. It represented Morrog's entire life.
   "How does it make you feel?" Janet Glasser insisted. The popular MarsNet MediaMaven couldn't link with this living legend at the climax of his career. He ignored the flying Cams and talked past her questions.
   "The time has come to transcend," Morrog opined.
   "Many viewers don't know your work," Glasser said. "We've prepared a historical segment." The live part ended and she relaxed.
"We'll be back in four," she told Morrog. "Top ratings."
   Morrog studied the half-orb, Venus seen from above the south pole, dawn merging into dusk. His whole life he'd known one goal. Somehow, he would make this hellish planet habitable. This fashionable mediastar with her eyecams couldn't begin to understand.
   His assistants stood around the observation room in groups, his brilliantly dysfunctional family. For forty years they had confronted the greatest problem in terraforming.
   "We're back," Glasser announced. "Professor, please tell us what your work was about for the four hundred new citizens born every second?"
   The planet made a dramatic backdrop for his speech. "To make Venus into a second Earth, we needed to lose its dense atmosphere," he explained. "The main problem was the CO2-carbon. This gas causes a runaway greenhouse effect above a 1% threshold. The surface temperature is almost 800K, though the Sun never penetrates the water-free cloud layers. Even at night it stays hot enough to melt lead, though the night lasts months. We had to eliminate this carbon."
   He was oversimplifying of course. There was no way to get rid of it. Morrog felt nostalgia for when the problem had merely seemed hopeless.
   "Yet you solved the problem," Glasser said, "when everyone said it was impossible."
   "My Thermal Compressor was one element out of thousands," Morrog replied. "It's the one I'm proudest of."
   Meanwhile, they planned to speed up the planet's rotation. Like Mercury, Venus's day had been lengthened by solar tides. They hadn't circularized the planet's orbit, causing a resonance with Earth. The two worlds shared a deeper bond than their similar sizes and compositions. Whenever Venus came closest, the same side always faced Earth.
Ironically, this connection made it harder to exploit. Venus's day lasted longer than its year. To accelerate Venus's rotation, they would strengthen and then flip the magnetic poles by 90 degrees. Artificial metal asteroids with trillion-Tesla magnetic fields would circle the planet and spin it up over a few centuries.
Such an undertaking would overwhelm almost anyone. Morrog was incapable of being intimidated.
   There were other links between Earth and Venus. In the early days of the Solar System, the two worlds had performed an irregular dance, switching orbits several times and almost colliding. He believed the object which had long ago slammed into Earth, forming its moon, had once orbited Venus. That gave Earth its rapid rotation, but had doomed Venus.
   "Can you explain your solution to offload the carbon?" Glasser asked. "You couldn't build space elevators."
   He chuckled. His assistants couldn't remember seeing him relaxed. "Carbon is a special molecule," Morrog said. "When compressed it shifts into more stable configurations, the hardest being diamond. More common are fullerenes and diamonite. Our force field compresses atmospheric carbon and trace elements into a rocklike matrix thirty times harder than steel. The reaction goes faster at higher temperatures."
   "A huge amount of carbon to solidify," Glasser said. "Enough to layer the planet half a kilometer thick. Yet it would take under 1% of the energy needed to adjust Venus's day length."
   "Still a century's output from the Vulcan solar power station." The great disk was kept in place by solar radiation pressure. "For years its shadow has shielded the planet."
   "Fortunately diamonite is an almost indestructible building material."
   They would laser-cut it into standard sized bricks and panels of great strength, allowing buildings to rise tens of kilometers. A forest of crystal towers connected by thin bridges would cover the surface, the first three-dimensional society.
   Morrog had envisioned every phase in SimSpace. As real as his memories, the spires soared like endless needles to the upper atmosphere. Walking through, he admired the elegant causeways, the suspended domes and airy promenades.
There were no people there. He didn't do social dynamics. Their society would surprise even him.

   "I must interrupt," Glasser said. "It is time." The chatter in the observation room died down. Everyone looked at Venus.
   For an instant all was light, as every shadow dissolved in the glare of the planet's death.
   "Outer detonation rings were perfectly timed," the announcer said. "Seismic data shows blast energy focusing down."
   Not for long, Glasser thought. Contained or not, the planet was already expanding into a sphere of light.
   The most dramatic way to blow up a planet was to drop a million tons of antimatter into the core through a Gravity Drill. At the core, the antimatter's containment field was released.
   That wasn't necessary here. Morrog's team had drilled shafts through the planet's crust into unusually deep bedrock. "Stalactubes" were a strange feature of Venusian geology. There, a trillion self-replicating heavy fusion bombs had done their work.
   Venus and Earth were in direct opposition, so the sun would shield most of the blast (a rare opportunity too good to miss). Looking at the expanding fireball, it was hard to believe the core of Venus was still shrinking. How many seconds had passed, Morrog wondered, five or fifty?
   The light intensified as the rebound broke through the surface. The outer fringes slowed as the central mass caught up around the equator, elongating at incredible speed. Evolving as planned, the explosion no longer resembled a planet. Already the hollow disk was turning inward, becoming lopsided. Most of the detonation energy had been released in the orbital plane. Tidal forces would spread out the gas and debris. The rubble would become a ring arc, then a diffuse ring around the sun. Only five percent of the planet's mass would be lost, blown harmlessly out of the solar system. The rest would become a new asteroid belt composed of small pebbles.
Then the real work would begin. Morrog didn't hear the muted sobs in the room. He had only been told seven years ago, when the plans were finalized. No one could argue against the Council. Human population was growing faster than expected. The old plans from the twenty-second century were obsolete. Only a trillion people could live on Venus once it had been terraformed. Its debris, reworked into a great belt of space colonies, would support ten thousand times as many. That was the most they could hope for, since Computronium had been outlawed.
   Glasser needed to ask a personal question. This was a human interest story after all.
   "Prof Morrog, as a Gengineered individual your dopamine receptors were tailored for one purpose. You were literally born to terraform Venus. Do you feel bad to have . . . 'failed'?"
   "But I haven't failed. I know our plan could have removed the atmosphere in a decade. I think I can reveal our secret now. Our field compressor was designed to extract heat directly from the mantle. It didn't even need solar power. The planet's interior contains, sorry contained far more free energy than Earth's. We learned to exploit this untapped resource."
   Glasser nodded. "You were skilled at deep work. My source tells me you used your method to build the shafts for the fusion bombs."
   That might have been Morrog's greatest achievement. The temperature in those semi-fluid bedrock pillars exceeded a thousand degrees.
   Morrog's face was artfully lit by the light from the end of the world. "We could have put the bombs in pure lava. We had the strongest material in the universe to work with."
   Of course. Diamond formed easily at those depths. On her brainphone she listened to the buzzing experts.
   "You found a way to accelerate the process, didn't you? A way to trigger instant carbon crystallization inside molten basalt."
   "Of course."
   The diamonite they had invented was extremely strong and compression-resistant. They could use it to shield the shaft walls to any thickness and drill even deeper. The process went faster than expected. There were no real depth limits.
   Glasser's fine intuition leaped ahead. "You did it. You built a diamond shaft to the planet's core." Speaking the words, she remembered certain facts.
   "Excellent investigative reporting," Morrog beamed. "You're right. We couldn't resist the opportunity. I'm happy to say my theories were proven correct."
   "Wait a moment . . ." she said. Morrog's team had performed an illegal experiment. There was a problem.
   Outside, the detonation dominated the solar system. The observation window blocked harmful radiation, and the embedded magnetic mesh would even stop small particles. There were few this far out. The acceleration had turned the outer debris into hypersonic vapor. The first streamers were passing the station in a magnificent color display. The rest would congeal and fall back toward the main mass. Glasser watched the show. It was beautiful, especially those sparkling points, like a wave of jewels.
The debris approached at ten kilometers per second.


The best hard SF novel: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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