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“They succeeded, by chance or accident, or the sun just obliged them on its own, but that fractional reduction of radiation left us with less than we need for a stable envirosystem, and for the millennia since then we’ve been teetering on the edge of ice age after ice age.”
    “Where is global warming when we need it?” Duhyle added quickly, “Isn’t that what the Aesyr would ask?”
    “They’ve asked it enough, without any real understanding. You know that, Kavn. Most important, the ancients burned so much of the Earth’s fossil fuels that we couldn’t replicate that even if we wanted to and if we could deal with the polluting by-products. The green house gases that we could create are too long-lasting, and we’d be back where the Jhaenists were. A compounding green house effect is almost always a runaway process over any length of time—something the most distant ancients didn’t understand, even with the obvious example of Venus. Neither did too many of their successors. That’s why the Jhaenists were so desperate. Life in the universe appears to be balanced on the edge of a very sharp and unforgiving blade, and in the end entropy will always win.” She offered a sardonic smile, enhanced by a momentary flash of green in her eyebrows. “But only eventually, and not until after the sun becomes a red giant.”
    “Not before Earth freezes solid again.”
    “That probably won’t happen. Unless we can discover something less catastrophic, the advocates of enhancing the green house effect will win out, backed by the Aesyr, and our descendants will face another seared Earth. This time, there’s not likely to be any way to recover.”
    “Haven’t scients said that before?”
    “When the clock finally stops, it’s usually the wrong time.”
    Duhyle didn’t ask about the applicability of that metaphor. She was convinced that the clock was all too likely to stop when it melted in the furnace of a runaway green house. From the recent comm-system disruptions staged by the Climate for People and the Warm Clean Earthers, both Aesyr fronts or sympathizers, it was also clear that too many humans wanted the ice gone—now. They wanted it to vanish without any untidy or unpleasant complications. That had never been possible, and it wasn’t likely to happen this time, either. That also was why his tech status had been reactivated and why Helkyria had been called up, again, as a scient-commander. He had asked if she’d really been assigned, but she’d always evaded the question.
    “What about terraforming Mars again?” he asked after a moment.
    “With what? It takes water, and the previous efforts scoured the easily available ices from the Kuiper Belt. Those remaining are farther out and smaller. That takes time, resources, and energy. We’re short on all three.”
    “Even if…?”
    “Enhancing thorium for a breeder program would require massive energy concentrations as well, and it’s politically unthinkable, except for the most radical of the Aesyr. Besides, even if we could do that, we don’t have the resources to move four hundred million people.”
    “The distant ancients numbered billions…”
    “When everything fell apart, most of those billions died. You’ve seen enough of the fossils and all the evidence of total societal collapse. The Hu-Ruche apparently evaded one collapse, and they’re the only ones who did…and that only postponed the inevitable.”
    “Are you certain?”
    “Every simulation I can run predicts Iceberg Earth. So does every other simulation attempted by the Department.”
    “With no rebound?”
    “I wouldn’t say that the probability of no rebound is unitary, but it’s so close that…” Helkyria offered a sad smile, and the tips of her silver-gold locks flickered the off-blue of disappointment. Her eyebrows did not shift hues, suggesting that her discouragement was perhaps not so deep as her words conveyed.
    “That it might as well be,” Duhyle