To the McArthur Corporation, whose exploratory starship the Renfrew discovered it in 2098, such conditions were perfect In the late twenty-first century, interstellar expansion was at its height, with the big companies and financial consortia funding dozens of colonies. Any planet with an oxygen/ nitrogen atmosphere was being claimed and settled. But these ventures were expensive. The alien biospheres that had produced that precious blend of breathable gases were inevitably hostile and poisonous to terrestrial organisms, some immediately fatal. Establishing human communities amid such conditions was extremely costly. Not so Amethi.
For all it was technically a moon, Amethi's evolution had been fairly standard for a world of its size. It started normally, with a reducing atmosphere that slowly changed as life began to emerge from primordial seas. Primitive organisms that could photosynthesize released oxygen. Carbon was consumed by new lichens and amoebas. An unremarkable cycle that was repeated across the universe wherever such conditions occurred.
Evolution was progressing along standard lines until the asteroid was drawn in by Nizana's immense gravity field. Two hundred million years after the first primitive amoebas began fissioning, the seas were full of fish; plants had established themselves across the land. There were big insects with thistledown wings, and even small creatures not far removed from terrestrial amphibian genealogy. They all died in the aftermath.
The impact explosion threw up enough dust and steam to obscure the entire surface. In doing so, it triggered the ultimate ice age. The glaciers that thrust out from the polar caps in the aftermath encroached farther and farther through the temperate zone until they actually merged at the equator. Seas, oceans and lakes surrendered their water to the single megaglacier as it continued to expand. Temperature plummeted right across the planet, combining with the water loss and darkened atmosphere to eliminate all forms of life except the most resilient bacteria. Amethi returned to an almost primordial state. But now with a fifth of the surface covered in ice to a depth of several kilometers, and the remainder a desert that was Mars-like in its desolation, there was no potential catalyst left to precipitate change. It had become a world trapped in stasis. The isolock.
For the McArthur board members Amethi was perfection, an existing breathable atmosphere and no indigenous life. All that was needed was a slight rise in global temperature to end the isolock and restart a normal meteorological cycle.
Templeton was founded in 2115. At first it was nothing more than a collection of prefabricated igloos with a single track linking it to a runway bulldozed into the frozen dunes. The engineers and administrators who lived there were tasked with establishing a manufacturing base that would be self-sustaining, the idea being that once the initial investment was made, all you needed to do was shovel in local raw materials at one end and ultimately any product you wanted would pop out the other. After that, the only imports would be people and new designs to upgrade and expand the first few factories. Information cost nothing to transport between stars, while people would buy their own tickets to a new land with immense opportunities.
Over the first three years, spaceplanes ferried down their cargo from eight starship flights. At the end of it, industrial facilities in heavily insulated factories could supply most of the burgeoning colony's needs. But not all. There were always a few specialist systems or chemicals essential for the economy or special projects that only Earth with its abundant production facilities could provide. Time after time Temple-ton's governor sent back requests for additional units to be flown out, without which the whole project would stall.
The financial strain that Amethi placed on McArthur wasn't as bad as that for most other colony worlds, where human biochemists fought desperate battles against alien biospheres. Here there was just HeatSmash, the climate project, to initiate. Templeton's first indigenous industrial undertaking was to establish an orbital manufacturing station, Tarona. With that up and running in 2140—after nearly a third of its systems had been shipped in from Earth—they began local production of asteroid capture propulsion engines. Nizana had so much junk rock strewn around in orbit it could have provided HeatSmash with enough material to reheat a dozen worlds. The inaugural impact came in 2142, when a lump of stony iron rock measuring eighty meters across smacked right into the center of Barclay's glacier.
The explosion vaporized nearly a cubic kilometer of water and melted a considerably larger quantity. It had refrozen within a week. The steam clouds never even reached the edge of the glacier before they condensed into bullet-hard snow-flakes and rained down.
Once the planetary engineers had correlated all the data from their sensors, they estimated that the atmosphere would have reheated sufficiently to induce and sustain glacial melt after 111 years of one impact per year, involving asteroids four times the mass of the test impact. With this mildly favorable prognosis, the colonists set about building their new world. By the time Lawrence Newton was born in 2310, economic and social changes on the old homeworld had modified the nature of the colony. Although the physical task of terraforming the world had progressed without interruption, it was no longer a destination for exultant pioneers searching for a little homestead amid a wilderness that was slowly being resurrected.
* * *
The big school bus rolled easily along Templeton's main north highway, fat tires clinging to the grubby concrete with its lacework of fine cracks. Twenty-five kids, aged nine to twelve, chattered excitably or threw crumpled biscuit wrappers at each other before ducking down behind their seats to avoid retaliation. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley, their teachers, sat up at the front, doing their best to ignore what was going on behind. They'd left the school dome only ten minutes ago; it was going to be a long day.
Lawrence was sitting midway along the bus. The seat next to him went unoccupied. It wasn't that he didn't have friends at school; he did, as well as several cousins and a tribe of more distant relatives. He just didn't have any close friends. Teachers described him as restless. He was clever enough, naturally, given he was a Newton, but that intelligence was never quite captured by any of his academic subjects. Report after report filed with his parents had the age-old comment: can do better. In the competitive environment of the school, where application and achievement received the highest accolades, he was too different to fit in comfortably. Not quite a rebel—he was still too young for that classification—but there were plenty of danger signs that he could fall into the dropout category if something wasn't done fairly soon. It was an almost unknown development among Amethi's well-ordered population. For a member of a Board family it was unthinkable.