Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 603
saying PHOTO glowed above one of them; another was
probably a restaurant.
Disappointed, Marya put the papers back. A second box
held records of the Ventus project. It was obvious now she
inscape. At least, though, she would be able to tell people back
home that she had held these documents in her own hands
(almost) and seen them with her own eyes (really).
Here were photos of some of the team; she remembered
their names intimately. Kreiger, the mastermind of the
terraforming effort; he had come up with the idea of the
nanotech-driven ecosphere. There was Larry Page, the
geneticist. There were dozens of others at the height of the
project, all driven by a shared vision of interstellar settlement
on worlds terraformed before any human set foot on them.
New Edens, by the thousands, of which Ventus would be the
first.
They did not command the wealth of nations, these
researchers. Although their grants amounted to millions of
Euros, they could never have funded a deep-space mission on
their own, nor could they have built the giant machineries they
conceived of. In order to achieve their dream, they built their
prototypes only in computer simulation, and paid to have a
commercial power satellite boost the Wind seeds to a fraction
of light speed. The Wind seeds massed only twenty kilos, but
microwave power. They were famous--in the way that
romantic dreamers and crackpots often are--but no one
expected the Winds to bloom and grow the way they ultimately
did.
She held each photo and paper in turn, then put it
reverently down. Finally, at the bottom of the box, Marya