2312

Swan on Earth

Earth exerted a fatal attraction far beyond its heavy g, having to do more with its nearly infinite historical gravity, its splendor and decadence and dirt. You didn’t have to go to Uttar Pradesh and view the melting ruins of Agra or Benares to see it—it was fractal and everywhere, in every valley and village: decrepit age, the stink of cruel societies, bare eroded hillsides, drowned coastlines still melting into the sea. A very disturbing place. The strangeness was not always obvious or tangible. Human time here was simply wrenched; the center had not held; things fell apart and recombined to create feelings that did not cohere inside one. Ideas of order became hopelessly bogged in ancient stories, webs of law, faces on the street.

Best to focus on the day in hand, as always. Therefore Swan launched out of one of the mid-African elevator cars in a glider at some fifty thousand meters, and flew down toward a landing strip in the Sahel, in what should have been the bare waste of the south-marching Sahara, a desert without the slightest sign of life on it, not unlike brightside on Mercury—except there below her, brilliant white blocky towns rimmed the edges of shallow green or sky-blue lakes, huge lakes with their own clouds standing over them protectively, reflected in the water below so that their twins were standing tall in an upside-down world. Down down she flew, exhilarated despite all to be returning to Earth again—out of the glider, standing on a runway in the Sahara, in the wind—it was beyond compare superb, a huge rush and infusion of the real. Just the sky standing dark and clear over her, the wind pouring through her from the west, the naked sun on her bare face. Oh my God. This the home. To walk the side of your own planet and breathe it in, to throw yourself out into the spaces you breathed…

The town at the foot of this elevator was painfully white, with colors accenting doorways and window frames, a cheery Mediterranean look with an Islamic touch in the crowding, the town wall, the minarets. Somewhat like Morocco to the northwest. Oasis architecture, classic and satisfying: for what town was not an oasis, in the end. Topologically this town was no different from Terminator.

And yet the people were thin and small, bent and dark. Wizened by sun, broiled a bit, sure—but it was more than that. Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike. Again she saw: a big minority of Earth’s population did robot work, and that had never gone away, no matter what political theories said. Of the eleven billion people on Earth, at least three billion were in fear when it came to housing and feeding themselves—even with all the cheap power pouring down from space, even with the farmworlds growing and sending down a big percentage of their food. No—off in the sky they were bashing out new worlds, while on old Earth people still suffered. It never got less shocking to see it. And things aren’t fun anymore when you know that there are people starving while you play around. But we grow your food up there, you can cry in protest, and yet it does nothing to say it. Something is stopping the food from getting through. There continues to be more people than the system can accommodate. So there is no answer. And it is hard to keep your mind on your work when so many people are out of luck.

So something had to be done.

Why is it like this?” Swan asked Zasha, for lack of anyone else. Z was up helping some project in Greenland.

“There’s never been a plan,” Zasha said in her ear. They had had this conversation before, Z’s patient tone seemed to say. “We’re always dealing with the crisis of the moment. And old ways die hard. Everyone on Earth could have lived at an adequate level for at least the last five centuries. We’ve had the power and resources relative to the needs, we could have done it. But that was never the project, so it’s never happened.”

“But why not now, with all the power at our command?”

“I don’t know. It just hasn’t happened. There are too many old poisons in people’s heads, I guess. Also, immiseration is a terror tactic. If a population is decimated, then the remaining ninety percent are docile. They’ve seen what can happen and they take what they can get.”

“But is that true?” Swan cried. “I don’t believe it! Why wouldn’t people fight harder once they saw?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it could have happened, but instead there’s been the sea level rise and the climate catastrophes to make everything that much harder. There’s always a crisis.”

“All right, but why not now?”

“Well, sure, but who’s going to do it?”

“People would do it for themselves if they could!”

“You would think so.”

“I would because it’s true! If they aren’t doing it, they’re being held back from it somehow. There are guns in their faces, somehow.”

A silence from Zasha, whom it seemed was dealing with some distraction. Finally: “It’s been said that when societies are stressed, they don’t actually face up to their problem but look away instead, put on blinkers and go into denial. What’s historical is pretended to be natural, and people fractionate into tribal loyalties. Then they fight over what are perceived to be shortages. You hear it said that they never got over the food panics at the end of the twenty-first century, or during the Little Ice Age. Two hundred years have passed and yet it’s still a deeply felt world trauma. And in fact they still don’t have much in the way of a food surplus, so in a way it’s a rational fear for them to have. They are balanced at the tip of a whole tangle of prostheses, like a Tower of Babel, and it all has to function successfully for things to work.”

“That’s true everywhere!”

“Sure, sure. But there are so many of them here.”

“True,” Swan said, looking at the crowds pushing and shoving through the medina. Beyond the town wall, irregular lines of people were bent in the early slant of sun, harvesting strawberries. “It’s so hot and dirty, and so damned heavy. Maybe they’re simply weighed down by this planet, rather than their history.”

“Maybe. It’s just the way it is, Swan. You’ve been here before.”

“Yes, but not here.”

“Have you been to China?”

“Of course.”

“India?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ve seen it, then. As for Africa, people say it’s a development sink. Outside aid disappears into it and nothing ever changes. Ruined long ago by slavers, they say. Full of diseases, torched by the temperature rise. Nothing to be done. The thing is, now those are the conditions everywhere. The industrial rust belts are just as bad. So you could say Earth itself is now a development sink. The marrow has been sucked dry, and most of the upper classes went to Mars long ago.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way!”

“I suppose not.”

“So why aren’t we helping?”

“We’re trying, Swan. We really are. But the population of Mercury is half a million people, and the population of Earth is eleven billion. And it’s their place. We can’t just come down and tell them what to do. In fact we can barely keep them from coming up and telling us what to do! So it isn’t that simple. You know that.”

“Yes. But now I’m thinking about what it means, I guess. What it means for us. You know Inspector Genette’s people IDed that ship we visited inside Saturn, and they found it belonged to a company in Chad.”

“Chad is just a tax haven. Is that why you came down there?”

“I suppose. Why not?”

“Swan, please leave that part of things to Inspector Genette and his people. It’s time for you to help assemble the inoculants and seed stock and everything we’re going to buy on Earth and ship home.”

“All right,” Swan said unhappily. “But I want to stay in touch with the inspector too. They’re on Earth too, looking into things.”

“Sure. But in matters like these, a time comes when the data analysts take over. You have to be patient and wait for the next move.”

“What if the next move is another attack on Terminator? Or somewhere else? I don’t think we have the luxury to be patient anymore.”

“Well, but some things you can help with and others you can’t. Tell you what—come see me and talk it over. I’ll give you all the latest on what’s really happening there.”

“All right, I will. But I’m going to take the long way there.”

Swan wandered the Earth. She flew to China and spent several days there, taking the train from one city to another. All the cities had most of their neighborhoods arranged as work units, factories that people lived in all their lives, as on Venus. From childhood they had plug-ins in their fingertips, and forearms tattooed with all kinds of apps. They ate a diet that gave them their legally required doses of supplements and drugs. This was not unusual on Earth, but nowhere else was it so prevalent as in China, despite which it was not much noticed or remarked on. Swan found out about it because she contacted one of Mqaret’s colleagues who worked in Hangzhou. Mqaret wanted her to give these people a blood sample, and as she was wandering anyway, she went by.

All the great old coastal cities had been semi-drowned by the sea rise, and though this had not killed them, it had spurred intense building sprees slightly inland, on land that would remain permanently above water even if all the ice on Earth melted. This new infrastructure favored Hangzhou over Shanghai, and though most of the new buildings and roads were inland of the ancient city, the old town still served as the cultural heart of the region.

There was still a big tidal bore that ran up the funnel-shaped estuary of the Qiantang River, and people still rode it on small watercraft of various sorts. It looked like they were having fun despite all. Good old Earth, so huge and dirty, the sky looking as if chewed by a brown fungus, the water the color of pale mud, the land stripped and industrialized—but all of it still out in the wind, flattened hard by its g and yet at the same time stiff with reality. Walking around the crowded alleys of the old city, Swan got Pauline to help her with Chinese dialects she didn’t catch. It slowed down her speech but it didn’t matter. The Chinese were intent on themselves and looked right through her. Surely this was part of what the Venusians had run from: everyone fixed on their inner space or their life in the work unit, to the exclusion of everything else. Surely none of these people would ever conceive a hatred against spacers: affairs outside China were in the realm of hungry ghosts. Even the life outside one’s work unit was ghostly. Or so it seemed as she sat in dives, slurping noodles and chatting with tired men who would give her a moment because a tall spacer asking them questions was unusual. And people seemed to be more tolerant in noodle shops. On the street she got some hard looks, once a shouted insult. She hurried the last part of the way to Mqaret’s colleagues. Once there she let them take a few tubes of blood and run a few tests on her eyesight and balance and such.

Back on the street, it seemed to her that there were many pairs of eyes just as interested in her as Mqaret’s colleagues had been. Possibly this was just her becoming frightened. She picked up her pace through the inevitable crowd—always at least five hundred people in view when in China. Back in her hostel she could only wonder at her fear of the crowd. But in fact, after falling asleep she woke up to find herself confined by restraints, her room lit only by medical monitors. The bed was attending to all her bodily needs, and she guessed there was a drug in her IV feed triggering her speech centers, because she was talking away without meaning to, even when she tried to stop herself. A disembodied voice from behind her head asked questions, about Alex and everything else, and she babbled away helplessly. Pauline was no help at all—seemed to have been turned off. And Swan could not resist the impulse to talk. It was not that unlike her normal self; indeed it was a bit of a relief to be able to go on and on without having to make excuses. Someone was making her do it, so she would.

Later she came to in the same bed, unrestrained, her clothing on a chair by the bed. The room was just barely bigger than the bed. Her same hostel room, yes. The AI at the desk, a green box sitting on the counter, said that it had seen no sign anything was wrong. The room monitor had shown her vital signs good, no incursions into the room, nothing unusual.

Swan turned on Pauline, who could not offer any help. It had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since she had left the clinic of Mqaret’s friends. She called Mercury House in Manhattan and told them what had happened, then called Zasha.

Everyone was shocked, concerned, and sympathetic, urging her to go immediately to the nearest Mercury House to get medical attention, and so on; but at the end of all that, Zasha said firmly, “You were on Earth alone. There are any number of malignancies down here, as I told you. It’s not like it was when you took your first sabbaticals. We tend to travel in packs here now. You saw what happened last time you went off by yourself, at my place.”

“But that was just some kids. Who was it this time?”

“I don’t know. Call Jean Genette at once. They may be able to track who did it. Or we may be able to deduce it by what happens next. They were probably on a fishing expedition in your head. That means it probably won’t happen again, but you should always travel with other people, maybe even a security team.”

“No.”

Zasha let her listen to how that sounded.

Swan said, “I guess I have to. I don’t know. It feels like I just had a bad dream. I’m a little hungry, but I think they IVed me food. They had me—I mean, I was babbling! And a lot of their questions were about Alex. I may have just told them everything I know about her!”

“Hmm.” A long silence. “Well, you see why Alex kept so much to herself.”

“So who were they?”

“I don’t know. Possibly some part of the Chinese government. They play rough sometimes. Although this seems a bit egregious. Maybe it’s a warning signal, but of what I’m not sure. So in that sense it wasn’t a very good warning. Maybe it was just a fishing expedition. Or a notice that we aren’t to fool around on Earth.”

“As if we didn’t know that.”

“But you don’t seem to know it. Maybe they don’t want you down here fooling around.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know! Consider it a message from the people of Earth. And call Genette. And come talk to me, please, before you get into any more trouble.”

So Swan called Inspector Genette, who was disturbed to hear about her experience. “Maybe we should keep Pauline and Passepartout in a permanent link while we’re on Earth,” he suggested. “I could stay aware of your movements.”

“But you’re always telling me let’s turn them off!”

“Not here. This is a different situation, and here they can help.”

“All right,” Swan said. “It’s better than traveling with bodyguards.”

“Well, it isn’t anything like that much protection. You should at least travel with other people.”

“I’m going to see Zasha. He’s in Greenland, so I should be safe.”

“Good. You should get out of China.”

“But I’m Chinese!”

“You are a Mercurial of Chinese extraction. It isn’t at all the same. Interplan doesn’t have an agreement with China, so I can’t help you legally when you’re there. Go to Greenland.”

That night she went out for noodles, stubbornly. People looked at her strangely. She was a stranger in a strange land. On the screens in the noodle shops she heard several fiery speeches denouncing various political crimes of the Hague, Brussels, the UN, Mars—spacers in general. Some speakers became so infuriated that she had to revise her opinion of Chinese detachment; they were as intense as anyone else, politically speaking, no matter their inward look on the street. Like any group, they had been shaped by their zeitgeist, and had had targets suggested to them such that their discontents were aimed away from Beijing. So, possibly space could be pulled into people’s red zone and attacked as an enemy. She listened to the screen speeches intently, ignoring the men in the shop watching her watch, and it became clear to her at last that there was a widespread view in China that spacers were living in outrageous decadence and luxury, like the colonialist powers of old, only more so. And she could see perfectly well also that in Hangzhou people lived like rats in a maze, jostling shoulder to shoulder every moment of the day. The potential for extreme thoughts was obvious. Throw a rock at the rich kid’s house—why not? Who wouldn’t do it?

On the flights to get to Zasha she looked at the news on her screen. Earth Earth Earth. They didn’t give a damn about space, most of them. Some lived by religious beliefs that had been backward-looking in the twelfth century. The pastoralists below her in central Asia ran flocks and herds like the expert ecologists they had to be to produce as much as was demanded of them; each pasture was dairy, stockyard, and soil factory, and their owners were stuffed with anger at the droughts brought on by rich people elsewhere. She saw huge conurbations here and there, meaning shantytowns in dust bowls or falling apart in tropical downpours and mudslides, the stunted occupants coping with problems of survival. Back in Chad she had seen clear signs of heavy internal parasite loads. She had seen hunger, disease, premature death. Wasted lives in blasted biomes. Basic needs not met for three billion of the eleven billion on the planet. Three billion was a lot already, but there were also another five or six billion teetering on the brink, about to slide into that same hole, never a day free of worry. The great precariat, wired in enough to know their situation perfectly well.

That was life on Earth. Split, fractionated, divided into castes or classes. The wealthiest lived as if they were spacers on sabbatical, mobile and curious, actualizing themselves in all the ways possible, augmenting themselves—genderizing—speciating—dodging death, extending life. Whole countries seemed like that, in fact, but they were small countries—Norway, Finland, Chile, Australia, Scotland, California, Switzerland; on it went for a few score more. Then there were struggling countries; then the patchwork post-nations, the cobbled-together struggles against failure, or the completely failed.

The eleven-meter rise in sea level on Earth had been accommodated all around the world by intensive building on higher ground, but the costs in human suffering had been huge, and no one wanted to have to do it again. People were sick of sea level rise. How they despised the generations of the Dithering, who had heedlessly pushed the climate into a change with an unstoppable momentum to it, continuing not only into the present but for centuries more to come, as methane clathrate releases and permafrost melting began to outgas the third great wave of greenhouse gases, possibly the largest of them all. They were on their way to being a jungle planet, and the prospect was so alarming that there was serious talk of trying atmospheric sunblocks again, despite the disaster two centuries before. There was growing agreement that the job had to be taken on, and geo-engineering either micro or macro attempted. Intensive micro, mild macro—there was a constant to-and-fro about it, and many micro or tiny macro restoration projects had already begun.

One thing they were trying was to slow the outflow glaciers off the Greenland ice cap. Antarctica and Greenland were the two meaningful reservoirs of ice left on the planet, and modelers were very hopeful that eastern Antarctica at least would hold fast through the heat peak into the hoped-for return to a colder atmosphere and ocean. If they could get the CO₂ down to 320 parts per million, and capture some of the methane, and temperatures therefore fell, and the ice cake on eastern Antarctica held, then the ocean would nevertheless stay high and warm for hundreds more years—but it would be a big success nonetheless. In fact if they failed to keep the East Antarctic ice, it wasn’t worth thinking about. So they needed to succeed. At some point, many were saying now, they were going to have to treat Earth like they were treating Mars and Venus, and whatever they lost by that would be too bad. Some said another little ice age was just what they needed; the billion or three likely deaths were not spoken of, but latent in the argument was the notion that fewer people wouldn’t hurt the situation either. Shock therapy—triage—people who liked to talk tough to make themselves look practical were full of this line.

So, Greenland was a much smaller ice cake than East Antarctica, but it was not insignificant. If it melted off (and it was a remnant of the previous ice age’s giant ice cap, located very far south for current conditions), it would mean another seven meters’ rise. That would ruin the adjusted new coastline civilization, so painfully fought for.

As with all ice sheets, it did not just melt; it slid in glaciers down into the sea, speeded by the lubrication of meltwater running under the ice, lifting the glaciers off their rock beds. It was the same in Antarctica, but while Antarctica’s ice slid down into the sea all the way round its circumference, so that there was nothing they could do about stopping it, Greenland was different. Its ice was mostly trapped within a high tub of encircling mountain ranges, and it could only slide down into the Atlantic through a few narrow gaps in the rock, like breaks in the edge of a bathtub. Through these gaps the lubricated glaciers poured at a speed of many meters a day, down U-valleys already smoothed for millennia, and when they hit the rising ocean, their snouts floated out over the terminal lips that often lay at the mouth of fjords, thus launching icebergs to sea more smoothly and swiftly than ever.

Early in the history of glaciology, researchers had noticed that one fast glacier in West Antarctica had suddenly slowed to a crawl. Investigations had found that the lubricating water underneath the ice had broken into some new channel and gone away, so that the immense weight of the glacier had thumped back onto the rock, causing it to stall. That now gave people ideas, and they were attempting to do something similar in Greenland by artificial means. They were testing several methods at one of the narrowest and fastest of the Greenland glaciers, the Helheim.

The western coast of Greenland was rather reassuringly icy, Swan thought, given all that one heard about the big melt. Under their helicopter lay a skim of winter sea ice, breaking up into giant polygonal sheets of white on a black sea. There was a polar bear park on the north shores of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, she was told, where tabular bergs floated on the natural eddy or got herded there by long flexible booms pushed by solar-powered propellers. So the Arctic ice was not entirely gone, and it was really quite beautiful to see it below her, and also to see how black the ocean was, as unlike the blues of tropic seas as could be imagined. Black ocean, white ice. All the blues were in the sky and in melt ponds strewn everywhere on the exposed ice of the Greenland ice cap, held three kilometers above the ocean by jagged black ridgelines—the coastal range, the chewed edge of the bathtub, holding in place the inland plateau of ice. The whole situation was as clear as could be, viewed from a helicopter flying five kilometers up.

“Is that our glacier?” Swan asked.

“Yes.”

The pilot headed down toward a little red X marking a flat spot of rock on a ridge overlooking the glacier, several kilometers upstream from where it calved into the ocean. The flat spot as they descended turned out to be about twenty hectares, with room for the whole camp; the red X was giant. As they made their last descent the whole scene lay below them, a fantastic prospect of black spiny spires, white ice, blue sky, black sunbeaten water in the fjord.

Outside the helo it was stunningly cold. It made Swan gasp, and a bolt of fear shocked her: if one felt this kind of cold in space, it would mean a breakdown and imminent death. But here people were greeting her and laughing at her expression.

Around their plateau, black lichenous spikes shattered in their thrust at the sky. Below them in the great U-valley the rock of the side walls had been ice-carved to curves like muscled flesh, scored by horizontal lines where boulders had been scraped across the granite hard enough to dig right into it—when one thought about it, quite an astonishing pressure.

The glacier itself was mostly a broken white surface, nobbled blue in certain patches. Though crevasse fields disrupted it frequently, the ice plain was fairly level across to the black ridge on its far side. Swan took off her sunglasses to look, then blinked and sniffed as a stunning white flash hit her like a blow to the head. She had to laugh—snorted—through her squint spotted Zasha approaching, and reached out an arm for a hug. “I’m glad I came! I feel better already!”

“I knew you would like it.”

The camp’s plateau made a perfect location for what was really a little hodgepodge of a town. After showing her the galley and getting her stuff stowed in the dorm, Zasha took her out to the edge that overlooked the glacier. Directly below the camp the ice was shattered all the way across to the other wall of the glacier. This apparently was the result of injecting liquid nitrogen between the ice and the bedrock. A certain amount of ice had been tacked down, but the ice over that had sheared off and continued on its way, shattered and slower, but still moving.

Downstream from that jumble there curved a deep gap in the ice. “That’s their latest experiment,” Zasha said, pointing. “They’re going to melt a gap all the way across, and keep melting the ice as it comes down. The ice downstream will slide away, and having cleared a space, they’re going to build a dam in the empty air, and when it’s done let the upstream ice come down to it.”

“Won’t the ice just flow over the dam?” Swan asked.

“It would, but they plan to build it so high that it will match the height of the interior ice cap. So ice will flow here until it rises up as high as the rest of Greenland, and then there won’t be any downward flow.”

“Wow,” Swan said, startled. “So, like a new ridge of the mountain range, filling this gap? Created while the ice is flowing down at it?”

“That’s right.”

“But won’t the ice up on the plateau just flow down other glaciers?”

“Sure, but if it works here, they plan to do it all the way around Greenland, except at the very north end of the island, where they’re trying to keep the sea ice park supplied anyway. They’ll corral what slides in up there, and slow the outfall, and that will keep the Greenland cap substantially in place, or at least really slow the melting down. Because it’s the sliding into the sea that makes it all happen so fast. So—we’ll stop up every break on the island! Can you believe it?”

“No.” Swan laughed. “Talk about terraforming! This must be a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers idea.”

“It sounds like it, but these are Scandinavians here. Plus the local Inuit. Apparently they like the idea. They regard it as a temporary measure, they said.” Zasha laughed. “The Inuit are great. Very cheerful tough people. You would like them.” A quick glance. “You could learn from them.”

“Shut up with that. I want to go down there and see what the bedrock looks like.”

“I figured you would.”

They went back to the galley, and over big mugs of hot chocolate some of the engineers in the camp sat with them and described their work to Swan. The dam was going to be made of a carbon nanofilament weave, somewhat similar to space elevator material, and it was even now being spun over foundation pilings drilled deep into the bedrock. The dam would rise from the ground, spun in place by spiderbots rolling back and forth and passing each other like shuttles on a loom. The dam, when completed, would be thirty kilometers wide, two kilometers tall, and yet only a meter thick at its thickest point. The structuring of the dam’s material was another biomimetic, the carbon fibers shaped like spiderweb strands but woven like seashells.

Downstream from the dam a short new glacial valley would be exposed. This would revegetate just as the other little green parts of Greenland had at the end of the ice age, ten thousand years before. Swan knew just how the U-valley would turn from bare gray rock into a fellfield biome, having induced it to happen in many an alpine or polar terrarium. Without assistance it would take about a thousand years, but with some gardening the process could be shortened a hundredfold: just add bacteria, then moss and lichen, grasses and sedges, and after that the fellfield flowers and ground-hugging shrubs. She had done it; she had loved it. From now on things here would every summer be exfoliating, flowering, casting seed; every winter it all would tuck into its subnivean world happily, and then struggle through the thaw and melt of a new spring, the really dangerous time. The ones that didn’t make it through the tough spring would provide food and soil for the ones that came after them, and on it would go. The Inuit could garden that if they wanted to, or let it go its own way. Maybe try different things in different fjords. How Swan would love to do that. “All right, maybe I need to become an Inuit,” she muttered at Z, staring at the map spread before them. She saw that Greenland itself was a whole world, and her kind of world—empty—therefore no one mad at her.

After dinner Swan went back outside and stood with Zasha above the great gap of air, under the huge dome of the sky. Out in the wind, oh the wind, the wind… The broad glacier below her—upstream a white shatter—downstream a blue gap—then a lower and smoother white sheet, rushing off to the sea. On the low wall of the dam she could now make out machines, running back and forth on both its top and its sides, looking a little bit like spiders, in fact, weaving a web so dense it was solid. The mountain ridges anchoring the two ends of the dam would wear away before the dam did, one of the engineers had said. If another ice age ever came, and the Greenland ice cap piled farther into the sky and overflowed this dam, the dam would still be there and would reemerge in the next warm period.

“Amazing,” Swan said. “So terraforming can be done on Earth!”

“Well, but Greenland is more like Europa than Europe, if you see what I mean. You can do it here because there are only a few locals, and they like the plan. If you were to try this kind of thing anywhere else…” Zasha laughed at the thought. “Like they could use this technology and polder New York Harbor, drain the bay down so that Manhattan was above water the way it used to be. You could make the whole area like a Dutch polder. Not even that difficult, compared to some things. But the New Yorkers won’t hear of it. They like it the way it is!”

“Good for them.”

“I know, I know. The fortunate flood. And I love New York the way it is now. But you see what I mean. A lot of good terraforming projects just won’t ever get approved.”

Swan nodded and made a face. “I know.”

Zasha gave her a brief hug. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in China. That must have been awful.”

“It was horrible. I really don’t like what I’m seeing this trip. In different ways we seem to have offended almost everyone on Earth.”

Zasha laughed. “Did you ever think it was otherwise?”

“Fine,” Swan said, “maybe so. But the thing is, now we have to find who attacked Terminator.”

“Interplan is the organization that has the closest to a total human database, so hopefully they will manage to find them.”

“What if that doesn’t work, what then?”

“I don’t know. I think it will work, eventually.”

Swan sighed. She wasn’t sure Genette’s team could do it, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Zasha gave her a look. “I’m not having fun anymore,” she explained.

“Poor Swan.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think so. But look, just go help gather the new inoculants for Terminator. Do your job, and let Genette and Interplan do their jobs.”

Swan was not happy with this either. “I can’t just leave it. Something’s going on. I mean, I was kidnapped, damn it, and asked a lot of questions about Alex. You said she didn’t trust me at the end, but what if I knew something I didn’t know was important?”

“Did they ask you about things on Venus?”

Swan thought it over; something had been triggered. “I think maybe so.”

Zasha looked worried. “There’s some strange stuff happening on Venus. When they get to the next stage of their terraforming, a lot of the planet will open to new settlements, and that’s causing fights to break out. Real estate wars, in effect. And these strange qubes Alex started us looking for, we’re finding more and more of them. They seem to be coming from Venus, and they often show up around New York. We’re not sure what it means yet. So, but just go help get the inoculants together. That’s not as easy as it used to be.”

“They just need to replace what we had before.”

“Not possible. They won’t let you take topsoil off Earth in anything like the quantities they used to. So our new soil is going to have to be some kind of Ascension, and you’re the expert at those.”

“But I don’t like Ascensions anymore!”

“They’re necessary now. It’s not a style choice.”

Swan heaved a great sigh. Z stayed silent, then gestured out at the scene. It was true: this glacier was a sight for sore eyes. The world was bigger than their petty melodramas, and as they stood here it couldn’t be denied. And that was a comfort.

“All right. I’ll go help with the soil. But I’m going to keep talking to Genette.”

So—back to Manhattan, freakish and superb, but without Zasha there to make it fun. And besides, things weren’t fun anymore.

The weariness that came at the end of the day on Earth. The sheer heaviness of life on Earth. “She’s so… heavy!” Swan sang to herself, dragging out the last word and repeating it in the way of the old song. “Heavy—heavy—heavy—heavy!”

Usually when she hurt in the effort to hold herself upright at the end of a day, she would get into her body bra and relax, let it walk her around. It was like getting a massage, just to be carried, lifted up as you walked. Let it dance you, melt into it. Oh lovely waldo. It stiffened under you no matter how you moved, and when fitted and programmed right, it could be dreamy; bad for bone building, bad for a full adjustment to life on Earth, but a lifesaver when flagging. People in space talked longingly about moving back to Earth, people went back for their sabbatical happily, crowing at the prospect—but after the thrill of the open air wore off, the g remained, and slowly but surely it dragged one down, until when the sabbatical year was over and one had had one’s Gaian replenishment, whatever it was, one rose back out of the atmosphere into the brilliant clarity of space and resumed life out there with relief and a feeling of ebullient lightness. Because Earth was just too damned heavy, and in every possible sense. It was as if a black filter had been dropped between her and the world. Inspector Genette had said things were going well, but obviously had no expectation of anything happening soon. The case seemed to be regarded as Swan would regard the growing of a marsh; you set certain actions in motion, created certain conditions of possibility, and then went away and did something else. When you came back, you would see that things had changed. But it would be years.

So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.”

She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feeling balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of Satyagraha—ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” Thus Gandhi in the program notes. Satya, truth, love; agraha, firmness, force. He had made the word up. Tolstoy, Gandhi, the opera’s Future Man: they all sang of hope and peace, of the way to peace, satyagraha itself. The Satyagrahi were the people who enacted satyagraha. “Forgiveness is the ornament of the brave.”

As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.”