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D uring this passage she often met with the inspector for a last drink at the end of the evening, when the dining terrace had otherwise emptied and many people were down below in the dimly lit pools, swimming about and coupling in the shallows. Swan sat with her forearms on the railing, chin on the back of her hand, looking down at them listlessly. The inspector would climb up and sit on the rail beside her, still sometimes reading Passepartout’s screen. Sometimes they talked about the case, and Swan was struck by questions Genette threw out along the way:

If you knew there was a mad person helping you get what you wanted, would you stop them? If a person was mistreated to the point where they acted like an algorithm, did they still count as human?

These were troubling questions. And all the while they looked down at the undeniably mammalian figures in the baths, wavering in the blue underwater lights-couples and small groups, a lot of laughter, low murmurs, occasional rhythmic primate cries. Coupling or tripling, or balling into intertwined panmixia. A lot of them would be on oxytocin and having supremely affectionate experiences; others would have taken entheogenic compounds and be off in mystical tantric transports. Right now under them on the wet poolside a number of smalls were attending to an extremely tall tall, so that it looked like Gulliver in a Lilliputian brothel, creepy and heartwarming in rapid oscillation. Swan herself had served as Snow White to some dwarves in her time, and now she glanced to see if the inspector was watching them, wondering if any reaction would be visible. But Genette appeared to be looking elsewhere, at two flagrant bisexuals, both with big breasts and tall erections, and also very pregnant, lying on their sides, rolling from one sexual position to another.

“They look like walruses,” Swan said. “The pregnancy is just too much. It’s not transgressive, it’s a travesty.”

Genette shrugged. “Pornography, right? They want it to look strange.”

“Well, they’ve succeeded.” Swan laughed. “I think they want it to be transgressive, but they haven’t quite managed.”

“Sex as public performance? Isn’t that transgressive where you come from?”

“But this is a sexliner. People come here to do this.”

The inspector looked at her, head tilted to the side. “Maybe it’s just theater.”

“But bad theater, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Just showing off, then. We all do it. We live in ideas. That can be a real problem, as I have said. But not here.” Genette blessed the scene with an outstretched hand. “This is just sweet. I’m going to go down myself in a while and join them.”

T he Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men was going to use Mars as a gravity handle to shoot cross-system to Earth, so Swan joined those who went out to the observation bubble to have a look as they flashed over it. She asked the inspector about going along, but got only a mime’s scowl in return.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong with Mars?”

“I grew up there,” Genette said, standing erect, shoulders back. “I went to school there, I worked there for forty years. But they exiled me for a crime I didn’t commit, and since they have exiled me, I exile them. I shit on Mars!”

“Oh,” Swan said. “I didn’t know. What was the crime?”

The inspector waved her away. “Go. Go look at the big red bastard before you miss it.”

So she went by herself up to the bubble chamber in the bowsprit. The Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men shot by Mars right above its atmosphere, avoiding any aerobraking while maximizing the gravity sling. For a matter of ten minutes or so they were right over it-the red land, the long green lines of the canals, the canyons running down to the northern sea, the great volcanoes sticking right up out of the atmosphere-then it was behind them, shrinking like a pebble dropped from a balloon. “I hear it’s an interesting place,” someone said.

EARTH, THE PLANET OF SADNESS

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass-a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?