2312

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.

W hy 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.”