2312

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.”

S wan 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.