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S o 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.

T he 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.