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S o Wahram crisscrossed the Old World like a modern-day Ibn Battuta, talking to government agencies in a position to do something. This was awkward work that took a real diplomatic touch to avoid being offensive in various ways. It was interesting. But he heard nothing from Swan. And Earth was big. There were 457 countries, and many associations of countries, and units within countries with significant power. Wahram was not going to run into Swan just because she also was at work on Earth.

So he looked her up. Apparently she was working near North Harare, a small country carved out of what had been Zimbabwe.

He read about the place on the flight there. Zimbabwe, rich in resources; a particularly dismal postcolonial history; splintered into a dozen residual countries, many still mired in problems; the great droughts exacerbating the situation; lately a recent population spike, and thus more trouble. North Harare was a slum in the shape of a crescent moon. The other little countries around it were better off.

He contacted Pauline and told her that he was coming to the area on RNA-related business, and soon enough Pauline got back to him with a hello from Swan and a suggested meeting on the very evening of his arrival, which was reassuring but meant that he had to meet her oppressed by jet lag. He was almost quivering with fatigue, and felt as if he weighed two hundred kilograms, when Swan burst into the room and it was time to perk up.

She gave him a nod and a quick appraisal. “You look like you’ve had a long trip. Come on in and I’ll make you some tea and you can tell me about it.”

She started the tea and then excused herself to deal with a visitor, talking in Chinese. Wahram tried hard to grasp what she was like now, vividly before him again. Still intense, that was clear.

Over tea they shared the news. Certain space elevators were slapping tariffs on equipment coming down; others were completely denied to spacers, an absurd situation. People were calling the Quito elevator the Umbilical Cord. It looked like the elevator problem would be a bottleneck, but there was a plan afoot to send down self-replicating factories from cislunar space, deployed in a single timed invasion of thousands of atmospheric landers. A wide variety of space-to-Earth landers were available, including some that split successively as they descended, until individual people or packages floated down in aerogel bubbles.

“That’s like the reverse of what hit Terminator,” Swan said sourly. “Instead of little bits convening to make a big mass, the big mass dissociates into parts. And when they land, things get built rather than destroyed.”

“They might get shot down.”

“There would be too many for that.”

“I don’t like the aggressive look of it,” Wahram said. “I thought we were trying to make it look like a charity thing.”

“Charity is always aggressive,” Swan said. “Don’t you know that?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

It seemed clear to him that aggressive aid wasn’t going to work. But Swan was not a patient person. Now she was trying to do diplomatic work in the way Alex would have; but Alex had had a genius for diplomacy, while Swan had none. And they were facing one of the longest-standing problems in human history.

The whole thing transcended their own opinions about it in any case, as it was a Mondragon effort, with the Venusians on board too. So all kinds of things were happening. News screens seemed to be transmitting news from ten Earths at once, all writhing in the same space. Earth meant people like gods and people like rats: and in a paroxysm of rage they were going to reach out and wreck everything, even the space worlds that kept them from starvation. In the big merry-go-round, Earth spun like a red horse with a bomb in it. And they could not get off the merry-go-round.

Absentmindedly Wahram whistled under his breath the opening notes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, trying to cheer her up. But she pursed her lips to make a little frown. Still, he had reminded her of the tunnel.

M any spacers were scared to go to sub-Saharan Africa, because the disease vector loads there were so much higher than in most space habitats. Wahram supposed that Swan had gone to Africa partly in defiance of that kind of caution; she would be one to believe in hormesis if anyone would, given her ingestion of the Enceladan aliens. So here she was in Nyabira, directing the deployment of self-replicating construction sheds. They planned to start by reconstructing the part of Harare called Domboshawa, transforming its northernmost ring of shantytowns into garden city versions of themselves. This “refurbishing of the built infrastructure” was not a complete solution, but the selfreps did build wells, health centers, schools, clothing factories, and housing in several styles already used in Domboshawa, including aspects of the traditional local rondavels.