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It was one of the ten biggest microterraforming projects currently being performed on Earth, and Wahram was happy to join his Saturnian colleagues, who were part of a work unit put together by an Alabama-Amsterdam cooperative venture. Teams in Alaska, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Nunavut were excavating the interiors of mountain ranges, creating galleries down in the bedrock, which were then being filled with frozen carbon dioxide they had elsewhere sucked out of the atmosphere. Whether all this could be done in a manner that was geologically and environmentally stable, Wahram doubted. It was a prodigious amount of rock, for one thing; Florida was on average five meters underwater, and they wanted to build it up slightly higher than it had been originally, in case Greenland or East Antarctica also gave their ice to the sea. Using the narrow finger of a peninsula that was the state’s only remaining land as their causeway, they were moving the segmented mountain interiors on trains and building the state as they had built rock jetties in older times. The Everglades were to be plumbed to function at the new higher elevation; newly generated analogs of the many extinct species of birds and animals that had graced the peninsula before European immigration were to be introduced. They were going to recreate Florida. Enough carbon dioxide was to be buried under the northern Rockies to make the project on balance carbon negative.

The building and transport crews for the job were hired primarily from the Suffering South, as it had been called in the years when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had come off and sea level made its biggest rise. The Florida work did not create full employment by itself, but riding the rails, Wahram had a lot of time to look at the passing country and think about it, and once he sent a note to Swan: Remember what you said on Venus about giving everyone here a job doing landscape restoration? It could work.

S o he rode the trains back and forth from Canada to Florida. The land was huge, and mostly flat. Heat had parched land that had once grown wheat without irrigation, so they had changed crops and started irrigating, but large regions in Manitoba and the Dakotas had reverted to high desert. Now people were saying the prairies had always been high desert. They were becoming home to buffalo again. On the other hand, the forests flanking the Mississippi were back, more subtropical than ever. Missouri and Arkansas looked like South America.

There were long hours when he could stand between cars, protected from the wind of their passage, and look at the big land. Landscapers and gardeners, animal handlers and vets, environmental engineers and designers, heavy equipment operators, porters and diggers-all were essential in the work of making a landscape. The giant waldos, the selfrep hangars, they were only good for certain things. Local people working their land was a better image than selfreps dropping out of the sky. The people he talked to were more accepting of the Florida project, and the relevant governments also. Not a few people were enthusiastic to an almost religious degree. To have their drowned land hauled back out of the water was their dream. Rebuilding the infrastructure here was a task without negative consequences, except for those who had been enjoying the new reefs, and they would be given new new reefs. Florida was going to end up like a big Venice, resting on pilings stuck deep into the Earth. Assisted migration would replant and reanimate the land as quickly as it was ready.

On one train ride north, Wahram listened to one of the reef engineers explain that the corals they were replanting all released their eggs on the same night of the year, and even within the same twenty minutes, though they were scattered over hundreds of miles. Apparently they accomplished this by way of two color-sensitive cells in each coral, which together were able to distinguish the particular blue of the twilight sky on the night after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This moon rose right after sunset, when the sky was still also lit by the recently departed sun, and this brief double illumination lit the sky to a particular shade of blue that the corals could recognize.

“I have to tell Swan about this,” Wahram said, amazed at the thought of such brainless but living precision. Sentience, what was it?

Meanwhile the Florida raising prospered. Wahram watched the people working in what he recognized as the euphoria of the project, which he had felt so strongly himself in his youth, building cities on Titan. There they had had to carve a world out of the ice; here they had to raise one out of the sea. But it was the same feeling.