Blue Mars

PART FOUR Green Earth

On Earth, meanwhile, the great flood dominated everything.

The flood had been caused by a cluster of violent volcanic eruptions under the west Antarctic ice sheet. The land underneath the ice sheet, resembling North America’s basin and range country, had been depressed by the weight of the ice until it lay below sea level. So when the eruptions began the lava and gases had melted the ice over the volcanoes, causing vast slippages overhead; at the same time, ocean water had started to pour in under the ice, at various points around the swiftly eroding grounding line. Destabilized and shattering, enormous islands of ice had broken off all around the edges of the Ross Sea and the Ronne Sea. As these islands of ice floated away on the ocean currents, the breakup continued to move inland, and the turbulence caused the process to accelerate. In the months following the first big breaks, the Antarctic Sea filled with immense tabular icebergs, which displaced so much water that sea level all over the world rose. Water continued to rush into the depressed basin in west Antarctica that the ice had once filled, floating out the rest of it berg by berg, until the ice sheet was entirely gone, replaced by a shallow new sea roiled by the continuing underwater eruptions, which were being compared in their severity to the Deccan Traps eruptions of the late Cretaceous.

And so, a year after the eruptions began, Antarctica was only a bit over half as big as it had been — east Antarctic like a half-moon, the Antarctic peninsula like an iced-over New Zealand — in between them, a berg-clotted bubbling shallow sea. And around the rest of the world, sea level was seven meters higher than it had been before.

Not since the last ice age, ten thousand years before, had humanity experienced a natural catastrophe of such magnitude. And this time it affected not just a few million hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, but fifteen billion civilized citizens, living atop a precarious sociotechnological edifice which had already been in great danger of collapse. All the big coastal cities were inundated, whole countries like Bangladesh and Holland and Belize were awash. Most of the unfortunates who lived in such low-lying regions had time to move to higher ground, for the surge was more like a tide than a tidal wave; and then there they all were, somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world’s population — refugees.

It goes without saying that human society was not equipped to handle such a situation. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy, and the early twenty-second century had not been the best of times. Populations were still rising, resources were more and more depleted, conflicts between rich and poor, governments and metanats, had been sharpening everywhere: the catastrophe had struck in the midst of a crisis.

To a certain extent, the catastrophe canceled the crisis. In the face of worldwide desperation, power struggles of all kinds were recontextualized, many rendered phantasmagorical;. there were whole populations in need, and legalities of ownership and profit paled in comparison to the problem. The United Nations rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos, and became the clearinghouse for the vast number of emergency relief efforts: migrations inland across national borders, construction of emergency accommodations, distribution of emergency food and supplies. Because of the nature of this work, with its emphasis on rescue and relief, Switzerland and Praxis were in the forefront of helping the UN. UNESCO returned from the dead, along with the World Health Organization. India and China, as the largest of the badly devastated countries, were also extremely influential in the current situation, because how they chose to cope made a big difference everywhere. They made alliances with each other, and with the UN and its new allies; they refused all help from the Group of Eleven, and the metanationals that were now fully intertwined into the affairs of most of the Gl 1 governments.

In other ways-, however, the catastrophe only exacerbated the crisis. The metanationals themselves were cast into a very curious position by the flood. Before its onset they had been absorbed in what commentators had been calling the metanatricide, fighting among themselves for final control of the world economy. A few big metanational superclusters had been jockeying for ultimate control of the largest industrial countries, and attempting to subsume the few entities still out of their control: Switzerland, India, China, Praxis, the so-called World Court countries, and so on. Now, with much of the population of Earth occupied in dealing with the flood, the metanats were mostly struggling to regain what control they had had of affairs. In the popular mind they were often linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished sinners — a very convenient bit of magical thinking for Mars and the other antimetanational forces, all of whom were doing their best to seize this chance to beat the metanats to pieces while they were down. The Group of Eleven and the other industrial governments previously associated with the metanats were scrambling to keep their own populations alive, and so could spare little effort to help the great conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning their previous jobs to join the various relief efforts; Praxis-style employee-owned enterprises were gaining in popularity as they took on the emergency, at the same time offering all their members the longevity treatment. Some of the metanats held on to their workforce by reconfiguring along these same lines. And so the struggle for power continued on many levels, but everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.

In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant. Oh it made for an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as ungrateful children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it was one example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to the equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over these days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking ship. Others regarded them as potential saviors, in some ill-defined way: another bit of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful in the notion of a new society forming on the next world out.

Meanwhile, no matter what happened on Mars, the people of Earth struggled to cope with the flood. The damage now began to include rapid climactic changes: more cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight and causing temperatures to drop, also creating torrential rainstorms, which often wrecked much-needed crops, and sometimes fell where rain had seldom fallen before, in the Sahara, theMojave, northern Chile — bringing the great flood far inland, in effect, bringing its impact everywhere. And with agriculture hammered by these new severe storms, hunger itself became an issue; any general sense of cooperation was therefore threatened, as it seemed that perhaps not everyone could be fed, and the cowardly spoke of triage. And so every part of Terra was in turmoil, like an anthill stirred by a stick.

So that was Earth in the summer of 2128: an unprecedented catastrophe, an ongoing universal crisis. The antediluvian world already seemed like no more than a bad dream from which they had all been rudely awakened, cast into an even more dangerous reality. From the frying pan into the fire, yes; and some people tried to get them back into the frying pan, while others struggled to get them off the stove; and no one could say what would happen next.

An invisible viseclamped down on Nirgal, each day more crushing than the last. Maya moaned and groaned about it, Michel and Sax did not seem to care; Michel was very happy to be making this trip, and Sax was absorbed in watching reports from the congress on Pavonis Mons. They lived in the rotating chamber of the spaceship Atlantis, and over the five months of the trip the chamber would accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they wanted to return home, diplomats traveling back and forth, and the few Martian natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few of the natives had gotten sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to stay in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.

Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya sat in the blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as she seemed to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while Nirgal was truly miserable, spacetime bending him in an ever more tortuous torque, until every cell of him cried out with the pain of it. It frightened him — the effort it took just to breathe, the idea of a planet so massive. Hard to believe!

He tried to talk to Michel about it, but Michel was distracted by his anticipation, his preparation. Sax by the events on Mars. Nirgal didn’t care about the meeting back on Pavonis, it would not matter much in the long run, he judged. The natives in the outback had lived the way they wanted to under UNTA, and they would do the same under the new government. Jackie might succeed in making a presidency for herself, and that would be too bad; but no matter what happened, their relationship had gone strange, become a kind of telepathy which sometimes resembled the old passionate love affair but just as often felt like a vicious sibling rivalry, or even the internal arguments of a schizoid self. Perhaps they were twins, who knew what kind of alchemy Hiroko had performed in the ectogene tanks — but no — Jackie had been born of Esther. He knew that. If it proved anything. For to his dismay, she felt like his other self; he did not want that, he did not want the sudden speeding of his heart whenever he saw her. It was one of the reasons he had decided to join the expedition to Earth. And now he was getting away from her at the rate of fifty thousand kilometers an hour, but there she still was on the screen, happy at the ongoing work of the congress, and her part in it. And she would be one of the seven on the new executive council, no doubt about it.

“She is counting on history to take its usual course,” May a said as they sat in the baths watching the news. “Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power, spread out through the tents — ” She shrugged cynically.

“Perhaps it’s a nova,” Nirgal suggested.

She laughed. “Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again. That’s the gravity of history — power drawn into centers, until there is an occasional nova. Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my words. And Jackie will be right at the middle of it — ” She stopped before adding the bitch, in respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious hooded gaze, as if wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance her never-ending war with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.

The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel comfortable. It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and his thinking. His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little blue-and-white marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking peculiarly flat and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they meant nothing to him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the blue world suddenly blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb a white line, the blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the continents peaking out from cloud patterns like little rebuses of half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. Europe. America.

For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s rotation was stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike, pulled to a window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass and the thousands of kilometers of distance, the detail was startling in its sharp-edged clarity. “The eye has such power,” he said to Sax.

“Hmm,” Sax said, and came to the window to look.

They watched the Earth, blue before them.

“Are you ever afraid?” Nirgal asked.

“Afraid?”

“You know.” Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more coherent phases; many things had to be explained to him. “Fear. Apprehension. Fright.”

“Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I was… disoriented.”

“I’m afraid now.”

Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand to Nirgal’s arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. “We’re here,” he said.

Dropping dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out from Earth now. Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing into two branching strands that touched down north and south of the equator, which was woefully short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down to Virac in the Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to Cairo and Durban. The one they were descending split some ten thousand kilometers above the Earth, the north line touching down near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while the southern one dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown on a tributary of the Amazon called the Theodore Roosevelt River.

They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centered over the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth. Down and down; in the five days of their descent the world approached until it eventually filled everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the previous month and a half once again slowly took them in its grasp and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What little tolerance Nirgal had developed for the weight seemed to have disappeared during the brief return to microgravity, and now he gasped. Every breath an effort. Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colors push and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.

In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred kilometers over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.

A long last day. Then they were in the atmosphere, and then the cable led their car down onto the green square of Trinidad, into a huge socket complex next to an abandoned airport, its runways like gray runes. The elevator car slid down into the concrete mass. It decelerated; it came to a stop.

Nirgal detached his hands from the rail, and walked carefully after all the others, plod, plod, the weight all through him, plod, plod. They plodded down a jetway. He stepped onto the floor of a building on Earth. The interior of the socket resembled the one on Pavonis Mons, an incongruous familiarity, for the air was salty, thick, hot, clangorous, heavy. Nirgal hurried as much as he could through the halls, wanting to get outside and see things at last. A whole crowd trailed him, surrounded him, but the Praxis aides understood, they made a way for him through a growing crowd. The building was huge, apparently he had missed a chance to take a subway out of it. But there was a doorway glowing with light. Slightly dizzy with the effort, he walked out into a blinding glare. Pure whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar, shit, spices: like a greenhouse gone mad.

Now his eyes were adjusting. The sky was blue, a turquoise blue like the middle band of the limb as seen from space, but lighter; whiter over the hills, magnesium around the sun. Black spots swam this way and that. The cable threaded up into the sky. It was too bright to look up. Green hills in the distance.

He stumbled as they led him to an open car — an antique, small and rounded, with rubber tires. A convertible. He stood up in the backseat between Sax and Maya, just to see better. In the glare of light there were hundreds of people, thousands, dressed in astonishing costumes, neon silks, pink purple teal gold aquamarine, jewels, feathers, headdresses — “Carnival,” someone in the front seat of the car said up to him, “we dress in costumes for Carnival, also for Discovery Day, when Columbus arrived on the island. That was just a week ago, so we’ve continued the festival for your arrival too.”

“What’s the date?” Sax asked.

“Nirgal day! August eleven.”

They drove slowly, down streets lined with cheering people. One group was dressed like the natives before the Europeans arrived, shouting wildly. Mouths pink and white in brown faces. Voices like music, everyone singing. The people in the car sounded like Coyote. There were people in the crowd wearing Coyote masks, Desmond Hawkins’s cracked face twisted into rubbery expressions beyond what even he could achieve. And words — Nirgal had thought that on Mars he had encountered every possible distortion of English, but it was hard to follow what the Trinidadians said: accent, diction, intonation, he couldn’t tell why. He was sweating freely but still felt hot.

The car, bumpy and slow, ran between the walls of people to a short bluff. Beyond it lay a harbor district, now immersed in shallow water. Buildings swamped in the water stood in patches of dirty foam, rocking on unseen waves. A whole neighborhood now a tide pool, the houses giant exposed mussels, some broken open, water sloshing in and out their windows, rowboats bobbing between them. Bigger boats were tied to streetlights and power-line poles out where the buildings stopped. Farther out sailboats tilted on the sun-beaten blue, each boat with two or three taut fore-and-aft sails. Green hills rising to the right, forming a big open bay. “Fishing boats still coming in through the streets, but the big ships use the bauxite docks down at Point T, see out there?”

Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Palm trees in the shallows were dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone; above it green burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a vegetable world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two primal colors were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were just above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of the size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The white water sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krmr sound, as loud as the cheers of the crowd.

The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind. “Pitch Lake down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a black hole in the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you smell, new road here by the water.” Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People jammed the black roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the car to put a necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise, pinging and panging, they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the drowned district to their left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered from the flooded rooftops, from boats, the water coated with flowers floating up and down on the foam. Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating wood dock piled with several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish scales and flower petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots swimming.

Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure color, yellow pink and red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring the road, “Hear the duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin contest, the best five bands in Port a Spain.”

They passed through an old neighborhood, visibly ancient, the buildings made of small crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or even thatch — all ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, “The countryside Hindu, the cities black. T ‘n T mix them, that’s dugla.” Grass covered the ground, burst out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of potholes, out of everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt — an explosive surge of green, pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air reeked! Then they emerged from the ancient district onto a broad asphalt boulevard, flanked by big trees and large marble buildings. “Metanat grabhighs, looked big when they first built, but nothing grab as high as the cable.” Sour sweat, sweet smoke, everything blazing green, he had to shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t be sick. “You okay?” Insects whirred, the air was so hot he couldn’t guess its temperature, it had gone off his personal scale. He sat down heavily between Maya and Sax.

The car stopped. He stood again, with an effort, and got out, and had trouble walking; he almost fell, everything was swinging around. Maya held his arm hard. He gripped his temples, breathed through his mouth. “Are you okay?” she asked sharply.

“Yes,” Nirgal said, and tried to nod. They were in a complex of raw new buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed flower petals. People everywhere, almost all in Carnival costume. The singe of the sun in his eyes wouldn’t go away. He was led to a wooden dais, above a throng of people cheering madly.

A beautiful black-haired woman in a green sari, with a white sash belting it, introduced the four Martians to the crowd. The hills behind bent like green flames in a strong western wind; it was cooler than before, and less smelly. Maya stood before the microphones and cameras, and the years fell away from her; she spoke crisp isolated sentences that were cheered antiphonally, call and response, call and response. A media star with the whole world watching, comfortably charismatic, laying out what sounded to Nirgal like her speech in Burroughs at the crux point of the revolution, when she had rallied and focused the crowd in Princess Park. Something like that.

Michel and Sax declined to speak, they waved Nirgal up there to face the crowd and the green hills holding them up to the sun. For a time as he stood there he could not hear himself think. White noise of cheers, thick sound in the thicker air.

“Mars is a mirror,” he said in the microphone, “in which Terra sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through and through. And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran thought and Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals or new genetic strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus in our small way we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles on the brink of becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”

Loud cheers.

“That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway — a long evolution through the centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they understand better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we have seen that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for giving, in a culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of all, working together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most free. No hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the greater we become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great flood, we see the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the two worlds at once.”

He sat in a blaze of noise. Then the speeches were over and they had shifted into some kind of public press conference, responding to questions asked by the beautiful woman in the green sari. Nirgal responded with questions of his own, asking her about the new compound of buildings surrounding them, and about the situation on the island; and she answered over a chatter of commentary and laughter from the appreciative crowd, still looking on from behind the wall of reporters and cameras. The woman turned out to be the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The little two-island nation had been unwillingly dominated by the metanat Armscor for most of the previous century, the woman explained, and only since the flood had they severed that association, “and every colonial bond at last.” How the crowd cheered! And her smile, so full of a whole society’s pleasure. She was dugla, he saw, and amazingly beautiful.

The compound they were in, she explained, was one of scores of relief hospitals that had been built on the two islands since the flood. Their construction had been the major project of the islanders in response to their new freedom; they had created relief centers that aided flood victims, giving them all at once housing, work, and medical care, including the longevity treatment.

“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth.

“You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all kinds of problems.”

“Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.”

It was a minute or two before anything more could be heard over the cheering of the crowd. The prime minister was trying to quiet them, but a short man dressed in a fashionable brown suit came out of the group behind the prime minister and proclaimed into the mike, to an uproar of cheers at every sentence, “This Marsman Nirgal is a son of Trinidad! His papa, Desmond Hawkins the Stowaway, the Coyote of Mars, is from Port of Spain, and he still has a lot of people there! That Armscor bought the oil company and they tried to buy the island too, but they picked the wrong island to try! Your Coyote didn’t get his spirit from out of the air, Maestro Nirgal, he got it from T and T! He’s been wandering around up there teaching everyone the T and T way, and they’re all up there dugla anyway, they understand the dugla way, and they have taken over all Mars with it! Mars is one great big Trinidad Tobago!”

The crowd went into transports at this, and impulsively Nirgal walked over to the man and hugged him, such a smile, then found the stairs and got down and walked out into the crowd, which clumped around him. A miasma of fragrances. Too loud to think. He touched people, shook hands. People touched him. The look in their eyes! Everyone was shorter than he was, they laughed at that; and every face was an entire world. Black dots swam in his vision, things went darker very abruptly — he looked around, startled — a bank of clouds had massed over a dark strip of sea to the west, and the lead edge had cut off the sun. Now as he continued to mingle the cloud bank came rolling over the island. The crowd broke up as people moved under the shelter of trees, or verandas, or a big tin-roofed bus stop. Maya and Sax and Michel were lost in their own crowds. The clouds were dark gray at their bases, rearing up in white roils as solid as rock but mutable, flowing continuously. A cool wind struck hard, and then big raindrops starred the dirt, and the four Martians were hustled under an open pavilion roof, where room was made for them.

Then the rain poured down like nothing Nirgal had ever seen — rain sheeting down, roaring, slamming into sudden broad rivering puddles, all starred with a million white droplet explosions, the whole world outside the pavilion blurred by falling water into patches of color, green and brown all mixed in a wash. Maya was grinning: “It’s like the ocean is falling on us!”

“So much water!” Nirgal said.

The prime minister shrugged. “It happens every day during monsoon. It’s more rain than before, and we already got a lot.”

Nirgal shook his head and felt a stabbing at his temples. The pain of breathing in wet air. Half drowning.

The prime minister was explaining something to them, but Nirgal could barely follow, his head hurt so. Anyone in the independence movement could join a Praxis affiliate, and during their first year’s work they were building relief centers like this one. The longevity treatment was an automatic part of every person’s joining, administered in the newly built centers. Birth-control implants could be had at the same time, reversible but permanent if left in; many took them as their contribution to the cause. “Babies later, we say. There will be time.” People wanted to join anyway, almost everyone had. Armscor had been forced to match the Praxis arrangement to keep some of their people, and so it made little difference now what organization one was part of, on Trinidad they were all much the same. The newly treated went on to build more housing, or work in agriculture, or make more hospital equipment. Trinidad had been fairly prosperous before the flood, the combined result of vast oil reserves and metanat investment in the cable socket. There had been a progressive tradition which had formed the basis of the resistance, in the years after the unwelcome metanat arrival. Now there was a growing infrastructure dedicated to the longevity project. It was a promising situation. Every camp was a waiting list for the treatment, working on its own construction. Of course people were absolutely firm in the defense of such places. Even if Armscor had wanted to, it would be very difficult for its security forces to take over the camps. And if they did they would find nothing of value to them anyway; they already had the treatment. So they could try genocide if they wanted to, but other than that, they had few options for taking back control of the situation.

“The island just walked away from them,” the prime minister concluded. “No army can stop that. It is an end to economic caste, caste of all kind. This is something new, a new dugla thing in history, like you said in your speech. Like a little Mars. So to have you here to see us, you a grandchild of the island, you who have taught us so much in your beautiful new world — oh, it is a special thing. A festival for real.” That radiant smile.

“Who was the man who spoke?”

“Oh that was James.”

Abruptly the rain let up. The sun broke through, and the world steamed. Sweat poured down Nirgal in the white air. He could not catch his breath. White air, black spots swimming.

“I think I need to lie down.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course. You must be exhausted, overwhelmed. Come with us.”

They took him to a small outbuilding of the compound, into a bright room walled with bamboo strips, empty except for a mattress on the floor.

“I’m afraid the mattress is not long enough for you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He was left alone. Something about the room reminded him of the interior of Hiroko’s cottage, in the grove on the far side of the lake in Zygote. Not just the bamboo, but the room’s size and shape — and something elusive, the green light streaming in perhaps. The sensation of Hiroko’s presence was so strong and so unexpected that when the others had left the room, Nirgal threw himself down the mattress, his feet hanging far off the bottom edge, and cried. A complete confusion of feeling. His whole body hurt, but especially his head. He stopped crying and fell into a deep sleep.

He woke in a small black chamber.It smelled green. He couldn’t remember where he was. He rolled onto his back and it came to him: Earth. Whispers — he sat up, frightened. A muffled laugh. Hands caught at him and pressed him down, but they were friendly hands, he could feel that immediately. “Shh,” someone said, and then kissed him. Someone else was fumbling at his belt, his buttons. Women, two, three, no two, scented overpoweringly with jasmine and something else, two strands of perfume, both warm. Sweaty skin, so slick. The arteries in his head pounded. This kind of thing had happened to him once or twice when he was younger, when the newly tented canyons were like new worlds, with new young women who wanted to get pregnant or just have fun. After the celibate months of the voyage it felt like heaven to squeeze women’s bodies, to kiss and be kissed, and his initial fright melted away in a rush of hands and mouths, breasts and tangled legs. “Sister Earth,” he gasped. There was music coming from somewhere far away, piano and steel drums and tablas, almost washed out by the sound of the wind in the bamboo. One of the women was on top of him, pressed down on him, and the feel of her ribs sliding under his hands would stay with him forever. He came inside her, kept on kissing. But his head still pounded painfully.

The next time he woke he was damp and naked on the mattress. It was still dark. He dressed and went out of the room, down a dim hallway to an enclosed porch. It was dusk; he had slept through a day. Maya and Michel and Sax were sitting down to a meal with a large group. Nirgal assured them he was fine, ravenous in fact.

He sat among them. Out in the clearing, in the middle of the raw wet compound, a crowd was gathered around an outdoor kitchen. Beyond them a bonfire blazed yellow in the dusk; its flames limned the dark faces and reflected in the bright liquid whites of their eyes, their teeth. The people at the inside table all looked at him. Several of the young women smiled, their jet hair like caps of jewels, and for a second Nirgal was afraid he smelled of sex and perfume; but the smoke from the bonfire, and the steamy scents of the spiced dishes on the table, made such a thing irrelevant — in such an explosion of smells, nothing could be traced to its origin — and anyway one’s olfactory system was blasted by the food, hot with spices, curry and cayenne, chunks of fish on rice, with a vegetable that seared his mouth and throat, so that he spent the next half hour blinking and sniffing and drinking glasses of water, his head burning. Someone gave him a slice of candied orange, which cooled his mouth somewhat. He ate several slices of bittersweet candied orange.

When the meal was over they all cleared the tables together, as in Zygote or Hiranyagarba. Outside dancers began to circle the bonfire, dressed in their surreal carnival costumes, with masks of beasts and demons over their heads, as during Fassnacht in Nicosia, although the masks were heavier and stranger: demons with multiple eyes and big teeth, elephants, goddesses. The trees were black against the blurry black of the sky, the stars all fat and swinging around, the fronds and leaves up there green black black green, and then fire-colored as the flames leaped higher, seeming to provide the rhythm of the dance. A small young woman with six arms, all moving together to the dance, stepped behind Nirgal and Maya. “This is the dance of Ramayana,” she told them. “It is as old as civilization, and in it they speak of Mangala.”

She gave Nirgal a familiar squeeze on the shoulder, and suddenly he recognized her jasmine scent. Without smiling she went back out to the bonfire. The tabla drums were following the leaping flames to a crescendo, and the dancers cried out. Nirgal’s head throbbed at every beat, and despite the candied orange his eyes were still watering from the burning pepper. And his lids were heavy. “I know it’s strange,” he said, “but I think I have to sleep again.”

He woke before dawn, and went out on a veranda to watch the sky lighten in a quite Martian sequence, black to purple to rose to pink, before turning the startling cyanic blue of a tropical Terran morning. His head was still sore, as if stuffed, but he felt rested at last, and ready to take on the world again. After a breakfast of green-brown bananas, he and Sax joined some of their hosts for a drive around the island.

Everywhere they went there were always several hundred people in his field of vision. The people were all small: brown-skinned like him in the countryside, darker in the towns. There were big vans that moved around together, providing mobile shops to villages too small to have them. Nirgal was surprised to see how lean people werq, their limbs wiry with labor or else as thin as reeds. In this context the curves of the young women were like the blooms of flowers, not long for this world.

When people saw who he was they rushed up to greet him and shake his hand. Sax shook his head at the sight of Nirgal among them. “Bimodal distribution,” he said. “Not speciation exactly — but perhaps if enough time passed. Island divergence, it’s very Darwinian.”

“I’m a Martian,” Nirgal agreed.

Their buildings were placed in holes hacked into the green jungle, which then tried to take the space back. The older buildings were all made of mud bricks black with age, melting back into the earth. Rice fields were terraced so finely that the hills looked farther away than they really were. The light green of rice shoots was a color never seen on Mars. In general the greens were brilliant and glowing beyond anything Nirgal could recall seeing; they pressed on him, so various and intense, the sun plating his back: “It’s because of the sky’s color,” Sax said when Nirgal mentioned it. “The reds in the Martian sky mute the greens just a bit.”

The air was thick, wet, rancid. The shimmering sea settled on a distant horizon. Nirgal coughed, breathed through his mouth, struggled to ignore his throbbing temples and forehead.

“You have low-altitude sickness,” Sax speculated. “I’ve read claims that it happens to Himalayans and Andeans who come down to sea level. Acidity levels in the blood. We ought to have landed you someplace higher.”

“Why didn’t we?”

“They wanted you here because Desmond came from here. This is your homeland. Actually there seems to be a bit of conflict over who should host us next.”

“Even here?”

“More here than on Mars, I should think.”

Nirgal groaned. The weight of the world, the stifling air — “I’m going running,” he said, and took off.

At first it was its usual release; the habitual motions and responses poured through him, reminding him that he was still himself. But as he thumped along he did not ascend into that lung-gom-pa zone where running was like breathing, something he could do indefinitely; instead he began to feel the press of the thick air in his lungs, and the pressure of eyes from the little people he passed, and most of all the pressure of his own weight, hurting his joints. He weighed more than twice what he was used to, and it was like carrying an invisible person on his back, except no — the weight was inside him. As if his bones had turned to lead inside him. His lungs burned and drowned at the same time, and no cough would get them clear. There were taller people in Western clothes behind him now, on little three-wheeled bicycles that splashed through every puddle. But locals were stepping into the road behind him, crowds of them blocking off the tricyclers, their eyes and teeth gleaming in their dark faces as they talked and laughed. The men on the tricycles had blank faces, and they were looking at Nirgal. But they did not challenge the crowd. Nirgal headed back toward the camp, turning down a new road. Now the green hills were blazing to his right. The road jarred up through his legs with every step, until his legs were like tree trunks aflame. That running should hurt! And his head was like a giant balloon. All the wet green plants seemed to be reaching out for him, a hundred shades of green flame melding to one dominant color band, pouring into the world. Black dots swimming. “Hiroko,” he gasped, and ran on with the tears streaming down his face; no one would be able to tell them from sweat. Hiroko, it isn’t like you said it would be!

He stumbled into the ochre dirt of the compound, and scores of people followed him to Maya. Soaking as he was, he still threw his arms around her and put his head down on her shoulder, sobbing.

“We should get to Europe,” Maya said angrily to someone over his back. “This is stupid, to bring him right to the tropics like this.”

Nirgal shifted to look back. It was the prime minister. “This is how we always live,” she said, and pierced Nirgal with a resentful proud look.

But Maya was unimpressed. “We have to go to Bern,” she said.

They flew to Switzerland in a small space plane provided by Praxis. As they traveled, they looked down on the Earth from thirty thousand meters: the blue Atlantic, the rugged mountains of Spain, somewhat like the Hellespontus Mon-tes; then France; then the white wall of the Alps, unlike any mountains he had ever seen. The cool ventilation of the space plane felt like home to Nirgal, and he was chagrined to think that he could not tolerate the open air of Earth.

“You’ll do better in Europe,” Maya told him.

Nirgal thought about the reception they had gotten. “They love you here,” he said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the welcome of the duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors as for him; and Maya had been particularly cherished.

“They’re happy we survived,” Maya said, dismissing it. “We came back from the dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we were dead, do you see? From sixty-one until just last year, they thought all the First Hundred were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them was dead too. To have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with everything changing — yes. It’s like a myth. The return from underground.”

“But not all of you.”

“No.” She almost smiled. “They still have to sort that out. They think Frank is alive, and Arkady — and John too, even though John was killed years before sixty-one, and everyone knew it! For a while, anyway. But people are forgetting things. That was a long time ago. And so much has happened since. And people want John Boone to be alive. And so they forget Nicosia, and say that he is part of the underground still.” She laughed shortly, unsettled by this.

“Like with Hiroko,” Nirgal said, feeling his throat constrict. A wave of sadness like the one in Trinidad washed through him, leaving him bleached and aching. He believed, he had always believed, that Hiroko was alive, and hiding with her people somewhere in the southern highlands. This was how he had coped with the shock of the news of her disappearance — by being quite certain that she had slipped out of Sabishii, and would show up again when she felt the time was right. He had been sure of it. Now, for some reason he could not tell, he was no longer sure.

In the seat on the other side of Maya, Michel sat with a pinched expression on his face. Suddenly Nirgal felt like he was looking in a mirror; he knew his face held the same expression, he could feel it in his muscles. He and Michel both had doubts — perhaps about Hiroko, perhaps about other things. No way of telling. Michel did not seem inclined to speak.

And from across the plane Sax watched them both, with his usual birdlike gaze.

They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of the Alps, and landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through a cool Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically up and out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were in Bern.

In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters, everyone with an ID badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to them. The city was small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered power was palpable. Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly arcaded stone buildings, everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift river Aare S-ing through it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow. The people crowding that quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking white people, not as short as most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their talk, and always a good number of them clustering around the Martians and their escorts, who now were blue-uniformed Swiss military police.

Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis headquarters, in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed Nirgal how close to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river of even two meters would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they had the river under control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest mountain range Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the Swiss were good on Mars.

The Praxis building was just a few streets from the old center of the city. The World Court occupied a scattering of offices next to the Swiss federal buildings, near the middle of the peninsula. So every morning they walked down the cobbled main street, the Kramgasse, which was incredibly clean, bare and underpopulated compared with any street in Port of Spain. They passed under the medieval clock tower, with its ornate face and mechanical figures, like one of Michel’s alchemical diagrams made into a three-dimensional object; then into the World Court offices, where they talked to group after group about the situations on Mars and Earth: UN officials, national government representatives, metanational executives, relief organizations, media groups. Everyone wanted to know what was happening on Mars, what Mars planned to do next, what they thought of the situation on Earth, what Mars could offer Earth in the way of help. Nirgal found most of the people he was introduced to fairly easy to talk with; they seemed to understand the respective situations on the two worlds, they were not unrealistic about Mars’s ability to somehow “save Earth”; they did not seem to expect to control Mars ever again, nor did they expect the metanational world order of the antediluvian years to return.

It was likely, however, that the Martians were being screened from people who had a more hostile attitude toward them. Maya was quite certain this was the case. She pointed out how often the negotiators and interviewers revealed what she called their “terracentricity.” Nothing mattered to them, really, but things Earthly; Mars was interesting in some ways, but not actually important. Once this attitude was pointed out to Nirgal, he saw it again and again. And in fact he found it comforting. The corresponding attitude existed on Mars, certainly, as the natives were inevitably areocentric; and it made sense, it was a kind of realism.

Indeed it began to seem to him that it was precisely the Terrans who showed an intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to contemplate: certain metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily in Martian terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily populated countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send large numbers of their people. So he sat in meetings with people from Armscor, Subarashii, China, Indonesia, Ammex, India, Japan, and the Japanese metanat council; and he listened most carefully, and did his best to ask questions rather than talk overmuch; and he saw that some of their staunchest allies up to that point, especially India and China, were likely in the new dispensation to become their most serious problem. Maya nodded emphatically when he made this observation to her, her face grim. “We can only hope that sheer distance will save us,” she said. “How lucky we are that it takes space travel to reach us. That should be a bottleneck for emigration no matter how advanced transport methods become. But we will have to keep our guard up, forever. In fact, don’t speak much of these things here. Don’t speak much at all.”

During lunch breaks Nirgal asked his escort group — a dozen or more Swiss who stayed with him every waking hour — to walk with him over to the cathedral, which someone told Nirgal was called in Swiss the monster. It had a tower at one end, containing a tight spiral staircase one could ascend, and almost every day Nirgal took several deep breaths and then pushed on up this staircase, gasping and sweating as he neared the top. On clear days, which were not frequent, he could see out the open arches of the top room to the distant abrupt wall of the Alps, a wall he had learned to call the Berner Oberland. This jagged white wall ran from horizon to horizon, like one of the great Martian escarpments, only covered everywhere with snow, everywhere except for on triangular north faces of exposed rock, rock of a light gray color, unlike anything on Mars: granite.

Granite mountains, raised by tectonic-plate collision. And the violence of these origins showed.

Between this majestic white range and Bern lay a number of lower ranges of green hills, the grassy alps similar to the greens in Trinidad, the conifer forests a darker green. So much green — again Nirgal was astounded by how much of Earth was covered with plant life, the lithosphere smothered in a thick ancient blanket of biosphere. “Yes,” Michel said, along one day to view the prospect with him. “The biosphere at this point has even formed a great deal of the upper layer of rock. Everywhere life teems, it teems.”

Michel was dying to get to Provence. They were near it, an hour’s flight or a night’s train; and everything that was going on in Berne seemed to Michel only the endless wrangling of politics. “Flood or revolution or the sun going nova, it will still go on! You and Sax can deal with it, you can do what needs doing better than I.”

“And Maya even more so.”

“Well, yes. But I want her to come with me. She has to see it, or she won’t understand.”

Maya, however, was absorbed in the negotiations with the UN, which were getting serious now that the Martians back home had approved the new constitution. The UN was turning out to still be very much a metanat mouthpiece, just as the World Court continued to support the new “co-op democracies”; and so the arguments in the various meeting rooms, and via video transmission, were vigorous, volatile, sometimes hostile. Important, in a word, and Maya went out to do battle every day; so she had no patience at all for the idea of Provence. She had visited the south of France in her youth, she said, and was not greatly interested in seeing it again, even with Michel. “She says the beaches are all gone!” Michel complained. “As if the beaches were what mattered to Provence!”

In any case, she wouldn’t go. Finally, after a few weeks had passed, Michel shrugged and gave up, unhappily, and decided to visit Provence on his own.

On the day he left, Nirgal walked him down to the train station at the end of the main street, and stood waving at the slowly accelerating train as it left the station. At the last moment Michel stuck his head out a window, waving back at Nirgal with a huge grin. Nirgal was shocked to see this unprecedented expression, so quickly replacing the discouragement at Maya’s absence; then he felt happy for his friend; then he felt a flash of envy. There was no place that would make him feel so good to be going to, not anywhere in the two worlds.

After the train disappeared, Nirgal walked back down Kramgasse in the usual cloud of escorts and media eyes, and hauled his two and a half bodies up the 254 spiral stairs of the Monster, to stare south at the wall of the Berner Ober-land. He was spending a lot of time up there; sometimes he missed early-afternoon meetings, let Sax and Maya take care of it. The Swiss were running things in their usual businesslike fashion. The meetings had agendas, and started on time, and if they didn’t get through the agenda, it wasn’t because of the Swiss in the room. They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency. It was an attitude that Coyote laughed at, or disdained as life-threatening; but seeing the results in the elegant stone city below him, overflowing with flowers and people as prosperous as flowers, Nirgal thought there must be something to be said for it. He had been homeless for so long. Michel had his Provence to go to, but for Nirgal no place endured. His hometown was crushed under a polar cap, his mother had disappeared without a trace, and every place since then had been just a place, and everything everywhere always changing. Mutability was his home. And looking over Switzerland, it was a hard thing to realize. He wanted a home place that had something like these tile roofs, these stone walls, here and solid these last thousand years.

He tried to focus on the meetings in the World Court, and in the Swiss Bundeshaus. Praxis was still leading the way in the response to the flood, it was good at working without plans, and it had already been a cooperative concentrating on the production of basic goods and services, including the longevity treatment. So it only had to accelerate that process to take the lead in showing what could be done in the emergency. The four travelers had seen the results in Trinidad; local movements did most of it, but Praxis was helping projects like that all over the world. William Fort was said to have been critical in leading the fluid response of the “collective transnat,” as he called Praxis.

And his mutant metanational was only one of hundreds of service agencies that had come to the fore. All over the world they were taking on the problem of relocating the coastal populations, and building or relocating a new coastal infrastructure on higher ground.

This loose network of reconstruction efforts, however, was running into some resistance from the metanats, who complained that a good deal of their infrastructure, capital and labor were being nationalized, localized, appropriated, salvaged, or stolen outright. Fighting was not infrequent, especially where fights had already been ongoing; the flood, after all, had arrived right in the middle of one of the world’s paroxysms of breakdown and reordering, and although it had altered everything, that struggle was often still happening, sometimes under the cover of the relief efforts.

Sax Russell was particularly aware of this context, convinced as he was that the global wars of 2061 had never resolved the basic inequities of the Terran economic system. In his own peculiar fashion he was insistent on this point in the meetings, and over time it seemed to Nirgal that he was managing to convince the skeptical listeners of the UN and the metanats that they all needed to pursue something like the Praxis method if they wanted themselves and civilization to survive. It did not matter much which of the two they really cared about, he said to Nirgal in private, themselves or civilization; it didn’t matter if they only instituted some Machiavellian simulacrum of the Praxis program; the effect would be much the same in the short term, and everyone needed that grace period of peaceful cooperation.

So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent and engaged, especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to Earth. And Sax Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current living avatar of The Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran culture, Nirgal thought — something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing reincarnation of the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture that only seemed to be able to handle one scientist at a time. Also, to the metanats Sax was the principal creator of the biggest new market in history — not an inconsiderable part of his aura. And, as Maya had pointed out, he was one of that group that had returned from the dead, one of the leaders of the First Hundred.

As all these things, his odd halting style actually helped to build the Terrans’ image of him. Simple verbal difficulty turned him into a kind of oracle; the Terrans seemed to believe that he thought on such a lofty plane that he could only speak in riddles. This was what they wanted, perhaps. This was what science meant to them — after all, current physical theory spoke of ultimate reality as ultramicro-scopic loops of string, moving supersymmetrically in ten dimensions. That kind of thing had inured people to strangeness from physicists. And the increasing use of translation AIs was getting everyone used to odd locutions of all types; almost everyone Nirgal met spoke English, but they were all slightly different Englishes, so that Earth seemed to Nirgal an explosion of idiolects, no two persons employing the same tongue.

In that context, Sax was listened to with the utmost seriousness. “The flood marks a break point in history,” he said one morning, to a large general meeting in the Bundeshaus’s National Council Chamber. “It was a natural revolution. Weather on Earth is changed, also the land, the sea’s currents. The distribution of human and animal populations. There is no reason, in this situation, to try to reinstate the antediluvian world. It’s not possible. And there are many reasons to institute an improved social order. The old one was — flawed. Resulting in bloodshed, hunger, servitude, and war. Suffering. Unnecessary death. There will always be death. But it should come for every person as late as possible. At the end of a good life. This is the goal of any rational social order. So we see the flood as an opportunity — here as it was on Mars — to — break the mold.”

The UN officials and the metanat advisers frowned at this, but they listened. And the whole world was watching; so that what a cadre of leaders in a European city thought was not as important, Nirgal judged, as the people in their villages, watching the man from Mars on the vid. And as Praxis and the Swiss and their allies worldwide had thrown all their resources into refugee aid and the longevity treatments, people everywhere were joining up. If you could make a living while saving the world — if it represented your best chance for stability and long life and your children’s chances — then why not? Why not? What did most people have to lose? The late metanational period had benefited some, but billions had been left out, in an ever-worsening situation.

So the metanats were losing their workers en masse. They couldn’t imprison them; it was getting hard to scare them; the only way they could keep them was to institute the same sorts of programs that Praxis had started. And this they were doing, or so they said. Maya was sure they were instituting superficial changes meant to resemble Praxis’s only in order to keep their workers and their profits too. But it was possible that Sax was right, and that they would be unable to keep control of the situation, and would usher in a new order despite themselves.

Which is what Nirgal decided to say, during one of his chances to speak, in a press conference in a big side room of the Bundeshaus. Standing at the podium, looking out at a room full of reporters and delegates — so unlike the improvised table in the Pavonis warehouse, so unlike the compound hacked out of the jungle in Trinidad, so unlike the stage in the sea of people during that wild night in Burroughs — Nirgal saw suddenly that his role was to be the young Martian, the voice of the new world. He could leave being reasonable to Maya and Sax, and provide the alien point of view.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them as he could. “Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements, things from all over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present is always a melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still knights coming through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are still guilds, and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work in the flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage. They want to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to do real work — meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore. Those of you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it’s true — that will happen. But it’s going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. This universal distribution of the longevity treatment that we are now seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic movement. It’s the physical manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health for all. And when that happens the explosion of positive human energy is going to transform the Earth in just a matter of years.”

Someone in the crowd stood and asked him about the possibility of a population explosion, and he nodded. “Yes of course. This is a real problem. You don’t have to be a demographer to see that if new ones continue being born while the elderly are not dying, population will quickly soar to incredible levels. Unsustainable levels, until there will be a crash. So. This has to be faced now. The birth rate simply has to be cut, at least for a while. It isn’t a situation that has to last forever. The longevity treatments are not immortality treatments. Eventually the first generations given the treatment will die. And therein lies the solution to the problem. Say the current population on the two worlds is fifteen billion. That means we’re already starting from a bad spot. Given the severity of the problem, as long as you get to be a parent at all, there is no reason to complain; it’s your own longevity causing the problem after all, and parenthood is parenthood, one child or ten. So say that each person partners, and the two parents have only a single child, so that there is one child for every two people in the previous generation. Say that means seven and a half billion children out of this present generation. And they are all given the longevity treatment too, of course, and cosseted until they are no doubt the insufferable royalty of the world. And they go on to have four billion children, the new royalty, and that generation has two, and so on. All of them are alive at once, and the population is rising all the time, but at a lower rate as time passes. And then at some point, maybe a hundred years from now, maybe a thousand years from now, that first generation will die. It may happen over a fairly short period of time, but fast or slow, when the process is done, the overall population will be almost halved. At that point people can look at the situation, the infrastructure, the environments of the two worlds — the carrying capacity of the entire solar system, whatever that might be. After the biggest generations are gone, people can start having two children each, perhaps, so that there is replacement, and a steady state. Or whatever. When they have that kind of choice, the population crisis will be over. It could take a thousand years.”

Nirgal stopped to look outside of himself, to stare around at the audience; people watching him rapt, silent. He gestured with a hand, to draw them all together. “In the meantime, we have to help each other. We have to regulate ourselves, we have to take care of the land. And it’s here, in this part of the project, that Mars can help Earth. First, we are an experiment in taking care of the land. Everyone learns from that, and some lessons can be applied here. Then, more importantly, though most of the population will always be located here on Earth, a goodly fraction of it can move to Mars. It will help ease the situation, and we’ll be happy to take them. We have an obligation to take on as many people as we possibly can, because we on Mars are Terrans still, and we are all in this together. Earth and Mars — and there are other habitable worlds in the solar system as well, none as big as our two, but there are a lot of them. And by using them all, and cooperating, we can get through the populated years. And walk out into a golden age.”

That day’s talk made quite an impression, as far as one could tell from within the eye of the media storm. Nirgal conversed for hours every day after that, with group after group, elaborating the ideas he had first expressed in that meeting. It was exhausting work, and after a few weeks of it without any letup, he looked out his bedroom window one cloudless morning, and went out and talked to his escort about making an expedition. And the escort agreed to tell the people in Bern he was touring privately; and they took a train up into the Alps.

The train ran south from Bern, past a long blue lake called the Thuner See, which was flanked by steep grassy alps, and ramparts and spires of gray granite. The lakeside towns were topped by slate roof tiles, dominated by ancient trees and an occasional castle, everything in perfect repair. The vast green pastures between the towns were dotted by big wooden farmhouses, with red carnations in flower boxes at every window and balcony. It was a style that had not changed in five hundred years, the escorts told him. Settling into the land, as if natural to it. The green alps had been cleared of trees and stones — in their original state they had been forests. So they were terraformed spaces, huge hilly lawns that had been created to provide forage for cattle. Such an agriculture had not made economic sense as capitalism denned it, but the Swiss had supported the high farms anyway, because they thought it was important, or beautiful, or both at once. It was Swiss. “There are values higher than economic values,” Vlad had insisted back in the congress on Mars, and Nirgal saw now how there were people on Earth who had always believed that, at least in part. Werteswandel, they were saying down in Bern, mutation of values; but it could as well be evolution of values, return of values; gradual change, rather than punctuated equilibrium; benevolent residual archaisms, which endured and endured, until slowly these high isolated mountain valleys had taught the world how to live, their big farmhouses floating by on green waves. A shaft of yellow sun split the clouds and struck the hill behind one such farm, and the alp gleamed in an emerald mass, so intensely green that Nirgal felt disoriented, then actually dizzy; it was hard to focus on such a radiant green!

The heraldic hill disappeared. Others appeared in the window, wave after green wave, luminous with their own reality. At the town of Interlaken the train turned and began to ascend a valley so steep that in places the tracks entered tunnels into the rocky sides of the valley, and spiraled a full 360 degrees inside the mountain before coming back out into the sun, the head of the train right above the tail. The train ran on tracks rather than pistes because the Swiss had not been convinced that the new technology was enough of an improvement to justify replacing what they already had. And so the train vibrated, and even rocked side to side, as it rumbled and squealed uphill, steel on steel.

They stopped in Grindelwald, and in the station Nirgal followed his escort onto a much smaller train, which led them up and under the immense north wall of the Eiger. Underneath this wall of stone it appeared only a few hundred meters tall; Nirgal had gotten a better sense of its great height fifty kilometers away, in Bern’s Monster. Now, here, he waited patiently as the little train hummed into a tunnel in the mountain itself, and began to make its spirals and switchbacks in the darkness, punctuated only by the interior lights of the train, and the brief light from a single side tunnel. His escort, about ten men strong, spoke among themselves in low guttural Swiss German.

When they emerged into the light again they were in a little station called the Jungfraujoch, “the highest train station in Europe” as a sign in six languages said — and no wonder, as it was located in an icy pass between the two great peaks the Monch and the Jungfrau, at 3,454 meters above sea level, with no point or destination but its own.

Nirgal got off the train, trailed by his escort, and went out of the station onto a narrow terrace outside the building. The air was thin, clean, crisp, about 270 K — the best air Nirgal had breathed since he left Mars, it brought tears to his eyes it felt so familiar! Ah, now this was a place!

Even with sunglasses on the light was extremely bright. The sky was a dark cobalt. Snow covered most of the mountainsides, but granite thrust through the snow everywhere, especially on the north sides of the great masses, where the cliffs were too steep to hold snow. Up here the Alps no longer resembled an escarpment at all; each mass of rock had its own look and presence, separated from the rest by deep expanses of empty air, including glacial valleys that were enormously deep U gaps. To the north these macro-trenches were very far below, and green, or even filled with lakes. To the south, however, they were high, and filled only with snow and ice and rock. On this day the wind was pouring up from this south side, bringing the chill of the ice with it.

Down the ice valley directly south of the pass, Nirgal could see a huge crumpled white plateau, where glaciers poured in from the surrounding high basins to meet in a great confluence. This was Concordiaplatz, they told him. Four big glaciers met, then poured south in the Grosser Aletschgletscher, the longest glacier in Switzerland.

Nirgal moved down the terrace to its end, to see farther into this wilderness of ice. At the far end he found that there was a staircase trail, hacked into the hard snow of the south wall where it rose to the pass. It was a path down to the glacier below them, and from there to Concordiaplatz.

Nirgal asked his escorts to stay in the station and wait for him; he wanted to hike alone. They protested, but the glacier in summer was free of snow, the crevasses all obvious, and the trail well clear of them. And no one else was down there on this cold summer day. Nevertheless the members of the escort were uncertain, and two insisted on coming with him, at least part way, and at a distance behind — “just in case.”

Finally Nirgal nodded at the compromise, and pulled on his hood, and hiked down the ice stairs, thumping down painfully until he was on the flatter expanse of the Jung-fraufirn. The ridges that walled this snow valley ran south from the Jungfrau and the Monch respectively, then after a few high kilometers dropped abruptly to Concordiaplatz. From the trail their rock looked black, perhaps in contrast to the whiteness of the snow. Here and there were patches of faint pinkness in the white snow — algae. Life even here — but barely. It was for the most part a pure expanse of white and black, and the overarching dome of Prussian blue, with a cold wind funneling up the canyon from Concordiaplatz. He wanted to make it down to Concordiaplatz and have a look around, but he couldn’t tell whether the day would give him enough time or not; it was very difficult to judge how far away things were, it could easily have been farther than it looked. But he could go until the sun was halfway to the western horizon, and then turn back; and so he hiked swiftly downhill over the firn, from orange wand to orange wand, feeling the extra person inside him, feeling also the two members of the escort who were tagging along some two hundred meters behind.

For a long time he just walked. It wasn’t so hard. The crenellated ice surface crunched under his brown boots. The sun had softened the top layer, despite the cool wind. The surface was too bright to see properly, even with sunglasses; the ice joggled as he walked, and glowed blackly.

The ridges to left and right began their drop. He came out into Concordiaplatz. He could see up glaciers into other high canyons, as if up ice fingers of a hand held up to the sun. The wrist ran down to the south, the Grosser Aletschgletscher. He was standing in the white palm, offered to the sun, next to a lifeline of rubble. The ice out here was pitted and gnarly and bluish in tone.

A wind picked at him, and swirled through his heart; he turned around slowly, like a little planet, like a top about to fall, trying to take it in, to face it. So big, so bright, so windy and vast, so crushingly heavy — the sheer mass of the white world! — and yet with a kind of darkness behind it, as of space’s vacuum, there visible behind the sky. He took off his sunglasses to see what it really looked like, and the glare was so immediate and violent that he had to close his eyes, to cover his face in the crook of his arm; still great white bars pulsed in his vision, and even the afterimage hurt in its blinding intensity. “Wow!” he shouted, and laughed, determined to try it again as soon as the afterimages lessened, but before his pupils had again expanded. So he did, but the second attempt was as bad as the first. How dare you try to look on me as I really am! the world shouted silently. “My God.” With feeling. “Ka wow.”

He put his sunglasses back on his closed eyes, looked out through the bounding afterimages; gradually the primeval landscape of ice and rock restabilized out of the pulsing bars of black and white and neon green. The white and the green; and this was the white. The blank world of the inanimate universe. This place had precisely the same import as the primal Martian landscape. Just as big as it was on Mars, yes, and even bigger, because of the distant horizons, and the crushing gravity; and steeper; and whiter; and windier, ka, it pierced so chill through his parka, even windier, even colder — ah God, like a wind lancing through his heart: the sudden knowledge that Earth was so vast that in its variety it had regions that even out-Marsed Mars itself — that among all the ways that it was greater, it was greater even at being Martian.

He was brought still by this thought. He only stood and stared, tried to face it. The wind died for the moment. The world too was still. No movement, no sound.

When he noticed the silence he began paying attention to it, listening for something, hearing nothing, so that the silence itself somehow became more and more palpable. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before. He thought about it; on Mars he had always been in tents or in suits — always in machinery, except for during the rare walks on the surface he had made in recent years. But then there had always been the wind, or machines nearby. Or he simply hadn’t noticed. Now there was only the great silence, the silence of the universe itself. No dream could imagine it.

And then he began to hear sounds again. The blood in his ears. His breath in his nose. The quiet whir of his thinking — it seemed to have a sound. His own support system this time, his body, with its organic pumps and ventilators and generators. The mechanisms were all still there, provided inside him, making their noises. But now he was free of anything more, in a great silence where he could actually hear himself quite well, just himself on this world alone, a free body standing on its mother earth, free in the rock and ice where it had all begun. Mother Earth — he thought of Hiroko — and this time without the tearing grief that he had felt in Trinidad. When he returned to Mars, he could live like this. He could walk out in the silence a free being, live outdoors in the wind, in something like this pure vast lifeless whiteness, with something like this dark blue dome overhead, the blue a visible exhalation of life itself — oxygen, life’s own color. Up there doming the whiteness. A sign, somehow. The white and the green, except here the green was blue.

With shadows. Among the faint lingering afterimages lay long shadows, running from the west. He was a long way from Jungfraujoch, and considerably lower as well. He turned and began hiking up the Jungfraufirn. In the distance, up the trail, his two companions nodded and turned uphill themselves, hiking fast.

Soon enough they were in the shadow of the ridge to the west, the sun now out of sight for good on this day, and the wind swirling over his back, helping on. Cold indeed. But it was his kind of temperature, after all, and his kind of air, just a nice touch of extra thickness to it; and so despite the weight inside him he began to trudge on up the crunchy hardpack in a little jog, leaning into it, feeling his thigh muscles respond to the challenge, fall into their old lung-gom-pa rhythm, with his lungs pumping hard and his heart as well, to handle the extra weight. But he was strong, strong, and this was one of Earth’s little high regions of Marsness; and so he crunched up the firn feeling stronger by the minute, also appalled, exhilarated — awed — it was a most astonishing planet, that could have so much of the white and so much of the green as well, its orbit so exquisitely situated that at sea level the green burst out and at three thousand meters the white blanketed it utterly — the natural zone of life just that three thousand meters wide, more or less. And Earth rolled right in the middle of that filmy bubble biosphere, in the right few thousand meters out of an orbit 150 million kilometers wide. It was too lucky to be believed.

His skin began to tingle with the effort, he was warm all over, even his toes. Beginning to sweat. The cold air was deliciously invigorating, he felt he was in a pace that he could sustain for hours; but alas, he would not need to; ahead and a bit above lay the snow staircase, with its rope-and-stanchion railing. His guides were making good time ahead of him, hurrying up the final slope. Soon he too would be there, in the little train station/space station. These Swiss, what they thought to build! To be able to visit the stupendous Concordiaplatz, on a day trip from the nation’s capital! No wonder they were so sympathetic to Mars — they were Earth’s closest thing to Martians, truly — builders, terraformers, inhabitants of the thin cold air.

So he was feeling very benevolent toward them when he stepped onto the terrace and then burst into the station, where he began immediately steaming; and when he walked over to his group of escorts and the other passengers who were waiting next to the little train, he was beaming so completely, he was so high, that the impatient frowns of the group (he saw that they had been kept waiting) cracked, and they looked at each other and laughed, shaking their heads as if to say to each other, What can you do? You could only grin and let it happen — they had all been young in the high Alps for the first time, one sunny summer day, and had felt that same enthusiasm — they remembered what it was like. And so they shook his hand, they embraced him — they led him onto the little train and got going, for no matter the event, it was not good to keep a train waiting — and once under way they remarked on his hot hands and face, and asked him where he had gone, and told him how many kilometers that was, and how many vertical meters. They passed him a little hip flask of schnapps. And then as the train went by the little side tunnel that ran out onto the north face of the Eiger, they told him the story of the failed rescue attempt of the doomed Nazi climbers, excited, moved that he was so impressed. And after that they settled into the lit compartments of the train, squealing down through its rough granite tunnel.

Nirgal stood at the end of one car, looking out at the dynamited rock as it flashed past, and then as they burst back into sunlight, up at the looming wall of the Eiger overhead. A passenger walked by him on the way to the next car, then stopped and stared: “Amazing to see you here, T must say.” He had a British accent of some kind. “I just ran into your mother last week.”

Confused, Nirgal said, “My mother?”

“Yes, Hiroko Ai. Isn’t that right? She was in England, working with people at the mouth of the Thames. I saw her on my way here. Quite a coincidence running into you too, I must say. Makes me think I’ll start seeing little red men any second now.”

The man laughed at the thought, began to move on into the next car.

“Hey!” Nirgal called. “Wait!”

But the man only paused — “No no,” he said over his shoulder, “didn’t want to intrude — all I know, anyhow. You’ll have to look her up — in Sheerness perhaps — ”

And then the train was squealing into the station at Klein Scheidegg, and the man hopped out an opening door in the next car, and as Nirgal went to follow him other people got in the way, and his escorts came to explain to him that he needed to descend to Grindelwald immediately if he wanted to get home that night. Nirgal couldn’t deny them. But looking out the window as they rolled out of the station, he saw the British man who had spoken to him, walking briskly down a trail into the dusky valley below.

He landed at a big airportin southern England, and was driven north and east to a town the escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were flooded. He had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police team that reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss escort: eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they had heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and he insisted on going out without fanfare to look for her. Eventually he convinced them.

They drove in a gray dawn, down to a new seafront, right there among buildings: in some places there were lines of stacked sandbags between soggy walls, in other places just wet streets, running off under dark water that spread for as far as he could see. Some planks were thrown here and there over mud and puddles.

Then on the far side of one line of sandbags was brown water without any buildings beyond, and a number of row-boats tied to a grille covering a window half awash in dirty foam. Nirgal followed one of the escorts into one big row-boat, and greeted a wiry red-faced man, wearing a dirty cap pulled low over his forehead. A kind of water policeman, apparently. The man shook his hand limply and then they were off, rowing over opaque water, followed by three more boats containing the rest of Nirgal’s worried-looking guards. Nirgal’s oarsman said something, and Nirgal had to ask him to repeat it; it was as if the man only had half his tongue. “Is that Cockney, your dialect?”

“Cockney.” The man laughed.

Nirgal laughed too, shrugged. It was a word he remembered from a book, he didn’t know what it meant really. He had heard a thousand different kinds of English before, but this was the real thing, presumably, and he could hardly understand it. The man spoke more slowly, which didn’t help. He was describing the neighborhood they were rowing away from, pointing; the buildings were inundated nearly to their rooflines. “Brents,” he said several times, pointing with his oar tips.

They came to a floating dock, tied to what looked like a highway sign, saying “OARE.” Several larger boats were tied to the dock, or swinging from anchor ropes nearby. The water policeman rowed to one of these boats, and indicated the metal ladder welded to its rusty side. “Go on.”

Nirgal climbed the side of the boat. On the deck stood a man so short he had to reach up to shake Nirgal’s hand, which he did with a crushing grip. “So you’re a Martian,” he said, in a voice that lilted like the oarsman’s, but was somehow much easier to understand. “Welcome aboard our little research vessel. Come to hunt for the old Asian lady, I hear?”

“Yes,” Nirgal said, his pulse quickening. “She’s Japanese.”

“Hmm.” The man frowned. “I only saw her the once, but I would have said she was Asian, Bangladeshi maybe. They’re everywhere since the flood. But who can tell, eh?”

Four of Nirgal’s escorts climbed aboard, and the boat’s owner pushed a button that started an engine, then spun the wheel in the wheelhouse, and watched forward closely as the boat’s rear pushed down in the water, and they vibrated, then moved away from the drowned line of buildings. It was overcast, the clouds very low, sea and sky both a brownish gray.

“We’ll go out over the wharf,” the little captain said.

Nirgal nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Ely’s the name. B-L-Y.”

“I’m Nirgal.”

The man nodded once.

“So this used to be the docks?” Nirgal asked.

“This was Faversham. Out here were the marshes — Ham, Magden — it was mostly marsh, all the way to the Isle of Sheppey. The Swale, this was. More fen than flow, if you know what I mean. Now you get out here on a windy day and it’s like the North Sea itself. And Sheppey is no more than that hill you see out there. A proper island now.”

“And that’s where you saw…” He didn’t know what to call her.

“Your Asian grandma came in on the ferry from Vlis-singen to Sheerness, other side of that island. Sheerness and Minster have the Thames for streets these days, and at high tide they have it for their roofs too. We’re over Magden Marsh now. We’ll go out around Shell Ness, the Swale’s too clotted.”

The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It was lined by long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed. Bly spun the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked, and in its entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in one before. Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between the cloud bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that, bobbing corklike. A liquid world.

“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said from the wheel. “If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court, underneath us.”

“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.

“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above sea level before the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how deep it is. What are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl needs, that’s sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”

He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side, so that it rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five meters. Harry Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come up at midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”

“What’s the tide now?”

“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”

“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”

“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”

“Oh, I believe in it — it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to believe something so far away has that much pull.”

“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking the view ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the world have gone up this far.”

“That is hard to believe.”

“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah, the mist has arrived.”

“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”

The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”

The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves smoked and hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nir-gal felt happy, despite the unease in his stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He was boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last. He could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.

The captain spun his big wheel again, and they ran with the waves directly behind them, northwest into the mouth of the Thames. Off to their left a brownish-green ridge emerged wetly out of greenish-brown water, buildings crowding its slope. “That’s Minster, or what’s left of it. It was the only high ground on the island. Sheerness is over there, you can see where the water is all shattered over it.”

Under the low ceiling of streaming mist Nirgal saw what looked like a reef of foaming white water, sloshing in every direction at once, black under the white foam. “That’s Sheerness?”

“Yeah.”

“Did they all move to Minster?”

“Or somewhere. Most of them. There’s some very stubborn people in Sheerness.”

Then the captain was absorbed in bringing the boat in through the drowned seafront of Minster. Where the line of rooftops emerged from the waves, a large building had had its roof and sea-facing wall removed, and now it functioned as a little marina, its three remaining walls sheltering a patch of water and the upper floors at the back serving as dock. Three other fishing boats were moored there, and as they coasted in, some men on them looked up and waved.

“Who’s this?” one of them said as Ely nosed his boat into the dock.

“One of the Martians. We’re trying to find the Asian lady who was helping in Sheerness the other week, have you seen her?”

“Not lately. Couple of months actually. I heard she crossed to Southend. They’ll know down in the sub.”

Ely nodded. “Do you want to see Minster?” he said to Nirgal.

Nirgal frowned. “I’d rather see the people who might know where she is.”

“Yeah.” Ely backed the boat out of the gap, turned it around; Nirgal looked in at boarded windows, stained plaster, the shelves of an office wall, some notes tacked to a beam. As they motored over the drowned portion of Minster, Ely picked up a radio microphone on a corkscrewed cord, and punched buttons. He had a number of short conversations very hard for Nirgal to follow — “ah jack!” and the like, with all the answers emerging from explosive static.

“We’ll try Sheerness then. Tide’s right.”

And so they motored right into the white water and foam sloshing over the submerged town, following streets very slowly. In the center of the foam the water was calmer. Chimneys and telephone poles stuck out of the gray liquid, and Nirgal caught occasional glimpses of the houses and buildings below, but the water was so foamy on top, and so murky below, that very little was visible — the slope of a roof, a glimpse down into a street, the blind window of a house.

On the far side of the town was a floating dock, anchored to a concrete pillar sticking out of the surf. “This is the old ferry dock. They cut off one section and floated it, and now they’ve pumped out the ferry offices down below and reoc-cupied them.”

“Reoccupied them?”

“You’ll see.”

Ely hopped from the rocking gunwale to the dock, and held out a hand to help Nirgal across; nevertheless Nirgal crashed to one knee when he hit.

“Come on, Spiderman. Down we go.”

The concrete pillar anchoring the dock stood chest-high; it turned out to be hollow, and a metal ladder had been bolted down its inner side. Electric bulbs hung from sockets on a rubber-coated wire, twisted around one post of the ladder. The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming with the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s walls, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like dishwater in a sink.

Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Ely, smiling briefly at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folk are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or off their roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in England, eh?”

“What do they do for work?”

“Fish, like they always have. And salvage. Eh Kama! Here’s my Martian, say hello. He’s short where he comes from, eh? Call him Spiderman.”

“But it’s Nirgal, innit? I’ll be fucked if I call Nirgal Spiderman when I got him visiting in me home.” And the man, black-haired and dark-skinned, an “Asian” in appearance if not accent, shook Nirgal’s right hand gently.

The room was brightly lit by a pair of giant spotlights pointed at the ceiling. The shiny floor was crowded: tables, benches, machiner-y in all stages of assembly: boat engines, pumps, generators, reels, things Nirgal didn’t recognize. The working generators were down a hall, though they didn’t seem any quieter for that. Nirgal went to one wall to inspect the bubble material. It was only a few molecules thick, Ely’s friends told him, and yet would hold thousands of pounds of pressure. Nirgal thought of each pound as a blow with a fist, thousands all at once. “These bubbles will be here when the concrete’s worn away.”

Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Kama shrugged. “I never knew her name. I thought she was a Tamil, from the south of India. She’s gone over to Southend I hear.”

“She helped to set this up?”

“Yeah. She brought the bubbles in from Vlissingen, her and a bunch like her. Great what they did here, we were groveling in High Halstow before they came.”

“Why did they come?”

“Don’t know. Some kind of coastal support group, no doubt.” He laughed. “Though they didn’t come on like that. Just moving around the coasts, building stuff out of the wreckage for the fun of it, what it looked like. Intertidal civilization, they called it. Joking as usual.”

“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”

“Yeah.”

“Care for some scrod?”

The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Kama cried “Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”

“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”

Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”

Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.

“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?” None. Still… if Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nir-gal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour of need… the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a reinhabitation…

“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”

Nirgal looked at Ely, who nodded; they could cross too.

But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted a day to arrange things. Meanwhile Ely and his friends were talking about underwater salvage projects, and when Ely heard about the bodyguards’ proposed delay, he asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the next morning — “though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do it.

So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Ely and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short narrow beds in Ely’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.

The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Ely’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Ely had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of Sheer-ness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might say.”

They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Ely threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered around a small AI screen set on Ely’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image changed from brown to black to brown.

“How do you know what you’re seeing?” Nirgal asked.

“We don’t.”

“But look, there’s a door, see?”-

“No.”

Ely tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”

“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.

“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the stuff worth pulling.”

“What about the owners?”

“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look — we’ll see what that is.”

He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”

“What about the house?”

“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”

They puttered away. Ely and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Ely explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”

“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.

“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”

Finally Ely killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”

The other men started getting out underwater gear: full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Ely said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”

“Let me try them on.”

So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”

“I will.”

Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony — a fatal blow — how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark…

He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Ely asked again about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with sweat.”

The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was hard work. The actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of the crush of the g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such a relief! Nirgal breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at the sudden freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah yes — his world on Earth was underwater.

Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on the screen, except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two men’s headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and behind them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about 285 K Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around the hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his exertions that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep him from overheating.

The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers looked around. They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings and the curbs, the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look uncannily like the mist up on the surface.

Then they were floating before a three-story brick building, filling a narrow triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of streets. Kev gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to oblige. The other diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely visible, and now he swam into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work attaching a small pulley to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time passed; Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second-story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings. A movement inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk away; he was afraid of the cable; but it was on the other side of the building. Some water seeped into his mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the way. It tasted of salt and mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He swam on.

Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small metal safe through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in place, waiting, until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam around the intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to the surface and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard, holding two small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious kicks pulsed up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist. He would have loved to go back down, but Ely did not want them in any longer, and so Nirgal threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side. He was sweating as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood off his head, despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good against his skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.

“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”

“Breathing vapors all his life.”

The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the sun a brighter white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he breathed deeply a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His stomach was queasy, and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation. Things rocked a bit more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for. The sky turned to zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal stayed sitting, breathed faster and shallower. “Did you like it?”

“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.” They laughed at the thought. “Here have a cup.”

Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g never felt right again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse was so wet that he felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand. His throat hurt, and his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was thirsty. The gleaming walls dripped, and nothing the people said was comprehensible, it was all ay and eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian English. A different language. Now they all spoke different languages. Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.

He slept again in the little bed on Ely’s boat. The next day the escort gave the okay, and they motored out of Sheer-ness, and north across the Thames estuary, in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.

Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea. Nirgal had been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis, where fronts ran up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water. And every time before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds a kind of flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and coating it with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there was very little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over it, the liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat rocked in a violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of the mist, but Ely paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a window beaded with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of screens under the window.

Suddenly Ely killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to a vicious side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered through the watery window, trying to see what had caused Ely to stop. “That’s a big ship for Southend,” Ely remarked, motoring on very slowly. “Where?”

“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal saw nothing.

Ely brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to it on both sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of Southend-on-Sea, which ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of buildings.

A number of men greeted Ely — “Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant” — and began to unload boxes from his hold.

Ely inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men shook their heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.” “They’re saying in Sheerness she and her group came to Southend.”

“Why would they say that?” “Because that’s what they think happened.” “That’s what you get listening to people who live underwater.”

“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other side of the pier. “She went over to Shoebury-ness, sometime back.”

Ely glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were here, these men would know.” “Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.

So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through the mist. From time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their left. They rounded a point, turned north. Ely brought them in to another floating dock, with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.

“That Chinese gang?” a toothless old man cried. “Gone up to Pig’s Bay they have! Gave us a greenhouse! Some kind of church.”

“Pig’s Bay’s just the next pier,” Ely said, looking thoughtful as he wheeled them away from the dock.

So they motored north. The coastline here was entirely composed of drowned buildings. They had built so close to the sea! Clearly there had been no reason to fear any change in sea level. And then it had happened; and now this strange amphibious zone, an intertidal civilization, wet and rocking in the mist.

A cluster of buildings gleamed at their windows. They had been filled by the clear bubble material, pumped out and occupied, their upstairs just above the foamy waves, their downstairs just below. Ely brought the boat in to a set of linked floating docks, greeted a group of women in smocks and yellow rain slickers mending a big black net. He cut his engine: “Has the Asian lady been to see you too then?”

“Oh yeah. She’s down inside, there in the building at the end.”

Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left him, he had to hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last building, a seafront boarding-house or something like, now much broken up and glimmering in all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants, vague and blurry seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Ely’s shoulder. The little man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room with one whole wall exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.

A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far door. White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She stared at them.

“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Ely asked, after glancing up at Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a British accent. She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other people in the room, more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the cliffside, in Medusa Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one, wandering the two planets building things…

Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The light, so dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Ely had made their farewells. Back into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A ruse, to get him out of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.

Ely sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”

Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down. Dark dim day on the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and mist turned into each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little drowsy. No doubt she was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual secrecy, yes. It had been absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would find her. Yes: it was a goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and make her come back out into the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the only way to be sure, the only way to remove this horrible weight from his heart. Yes: he would find her.

Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted. Low gray clouds rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The tide was ebbing now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the Thames was released full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken to mush, waves coming from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of foamy dark water, all carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam and jetsam. Ely’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails with grapnels and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to approach them. They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?” Nirgal asked Bly.

“It’s London,” Bly said. “It’s fucking London, washing out to sea.”

The cloud bottoms rushed east over their heads. Looking around Nirgal saw many other small boats on the tossing water of the great rivermouth, salvaging the flotsam or just fishing. Bly waved to some as they passed through, tooted at others. Horn blasts floated on the wind over the gray-speckled estuary, apparently signaling messages, as Ely’s crews commented on each.

Then Kev exclaimed, “Hey what’s that now!” pointing upstream.

Out of a fog bank covering the mouth of the Thames had emerged a ship with sails, many sails, sails square-rigged on three masts in the archetypal configuration, deeply familiar to Nirgal even though he had never seen it before. A chorus of horn blasts greeted this apparition — mad toots, long sustained blasts, all joining together and sustaining longer and longer, like a neighborhood of dogs roused and baying at night, warming to their task. Above them exploded the sharp penetrating blast of Ely’s air horn, joining the chorus — Nirgal had never heard such a shattering sound, it hurt his ears! Thicker air, denser sound — Ely was grinning, his fist shoved against the air-horn button — the men of the crew all standing at the rail or on it, Nirgal’s escorts as well, screaming soundlessly at the sudden vision.

Finally Ely let off. “What is it?” Nirgal shouted.

“It’s the Cutty Sarkl” Ely said, and threw his head back and laughed. “It was bolted down in Greenwich! Stuck in a park! Some mad bastards must have liberated it. What a brilliant idea. They must have towed it around the flood barrier. Look at her sail!”

The old clipper ship had four or five sails unfurled on each of the three masts, and a few triangular ones between the masts as well, and extending forward to the bowsprit. It was sailing in the midst of the ebb flow, and there was a strong wind behind it, so that it sliced through the foam and flotsam, splitting water away from its sharp bow in a quick succession of white waves. There were men standing in its rigging, Nirgal saw, most of them out leaning over the yard-arms, waving one-armed at the ragged flotilla of motorboats as they passed through it. Pennants extended from the mast tops, a big blue flag with red crosses — when it ca’me abreast of Ely’s boat, Ely hit the air-horn trigger again and again, and the men roared. A sailor out at the end of the Cutty Sark’s mainsail yard waved at them with both hands, leaning his chest forward against the big polished cylinder of wood. Then he lost his balance, they all saw it happen, as if in slow motion; and with his mouth a round little O the sailor fell backward, dropping into the white water that foamed away from the ship’s side. The men on Ely’s boat shouted all together: “NO!” Ely cursed loudly and gunned . his engine, which was suddenly loud in the absence of the air horn. The rear of the boat dug deep into the water, and then they were grumbling toward the man overboard, now one black dot among the rest, a raised arm waving frantically.

Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but the Cutty Sark never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all taut-bellied when seen from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached the fallen sailor, the stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east, its masts a cluster of white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared abruptly into another wall of mist.

“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What a glorious sight.”

“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”

Ely threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder over the side, leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made it over the rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the rail, shivering. “Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and the other crew members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty blankets.

“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Ely shouted down from the wheelhouse. “There you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now here you are on The Bride ofFaver-sham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”

“I know,” the man said between retches.

The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving at us like that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude, while getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the wheelhouse, dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with them, cursed his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in Sheerness they helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot stew, and pint after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside, and everyone who came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look here, this silly wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy bastard, when it was running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”

“To Pitcairn,” Ely corrected.

The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”

“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More sail than they needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless ‘em for that. Such a sight.”

Nirgal felt dizzy and bleak. The whole big room had gone a glossy dark, except in the exact spots where there were streaks of bright glare. Everything a chiaroscuro of jumbled objects, Brueghel in black-and-white, and so loud. “I remember the spring flood of thirteen, the North Sea in me living room — ” “Ah no, not the flood of thirteen again, will you not go on about that again!”

He went to a partitioned room at one corner of the chamber, the men’s room, thinking he would feel better if he relieved himself. Inside the rescued sailor was on the floor of one of the stalls, retching violently. Nirgal retreated, sat down on the nearest bench to wait. A young woman passed him by, and reached out to touch him on the top of the head. “You’re hot!”

Nirgal held a palm to his forehead, tried to think about it. “Three hundred ten K,” he ventured. “Shit.” “You’ve caught a fever,” she said. One of his bodyguards sat beside him. Nirgal told him about his temperature, and the man said, “Will you ask your wristpad?”

Nirgal nodded, asked for a readout. 309 K. “Shit.” “How do you feel?” “Hot. Heavy.”

“We’d better get you to see someone.” Nirgal shook his head, but a wave of dizziness came over him as he did. He watched the bodyguards calling to make arrangements. Ely came over, and they asked him questions.

“At night?” Bly said. More quiet talk. Ely shrugged; not a good idea, the shrug said, but possible. The bodyguards went on, and Bly tossed down the last of his pint and stood. His head was still at the same level as Nirgal’s, although Nirgal had slid down to rest his back against the table. A different species, a squat powerful amphibian. Had they known that, before the flood? Did they know it now?

People said good-bye, crushed or coddled his hand. Climbing the conning-tower ladder was painful work. Then they were out in the cool wet night, fog shrouding everything. Without a word Bly led them onto his boat, and he remained silent as he started the engines and unmoored the boat. Off they puttered over a low swell. For the first time the rocking over the waves made Nirgal really queasy. Nausea was worse than pain. He sat down beside Bly on a stool, and watched the gray cone of illuminated water and fog before their bow. When dark objects loomed out of the fog Bly would slow, even shove the engines into reverse. Once he hissed. This went on for a long time. By the time they docked in the streets of Faversham, Nirgal was too sick to say good-bye properly; he could only grasp Ely’s hand and look down briefly into the man’s blue eyes. Such faces. You could see people’s souls right there in their faces. Had they known that before? Then Bly was gone and they were in a car, humming through the night. Nirgal’s weight was increasing as it had during the descent in the elevator. Onto a plane, ascending in darkness, descending in darkness, ears popping painfully, nausea; they were in Berne and Sax was there by his side, a great comfort.

He was in a bed, very hot, his breathing wet and painful. Out one window, the Alps. The white breaking up out of the green, like death itself rearing up out of life, crashing through to remind him that viriditas was a green fuse that would someday explode back into nova whiteness, returning to the same array of elements it had been before the pattern dust devil had picked it up. The white and the green; it felt like the Jungfrau was shoving up his throat. He wanted to sleep, to get away from that feeling.

Sax sat at his side, holding his hand. “I think he needs to be in Martian gravity,” he was saying to someone who did not seem to be in the room. “It could be a form of altitude sickness. Or a disease vector. Or allergies. A systemic response. Edema, anyway. Let’s take him up immediately in a ground-to-space plane, and get him into a g ring at Martian g. If I’m right it will help, if not it won’t hurt.”

Nirgal tried to speak, but couldn’t catch his breath. This world had infected him — crushed him — cooked him in steam and bacteria. A blow to the ribs: he was allergic to Earth. He squeezed Sax’s hand, pulled in a breath like a knife to the heart. “Yes,” he gasped, and saw Sax squint. “Home, yes.”