“Maybe. It’s just the way it is, Swan. You’ve been here before.”
“Yes, but not here.”
“Have you been to China?”
“Of course.”
“India?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ve seen it, then. As for Africa, people say it’s a development sink. Outside aid disappears into it and nothing ever changes. Ruined long ago by slavers, they say. Full of diseases, torched by the temperature rise. Nothing to be done. The thing
is, now those are the conditions everywhere. The industrial rust belts are just as bad. So you could say Earth itself is now a development sink. The marrow has been sucked dry, and most of the upper classes went to Mars long ago.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way!”
“I suppose not.”
“So why aren’t we helping?”
“We’re trying, Swan. We really are. But the population of Mercury is half a million people, and the population of Earth is eleven billion. And it’s their place. We can’t just come down and tell them what to do. In fact we can barely keep them from coming up and telling us what to do! So it isn’t that simple. You know that.”
“Yes. But now I’m thinking about what it means, I guess. What it means for us. You know Inspector Genette’s people IDed that ship we visited inside Saturn, and they found it belonged to a company in Chad.”
“Chad is just a tax haven. Is that why you came down there?”
“I suppose. Why not?”
“Swan, please leave that part of things to Inspector Genette and his people. It’s time for you to help assemble the inoculants and seed stock and everything we’re going to buy on Earth and ship home.”
“All right,” Swan said unhappily. “But I want to stay in touch with the inspector too. They’re on Earth too, looking into things.”
“Sure. But in matters like these, a time comes when the data analysts take over. You have to be patient and wait for the next move.”
“What if the next move is another attack on Terminator? Or somewhere else? I don’t think we have the luxury to be patient anymore.”
“Well, but some things you can help with and others you can’t. Tell you what—come see me and talk it over. I’ll give you all the latest on what’s really happening there.”
“All right, I will. But I’m going to take the long way there.”
S
wan wandered the Earth. She flew to China and spent several days there, taking the train from one city to another. All the cities had most of their neighborhoods arranged as work units, factories that people lived in all their lives, as on Venus. From childhood they had plug-ins in their fingertips, and forearms tattooed with all kinds of apps. They ate a diet that gave them their legally required doses of supplements and drugs. This was not unusual on Earth, but nowhere else was it so prevalent as in China, despite which it was not much noticed or remarked on. Swan found out about it because she contacted one of Mqaret’s colleagues who worked in Hangzhou. Mqaret wanted her to give these people a blood sample, and as she was wandering anyway, she went by.
All the great old coastal cities had been semi-drowned by the sea rise, and though this had not killed them, it had spurred intense building sprees slightly inland, on land that would remain permanently above water even if all the ice on Earth melted. This new infrastructure favored Hangzhou over Shanghai, and though most of the new buildings and roads were inland of the ancient city, the old town still served as the cultural heart of the region.
There was still a big tidal bore that ran up the funnel-shaped estuary of the Qiantang River, and people still rode it on small watercraft of various sorts. It looked like they were having fun despite all. Good old Earth, so huge and dirty, the sky looking as if chewed by a brown fungus, the water the color of pale mud, the land stripped and industrialized—but all of it still out in the wind, flattened hard by its g and yet at the same time stiff with reality. Walking around the crowded alleys of the old city, Swan got Pauline to help her with Chinese dialects she didn’t catch. It slowed down her speech but it didn’t matter. The Chinese were intent on themselves and looked right through her. Surely this was part of what the Venusians had run from: everyone fixed on their inner space or their life in the work unit, to the exclusion of everything
else. Surely none of these people would ever conceive a hatred against spacers: affairs outside China were in the realm of hungry ghosts. Even the life outside one’s work unit was ghostly. Or so it seemed as she sat in dives, slurping noodles and chatting with tired men who would give her a moment because a tall spacer asking them questions was unusual. And people seemed to be more tolerant in noodle shops. On the street she got some hard looks, once a shouted insult. She hurried the last part of the way to Mqaret’s colleagues. Once there she let them take a few tubes of blood and run a few tests on her eyesight and balance and such.
Back on the street, it seemed to her that there were many pairs of eyes just as interested in her as Mqaret’s colleagues had been. Possibly this was just her becoming frightened. She picked up her pace through the inevitable crowd—always at least five hundred people in view when in China. Back in her hostel she could only wonder at her fear of the crowd. But in fact, after falling asleep she woke up to find herself confined by restraints, her room lit only by medical monitors. The bed was attending to all her bodily needs, and she guessed there was a drug in her IV feed triggering her speech centers, because she was talking away without meaning to, even when she tried to stop herself. A disembodied voice from behind her head asked questions, about Alex and everything else, and she babbled away helplessly. Pauline was no help at all—seemed to have been turned off. And Swan could not resist the impulse to talk. It was not that unlike her normal self; indeed it was a bit of a relief to be able to go on and on without having to make excuses. Someone was making her do it, so she would.
Later she came to in the same bed, unrestrained, her clothing on a chair by the bed. The room was just barely bigger than the bed. Her same hostel room, yes. The AI at the desk, a green box sitting on the counter, said that it had seen no sign anything was wrong. The room monitor had shown her vital signs good, no incursions into the room, nothing unusual.
Swan turned on Pauline, who could not offer any help. It had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since she had left the clinic of Mqaret’s friends. She called Mercury House in Manhattan and told them what had happened, then called Zasha.
Everyone was shocked, concerned, and sympathetic, urging her to go immediately to the nearest Mercury House to get medical attention, and so on; but at the end of all that, Zasha said firmly, “You were on Earth alone. There are any number of malignancies down here, as I told you. It’s not like it was when you took your first sabbaticals. We tend to travel in packs here now. You saw what happened last time you went off by yourself, at my place.”
“But that was just some kids. Who was it this time?”
“I don’t know. Call Jean Genette at once. They may be able to track who did it. Or we may be able to deduce it by what happens next. They were probably on a fishing expedition in your head. That means it probably won’t happen again, but you should always travel with other people, maybe even a security team.”
“No.”
Zasha let her listen to how that sounded.
Swan said, “I guess I have to. I don’t know. It feels like I just had a bad dream. I’m a little hungry, but I think they IVed me food. They had me—I mean, I was babbling! And a lot of their questions were about Alex. I may have just told them everything I know about her!”
“Hmm.” A long silence. “Well, you see why Alex kept so much to herself.”
“So who were they?”
“I don’t know. Possibly some part of the Chinese government. They play rough sometimes. Although this seems a bit egregious. Maybe it’s a warning signal, but of what I’m not sure. So in that sense it wasn’t a very good warning. Maybe it was just a fishing expedition. Or a notice that we aren’t to fool around on Earth.”
“As if we didn’t know that.”
“But you
don’t
seem to know it. Maybe they don’t want
you
down here fooling around.”
“But who?”
“I don’t know! Consider it a message from the people of Earth. And call Genette. And come talk to me, please, before you get into any more trouble.”
S
o Swan called Inspector Genette, who was disturbed to hear about her experience. “Maybe we should keep Pauline and Passepartout in a permanent link while we’re on Earth,” he suggested. “I could stay aware of your movements.”
“But you’re always telling me let’s turn them off!”
“Not here. This is a different situation, and here they can help.”
“All right,” Swan said. “It’s better than traveling with bodyguards.”
“Well, it isn’t anything like that much protection. You should at least travel with other people.”
“I’m going to see Zasha. He’s in Greenland, so I should be safe.”
“Good. You should get out of China.”
“But I’m Chinese!”
“You are a Mercurial of Chinese extraction. It isn’t at all the same. Interplan doesn’t have an agreement with China, so I can’t help you legally when you’re there. Go to Greenland.”
That night she went out for noodles, stubbornly. People looked at her strangely. She was a stranger in a strange land. On the screens in the noodle shops she heard several fiery speeches denouncing various political crimes of the Hague, Brussels, the UN, Mars—spacers in general. Some speakers became so infuriated that she had to revise her opinion of Chinese detachment; they were as intense as anyone else, politically speaking, no matter their inward look on the street. Like any group, they had been shaped by their zeitgeist, and had had targets suggested to them such that their discontents were aimed away from Beijing. So,
possibly space could be pulled into people’s red zone and attacked as an enemy. She listened to the screen speeches intently, ignoring the men in the shop watching her watch, and it became clear to her at last that there was a widespread view in China that spacers were living in outrageous decadence and luxury, like the colonialist powers of old, only more so. And she could see perfectly well also that in Hangzhou people lived like rats in a maze, jostling shoulder to shoulder every moment of the day. The potential for extreme thoughts was obvious. Throw a rock at the rich kid’s house—why not? Who wouldn’t do it?
On the flights to get to Zasha she looked at the news on her screen. Earth Earth Earth. They didn’t give a damn about space, most of them. Some lived by religious beliefs that had been backward-looking in the twelfth century. The pastoralists below her in central Asia ran flocks and herds like the expert ecologists they had to be to produce as much as was demanded of them; each pasture was dairy, stockyard, and soil factory, and their owners were stuffed with anger at the droughts brought on by rich people elsewhere. She saw huge conurbations here and there, meaning shantytowns in dust bowls or falling apart in tropical downpours and mudslides, the stunted occupants coping with problems of survival. Back in Chad she had seen clear signs of heavy internal parasite loads. She had seen hunger, disease, premature death. Wasted lives in blasted biomes. Basic needs not met for three billion of the eleven billion on the planet. Three billion was a lot already, but there were also another five or six billion teetering on the brink, about to slide into that same hole, never a day free of worry. The great precariat, wired in enough to know their situation perfectly well.
That was life on Earth. Split, fractionated, divided into castes or classes. The wealthiest lived as if they were spacers on sabbatical, mobile and curious, actualizing themselves in all the ways possible, augmenting themselves—genderizing—speciating—dodging death, extending life. Whole countries seemed like that,
in fact, but they were small countries—Norway, Finland, Chile, Australia, Scotland, California, Switzerland; on it went for a few score more. Then there were struggling countries; then the patchwork post-nations, the cobbled-together struggles against failure, or the completely failed.
T
he eleven-meter rise in sea level on Earth had been accommodated all around the world by intensive building on higher ground, but the costs in human suffering had been huge, and no one wanted to have to do it again. People were sick of sea level rise. How they despised the generations of the Dithering, who had heedlessly pushed the climate into a change with an unstoppable momentum to it, continuing not only into the present but for centuries more to come, as methane clathrate releases and permafrost melting began to outgas the third great wave of greenhouse gases, possibly the largest of them all. They were on their way to being a jungle planet, and the prospect was so alarming that there was serious talk of trying atmospheric sunblocks again, despite the disaster two centuries before. There was growing agreement that the job had to be taken on, and geo-engineering either micro or macro attempted. Intensive micro, mild macro—there was a constant to-and-fro about it, and many micro or tiny macro restoration projects had already begun.
One thing they were trying was to slow the outflow glaciers off the Greenland ice cap. Antarctica and Greenland were the two meaningful reservoirs of ice left on the planet, and modelers were very hopeful that eastern Antarctica at least would hold fast through the heat peak into the hoped-for return to a colder atmosphere and ocean. If they could get the CO
2
down to 320 parts per million, and capture some of the methane, and temperatures therefore fell, and the ice cake on eastern Antarctica held, then the ocean would nevertheless stay high and warm for hundreds
more years—but it would be a big success nonetheless. In fact if they failed to keep the East Antarctic ice, it wasn’t worth thinking about. So they needed to succeed. At some point, many were saying now, they were going to have to treat Earth like they were treating Mars and Venus, and whatever they lost by that would be too bad. Some said another little ice age was just what they needed; the billion or three likely deaths were not spoken of, but latent in the argument was the notion that fewer people wouldn’t hurt the situation either. Shock therapy—triage—people who liked to talk tough to make themselves look practical were full of this line.