6

Some things you must forget. Shikata ga nai

Back in Odessa Maya did the only thing she could with what she had learned, and forgot it, throwing herself into the work of the Hellas project, spending long hours at the office poring over reports, and assigning crews to the various drilling and construction sites. With the discovery of the Western Aquifer the dowsing expeditions lost their urgency, and more emphasis was placed on tapping and pumping the aquifers already found, and constructing the infrastructure of the rim settlements. So drillers followed dowsers, and pipeline crews went out after the drillers, and tent teams were out all around the piste, and up the Reull canyon above Harmakhis, helping the Sufis deal with a badly fretted canyon wall. New emigrants were arriving at a spaceport built between Dao and Harmakhis, and moving into upper Dao, and helping to transform Harmakhis-Reull, and also settling the other new tent towns around the rim. It was a massive exercise in logistics, and in almost every respect it conformed to Maya’s old dream of development for Hellas. But now that it was actually happening, she felt extremely jangly and odd; she was no longer sure what she wanted for Hellas, or for Mars, or herself. Often she felt at the mercy of her mood swings, and in the months after the visit to Zeyk and Nazik (though she did not make this correlation) they were especially violent, an irregular oscillation from elation to despair, with the equinox time in the middle wrecked by the knowledge that she was either on her way up or down.

She was often hard on Michel in these months, often annoyed by his composure, by the way he seemed so at peace with himself, humming along through his life as if his years with Hiroko had answered all his questions. “It’s your fault,” she told him, pushing to get a reaction. “When I needed you, you were gone. You weren’t doing your job.”

Michel would ignore that, would soothe and soothe until it made her angry. He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn’t make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one’s lover was also one’s therapist— how that objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job— it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control. That had to be disproved. And so (forgetting to forget): “I killed them both! I snared them and played them against each other, to increase my own power. I did it on purpose and you were no help at all! It was your fault too!”

He muttered something, beginning to get worried, as he could see what was coming, like one of the frequent storms that blew over the Hellespontus into the basin, and she laughed and slapped him hard in the face, punching him as he retreated, shouting “Come on, you coward, stand up for yourself!” until he ran out onto the balcony and held the door shut with the heel of his foot, staring over the trees of the park and cursing out loud in French while she battered the door. Once she even broke one of the panes and showered glass over his back, and he yanked the door open, still cursing in French as he shoved by her and out the door, out of the building.

But usually he just waited until she collapsed and started to cry, and then he came back in and spoke in English, which marked the return of his composure. And with only a slightly disgusted air he would return to the intolerable therapy again. “Look,” he would say, “we were all under great pressure then, whether we could tell it or not. It was an extremely artificial situation, and dangerous as well— if we had failed in any number of different ways, we all could have died. We had to succeed. Some of us dealt with the pressure better than others. I did not do so well, and neither did you. But here we are now. And the pressures are still there, some different, some the same. But we are doing better at dealing with them, if you ask me. Most of the time.”

And then he would leave and go out to a café on the corniche, and nurse a cassis for an hour or two, drawing sketches of faces in his lectern, mordant caricatures that he erased at the moment of completion. She knew this because some nights she would go out and find him, and sit by him in silence with her glass of vodka, apologizing with the set of her shoulders. How to tell him that it helped her to fight now and then, that it started her on the upward curve again— tell him without causing that sardonic little shrug of his, melancholy and oppressed? Besides, he knew. He knew and he forgave. “You loved them both,” he would say, “but in different ways. And there were things you didn’t like about them as well. Besides, whatever you did, you can’t take responsibility for their actions. They chose to do what they did, and you were only one factor.”

It helped her to hear that. And it helped her to fight. It would be all right; she would feel better, for a few weeks or days at least. The past was so shot full of holes anyway, a ragged collection of images— eventually she would forget for real, surely. Although the memories that held the firmest seemed to stick because of a glue made of pain, and remorse. So it might take a while to forget them, even though they were so corrosive, so painful, so useless. Useless! Useless. Better to focus on the present.

• • •

Thinking that one afternoon, in the apartment by herself, she stared for a long time at the photo of the young Frank by the sink— thinking that she would take it down, and throw it away. A murderer. Focus on the present. But she too was a murderer. And also the one who had driven him to murder. If one ever drove anyone to anything. In any case he was her companion in that, somehow. So after a long time thinking about it, she decided to leave the photo up.

Over the months, however, and the long rhythms of the time-slipped days and the six-month seasons, the photo became little more than part of the decor, like the rack of tongs and wooden paddles, or the hanging row of copper-bottomed pots and pans, or the little sailing-ship salt and pepper shakers. Part of the stage set for this act of the play, as she sometimes thought of it, which however permanent it seemed would be struck at some point— would disappear utterly, as all the previous sets had disappeared, while she passed through to the next reincarnation. Or not.

So the weeks passed and then the months, twenty-four per year. The first of the month would fall on a Monday for so many months in a row that it would seem fixed forever; then a third of a Martian year would have passed, and a new season finally have made its appearance, and a twenty-seven-day month would pass and suddenly the first would be on a Sunday, and after a while that too would begin to seem the eternal norm, for month after month. And this went on and on; the long Martian years made their slow wheel. Out around Hellas, they seemed to have discovered most of the significant aquifers, and the effort shifted entirely to mining and piping. The Swiss had recently developed what they called a walking pipeline, made specifically for the work in Hellas, and up on Vastitas Borealis. These contraptions rolled over the landscape, distributing the groundwater evenly over the land, so that they could cover the basin floor without creating mountains of ice directly outside the ends of fixed pipelines, as they had tended to before.

Maya went out with Diana to look at one of these pipes in action. Seen from a dirigible floating overhead, they looked remarkably like a garden hose lying on the ground, snaking back and forth under the high pressure of the spurting water.

Down on the ground it was more impressive, even bizarre; the pipeline was huge, and it rolled majestically over layers of smooth ice already deposited, held a couple of meters over the ice on squat pylons that ended in big pontoon skis. The pipeline moved at several kilometers an hour, pushed by the pressure of the water spewing out of its nozzle, which pointed at various angles set by computer. When the pipeline had skiied out to the end of its arc, motors would turn the nozzle, and the pipeline would slow down, stop, and reverse direction.

The water shot out of the nozzle in a thick white stream, arcing out and splashing onto the surface in a spray of red dust and white frost steam. Then the water flowed over the ground, in great muddy lobate spills, slowing down, pooling, settling flat, then whitening, and shifting slowly to ice. This was not pure ice, however; nutrients and several strains of ice bacteria had been added to the water from big bioreservoirs located back at the beachline, and so the new ice had a milky pink cast, and melted quicker than pure ice. Extensive melt ponds, actually shallow lakes many square kilometers in area, were a daily event in the summer, and on sunny spring and fall days. The hydrologists also reported big melt pods under the surface. And as worldwide temperatures continued to rise, and the ice deposits in the basin got thicker, the bottom layers were apparently melting under the pressure. So great plates of ice over these melt zones would slip down even the slightest of slopes, piling up in great broken heaps over all the lowest points on the basin floor, in areas that were fantastic wastelands of pressure ridges, seracs, melt pools that froze every night, and blocks of ice like fallen skyscrapers. These great unstable ice piles shifted and broke as they melted in the day’s heat, with explosive booms like thunder, heard in Odessa and every other rim town. Then the piles froze again every night, booming and cracking, until many places on the basin floor were an inconceivably shattered chaos.

• • •

No travel was possible across such surfaces, and the only way to observe the process over the majority of the basin was from the air. One week in the fall of M-48, Maya decided to join Diana and Rachel and some others taking a trip out to the little settlement on the rise in the center of the basin. This was already called Minus One Island, although it was not yet quite an island, as the Zea Dorsa were not yet covered. But the last of the Zea Dorsa was going to be inundated in a matter of days, and Diana, along with several other hydrologists at the office, thought it would be a good idea to go out and see the historic occasion.

Just before they were scheduled to leave, Sax showed up at their apartment, by himself. He was on his way from Sabishii down to Vishniac, and had dropped in to see Michel. Maya was glad to think that she would be off soon, and so not be around during his stay, which would surely be brief. She still found it unpleasant to be around him, and it was clear that the feeling was mutual; he continued to avoid her eye, and did his talking with Michel and Spencer. Never one word for her! Of course he and Michel had spent hundreds of hours talking during Sax’s rehabilitation, but still, it made her furious.

Thus when he heard about her impending trip to Minus One, and asked if he could come along, she was very unpleasantly surprised. But Michel gave her a beseeching glance, quick as a lightning bolt, and Spencer quickly asked if he could come along too, no doubt to keep her from pushing Sax out of the dirigible. And so she agreed, very grumpily.

Thus when they took off a couple of mornings later they had “Stephen Lindholm” and “George Jackson” along with them, two old men whom Maya did not bother to explain to the others, seeing that Diana and Rachel and Frantz all knew who they were. The youngsters were all a bit more subdued as they climbed the steps into the dirigible’s long gondola, which made Maya purse her lips irritably. It was not going to be the same trip it would have been without Sax.

• • •

The flight from Odessa out to Minus One Island took about twenty-four hours. The dirigible was smaller than the old arrowhead-shaped behemoths of the early years; this one was a cigar-shaped craft called the Three Diamonds, and the gondola that formed the bag’s keel was long and capacious. Though its ultralight props were powerful enough to drive it at some speed, and directly into fairly strong winds, it still felt to Maya like a barely controlled drift, the hum of the motors scarcely audible under the whoosh of the west wind. She went to one window and looked down, her back to Sax.

The view out the windows was a marvel from the very moment of the first ascent, for Odessa was a handsome banked leaf-and-tile vision in its tent on the north slope. And after a couple of hours of plowing through the air to the southeast, the basin’s ice plain covered the entire visible surface of the world, as if they flew over an Arctic Ocean, or an ice world.

They sailed at an altitude of some thousand meters, at about fifty kilometers an hour. Through the afternoon of the first day the shattered icescape beneath them was everywhere a dirty white, liberally dotted with sky-purple melt pools, occasionally blazing silver as they mirrored the sun. For a while they could see a pattern of spiral polynyas to the west, the long black streaks of open water marking the location of the drowned mohole at Low Point.

At sunset the ice became a jumble of opaque pinks and oranges and ivories, streaked by long black shadows. Then they flew through the night, under the stars, over a luminous crackled whiteness. Maya slept uneasily on one of the long benches under the windows, and woke before dawn, which was another wonder of coloration, the purples of the sky appearing much darker than the pink ice below, an inversion that made everything look surreal.

Around midmorning of that day they caught sight of land again; over the horizon floated an oval of sienna hills rising out of the ice, about a hundred kilometers long and fifty wide. This rise was Hellas’s equivalent of the central knob found on the floor of medium-sized craters, and it was high enough to remain well above the planned water level, giving the future sea a fairly substantial central island.

At this stage the Minus One settlement, on the northwest point of the high ground, was no more than an array of runways, rocket pads, dirigible masts, and an untidy collection of small buildings— a few under a small station tent, the rest standing isolate and bare, like concrete blocks dumped from the sky. No one lived there but a small technical and scientific staff, although visiting areologists dropped in from time to time.

The Three Diamonds swung around and latched on to one of the poles, and was hauled down to the ground. The passengers left the gondola by a jetway, and were given a short tour of the airport and residential habitat by the stationmaster.

After a forgettable dinner in the dining hall of the habitat, they suited up and took a walk outside, wandering through the scattered utilitarian buildings, downhill to what one of the locals said would eventually be the shoreline. They found when they got there that no ice was yet visible from this elevation; it was a low sandy rubble-strewn plain, all the way out to the nearby horizon, some seven kilometers away.

Maya strolled aimlessly behind Diana and Frantz, who seemed to be commencing a romance. Beside them walked another native couple who were based at the station, both even younger than Diana, arm in arm, very affectionate. They were both well over two meters tall, but not lithe and willowy like most of the young natives— this couple had worked out with weights, bulking up until they had the proportions of Terran weight lifters, despite their great height. They were huge people, and yet still very light on their feet, doing a kind of boulder ballet over the scattered rocks of this empty shore. Maya watched them, marveling again at the new species. Behind her Sax and Spencer were coming along, and she even said something about it over the old First Hundred band. But Spencer only said something about phenotype and genotype, and Sax ignored the remark, and took off down the slope of the plain.

Spencer went with him, and Maya followed them, moving slowly over all the other new species: there were grass tufts dotting the sand between the rocks of the rubble, also low flowering plants, weeds, cacti, shrubs, even some very small gnarled trees, tucked into the sides of rocks. Sax wandered around stepping gingerly, crouching down to inspect plants, standing back up with an unfocused look, as if the blood had left his head while he was crouching. Or perhaps this was the look of Sax surprised, something Maya could not recall seeing before. She stopped to stare around her; it was in fact surprising to discover such profligate life, out here where no one had cultivated anything. Or perhaps the scientists stationed at the airport had done it. And the basin was low, and warm, and humid. . . . The young Martians upslope danced over it all, gracefully avoiding the plants without taking any notice of them.

Sax stopped in front of Spencer and tilted his helmet back so that he was staring up into Spencer’s faceplate. “These plants will all be drowned,” he said querulously, almost as if asking a question.

“That’s right,” Spencer said.

Sax briefly glanced toward Maya. His gloved fingers were clenching in agitation. What, was he accusing her of murdering plants now too?

Spencer said, “But the organic matter will help sustain later aquatic life, isn’t that right?”

Sax merely looked around. As he looked past her, Maya could see he was squinting, as if in distress. Then he took off again across the intricate tapestry of plants and rocks.

Spencer met Maya’s gaze and lifted his gloved hands, as if to apologize for the way Sax was ignoring her. Maya turned and walked back upslope.

Eventually the whole group walked up a spiraling ridge, above the—1 contour to a knoll just north of the station, where they were high enough to get a view of the ice on the western horizon. The airport lay below them, reminding Maya of Underhill or the Antarctic stations— unplanned, unstructured, with no sense at all of the island town that was sure to come. The youngsters as they stepped gracefully over the rocks speculated about what that town would look like— a seaside resort, they were sure, every hectare built up or gardened, with boat harbors in every little indentation of the shoreline, and palm trees, beaches, pavilions. . . . Maya closed her eyes and tried to imagine what the young ones were describing— opened them again, to see rock and sand and scrubby little plants. Nothing had come to her mind. Whatever the future brought would be a surprise to her— she could form no image of it, it was a kind of jamais vu, pressing at the present. A sudden premonition of death washed over her, and she struggled to shrug it off. No one could imagine the future. A blank there in her mind meant nothing; it was normal. It was only the presence of Sax that was disturbing her, reminding her of things she could not afford to think of. No, it was a blessing that the future was blank. The freedom from déjà vu. An extraordinary blessing.

Sax trailed behind, looking off at the basin below them.

• • •

The next day they climbed back in the Three Diamonds and took to the air again and floated southeast, until the captain dropped an anchor line just to the west of the Zea Dorsa. It had been quite a while since Maya had driven out onto them with Diana and her friends, and now the ridges were no more than skinny rock peninsulas, extending out into the shattered ice toward Minus One, and diving under the ice one after the next— all except for the largest one, which was still an unbroken ridge, dividing two rough ice masses, the western ice mass clearly about two hundred meters lower than the eastern one. This, Diana said, was the final line of land connecting Minus One and the basin rim. When this isthmus was overwhelmed, the central rise would be an actual island.

The ice mass on the eastern side of the remaining dorsum was at one point very near to the ridgeline. The dirigible captain let out more anchor line and they floated east on the prevailing wind until they were directly over the ridge, where they could see clearly that only meters of rock remained to be overcome. And off to the east was a walking pipeline, a blue hose sliding slowly back and forth on its ski pylons as its nozzle shot water onto the surface. Under the drone of the props, they could hear occasional creaks and moans from below, a muffled boom, a high crack like a gunshot. There was liquid water below the ice, Diana explained, and the weight of new water on top was causing some sections of ice to scrape over barely submerged dorsa. The captain pointed to the south, and Maya saw a line of icebergs fly into the air as if propelled by explosives, arcing in various directions and falling back onto the ice, breaking into thousands of pieces. “Maybe we’d better back off a little,” the captain said. “It would be better for my reputation if we did not get shot out of the sky by an iceberg.”

The walking pipeline’s nozzle was pointing their way. And then, with a faint seismic roar, the last complete ridge was overwhelmed. A rush of dark water ran up the rock, and then poured down the western side of the ridge in a waterfall some hundred meters wide. It fell the two hundred meters of its descent in a slow lazy sheet. In the context of the great ice world stretching to the horizon in every direction, it was no more than a trickle— but it kept pouring steadily, the water on the eastern mass now channelized by ice on its sides, the falls booming like thunder, the water on the western side fanning out in a hundred streams through the broken ice— and the hair on Maya’s neck lifted in fear. Probably a memory of the Marineris flood, she decided, but couldn’t say for sure.

Slowly the volume of the waterfall decreased, and in less than an hour it had all slowed and then frozen, at least on the surface; though a sunny fall day, it was eighteen degrees below freezing down there, and a line of ragged cumulonimbus clouds was approaching from the west, indicating a cold front. So the waterfall eventually stilled. But left behind was a fresh icefall, coating the rock ridge with a thousand smooth white tubes. So now the ridge had become two promontories which did not quite meet, like all the other ridges of the Zea Dorsa, all diving into the ice like sets of matching ribs: matching peninsulas. The Hellas Sea was continuous now, and Minus One truly an island.

• • •

After that, the circumHellas train trips and the various overflights felt different to Maya, as she perceived the interlaced network of glaciers and ice chaoses in the basin to be the new sea itself, rising and filling and sloshing around. And in fact the liquid sea under the surface ice near Low Point was growing much faster in the springs and summers than it was shrinking in the autumns and winters. And strong winds kicked up waves in the polynyas, which in the summers broke the ice between them, creating regions of brash ice, a floating pack of ice chunks which growled so loudly as they rode the steep little swells that conversation in dirigibles overhead was difficult.

And in the year M-49, the flow rates from all the tapped aquifers reached their maximums, combining to pump 2,500 cubic meters a day into the sea, an amount that would fill the basin to the –1-kilometer contour in about six M-years. To Maya this did not seem long at all, especially as they could see the progress, right there on Odessa’s horizon. In winters the black storms that poured over the mountains would blanket the whole basin floor with startling white snow; in the springs the snow would melt, but the new edge of the ice sea would be closer than it had been the previous autumn.

It was much the same in the northern hemisphere, as news reports and her infrequent trips to Burroughs made clear. The great northern dunes of Vastitas Borealis were being rapidly inundated, as the truly enormous aquifers under Vastitas and the north polar region were being pumped onto the surface by drilling platforms that rose on the ice as the ice accumulated under them. In the northern summers, great rivers were pouring off the melting northern polar cap, cutting channels through the laminate sands and running down to join the ice. And a few months after Minus One had been islanded, news reports showed video of an uncovered stretch of ground in Vastitas, disappearing under a dark flood from west and east and north. This apparently created the last link between the lobes of ice; so now there was a world-wrapping sea in the north. Of course it was patchy still, and covered only about half of the land between the sixtieth and seventieth latitudes, but as satellite photos showed, there were already great bays of ice extending south into the deep depressions of Chryse and Isidis.

Submerging the rest of Vastitas would take about twenty more M-years, as the amount of water necessary to fill Vastitas Borealis was much greater than that needed to fill Hellas. But the pumping operation up there was bigger as well, so things were proceeding apace, and all the acts of Red sabotage combined could do no more than put a dent in this progress. In fact progress was accelerating despite increasing acts of sabotage and ecotage, because some of the new mining methods being put into use were quite radical, and very effective. The news programs showed video of the latest method, which set off big underground thermonuclear explosions, very deep under Vastitas. This melted the permafrost over large areas, providing the pumps with more water. On the surface these explosions were manifested as sudden icequakes, which reduced the surface ice overhead to a bubbling slurry, the liquid water soon freezing on the surface, but tending to stay liquid underneath. Similar explosions under the northern polar cap were causing floods nearly as vast as the great outbursts of ‘61. And all that water was pouring downhill into Vastitas.

Down at the office in Odessa, they followed all of this with professional interest. A recent assessment of the amount of underground water in the north had encouraged the Vastitas engineers to shoot for a final sea level very near the datum itself, the 0-kilometer contour that had been set back in the days of sky areology. Diana and other hydrologists in Deep Waters thought that subsidence of the land in Vastitas, as a result of the mining of aquifers and permafrost, would cause them to end up with a sea level somewhat lower than the datum. But up there they seemed confident they had factored that in, and would reach the mark.

Fooling around with various sea levels on an office AI map made it clear what shape the coming ocean was likely to have. In many places the Great Escarpment would form its southern shoreline. Sometimes that would mean a gentle slope; in the fretted terrain, archipelagos; in certain regions, dramatic seaside cliffs. Broached craters would provide good harbors. The Elysium massif would become an island continent, and the remains of the northern polar cap would as well— the land under the cap was the only part of the north well above the 0-kilometer contour.

No matter which exact sea level they chose to display on the maps, a big southern arm of the ocean was going to cover Isidis Planitia, which was lower than most of Vastitas. And aquifers in the highlands around Isidis were being pumped down into it as well. So a big bay was going to fill the old plain, and because of that, construction crews were building a long dike in an arc around Burroughs. The city was located fairly close to the Great Escarpment, but its elevation was just below the datum. It was therefore going to become a port city every bit as much as Odessa, a port city on a world-wrapping ocean.

The dike they were building around Burroughs was two hundred meters high and three hundred meters wide. Maya found the concept of a dike to protect the city disturbing, though it was clear from the aerial shots taken of it that it was another pharaonic monument, tall and massive. It ran in a horseshoe shape, with both its ends up on the slope of the Great Escarpment, and it was so big that there were plans to build on it, to make it into a fashionable Lido district, containing small boat harbors on its water side. But Maya remembered once standing on a dike in Holland, with the land on one side of her lower than the North Sea on the other side of her; it had been a very disorienting sensation, more unbalancing than weightlessness. And, on a more rational level, as news programs from Earth now showed, all dikes there were currently, stressed by a very slight rise in sea level, caused by global warming initiated two centuries before. As little as a meter’s rise endangered many of the low-lying areas of Earth, and Mars’s northern ocean was supposed to rise in the coming decade by a full kilometer. Who could say whether they would be able to fine-tune its ultimate level so accurately as to make a dike sufficient? Maya’s work in Odessa made her worry about such control, though of course they were trying for it themselves in Hellas, and thought that they probably had it. They had better, as Odessa’s location gave them little margin for error. But the hydrologists also talked about using the “canal” that had been burned by the aerial lens before its destruction, as a runoff into the northern ocean, if such a runoff became necessary. Fine for them, but the northern ocean would have no such recourse.

“Oh,” Diana said, “they could always pump any excess up into Argyre Basin.”

• • •

On Earth, riots, arson, and sabotage were becoming daily weapons of the people who had not gotten the treatment— the mortals, as they were called. Springing up around all the great cities were walled towns, fortress suburbs where those who had gotten the treatment could live their entire lives inside, using telelinks, teleoperation, portable generators, even greenhouse food, even air filtration systems: like tent towns on Mars, in fact.

One evening, tired of Michel and Spencer, Maya went out to eat by herself. Often she was feeling an urge to get off alone. She walked down to a corner café on the sidewalk facing the corniche, and sat at one of its outdoor tables, under trees strung with lights, and ordered antipasto and spaghetti, and ate abstractedly while she drank a small carafe of chianti, and listened to a small band of musicians play. The leader played a kind of accordion with nothing but buttons on it, called a bandoneon, and his companions played violin, guitar, piano, and an upright bass. A bunch of wizened old men, guys her age, rollicking their way with a tight nimble attack through gaily melancholy tunes— gypsy songs, tangos, odd scraps they seemed to be improvising together. . . . When her meal ended she sat for a long time, listening to them, nursing a last glass of wine and then a coffee, watching the other diners, the leaves overhead, the distant icescape beyond the corniche, the clouds tumbling in over the Hellespontus. Trying to think as little as possible. For a while it worked, and she made a blissful escape into some older Odessa, some Europe of the mind, as sweet and sad as the duets of violin and accordion. But then the people at the next table began to debate what percentage of Earth’s population had received the treatment— one argued ten percent, another forty— a sign of the information war, or simply the level of chaos that obtained there. Then as she turned away from them, she noticed a headline on the newspaper screen placed over the bar, and read the sentences scrolling right to left after it: the World Court had suspended operations in order to move from the Hague to Bern, and Consolidated had seized the opportunity of the break to attempt a hostile takeover of Praxis holdings in Kashmir, which in effect meant starting a large coup or small war against the government of Kashmir, from Consolidated’s base in Pakistan. Which would of course draw India into it. And India had been dealing with Praxis lately as well. India versus Pakistan, Praxis versus Consolidated— most of the world’s population, untreated and desperate. . . .

That night when Maya went home, Michel said that this assault marked a new level of respect for the World Court, in that Consolidated had timed its move to the court’s recess; but given the devastation in Kashmir, and the reversal for Praxis, Maya was in no mood to listen to him. Michel was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around. One had to admit it; they lived in a darkening situation. The cycle of madness on Earth was coming around again, caught in its inexorable sine wave, a sine wave more awful even than Maya’s, and soon they would be back in the midst of one of those paroxysms, out of control, struggling to avoid obliteration. She could feel it. They were falling back in.

She began eating in the corner café regularly, to hear the band, and be alone. She sat with her back to the bar, but it was impossible not to think about things. Earth: their curse, their original sin. She tried to understand, she tried to see it as Frank would have seen it, tried to hear his voice analyzing it. The Group of Eleven (the old G-7 plus Korea, Azania, Mexico, and Russia) were still in titular command of much of Terra’s power, in the form of their militaries and their capital. The only real competitors to these old dinosaurs were the big metanationals, which had coalesced like Athenas out of the transnats. The big metanats— and there was only room in the two-world economy for about a dozen of them, by definition— were of course interested in taking over countries in the Group of Eleven, as they had so many smaller countries; the metanats that succeeded in this effort would probably win the dominance game among themselves. And so some of them were trying to divide and conquer the G-11, doing their best to pit the Eleven against each other, or to bribe some to break ranks. All the while competing among themselves, so that while some had allied themselves with G-11 countries, in an attempt to subsume them, others had concentrated on poor countries, or the baby tigers, to build up their strength. So there was a kind of complex balance of power, the strongest old nations against the biggest new metanationals, with the Islamic League, India, China, and the smaller metanats existing as independent loci of power, forces that could not be predicted. Thus the balance of power, like any moment of temporary equipoise, was fragile— necessarily so, as half the population of the Earth lived in India and China, a fact Maya could never quite believe or comprehend— history was so strange— and there was no knowing what side of the balance this half of humanity might come down on.

And of course all this begged the question of why there was so much conflict to begin with. Why, Frank? she thought as she sat listening to the cutting melancholy tangos. What is the motivation of these metanational rulers? But she could see his cynical grin, the one from the years when she had known him. Empires have long half-lives, as he had remarked to her once. And the idea of empire has the longest half-life of all. So that there were people around still trying to be Genghis Khan, to rule the world no matter the cost— executives in the metanats, leaders in the Group of Eleven, generals in the armies. . . .

Or, suggested her mental Frank, calmly, brutally— Earth had a carrying capacity. People had overshot it. Many of them would therefore die. Everyone knew this. The fight for resources was correspondingly fierce. The fighters, perfectly rational. But desperate.

The musicians played on, their tart nostalgia made even more poignant as the months passed, and the long winter came on, and they played through the snowy dusks with the whole world darkening, entre chien et loup. Something so small and brave in that bandoneon wheeze, in those little tunes pattering on in the face of it all: normal life, clung to so stubbornly, in a patch of light under bare-branched trees.

So familiar, this apprehension. This was how it had felt in the years before ‘61. Even though she could not remember any of the individual incidents and crises that had constituted the prewar period last time around, she could still remember the feel of it as fully as if stimulated by a familiar scent; how nothing seemed to matter, how even the best days were pale and chill under the black clouds that lay massed to the west. How the pleasures of town life took on an antic, desperate edge, everyone with their backs to the bar, so to speak, doing their best to counteract a feeling of diminution, of helplessness. Oh yes, this was déjà vu all right.