and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike. Again she saw: a big minority of Earth’s population did robot work, and that had never gone away, no matter what political theories said. Of the eleven billion people on Earth, at least three billion were in fear when it came to housing and feeding themselves-even with all the cheap power pouring down from space, even with the farmworlds growing and sending down a big percentage of their food. No-off in the sky they were bashing out new worlds, while on old Earth people still suffered. It never got less shocking to see it. And things aren’t fun anymore when you know that there are people starving while you play around. But we grow your food up there, you can cry in protest, and yet it does nothing to say it. Something is stopping the food from getting through. There continues to be more people than the system can accommodate. So there is no answer. And it is hard to keep your mind on your work when so many people are out of luck.
So something had to be done.
W hy is it like this?” Swan asked Zasha, for lack of anyone else. Z was up helping some project in Greenland.
“There’s never been a plan,” Zasha said in her ear. They had had this conversation before, Z’s patient tone seemed to say. “We’re always dealing with the crisis of the moment. And old ways die hard. Everyone on Earth could have lived at an adequate level for at least the last five centuries. We’ve had the power and resources relative to the needs, we could have done it. But that was never the project, so it’s never happened.”
“But why not now, with all the power at our command?”
“I don’t know. It just hasn’t happened. There are too many old poisons in people’s heads, I guess. Also, immiseration is a terror tactic. If a population is decimated, then the remaining ninety percent are docile. They’ve seen what can happen and they take what they can get.”
“But is that true?” Swan cried. “I don’t believe it! Why wouldn’t people fight harder once they saw?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it could have happened, but instead there’s been the sea level rise and the climate catastrophes to make everything that much harder. There’s always a crisis.”
“All right, but why not now?”
“Well, sure, but who’s going to do it?”
“People would do it for themselves if they could!”
“You would think so.”
“I would because it’s true! If they aren’t doing it, they’re being held back from it somehow. There are guns in their faces, somehow.”
A silence from Zasha, whom it seemed was dealing with some distraction. Finally: “It’s been said that when societies are stressed, they don’t actually face up to their problem but look away instead, put on blinkers and go into denial. What’s historical is pretended to be natural, and people fractionate into tribal loyalties. Then they fight over what are perceived to be shortages. You hear it said that they never got over the food panics at the end of the twenty-first century, or during the Little Ice Age. Two hundred years have passed and yet it’s still a deeply felt world trauma. And in fact they still don’t have much in the way of a food surplus, so in a way it’s a rational fear for them to have. They are balanced at the tip of a whole tangle of prostheses, like a Tower of Babel, and it all has to function successfully for things to work.”
“That’s true everywhere!”
“Sure, sure. But there are so many of them here.”
“True,” Swan said, looking at the crowds pushing and shoving through the medina. Beyond the town wall, irregular lines of people were bent in the early slant of sun, harvesting strawberries. “It’s so hot and dirty, and so damned heavy. Maybe they’re simply weighed down by this planet, rather than their history.”
“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
