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If you knew there was a mad person helping you get what you wanted, would you stop them? If a person was mistreated to the point where they acted like an algorithm, did they still count as human?

These were troubling questions. And all the while they looked down at the undeniably mammalian figures in the baths, wavering in the blue underwater lights—couples and small groups, a lot of laughter, low murmurs, occasional rhythmic primate cries.
Coupling or tripling, or balling into intertwined panmixia. A lot of them would be on oxytocin and having supremely affectionate experiences; others would have taken entheogenic compounds and be off in mystical tantric transports. Right now under them on the wet poolside a number of smalls were attending to an extremely tall tall, so that it looked like Gulliver in a Lilliputian brothel, creepy and heartwarming in rapid oscillation. Swan herself had served as Snow White to some dwarves in her time, and now she glanced to see if the inspector was watching them, wondering if any reaction would be visible. But Genette appeared to be looking elsewhere, at two flagrant bisexuals, both with big breasts and tall erections, and also very pregnant, lying on their sides, rolling from one sexual position to another.

“They look like walruses,” Swan said. “The pregnancy is just too much. It’s not transgressive, it’s a travesty.”

Genette shrugged. “Pornography, right? They want it to look strange.”

“Well, they’ve succeeded.” Swan laughed. “I think they want it to be transgressive, but they haven’t quite managed.”

“Sex as public performance? Isn’t that transgressive where you come from?”

“But this is a sexliner. People come here to do this.”

The inspector looked at her, head tilted to the side. “Maybe it’s just theater.”

“But bad theater, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Just showing off, then. We all do it. We live in ideas. That can be a real problem, as I have said. But not here.” Genette blessed the scene with an outstretched hand. “This is just sweet. I’m going to go down myself in a while and join them.”

T
he
Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men
was going to use Mars as a gravity handle to shoot cross-system to Earth, so Swan joined
those who went out to the observation bubble to have a look as they flashed over it. She asked the inspector about going along, but got only a mime’s scowl in return.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong with Mars?”

“I grew up there,” Genette said, standing erect, shoulders back. “I went to school there, I worked there for forty years. But they exiled me for a crime I didn’t commit, and since
they
have exiled
me
,
I
exile
them
. I shit on Mars!”

“Oh,” Swan said. “I didn’t know. What was the crime?”

The inspector waved her away. “Go. Go look at the big red bastard before you miss it.”

So she went by herself up to the bubble chamber in the bowsprit. The
Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men
shot by Mars right above its atmosphere, avoiding any aerobraking while maximizing the gravity sling. For a matter of ten minutes or so they were right over it—the red land, the long green lines of the canals, the canyons running down to the northern sea, the great volcanoes sticking right up out of the atmosphere—then it was behind them, shrinking like a pebble dropped from a balloon. “I hear it’s an interesting place,” someone said.

W
hen you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass—a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?

In North Africa the pattern is now disrupted by many big shallow lakes dotting the Sahara and the Sahel. The water has been pumped out of the Mediterranean and deposited in depressions in the desert, often in ancient lake beds. Some of these are as big as the Great Lakes, though much shallower. They’re freshwater lakes; the water from the Med has been progressively desalinated on its way inland, and the recovered salts have been bonded with fixatives to make excellent white bricks and roof tiles. White roof tiles covered by translucent photovoltaic film have been used for all new construction since the Accelerando, and retrofitted onto many older roofs as well; these days when seen from space, cities look like patches of snow.

But clean tech came too late to save Earth from the catastrophes of the early Anthropocene. It was one of the ironies of their time that they could radically change the surfaces of the other planets, but not Earth. The methods they employed in space were almost all too crude and violent. Only with the utmost caution could they tinker with anything on Earth, because everything there was so tightly balanced and interwoven. Anything done for good somewhere usually caused ill somewhere else.

This caution about terraforming Earth expressed itself in clots and gouts of sometimes military bickering. Political crosschop led to legal gridlock. Big geoengineering projects were all assumed to contain within them an accident like the Little Ice Age of the 2140s, which was generally said to have caused the death of a billion people. Nothing now could overcome that fear.

Also, for many of Earth’s problems, there was simply nothing to be done. The heating and subsequent expansion of the ocean’s water—also its acidification—nothing could be done about these. There was no terraforming technique that would help. Some water had been pumped onto the dry basins of North Africa and central Asia, but the capacity was not there to hold very much of the ocean’s excess volume. Maintaining the one healthy ice cap remaining to them, high on East Antarctica, was a priority that meant no one was comfortable pumping salt water up there to freeze, as had sometimes been proposed, because if something went wrong and they lost the whole ice cap, it would raise sea level another fifty meters and deal humanity something very like a death blow. So caution was in order, and ultimately it had to be admitted: the new sea level could not be substantially altered. And it was much the same with many of their other problems. The many delicate physical, biological, and legal situations were so tightly knitted together that none of the cosmic engineering they were doing elsewhere in the solar system could be fitted to the needs of the place.

Despite this, people tried things. So much more power than ever before was at their command that some felt they could at last begin to overturn Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it. That painful paradox has never yet failed to manifest itself in human history, but perhaps now was the tipping point—Archimedes’ lever brought to bear at last—the moment when they could get something out of their growing powers besides redoubled destruction.

But no one could be sure. They still hung suspended between catastrophe and paradise, spinning bluely in space like some terrible telenovela. Scheherazade was Earth’s muse, it seemed; it was just one damn thing after another, always one more cliffhanger, clinging to life and sanity by the skin of one’s teeth; and so the spacers kept on coming home, home to home’s nightmares, with the Gordian knot tied right in their guts.

E
arth exerted a fatal attraction far beyond its heavy g, having to do more with its nearly infinite historical gravity, its splendor and decadence and dirt. You didn’t have to go to Uttar Pradesh and view the melting ruins of Agra or Benares to see it—it was fractal and everywhere, in every valley and village: decrepit age, the stink of cruel societies, bare eroded hillsides, drowned coastlines still melting into the sea. A very disturbing place. The strangeness was not always obvious or tangible. Human time here was simply wrenched; the center had not held; things fell apart and recombined to create feelings that did not cohere inside one. Ideas of order became hopelessly bogged in ancient stories, webs of law, faces on the street.

Best to focus on the day in hand, as always. Therefore Swan launched out of one of the mid-African elevator cars in a glider at some fifty thousand meters, and flew down toward a landing strip in the Sahel, in what should have been the bare waste of the south-marching Sahara, a desert without the slightest sign of life on it, not unlike brightside on Mercury—except there below her, brilliant white blocky towns rimmed the edges of shallow green or sky-blue lakes, huge lakes with their own clouds standing over them protectively, reflected in the water below so that their twins were standing tall in an upside-down world. Down down she flew, exhilarated despite all to be returning to Earth again—out
of the glider, standing on a runway in the Sahara, in the wind—it was beyond compare superb, a huge rush and infusion of the real. Just the sky standing dark and clear over her, the wind pouring through her from the west, the naked sun on her bare face. Oh my God. This the home. To walk the side of your own planet and breathe it in, to throw yourself out into the spaces you breathed…

The town at the foot of this elevator was painfully white, with colors accenting doorways and window frames, a cheery Mediterranean look with an Islamic touch in the crowding, the town wall, the minarets. Somewhat like Morocco to the northwest. Oasis architecture, classic and satisfying: for what town was not an oasis, in the end. Topologically this town was no different from Terminator.

And yet the people were thin and small, bent and dark. Wizened by sun, broiled a bit, sure—but it was more than that. Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, 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.”