Part 35 (2/2)

”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 sh.o.r.eline, 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 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 deja vu. An extraordinary blessing.

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

The next day they climbed back in the Three Diamonds 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 ma.s.ses, the western ice ma.s.s 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. 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 ma.s.ses, the western ice ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 m.u.f.fled 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 ma.s.s 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 c.u.mulonimbus 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 h.e.l.las Sea was continuous now, and Minus One truly an island.

After that, the circ.u.mh.e.l.las 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 slos.h.i.+ng 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 Vast.i.tas Borealis were being rapidly inundated, as the truly enormous aquifers under Vast.i.tas and the north polar region were being pumped onto the surface by drilling platforms that rose on the ice as the ice acc.u.mulated 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 Vast.i.tas, 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 lat.i.tudes, 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 Vast.i.tas would take about twenty more M-years, as the amount of water necessary to fill Vast.i.tas Borealis was much greater than that needed to fill h.e.l.las. 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 Vast.i.tas. 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 Vast.i.tas.

Down at the office in Odessa, they followed all of this with professional interest. A recent a.s.sessment of the amount of underground water in the north had encouraged the Vast.i.tas 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 Vast.i.tas, 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 ma.s.sif 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 Vast.i.tas. 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 ma.s.sive. 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 h.e.l.las, 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 ”ca.n.a.l” 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 cafe 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 b.u.t.tons on it, called a bandoneon, and his companions played violin, guitar, piano, and an upright ba.s.s. 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 sc.r.a.ps they seemed to be improvising together.... When her meal ended she sat for a long time, listening to them, nursing a last gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.lespontus. 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 a.s.sault 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 cafe 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 a.n.a.lyzing it. The Group of Eleven (the old G-7 plus Korea, Azania, Mexico, and Russia) were still in t.i.tular command of much of Terra's power, in the form of their militaries and their capital. The only real compet.i.tors 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 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 pa.s.sed, and the long winter came on, and they played through the snowy dusks with the whole world darkening, entre chien et loup 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 const.i.tuted 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 ma.s.sed 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 deja vu all right.

So when they traveled around h.e.l.las and met with Free Mars groups, Maya was thankful to see the people who came, who made the effort to believe that their actions could make a difference, even in the face of the great vortex swirling below them. Maya learned from them that everywhere he went, Nirgal was apparently insisting to the other natives that the situation on Earth was critical to their own fortunes, no matter how distant it seemed. And this was having an effect; now the people who came to the meetings were full of the news of Consolidated and Amexx and Subaras.h.i.+, and of the recent new incursions into the southern highlands by the UNTA police, incursions which had forced the abandonment of Overhangs, and many hidden sanctuaries. The south was being emptied, all the hidden ones flooding into Hiranyagarbha or Sabis.h.i.+, or Odessa and the east h.e.l.las canyons.

Some of the young natives Maya met seemed to think that the UNTA appropriation of the south was basically a good thing, as it began the countdown to action. She was quick to denounce such thinking. ”It's not them who should have control of the timetable,” she told them. ”We have to control the timing of this, we have to wait for our moment. And then all act together. If you don't see that-”

Then you're fools fools!

But Frank had always lashed out at his audiences. These people needed something more- or, to be precise, they deserved something more. Something positive, something to draw them as well as to drive them. Frank had said this too, but he had seldom acted on it. They needed to be seduced, like the nightly dancers on the corniche. Probably these people were out on their own waterfronts on all the other nights of the week. And politics needed to co-opt some of that erotic energy, or else it was only a matter of ressentiment ressentiment and damage control. and damage control.

So she seduced them. She did it even when she was worried or frightened, or in a bad mood. She stood among them thinking about s.e.x with the tall lithe young men, and then she sat down in their midst, and asked them questions. She caught their gazes one by one, all of them so tall that when she sat on tables she was eye to eye with them as they sat in chairs, and she engaged them in conversation as intimate and pleasurable as she could make it. What did they want from life, from Mars? Often she laughed out loud at their responses, caught unawares by their innocence or their wit. They had themselves already dreamed Ma.r.s.es more radical than any she could believe in, Ma.r.s.es that were truly independent, egalitarian, just and joyous. And in some ways they had already enacted these dreams: many of them now had made their little warrens into extensive communal apartments, and they worked in their alternative economy that had less and less connection with the Transitional Authority or the metanats- an economy governed by Marina's eco-economics and Hiroko's areophany, by the Sufis and by Nirgal, by his roving gypsy government of the young. They felt they were going to live forever; they felt they lived in a world of sensuous beauty; their confinement in tents was normality, but a stage only, a confinement in warm womb mesocosms, which would be inevitably followed by their emergence onto a free living surface- by their birth, yes! They were embryo areurges, to use Michel's term, young G.o.ds operating their world, people who knew they were meant to be free, and were confident they would get there, and soon. Bad news would come from Earth and attendance at the meetings would rise- and in these meetings the air was not one of fear but of determination, of the look on Frank's face in the photo over her sink. A struggle between ex-allies Armscor and Subaris.h.i.+ over Nigeria resulted in the use of biological weapons (both sides disclaimed responsibility) so that the people, animals, and plants of Lagos and the surrounding area were devastated by grotesque diseases; and in the meetings that month, the young Martians spoke angrily, their eyes flas.h.i.+ng, of the lack of any rule of law on Earth- the lack of any authority that could be trusted. The metanational global order was too dangerous dangerous to be allowed to rule Mars! to be allowed to rule Mars!

Maya let them talk for an hour before she said anything but ”I know.” And she did know! It almost made her weep to look at them, to see how shocked they were by injustice and cruelty. Then she went over the points of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration one by one, describing how each had been argued out, what it meant, and what its implementation in the real world would feel like in their lives. They knew more about this than she did, and these parts of the discussion got them more fired up than any complaints about Earth- less anxious, and more enthusiastic. And in trying to envision a future based on the declaration she often got them laughing: ludicrous scenarios of collective harmony, everyone at peace and happy- they knew the squabbling cramped reality of their shared apartments, and so it really was funny. The light in the eyes of laughing young Martians- even she, who never laughed, felt a small smile rearranging the unseen map of wrinkles that was her face.

And so she would end the meeting, feeling that it was work well done. What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young? This was what Frank had never understood, at least not in his latter years. And so she would abandon Spencer's security procedures, and lead the people in the meetings out of their rooms and down to the dry waterfronts, or into parks or cafes, to have a walk or a drink or a late meal, feeling that she had found one of the keys to revolution, a key that Frank had never known existed, but only suspected when looking at John.

”Of course,” Michel said when she returned to Odessa, and tried to tell him about it. ”But Frank was not a believer in revolution anyway. He was a diplomat, a cynic, a counterrevolutionary. Joy was not in his nature. It was all damage control to him.”

But Michel was often contrary with her these days. He had learned to explode rather than soothe if she showed signs she needed a fight, and she appreciated that so much that she found she didn't need to fight nearly so often. ”Come on,” she objected at this characterization of Frank, and shoved Michel onto their bed and ravished him, just for the fun of it, just to drag him into the realm of joy and make him admit it. She knew perfectly well that he felt it was his duty to pull her always back toward the midline of her mood oscillations, and she could see his point, no one more so, and appreciated the anchoring he tried to provide; but sometimes, soaring up at the top of the curve, she saw no reason not to enjoy it a little, those brief moments of no-g flight, something like a spiritual status o.r.g.a.s.mus status o.r.g.a.s.mus.... And so she would pull him up by the c.o.c.k to that level, and make him smile for an hour or two. Then it was possible for them to walk together downstairs and out the gate, and down through the park, over to her cafe in a mood of relaxation and peace, there to sit with their backs to the bar, and listen to the flamenco guitarist or the old tango band, playing its piazzollas piazzollas. Talking casually about the work around the basin. Or not talking at all.

One evening in the late summer of M-year 49, they walked down with Spencer to the cafe and sat through the long twilight, watching dark copper clouds that sat glowing over the distant ice, under the purple sky. The prevailing westerlies drove air ma.s.ses up over the h.e.l.lespontus, so that dramatic fronts of cloud over the ice were part of their daily life, but some clouds were special- metallic lobed solid objects, like mineral statues which could never just waft away on a wind. Spitting lightning from their black bottoms onto the ice below.

And then as they watched these particular statues, there was a low rumble, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the silverware chattered across the table. They grabbed their gla.s.ses and stood, along with everyone else in the cafe- and in the shocked silence Maya saw they were all automatically looking to the south, out toward the ice. People were pouring out of the park onto the corniche, and then standing against the tent wall in silence, looking outward. There in the fading indigo of sunset, under the copper clouds, it was just possible to see movement, a winking black and white at the edge of the white-and-black ma.s.s. Moving toward them across the plain. ”Water,” someone at the next table said.

Everyone moved as if in a tractor beam, gla.s.ses in hand, all other thoughts gone as they came to the tent coping at the edge of the waterfront and stood together against the chest-high wall, squinting into the shadows on the plain: black on black, with a salting of white spots, tumbling this way and that. For a second Maya recalled again the Marineris flood, and she shuddered, forced the memory back down like chyme in her esophagus, choking slightly on the acidity, doing her best to kill that part of her mind. It was the h.e.l.las Sea coming toward her- her sea, her idea, now inundating the slope of the basin. A million plants were dying, as Sax had taught her to remember. The Low Point melt pod had been getting bigger and bigger, connecting up to other pods of liquid water, melting the rotten ice between and around them, warmed by the long summer and the bacteria and the surges of steam from explosions set in the surrounding ice. One of the northern ice walls must have broken, and now the flood was blackening the plain south of Odessa. The nearest edge was no more than fifteen kilometers away. Now most of what they could see of the basin was a salt-and-pepper jumble, the predominant pepper in the foreground s.h.i.+fting even as they watched to more and more salt- the land lightening at the same time that the sky was darkening, which as always gave things an unnatural aspect. Frost steam swirled up from the water, glowing with what looked to be reflected light from Odessa itself.

Perhaps half an hour pa.s.sed, with everyone on the corniche standing still and watching, in a general silence that only began to end when the flood was frozen, and the twilight ended. Then there was a sudden return of human voices, and electric music from a cafe two down. A peal of laughter. Maya went to the bar and ordered champagne for the table, feeling her high spirits sizzle. For once her mood was in tune with events, and she was ready to celebrate the bizarre sight of their own powers unleashed, lying out there on the landscape for their inspection. She offered a toast to the cafe at large: ”To the h.e.l.las Sea, and all the sailors who will sail it, dodging icebergs and storms to reach the far sh.o.r.e!”

Everyone cheered, and people all up and down the corniche picked it up and cheered as well, a wild moment. The gypsy band struck up a tango version of a sea chantey, and Maya felt the small smile s.h.i.+fting the stiff skin of her cheeks for the entire rest of that evening. Even a long discussion of the possibility of another surge was.h.i.+ng up and over Odessa's seawall could not take that smile off her face. Down at the office they had calculated the possibilities very finely indeed, and any slopover, as they called it, was unlikely or even impossible. Odessa would be all right.

But news kept flooding in from afar, threatening to overwhelm them in its own way. On Earth the wars in Nigeria and Azania had caused bitter worldwide economic conflict between Armscor and Subaras.h.i.+. Christian, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists were all making a vice of necessity and declaring the longevity treatment the work of Satan; great numbers of the untreated were joining these movements, taking over local governments and making direct, human-wave a.s.saults on the metanational operations within their reach. Meanwhile all the big metanationals were trying to resuscitate the UN, and put it forth as an alternative to the World Court; and many of the biggest metanat clients, and now the Group of Eleven, were going along with it. Michel considered this a victory, as it again showed fear of the World Court. And any strengthening of an international body like the UN, he said, was better than none. But now there were two competing arbitration systems erected, one controlled by the metanats, which made it easier to avoid the one they didn't like.

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