He stumbled into the ochre dirt of the compound, and scores of people followed him to Maya. Soaking as he was, he still threw his arms around her and put his head down on her shoulder, sobbing.

“We should get to Europe,” Maya said angrily to someone over his back. “This is stupid, to bring him right to the tropics like this.”

Nirgal shifted to look back. It was the prime minister. “This is how we always live,” she said, and pierced Nirgal with a resentful proud look.

But Maya was unimpressed. “We have to go to Bern,” she said.

They flew to Switzerland in a small space plane provided by Praxis. As they traveled, they looked down on the Earth from thirty thousand meters: the blue Atlantic, the rugged mountains of Spain, somewhat like the Hellespontus Mon-tes; then France; then the white wall of the Alps, unlike any mountains he had ever seen. The cool ventilation of the space plane felt like home to Nirgal, and he was chagrined to think that he could not tolerate the open air of Earth.

“You’ll do better in Europe,” Maya told him.

Nirgal thought about the reception they had gotten. “They love you here,” he said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the welcome of the duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors as for him; and Maya had been particularly cherished.

“They’re happy we survived,” Maya said, dismissing it. “We came back from the dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we were dead, do you see? From sixty-one until just last year, they thought all the First Hundred were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them was dead too. To have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with everything changing — yes. It’s like a myth. The return from underground.”

“But not all of you.”

“No.” She almost smiled. “They still have to sort that out. They think Frank is alive, and Arkady — and John too, even though John was killed years before sixty-one, and everyone knew it! For a while, anyway. But people are forgetting things. That was a long time ago. And so much has happened since. And people want John Boone to be alive. And so they forget Nicosia, and say that he is part of the underground still.” She laughed shortly, unsettled by this.

“Like with Hiroko,” Nirgal said, feeling his throat constrict. A wave of sadness like the one in Trinidad washed through him, leaving him bleached and aching. He believed, he had always believed, that Hiroko was alive, and hiding with her people somewhere in the southern highlands. This was how he had coped with the shock of the news of her disappearance — by being quite certain that she had slipped out of Sabishii, and would show up again when she felt the time was right. He had been sure of it. Now, for some reason he could not tell, he was no longer sure.

In the seat on the other side of Maya, Michel sat with a pinched expression on his face. Suddenly Nirgal felt like he was looking in a mirror; he knew his face held the same expression, he could feel it in his muscles. He and Michel both had doubts — perhaps about Hiroko, perhaps about other things. No way of telling. Michel did not seem inclined to speak.

And from across the plane Sax watched them both, with his usual birdlike gaze.

They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of the Alps, and landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through a cool Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically up and out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were in Bern.

In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters, everyone with an ID badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to them. The city was small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered power was palpable. Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly arcaded stone buildings, everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift river Aare S-ing through it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow. The people crowding that quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking white people, not as short as most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their talk, and always a good number of them clustering around the Martians and their escorts, who now were blue-uniformed Swiss military police.

Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis headquarters, in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed Nirgal how close to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river of even two meters would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they had the river under control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest mountain range Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the Swiss were good on Mars.

The Praxis building was just a few streets from the old center of the city. The World Court occupied a scattering of offices next to the Swiss federal buildings, near the middle of the peninsula. So every morning they walked down the cobbled main street, the Kramgasse, which was incredibly clean, bare and underpopulated compared with any street in Port of Spain. They passed under the medieval clock tower, with its ornate face and mechanical figures, like one of Michel’s alchemical diagrams made into a three-dimensional object; then into the World Court offices, where they talked to group after group about the situations on Mars and Earth: UN officials, national government representatives, metanational executives, relief organizations, media groups. Everyone wanted to know what was happening on Mars, what Mars planned to do next, what they thought of the situation on Earth, what Mars could offer Earth in the way of help. Nirgal found most of the people he was introduced to fairly easy to talk with; they seemed to understand the respective situations on the two worlds, they were not unrealistic about Mars’s ability to somehow “save Earth”; they did not seem to expect to control Mars ever again, nor did they expect the metanational world order of the antediluvian years to return.

It was likely, however, that the Martians were being screened from people who had a more hostile attitude toward them. Maya was quite certain this was the case. She pointed out how often the negotiators and interviewers revealed what she called their “terracentricity.” Nothing mattered to them, really, but things Earthly; Mars was interesting in some ways, but not actually important. Once this attitude was pointed out to Nirgal, he saw it again and again. And in fact he found it comforting. The corresponding attitude existed on Mars, certainly, as the natives were inevitably areocentric; and it made sense, it was a kind of realism.

Indeed it began to seem to him that it was precisely the Terrans who showed an intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to contemplate: certain metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily in Martian terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily populated countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send large numbers of their people. So he sat in meetings with people from Armscor, Subarashii, China, Indonesia, Ammex, India, Japan, and the Japanese metanat council; and he listened most carefully, and did his best to ask questions rather than talk overmuch; and he saw that some of their staunchest allies up to that point, especially India and China, were likely in the new dispensation to become their most serious problem. Maya nodded emphatically when he made this observation to her, her face grim. “We can only hope that sheer distance will save us,” she said. “How lucky we are that it takes space travel to reach us. That should be a bottleneck for emigration no matter how advanced transport methods become. But we will have to keep our guard up, forever. In fact, don’t speak much of these things here. Don’t speak much at all.”