During lunch breaks Nirgal asked his escort group — a dozen or more Swiss who stayed with him every waking hour — to walk with him over to the cathedral, which someone told Nirgal was called in Swiss the monster. It had a tower at one end, containing a tight spiral staircase one could ascend, and almost every day Nirgal took several deep breaths and then pushed on up this staircase, gasping and sweating as he neared the top. On clear days, which were not frequent, he could see out the open arches of the top room to the distant abrupt wall of the Alps, a wall he had learned to call the Berner Oberland. This jagged white wall ran from horizon to horizon, like one of the great Martian escarpments, only covered everywhere with snow, everywhere except for on triangular north faces of exposed rock, rock of a light gray color, unlike anything on Mars: granite.

Granite mountains, raised by tectonic-plate collision. And the violence of these origins showed.

Between this majestic white range and Bern lay a number of lower ranges of green hills, the grassy alps similar to the greens in Trinidad, the conifer forests a darker green. So much green — again Nirgal was astounded by how much of Earth was covered with plant life, the lithosphere smothered in a thick ancient blanket of biosphere. “Yes,” Michel said, along one day to view the prospect with him. “The biosphere at this point has even formed a great deal of the upper layer of rock. Everywhere life teems, it teems.”

Michel was dying to get to Provence. They were near it, an hour’s flight or a night’s train; and everything that was going on in Berne seemed to Michel only the endless wrangling of politics. “Flood or revolution or the sun going nova, it will still go on! You and Sax can deal with it, you can do what needs doing better than I.”

“And Maya even more so.”

“Well, yes. But I want her to come with me. She has to see it, or she won’t understand.”

Maya, however, was absorbed in the negotiations with the UN, which were getting serious now that the Martians back home had approved the new constitution. The UN was turning out to still be very much a metanat mouthpiece, just as the World Court continued to support the new “co-op democracies”; and so the arguments in the various meeting rooms, and via video transmission, were vigorous, volatile, sometimes hostile. Important, in a word, and Maya went out to do battle every day; so she had no patience at all for the idea of Provence. She had visited the south of France in her youth, she said, and was not greatly interested in seeing it again, even with Michel. “She says the beaches are all gone!” Michel complained. “As if the beaches were what mattered to Provence!”

In any case, she wouldn’t go. Finally, after a few weeks had passed, Michel shrugged and gave up, unhappily, and decided to visit Provence on his own.

On the day he left, Nirgal walked him down to the train station at the end of the main street, and stood waving at the slowly accelerating train as it left the station. At the last moment Michel stuck his head out a window, waving back at Nirgal with a huge grin. Nirgal was shocked to see this unprecedented expression, so quickly replacing the discouragement at Maya’s absence; then he felt happy for his friend; then he felt a flash of envy. There was no place that would make him feel so good to be going to, not anywhere in the two worlds.

After the train disappeared, Nirgal walked back down Kramgasse in the usual cloud of escorts and media eyes, and hauled his two and a half bodies up the 254 spiral stairs of the Monster, to stare south at the wall of the Berner Ober-land. He was spending a lot of time up there; sometimes he missed early-afternoon meetings, let Sax and Maya take care of it. The Swiss were running things in their usual businesslike fashion. The meetings had agendas, and started on time, and if they didn’t get through the agenda, it wasn’t because of the Swiss in the room. They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency. It was an attitude that Coyote laughed at, or disdained as life-threatening; but seeing the results in the elegant stone city below him, overflowing with flowers and people as prosperous as flowers, Nirgal thought there must be something to be said for it. He had been homeless for so long. Michel had his Provence to go to, but for Nirgal no place endured. His hometown was crushed under a polar cap, his mother had disappeared without a trace, and every place since then had been just a place, and everything everywhere always changing. Mutability was his home. And looking over Switzerland, it was a hard thing to realize. He wanted a home place that had something like these tile roofs, these stone walls, here and solid these last thousand years.

He tried to focus on the meetings in the World Court, and in the Swiss Bundeshaus. Praxis was still leading the way in the response to the flood, it was good at working without plans, and it had already been a cooperative concentrating on the production of basic goods and services, including the longevity treatment. So it only had to accelerate that process to take the lead in showing what could be done in the emergency. The four travelers had seen the results in Trinidad; local movements did most of it, but Praxis was helping projects like that all over the world. William Fort was said to have been critical in leading the fluid response of the “collective transnat,” as he called Praxis.

And his mutant metanational was only one of hundreds of service agencies that had come to the fore. All over the world they were taking on the problem of relocating the coastal populations, and building or relocating a new coastal infrastructure on higher ground.

This loose network of reconstruction efforts, however, was running into some resistance from the metanats, who complained that a good deal of their infrastructure, capital and labor were being nationalized, localized, appropriated, salvaged, or stolen outright. Fighting was not infrequent, especially where fights had already been ongoing; the flood, after all, had arrived right in the middle of one of the world’s paroxysms of breakdown and reordering, and although it had altered everything, that struggle was often still happening, sometimes under the cover of the relief efforts.

Sax Russell was particularly aware of this context, convinced as he was that the global wars of 2061 had never resolved the basic inequities of the Terran economic system. In his own peculiar fashion he was insistent on this point in the meetings, and over time it seemed to Nirgal that he was managing to convince the skeptical listeners of the UN and the metanats that they all needed to pursue something like the Praxis method if they wanted themselves and civilization to survive. It did not matter much which of the two they really cared about, he said to Nirgal in private, themselves or civilization; it didn’t matter if they only instituted some Machiavellian simulacrum of the Praxis program; the effect would be much the same in the short term, and everyone needed that grace period of peaceful cooperation.

So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent and engaged, especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to Earth. And Sax Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current living avatar of The Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran culture, Nirgal thought — something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing reincarnation of the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture that only seemed to be able to handle one scientist at a time. Also, to the metanats Sax was the principal creator of the biggest new market in history — not an inconsiderable part of his aura. And, as Maya had pointed out, he was one of that group that had returned from the dead, one of the leaders of the First Hundred.