“No I do not!”

“But did you ever have a kid?”

“No.”

“Well there you go.”

“Oh God.”

Her ghost finger was tingling. But now it was really there.

Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the good of China we need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars. You’ll go there together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your friends and neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years if you decide you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to the new Xiazha. We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the harbor town ofNilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile. There are other Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections in all the big cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can begin in a month — train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space elevator into orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down their elevator to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say? Let’s have a unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.

Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong Kong, and told an operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the information along to Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner there named Amy added the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat thinking for a morning. That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman emeritus William Fort, who was surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described the situation to him. “The blue world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty. There’s going to be problems. Let’s talk about them.”

The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team, including many of the Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf camp. The demographers laid out the situation. “Everyone is getting the longevity treatment now,” Amy said. “We are fully into the hypermalthusian age.”

It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration to Mars was often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the problem. Even with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as Earth, and hardly any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group, were already sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were members of ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack of autonomy in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the elevator cars of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the Maldives, were constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a stream of Sikhs and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space and moving to Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from Israel. Kurds from Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that sense,” Amy said, “Mars is becoming the new America.”

“And like the old America,” a woman named Elizabeth added, “there’s a native population already there to be impacted. Think about the numbers for a while. If every day the cars of all the space elevators on Earth are full, then that’s a hundred people per car, therefore twenty-four hundred per day per elevator taking off, and a different twenty-four hundred leaving the cars at the top of each elevator, and transferring into shuttles. There are ten elevators, so that’s twenty-four thousand people a day. Therefore eight million seven hundred and sixty thousand people every year.”

“Call it ten million a year,” Amy said. “That’s a lot, but at that rate it will still take a century to transfer just one of Earth’s sixteen billions to Mars. Which won’t make any difference here to speak of. So it doesn’t really make sense! No major relocation is possible. We can never move a significant fraction of the Terran population to Mars. We have to keep our attention on solving Earth’s problems at home. Mars’s presence can only help as a kind of psychological vent. In essence, we’re on our own.”

William Fort said, “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “Lots of Terran governments are trying it, whether it makes sense or not. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil — they’re all going for it, and if they keep emigration at the system’s capacity, Mars’s population will double in about two years. So nothing changes on Earth, but Mars is totally inundated. “

One of the Immortals noted that an emigration surge of a similar scale had helped to cause the first Martian revolution.

“What about the Earth-Mars treaty,” someone else asked. “I thought it specifically forbade such overwhelming influxes.”

“It does, “Elizabeth said. “It specifies no more than ten percent of the Martian population to be added every Terran year. But it also states that Mars should take more if they can.”

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

William Fort said, “We’ll have to send them somewhere else.” The others looked at him. “Where?” said Amy.

No one replied. Fort waved a hand vaguely. “We’d better think of somewhere,” Elizabeth said grimly. “The Chinese and Indians have been good allies of the Martians, so far, and even they aren’t paying much attention to the treaty. I was sent a tape recording of an Indian policy meeting about this, and they spoke about running their program at capacity for a couple of centuries, and then seeing where they stand.”

The elevator car descendedand Mars grew huge beneath their feet. Finally they slowed down, low over Sheffield, and everything felt normal, Martian gravity again, without the Coriolis force pulling reality to the side. And then they were in the Socket, and back home.

Friends, reporters, delegations, Mangalavid. In Sheffield itself people hurried about their business. Occasionally Nir-gal was recognized, and waved at happily; some even stopped to shake his hand, or give him a hug, inquiring about his trip or his health. “We’re glad you’re back!”

Still, in most people’s eyes… Illness was so rare. Quite a few looked away. Magical thinking: Nirgal saw suddenly that for many people the longevity treatments equaled immortality. They did not want to think otherwise; they looked away.

But Nirgal had seen Simon die even though Simon’s bones had been stuffed with Nirgal’s young marrow. He had felt his body unravel, felt the pain in his lungs, in every cell of him. He knew death was real. Immortality had not come to them, and never would. Delayed senescence, Sax called it. Delayed senescence, that was all it was; Nirgal knew that. And people saw that knowledge in him, and recoiled. He was unclean, and they looked away. It made him angry.

He took the train down to Cairo, looking out at the vast tilted desert of east Tharsis, so dry and ferric, the Ur landscape of red Mars: his land. His eyes felt it. His brain and body glowed with that recognition. Home.

But the faces on the train, looking at him and then looking away. He was the man who had not been able to adjust to Earth. The home world had nearly killed him. He was an alpine flower, unable to withstand the true world, an exotic to whom Earth was like Venus. This is what their eyes were saying with their darting glances. Eternal exile.

Well, that was the Martian condition. One out of every five hundred Martian natives who visited Earth died; it was one of the most dangerous things a Martian could do, more dangerous than cliff flying, visiting the outer solar system, childbirth. A kind of Russian roulette, with lots of empty chambers in the gun to be sure, but the full one was full.

And he had dodged it. Not by much, but he had dodged it. He was alive, he was home! These faces in the train, what did they know? They thought he had been defeated by Earth; but they also thought he was Nirgal the Hero, who had never been defeated before — they thought he was a story, an idea only. They didn’t know about Simon or Jackie or Dao, or Hiroko. They didn’t know anything about him. He was twenty-six m-years old now, a middle-aged man who had suffered all that any middle-aged man might suffer — death of parents, death of love, betrayal of friends, betrayal by friends. These things happen to everyone. But that wasn’t the Nirgal that people wanted.