Later she came to in the same bed, unrestrained, her clothing on a chair by the bed. The room was just barely bigger than the bed. Her same hostel room, yes. The AI at the desk, a green box sitting on the counter, said that it had seen no sign anything was wrong. The room monitor had shown her vital signs good, no incursions into the room, nothing unusual.

Swan turned on Pauline, who could not offer any help. It had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since she had left the clinic of Mqaret’s friends. She called Mercury House in Manhattan and told them what had happened, then called Zasha.

Everyone was shocked, concerned, and sympathetic, urging her to go immediately to the nearest Mercury House to get medical attention, and so on; but at the end of all that, Zasha said firmly, “You were on Earth alone. There are any number of malignancies down here, as I told you. It’s not like it was when you took your first sabbaticals. We tend to travel in packs here now. You saw what happened last time you went off by yourself, at my place.”

“But that was just some kids. Who was it this time?”

“I don’t know. Call Jean Genette at once. They may be able to track who did it. Or we may be able to deduce it by what happens next. They were probably on a fishing expedition in your head. That means it probably won’t happen again, but you should always travel with other people, maybe even a security team.”

“No.”

Zasha let her listen to how that sounded.

Swan said, “I guess I have to. I don’t know. It feels like I just had a bad dream. I’m a little hungry, but I think they IVed me food. They had me—I mean, I was babbling! And a lot of their questions were about Alex. I may have just told them everything I know about her!”

“Hmm.” A long silence. “Well, you see why Alex kept so much to herself.”

“So who were they?”

“I don’t know. Possibly some part of the Chinese government. They play rough sometimes. Although this seems a bit egregious. Maybe it’s a warning signal, but of what I’m not sure. So in that sense it wasn’t a very good warning. Maybe it was just a fishing expedition. Or a notice that we aren’t to fool around on Earth.”

“As if we didn’t know that.”

“But you don’tseem to know it. Maybe they don’t want youdown here fooling around.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know! Consider it a message from the people of Earth. And call Genette. And come talk to me, please, before you get into any more trouble.”

So Swan called Inspector Genette, who was disturbed to hear about her experience. “Maybe we should keep Pauline and Passepartout in a permanent link while we’re on Earth,” he suggested. “I could stay aware of your movements.”

“But you’re always telling me let’s turn them off!”

“Not here. This is a different situation, and here they can help.”

“All right,” Swan said. “It’s better than traveling with bodyguards.”

“Well, it isn’t anything like that much protection. You should at least travel with other people.”

“I’m going to see Zasha. He’s in Greenland, so I should be safe.”

“Good. You should get out of China.”

“But I’m Chinese!”

“You are a Mercurial of Chinese extraction. It isn’t at all the same. Interplan doesn’t have an agreement with China, so I can’t help you legally when you’re there. Go to Greenland.”

That night she went out for noodles, stubbornly. People looked at her strangely. She was a stranger in a strange land. On the screens in the noodle shops she heard several fiery speeches denouncing various political crimes of the Hague, Brussels, the UN, Mars—spacers in general. Some speakers became so infuriated that she had to revise her opinion of Chinese detachment; they were as intense as anyone else, politically speaking, no matter their inward look on the street. Like any group, they had been shaped by their zeitgeist, and had had targets suggested to them such that their discontents were aimed away from Beijing. So, possibly space could be pulled into people’s red zone and attacked as an enemy. She listened to the screen speeches intently, ignoring the men in the shop watching her watch, and it became clear to her at last that there was a widespread view in China that spacers were living in outrageous decadence and luxury, like the colonialist powers of old, only more so. And she could see perfectly well also that in Hangzhou people lived like rats in a maze, jostling shoulder to shoulder every moment of the day. The potential for extreme thoughts was obvious. Throw a rock at the rich kid’s house—why not? Who wouldn’t do it?

On the flights to get to Zasha she looked at the news on her screen. Earth Earth Earth. They didn’t give a damn about space, most of them. Some lived by religious beliefs that had been backward-looking in the twelfth century. The pastoralists below her in central Asia ran flocks and herds like the expert ecologists they had to be to produce as much as was demanded of them; each pasture was dairy, stockyard, and soil factory, and their owners were stuffed with anger at the droughts brought on by rich people elsewhere. She saw huge conurbations here and there, meaning shantytowns in dust bowls or falling apart in tropical downpours and mudslides, the stunted occupants coping with problems of survival. Back in Chad she had seen clear signs of heavy internal parasite loads. She had seen hunger, disease, premature death. Wasted lives in blasted biomes. Basic needs not met for three billion of the eleven billion on the planet. Three billion was a lot already, but there were also another five or six billion teetering on the brink, about to slide into that same hole, never a day free of worry. The great precariat, wired in enough to know their situation perfectly well.

That was life on Earth. Split, fractionated, divided into castes or classes. The wealthiest lived as if they were spacers on sabbatical, mobile and curious, actualizing themselves in all the ways possible, augmenting themselves—genderizing—speciating—dodging death, extending life. Whole countries seemed like that, in fact, but they were small countries—Norway, Finland, Chile, Australia, Scotland, California, Switzerland; on it went for a few score more. Then there were struggling countries; then the patchwork post-nations, the cobbled-together struggles against failure, or the completely failed.

The eleven-meter rise in sea level on Earth had been accommodated all around the world by intensive building on higher ground, but the costs in human suffering had been huge, and no one wanted to have to do it again. People were sick of sea level rise. How they despised the generations of the Dithering, who had heedlessly pushed the climate into a change with an unstoppable momentum to it, continuing not only into the present but for centuries more to come, as methane clathrate releases and permafrost melting began to outgas the third great wave of greenhouse gases, possibly the largest of them all. They were on their way to being a jungle planet, and the prospect was so alarming that there was serious talk of trying atmospheric sunblocks again, despite the disaster two centuries before. There was growing agreement that the job had to be taken on, and geo-engineering either micro or macro attempted. Intensive micro, mild macro—there was a constant to-and-fro about it, and many micro or tiny macro restoration projects had already begun.

One thing they were trying was to slow the outflow glaciers off the Greenland ice cap. Antarctica and Greenland were the two meaningful reservoirs of ice left on the planet, and modelers were very hopeful that eastern Antarctica at least would hold fast through the heat peak into the hoped-for return to a colder atmosphere and ocean. If they could get the CO ₂down to 320 parts per million, and capture some of the methane, and temperatures therefore fell, and the ice cake on eastern Antarctica held, then the ocean would nevertheless stay high and warm for hundreds more years—but it would be a big success nonetheless. In fact if they failed to keep the East Antarctic ice, it wasn’t worth thinking about. So they needed to succeed. At some point, many were saying now, they were going to have to treat Earth like they were treating Mars and Venus, and whatever they lost by that would be too bad. Some said another little ice age was just what they needed; the billion or three likely deaths were not spoken of, but latent in the argument was the notion that fewer people wouldn’t hurt the situation either. Shock therapy—triage—people who liked to talk tough to make themselves look practical were full of this line.