After dinner Swan went back outside and stood with Zasha above the great gap of air, under the huge dome of the sky. Out in the wind, oh the wind, the wind… The broad glacier below her—upstream a white shatter—downstream a blue gap—then a lower and smoother white sheet, rushing off to the sea. On the low wall of the dam she could now make out machines, running back and forth on both its top and its sides, looking a little bit like spiders, in fact, weaving a web so dense it was solid. The mountain ridges anchoring the two ends of the dam would wear away before the dam did, one of the engineers had said. If another ice age ever came, and the Greenland ice cap piled farther into the sky and overflowed this dam, the dam would still be there and would reemerge in the next warm period.

“Amazing,” Swan said. “So terraforming canbe done on Earth!”

“Well, but Greenland is more like Europa than Europe, if you see what I mean. You can do it here because there are only a few locals, and they like the plan. If you were to try this kind of thing anywhere else…” Zasha laughed at the thought. “Like they could use this technology and polder New York Harbor, drain the bay down so that Manhattan was above water the way it used to be. You could make the whole area like a Dutch polder. Not even that difficult, compared to some things. But the New Yorkers won’t hear of it. They like it the way it is!”

“Good for them.”

“I know, I know. The fortunate flood. And I love New York the way it is now. But you see what I mean. A lot of good terraforming projects just won’t ever get approved.”

Swan nodded and made a face. “I know.”

Zasha gave her a brief hug. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in China. That must have been awful.”

“It was horrible. I really don’t like what I’m seeing this trip. In different ways we seem to have offended almost everyone on Earth.”

Zasha laughed. “Did you ever think it was otherwise?”

“Fine,” Swan said, “maybe so. But the thing is, now we have to find who attacked Terminator.”

“Interplan is the organization that has the closest to a total human database, so hopefully they will manage to find them.”

“What if that doesn’t work, what then?”

“I don’t know. I think it will work, eventually.”

Swan sighed. She wasn’t sure Genette’s team could do it, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Zasha gave her a look. “I’m not having fun anymore,” she explained.

“Poor Swan.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think so. But look, just go help gather the new inoculants for Terminator. Do your job, and let Genette and Interplan do their jobs.”

Swan was not happy with this either. “I can’t just leave it. Something’s going on. I mean, I was kidnapped, damn it, and asked a lot of questions about Alex. You said she didn’t trust me at the end, but what if I knew something I didn’t know was important?”

“Did they ask you about things on Venus?”

Swan thought it over; something had been triggered. “I think maybe so.”

Zasha looked worried. “There’s some strange stuff happening on Venus. When they get to the next stage of their terraforming, a lot of the planet will open to new settlements, and that’s causing fights to break out. Real estate wars, in effect. And these strange qubes Alex started us looking for, we’re finding more and more of them. They seem to be coming from Venus, and they often show up around New York. We’re not sure what it means yet. So, but just go help get the inoculants together. That’s not as easy as it used to be.”

“They just need to replace what we had before.”

“Not possible. They won’t let you take topsoil off Earth in anything like the quantities they used to. So our new soil is going to have to be some kind of Ascension, and you’re the expert at those.”

“But I don’t like Ascensions anymore!”

“They’re necessary now. It’s not a style choice.”

Swan heaved a great sigh. Z stayed silent, then gestured out at the scene. It was true: this glacier was a sight for sore eyes. The world was bigger than their petty melodramas, and as they stood here it couldn’t be denied. And that was a comfort.

“All right. I’ll go help with the soil. But I’m going to keep talking to Genette.”

So—back to Manhattan, freakish and superb, but without Zasha there to make it fun. And besides, things weren’t fun anymore.

The weariness that came at the end of the day on Earth. The sheer heaviness of life on Earth. “She’s so… heavy!” Swan sang to herself, dragging out the last word and repeating it in the way of the old song. “Heavy—heavy—heavy—heavy!”

Usually when she hurt in the effort to hold herself upright at the end of a day, she would get into her body bra and relax, let it walk her around. It was like getting a massage, just to be carried, lifted up as you walked. Let it dance you, melt into it. Oh lovely waldo. It stiffened under you no matter how you moved, and when fitted and programmed right, it could be dreamy; bad for bone building, bad for a full adjustment to life on Earth, but a lifesaver when flagging. People in space talked longingly about moving back to Earth, people went back for their sabbatical happily, crowing at the prospect—but after the thrill of the open air wore off, the g remained, and slowly but surely it dragged one down, until when the sabbatical year was over and one had had one’s Gaian replenishment, whatever it was, one rose back out of the atmosphere into the brilliant clarity of space and resumed life out there with relief and a feeling of ebullient lightness. Because Earth was just too damned heavy, and in every possible sense. It was as if a black filter had been dropped between her and the world. Inspector Genette had said things were going well, but obviously had no expectation of anything happening soon. The case seemed to be regarded as Swan would regard the growing of a marsh; you set certain actions in motion, created certain conditions of possibility, and then went away and did something else. When you came back, you would see that things had changed. But it would be years.

So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.”

She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feeling balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of Satyagraha—ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” Thus Gandhi in the program notes. Satya, truth, love; agraha, firmness, force. He had made the word up. Tolstoy, Gandhi, the opera’s Future Man: they all sang of hope and peace, of the way to peace, satyagraha itself. The Satyagrahi were the people who enacted satyagraha. “Forgiveness is the ornament of the brave.”

As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.”

Lists (10)

It’s too hard, there isn’t time, someone might laugh;

To protect one’s family, to protect one’s honor, one’s children;

Kin selection; bad seed;

Original sin, intrinsic evil, fortune, luck, destiny, fate;