It was rumored in these years that Martian spies were everywhere in the system, but that they were constantly reporting back to headquarters that there was nothing to fear—balkanization meant Mars faced nothing but a stochastic chaos of human flailing

WAHRAM ON EARTH

That he would alter his plans, not to say change his life, all to help and please a person he did not know very well or trust very much, someone who was often angry at him and just as likely to punch his chest as smile at him; someone who might give him the evil eye at any time, might snarl at him contemptuously, so that really all his efforts to please her could be labeled a form of cowardice rather than affection—this surprised him. And yet it was turning out to be the case. He had already spent the greater part of the previous year traveling all over the system, rallying diplomatic and material support for Alex’s plans to revivify Earth and to deal with the qube problem; now added to this campaign, he spent a lot of time thinking about ways to implement Swan’s notion of rapidly improving conditions for the Terran forgotten ones. Whether Swan was aware of his efforts he doubted, but he felt she could find out if she wanted to, as his life was an open book, except for the parts he was hiding from her. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her what he had done. It seemed to him that the intensity of her engagement with him at their last crossing—beating on him and yelling at him—meant she had been paying attention, and would continue to. And actions were what mattered.

The nature of this new work was terribly hard on his pseudoiterative mode, which became so much more pseudo than iterative that it tipped over into the flux of sheer exfoliation, every day different and no patterns possible. This was hard for him, and as day followed day, then week week, and month month, he began to wonder, not why he was doing what he was doing, but why Swan was not contacting him to join forces. They would have accomplished more working as a team. Combining the powers of the innermost and outermost societies in the solar system would have some good effects, and it would seem therefore that Mercury and Saturn should be natural partners and, if they were, become a force almost the equal of the big bangers in the middle. Wahram could see several potential leverages. But she had not called or sent any messages.

So he continued to work. In some countries their campaign was called Rapid Noncompliance Alleviation—RNA. The noncompliance was with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the infractions involved many articles of that document, but most often articles 17, 23, and 25, with 28 occasionally waved about as a reminder to recalcitrant governments. In other countries their programs were based on a venerable Indian government office, the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP). This organization had never gotten much traction in its stated goal, but it was an already existing agency, and these had been identified by the Mondragon as the best of the bad options for channeling assistance. Wahram had thought it generally agreed that the whole development-aid model had been demonstrated to be an example of the Jevons Paradox, in which increases in efficiency trigger more consumption rather than less; increased aid had always somehow increased suffering, in some kind of feedback loop, poorly theorized—or else theorized perfectly well, but in such a way that revealed the entire system to be a case of vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor. No one wanted to hear that news, so they kept on repeating errors identified four hundred years before, on ever-grander scales. So, the Planet of Sadness.

There were of course very powerful forces on Earth adamantly opposed to tinkering from above in general, and to creating full employment in particular. Full employment, if enacted, would remove “wage pressure”—which phrase had always meant fear struck into the hearts of the poor, also into the hearts of anyone who feared becoming poor, which meant almost everyone on Earth. This fear was a major tool of social control, indeed the prop that held up the current order despite its obvious failures. Even though it was a system so bad that everyone in it lived in fear, either of starvation or the guillotine, still they clutched to it harder than ever. It was painful to witness.

Nevertheless, the immiserated were ready to try anything. So something ought to be possible.

So Wahram crisscrossed the Old World like a modern-day Ibn Battuta, talking to government agencies in a position to do something. This was awkward work that took a real diplomatic touch to avoid being offensive in various ways. It was interesting. But he heard nothing from Swan. And Earth was big. There were 457 countries, and many associations of countries, and units within countries with significant power. Wahram was not going to run into Swan just because she also was at work on Earth.

So he looked her up. Apparently she was working near North Harare, a small country carved out of what had been Zimbabwe.

He read about the place on the flight there. Zimbabwe, rich in resources; a particularly dismal postcolonial history; splintered into a dozen residual countries, many still mired in problems; the great droughts exacerbating the situation; lately a recent population spike, and thus more trouble. North Harare was a slum in the shape of a crescent moon. The other little countries around it were better off.

He contacted Pauline and told her that he was coming to the area on RNA-related business, and soon enough Pauline got back to him with a hello from Swan and a suggested meeting on the very evening of his arrival, which was reassuring but meant that he had to meet her oppressed by jet lag. He was almost quivering with fatigue, and felt as if he weighed two hundred kilograms, when Swan burst into the room and it was time to perk up.

She gave him a nod and a quick appraisal. “You look like you’ve had a long trip. Come on in and I’ll make you some tea and you can tell me about it.”

She started the tea and then excused herself to deal with a visitor, talking in Chinese. Wahram tried hard to grasp what she was like now, vividly before him again. Still intense, that was clear.

Over tea they shared the news. Certain space elevators were slapping tariffs on equipment coming down; others were completely denied to spacers, an absurd situation. People were calling the Quito elevator the Umbilical Cord. It looked like the elevator problem would be a bottleneck, but there was a plan afoot to send down self-replicating factories from cislunar space, deployed in a single timed invasion of thousands of atmospheric landers. A wide variety of space-to-Earth landers were available, including some that split successively as they descended, until individual people or packages floated down in aerogel bubbles.

“That’s like the reverse of what hit Terminator,” Swan said sourly. “Instead of little bits convening to make a big mass, the big mass dissociates into parts. And when they land, things get built rather than destroyed.”

“They might get shot down.”

“There would be too many for that.”

“I don’t like the aggressive look of it,” Wahram said. “I thought we were trying to make it look like a charity thing.”

“Charity is always aggressive,” Swan said. “Don’t you know that?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

It seemed clear to him that aggressive aid wasn’t going to work. But Swan was not a patient person. Now she was trying to do diplomatic work in the way Alex would have; but Alex had had a genius for diplomacy, while Swan had none. And they were facing one of the longest-standing problems in human history.