The building and transport crews for the job were hired primarily from the Suffering South, as it had been called in the years when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had come off and sea level made its biggest rise. The Florida work did not create full employment by itself, but riding the rails, Wahram had a lot of time to look at the passing country and think about it, and once he sent a note to Swan: Remember what you said on Venus about giving everyone here a job doing landscape restoration? It could work.

So he rode the trains back and forth from Canada to Florida. The land was huge, and mostly flat. Heat had parched land that had once grown wheat without irrigation, so they had changed crops and started irrigating, but large regions in Manitoba and the Dakotas had reverted to high desert. Now people were saying the prairies had always been high desert. They were becoming home to buffalo again. On the other hand, the forests flanking the Mississippi were back, more subtropical than ever. Missouri and Arkansas looked like South America.

There were long hours when he could stand between cars, protected from the wind of their passage, and look at the big land. Landscapers and gardeners, animal handlers and vets, environmental engineers and designers, heavy equipment operators, porters and diggers—all were essential in the work of making a landscape. The giant waldos, the selfrep hangars, they were only good for certain things. Local people working their land was a better image than selfreps dropping out of the sky. The people he talked to were more accepting of the Florida project, and the relevant governments also. Not a few people were enthusiastic to an almost religious degree. To have their drowned land hauled back out of the water was their dream. Rebuilding the infrastructure here was a task without negative consequences, except for those who had been enjoying the new reefs, and they would be given new new reefs. Florida was going to end up like a big Venice, resting on pilings stuck deep into the Earth. Assisted migration would replant and reanimate the land as quickly as it was ready.

On one train ride north, Wahram listened to one of the reef engineers explain that the corals they were replanting all released their eggs on the same night of the year, and even within the same twenty minutes, though they were scattered over hundreds of miles. Apparently they accomplished this by way of two color-sensitive cells in each coral, which together were able to distinguish the particular blue of the twilight sky on the night after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This moon rose right after sunset, when the sky was still also lit by the recently departed sun, and this brief double illumination lit the sky to a particular shade of blue that the corals could recognize.

“I have to tell Swan about this,” Wahram said, amazed at the thought of such brainless but living precision. Sentience, what was it?

Meanwhile the Florida raising prospered. Wahram watched the people working in what he recognized as the euphoria of the project, which he had felt so strongly himself in his youth, building cities on Titan. There they had had to carve a world out of the ice; here they had to raise one out of the sea. But it was the same feeling.

Once on a train going south he was out between cars with a Dutch woman he was working with, a blond firebrand, and going slow at one road crossing, they looked down at a group of young men who were throwing stones at the train cars and chanting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and she leaned out and shouted, “Hey, fuck you back! We are reconstructing the South! And you have to like it!” With an evil Germanic laugh that hopefully they did not hear.

Extracts (15)

the brain is labile and has been shown to accept introduced machines, stem cells, drugs, electrodes, brain cells from other species,

evolution conserves things that work. We have a conserved brain, with different ages for its different parts—in effect lizard at back and bottom, mammal in the middle, human at the front and top. Lizard brain to breathe and sleep, mammal brain to form packs, human brain to think it over

over-selecting for a single trait warps evolution, you can get a result called “the bad becoming normal.” As people have been speciating into self-evolved post-humans of various kinds, this result has been seen frequently, as in

parts of the brain fire at the sight of a picture of food, but not at food itself. People like to hunt. Hunting takes many forms. Hunt for a deal, hunt for meaning. A predator’s killing is calm and rewarding. Rage always feels bad, rage is a painful emotion. Without a catch, the predator may not be able to deactivate the hunt. Fear is a constraint on anger. Animals never unlearn a bad fear. And we are animals. Piloerection

pathological aggression: dolphins kill porpoises for no reason, they don’t eat them, they’re not competitors. Does this suggest the uncanny valley exists for all mammals?

reason can’t work without emotion. People cut off from their emotions can’t decide. Thus the decision to manipulate the brain with hormonal therapies has wide-reaching consequences. Bisexual therapies alter brain levels of oxytocin, vasopressin, and their precursor vasotocin. An oxytocin nasal spray causes immediately better eye contact. Endorphins are nature’s version of morphine. The brain releases endorphins when injured, and when someone we love touches us. Thrill seekers calm a hurt

3 percent of mammals monogamous. Play teaches mammals how to handle surprises

five different brain areas evaluate melody, rhythm, meter, tonality, and timbre. Music was the first human language, and still is the language of animals and birds. Music predates humanity by 160 million years. The introduction of birdsong brain nodules to the appropriate human brain sites has resulted in aphasia, also temporal lobe phenomena like omnipresent sublimity, hypermusicality leading to hyperventilation (whistling or singing),

human vocal cords were already capable of purring and it needed only the insertion of feline amygdalan and hippocampal and hypothalamic cells to

performance in flight waldos is vastly improved by implantation of raptor or hummingbird flight nodules in human operators. The different structure of avian brains makes insertion into interstitial cells particularly

it is possible that orgasm already taxes the relevant systems as far as it can without damage such as hernias, broken ribs, thrombosis, and heart attacks. Passengers on sexliners who have taken vasotocin have been known to

The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, or sgACC, is the place in the brain that directs the body to ignore fear. It is the place of courage, and stimulating it can help a person overcome the dread of phobias. It is possible to overstimulate it, after which

The temporal lobe is the site of feeling states such as the omnipresent sublime, hyperreligiosity, hypersexuality, hypergraphia, overinclusion mania, and so on. Intentional brain stimulation or alteration to promote any of these states can easily trigger the others, or cause epileptic

Human subjects (volunteers) who have ingested the Enceladan community, including the organism Enceladusea irwinii, reported synesthesia and individually heightened senses, sometimes confirmable by test. Heightened sensory impressions are often balanced by a reduced ability to generalize or calculate