Into this nightmare Wahram suddenly appeared, accompanied by an African League officer, a short slight man from Gabon named Pierre, who spoke beautiful French and a much more rudimentary English. He said, “You are released to your colleague here, but must leave North Harare. The construction machines will be taken over by locals. Locals only must run them. So.” He held out a hand as if pointing her to the exit.

Swan, surprised, almost refused on principle to agree. Then she saw Wahram’s eyebrows shoot up and his eyes go round; his dismay reminded her of how much her situation had been frightening her, and after a moment more she humbly agreed with Pierre’s conditions and followed Wahram out to a car, which drove them to an airfield where a big dirigible was tethered to a tall mast.

“Let’s get out while the getting’s good,” Wahram suggested.

“Yeah yeah,” Swan said.

The dirigible was as long as an oil tanker, one of a big fleet of similar craft that were constantly circling the Earth from west to east, tugged by kites that were cast up into the jet stream, delivering freight slowly but surely as they circumnavigated the globe time after time. This particular dirigible had a balloon shaped like a cigar, and the gondola under it was lined with windows stacked four and five high.

Wahram led her into the mast elevator and they rose to the loading platform. Inside the dirigible they walked a long hall to the bow, where there was a viewing deck somewhat like the bubble at the fore end of a terrarium. Wahram had reserved two chairs and a table there for later in the day, after they had launched and hummed up to altitude. So that afternoon when they sat at their table, they could look down at the green hills of Earth, passing below in a stately parade. It was beautiful, but Swan was not looking.

“Thank you,” Swan said stiffly. “I was in serious trouble there.”

Wahram shrugged. “Happy to help.” He talked about the work in North America, the problems there and elsewhere. Much of it Swan had not heard about yet, but the pattern was depressingly clear. Nothing new to learn here: the Earth was fucked.

Wahram had come to a more measured conclusion, as was his way. “I’ve been thinking that our first wave of help has been too… too blunt, for lack of a better word. Too focused on the built environment, and on housing in particular. Maybe people like to feel they’ve had a hand in building their homes.”

“I don’t think people care who builds it,” Swan said.

“Well, but in space we do. Why not here?”

“Because when your home can fall apart and kill you and your kids just because it rains, then you’re happy to see a machine replace it with something better! You don’t worry about feelingsuntil your material needs are met. You know that. The hierarchy of needs is a real thing.”

“But granting that,” Wahram said, “which I do, there have still been a lot of complaints about our efforts. And there is no denying that the project is getting snarled. It’s like Gulliver tied down by strings.”

“That’s not a good image,” Swan said, thinking of the talls and smalls in the sexliner. “A lot of opposition is disguised to look like it comes from the people, but really it’s the usual reactionary obstructionism. We have to break those strings if they try to wrap us!”

“It seems to me that the image is somewhat apt,” Wahram said mildly. “The lines holding Gulliver down are laws, and that makes them important. But look, there’s a way around the lines. We can slip through. The work we’ve been doing in Canada has been very suggestive.”

Their tea tray arrived, and he poured her a cup, which she promptly forgot. He sipped his slowly, watching the Indian Ocean appear, and then in the distance to the south a rumpled green island: Madagascar, one of the most completely devastated ecosystems in history, now a model of Ascension-type hybridization. One of the biggest islands on Earth, now completely a work of landscape art, and thriving. People went there to see its gardens and forests.

Wahram gestured at it. “Landscape restoration is going on all over, as people try to cope with the changes. And it’s very labor intensive, and very tied to place. You can’t do it from somewhere else. You can’t take advantage of differential currencies. You can’t really extract a profit from it. So it’s already well situated in terms of our purposes. It’s a public good and it needs to be done. All the coastlines need it. It’s hard to believe how much needs to be done. It isn’t even restoration exactly, because the old coastlines are gone for good, or for hundreds of years. It’s actually creating new coastlines at the higher sea level. Right now they’re raw. The ocean rips up what it inundates, and a lot of toxic stuff gets released. The new shoreline and tidal zone is usually a disaster. Fixing all that is very labor intensive. And yet everyone living on the new coasts wants to see it done. Many want to do it themselves. So, what I’ve been involved with in Florida is a bit of an unusual case, because it looks like restoration, but really it’s creation from scratch. Another kind of terraforming. It only resembles restoration because Florida used to be there. Actually you could do the same thing in shallow water anywhere. It might not even take moving mountains into the sea. There are fast corals now that could be used as foundation builders. Bioceramics expressed more broadly. I’ve seen groups using these corals, and they can grow them fast at many of the new coastlines, and pretty soon you get wonderful pure-white sand, very fine. It squeaks when you walk on it.”

Swan shrugged. “All right, sure. But I’m still not willing to stop working directly on housing.”

“I know.” He watched the land below. Seemed like he might even sleep.

After a few minutes he stirred and began to say something, but hesitated. Swan saw this and said, “What? Tell me.”

“There’s something else,” he said, glancing at her almost as if shyly. “I’ve been thinking that one of the things we’ve been doing here is providing more evidence that reform inside the paradigm of the current system on Earth is never going to be enough. That there is still, in other words, the necessity for revolution.”

“But that’s what I’ve been saying! That’s what I said to you on Venus!”

“I know. So now I’m coming to agree. So… you remember the project I told you about that Alex was leading, the stocking up of animals in the terraria, so we could bring them back to Earth?”

“Yes, of course. She wanted there to be enough animals to resupply Earth when the right time came.”

“Right. And so… I’ve been wondering if the time has come.”

Swan was startled. “You mean the time to bring the animals back?”

A feeling filled her then that she couldn’t name: oceans of clouds, roiling inside her chest, building to some kind of thunderhead…. “Do you think so? What do you mean?”

He lifted his gaze from Madagascar and looked at her. He had a goofy little grin, brief and crooked, a toad’s grin, and yet warm. “Yes.”

Lists (13)

Bats. Sloths. Tarsiers and tapirs. Elephants and seals. Rhinoceroses. Lions and tigers and bears. Tule elk, musk ox, moose. Caribou and reindeer, chamois and ibex. Tigers and snow leopards. Pika and mule deer. Orangutan and langur and gibbon and spider monkey (all primate species are endangered). Moles and voles. Hedgehogs and badgers, bighorn sheep, aardvarks and pangolins, hyrax and marmot. Leaf-nosed bats, mustached bats, thumbless bats. Foxes and hares. Deer, boar, peccary, manatee. Porcupines. Wolves

It is not true that every mammal larger than a rabbit is endangered on Earth. Most are only