“I’d like to thank the people of Subarashii for bringing me south to this conference.”

Art cringed as he returned to his seat, and turned and cupped a hand by his mouth: “That’s Sabishii,” he said in an undertone to Fort.

“What’s that?”

“Sabishii. You said Subarashii, which is the transnational. The settlement you went through to get here is called Sabishii. Sabishii means lonely.’ Subarashii means ‘wonderful.’ “

“Wonderful,” Fort said, staring curiously at Art. Then he shrugged and was off and running, an old Terran with a quiet but penetrating voice, and a somewhat wandering style. He described Praxis, how it had begun and how it operated now. When he explained the relationship of Praxis to the other transnationals, Nadia i thought there were similarities to the relationship on Mars between , the underground and the surface worlds, no doubt cleverly high-| lighted by Fort’s description. And it seemed to her from the silence behind her that Fort was doing pretty well at capturing the crowd’s I interest. But then he said something about ecocapitalism, and re-| garding Earth as a full world while Mars was still an empty one; and three or four Reds popped to their feet.

“What do you mean by that?” one of them called out. Nadia saw Art’s hands clench in his lap, and soon she could see why; Fort’s answer was long and strange, describing what he called ecocapitalism, in which nature was referred to as the bioinfrastructure, while people were referred to as human capital. Looking back Nadia saw many people frowning; Vlad and Marina had their heads together, and Marina was tapping away at her wrist. Suddenly Art popped to his feet, and interrupted to ask Fort what Praxis was doing now, and what he thought Praxis’s role might be on Mars. Fort stared at Art as if he didn’t recognize him. “We’ve been working with the World Court. The UN never recovered from 2061, and is now widely regarded as an artifact of World War Two, just as the League of Nations was an artifact of World War One. So we’ve lost our best arbitrator of international disputes, and meanwhile conflicts have been ongoing, and some are serious. More and more of these conflicts have been brought before the World Court by one party or another, and Praxis has started a Friends of the Court organization, which tries to give it aid in every way possible. We abide by its rulings, give it money, people, try to work out arbitration techniques, and so on. We’ve been part of a new technique, where if two international bodies of any kind have a disagreement and decide to submit to arbitration, they enter into a yearlong program with the World Court, and its arbitrators try to find a course of action that satisfies both sides. At the end of the year the World Court rules on any outstanding problems, and if it works, a treaty is signed, and we try to support the treaties any way we can. India has been interested, and went through the program with Sikhs in the Punjab, and it’s working so far. Other cases have proved more difficult, but it’s been instructive. The concept of semiautonomy is receiving a lot of attention. At Praxis we believe nations were never truly sovereign, but were always semi-autonomous in relation to the rest of the world. Metanationals are semiautonomous, individuals are semiautonomous, culture is semiautonomous in relation to the economy, values are’semiautonomous in relation to prices … there’s a new branch of math that is trying to describe semiautonomy in formal logical terms.”

Vlad and Marina and Coyote were trying to listen to Fort and confer among themselves and write down notes all at once. Nadia stood and waved at Fort.

“Do the other transnationals support the World Court as well?” she asked.

“No. The metanationals avoid the World Court, and use the UN as a rubber stamp. I’m afraid they still believe in the myth of sovereignty.”

“But this sounds like a system that only works when both sides agree to it.”

“Yes. All I can tell you is that Praxis is very interested, and we’re trying to build bridges between the World Court and all powers on Earth.”

“Why?” Nadia asked.

Fort raised his hands, in a gesture just like one of Art’s. “Capitalism only works if there is growth. But growth is no longer growth, you see. We need to grow inward, to recomplicate.”

Jackie stood. “But you could grow on Mars in classic capitalist style, right?”

“I suppose, yes.”

“So maybe that’s all you want from us, right? A new market? This empty world you spoke of earlier?”

“Well, in Praxis we’ve been coming to think that the market is only a very small part of a community. And we’re interested in all of it.”

“So what do you want from us?” someone yelled from the back.

Fort smiled. “I want to watch.”

The meeting ended soon after that, and the afternoon’s regular sessions took place. Of course in all of them the arrival of the Praxis group dominated at least part of the discussion. Unfortunately for Art, it became evident as they sat around that night reviewing the tapes that Fort and his team affected the congress as a separator rather than a bonding agent. Many could not accept a Terran transnational as a valid member of the congress, and that was that. Coyote came by and said to Art, “Don’t tell me about how different Praxis is. That’s the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That’s crap. The system overdeterfnines everything, and it’s the system that has to change.”

“Fort’s talking about changing it,” Art objected. But here Fort was his own worst enemy, with his habit of using classic economic terms to describe his new ideas. The only ones interested in that approach were Vlad and Marina. For the Bogdanovists, and Reds, and Marsfirsters — for most of the natives, and many of the immigrants — it represented Terran business as usual, and they wanted no part of it. No dealing with a transnat, Kasei exclaimed on one tape to applause, no dealing with Terra however they phrased it! Fort was beyond the pale! The only question for this crowd was whether he and his group were going to be allowed to leave or not; some felt that they, like Art, were now prisoners of the underground.

Jackie, however, stood up in that same meeting, to take the Boonean position that everything ought to be put to use in the cause. She was contemptuous of those rejecting Fort on principle. “Since you’re going to take visitors hostage,” she said sharply to her father, “why not put them to use? Why not talk to them?”

So in effect they had a new split to add to all their others: isolationists and two-worlders.

In the next few days Fort handled the controversy surrounding him by ignoring it, to the extent that it seemed to Nadia that he might not even be aware of it. The Swiss asked him to run a workshop on the current Terran situation, and this was packed, with Fort and his companions answering questions at length in every session. In these sessions Fort seemed content to accept whatever they told him about Mars, and regarding it he advocated nothing. He stuck to Terra, and he only described. “The transnationals have collapsed down into the couple dozen largest of them,” he said in response to one question, “all of which have entered into development contracts with more than one national government. We call those the metanationals. The biggest are Subarashii, Mitsubishi, Consolidated, Amexx, Armscor, Mahjari, and Praxis. The next ten or fifteen are also quite big, and after that you’re back down to transnat size, but these are being quickly incorporated into the metanats. The big metanats are now the major world powers, insofar as they control the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all their client countries.”

Sax asked him to define a metanational in more detail.

“About a decade ago we at Praxis were asked by Sri Lanka to come into their country and take over the economy and work on arbitration between the Tamils and the Singhalese. We did that and the results were good, but during the time of the arrangement it was clear that our relationship with a national government was a new kind of thing. It got noticed in certain circles. Then some years ago Amexx got into a disagreement with the Group of Eleven, and pulled all of its assets out of the Eleven and relocated them in the Philippines. The mismatch between Amexx and the Philippines, estimated in gross yearly product to be on the order of a hundred to one, resulted in a situation where Amexx in effect took that country over. That was the first real metanational, though it wasn’t clear that it was a new thing until their arrangement was imitated by Subarashii, when they shifted many of their operations into Brazil. It became clear that this was something new, not like the old flag-of-convenience relationship. A metanational takes over the foreign debt and the internal economy of its client countries, kind of like the UN did in Cambodia, or Praxis in Sri Lanka, but much more comprehensively. In these arrangements the client government becomes the enforcement agency of the metanational’s economic policies. In general they enforce what are called austerity measures, but all government employees are paid much more than they were before, including the army and police and intelligence operations. So at that point, the country is bought. And every metanational has the resources to buy several countries. Amexx has that kind of relationship with the Philippines, the North African countries, Portugal, Venezuela, and five or six smaller countries.”