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By Root 2303 0

they had had of affairs. In the popular mind they were often linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished sinners— a very convenient bit of magical thinking for Mars and the other antimetanational forces, all of whom were doing their best to seize this chance to beat the metanats to pieces while they were down. The Group of Eleven and the other industrial governments previously associated with the metanats were scrambling to keep their own populations alive, and so could spare little effort to help the great conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning their previous jobs to join the various relief efforts; Praxis-style employee-owned enterprises were gaining in popularity as they took on the emergency, at the same time offering all their members the longevity treatment. Some of the metanats held on to their workforce by reconfiguring along these same lines. And so the struggle for power continued on many levels, but everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.

In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant. Oh it made for an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as ungrateful children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it was one example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to the equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over these days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking ship. Others regarded them as potential saviors, in some ill-defined way: another bit of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful in the notion of a new society forming on the next world out.

Meanwhile, no matter what happened on Mars, the people of Earth struggled to cope with the flood. The damage now began to include rapid climactic changes: more cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight and causing temperatures to drop, also creating torrential rainstorms, which often wrecked much-needed crops, and sometimes fell where rain had seldom fallen before, in the Sahara, the Mojave, northern Chile— bringing the great flood far inland, in effect, bringing its impact everywhere. And with agriculture hammered by these new severe storms, hunger itself became an issue; any general sense of cooperation was therefore threatened, as it seemed that perhaps not everyone could be fed, and the cowardly spoke of triage. And so every part of Terra was in turmoil, like an anthill stirred by a stick.

So that was Earth in the summer of 2128: an unprecedented catastrophe, an ongoing universal crisis. The antediluvian world already seemed like no more than a bad dream from which they had all been rudely awakened, cast into an even more dangerous reality. From the frying pan into the fire, yes; and some people tried to get them back into the frying pan, while others struggled to get them off the stove; and no one could say what would happen next.

1

An invisible vise clamped down on Nirgal, each day more crushing than the last. Maya moaned and groaned about it, Michel and Sax did not seem to care; Michel was very happy to be making this trip, and Sax was absorbed in watching reports from the congress on Pavonis Mons. They lived in the rotating chamber of the spaceship Atlantis, and over the five months of the trip the chamber would accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they wanted to return home, diplomats traveling back and forth, and the few Martian natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few of the natives had gotten sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to stay in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.

Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya sat in the blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as she seemed to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while Nirgal was truly miserable,