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By Root 2401 0

from the old center of the city. The World Court occupied a scattering of offices next to the Swiss federal buildings, near the middle of the peninsula. So every morning they walked down the cobbled main street, the Kramgasse, which was incredibly clean, bare and underpopulated compared with any street in Port of Spain. They passed under the medieval clock tower, with its ornate face and mechanical figures, like one of Michel’s alchemical diagrams made into a three-dimensional object; then into the World Court offices, where they talked to group after group about the situations on Mars and Earth: UN officials, national government representatives, metanational executives, relief organizations, media groups. Everyone wanted to know what was happening on Mars, what Mars planned to do next, what they thought of the situation on Earth, what Mars could offer Earth in the way of help. Nirgal found most of the people he was introduced to fairly easy to talk with; they seemed to understand the respective situations on the two worlds, they were not unrealistic about Mars’s ability to somehow “save Earth”; they did not seem to expect to control Mars ever again, nor did they expect the metanational world order of the antediluvian years to return.

It was likely, however, that the Martians were being screened from people who had a more hostile attitude toward them. Maya was quite certain this was the case. She pointed out how often the negotiators and interviewers revealed what she called their “terracentricity.” Nothing mattered to them, really, but things Earthly; Mars was interesting in some ways, but not actually important. Once this attitude was pointed out to Nirgal, he saw it again and again. And in fact he found it comforting. The corresponding attitude existed on Mars, certainly, as the natives were inevitably areocentric; and it made sense, it was a kind of realism.

Indeed it began to seem to him that it was precisely the Terrans who showed an intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to contemplate: certain metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily in Martian terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily populated countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send large numbers of their people. So he sat in meetings with people from Armscor, Subarashii, China, Indonesia, Ammex, India, Japan, and the Japanese metanat council; and he listened most carefully, and did his best to ask questions rather than talk overmuch; and he saw that some of their staunchest allies up to that point, especially India and China, were likely in the new dispensation to become their most serious problem. Maya nodded emphatically when he made this observation to her, her face grim. “We can only hope that sheer distance will save us,” she said. “How lucky we are that it takes space travel to reach us. That should be a bottleneck for emigration no matter how advanced transport methods become. But we will have to keep our guard up, forever. In fact, don’t speak much of these things here. Don’t speak much at all.”

• • •

During lunch breaks Nirgal asked his escort group— a dozen or more Swiss who stayed with him every waking hour— to walk with him over to the cathedral, which someone told Nirgal was called in Swiss the monster. It had a tower at one end, containing a tight spiral staircase one could ascend, and almost every day Nirgal took several deep breaths and then pushed on up this staircase, gasping and sweating as he neared the top. On clear days, which were not frequent, he could see out the open arches of the top room to the distant abrupt wall of the Alps, a wall he had learned to call the Berner Oberland. This jagged white wall ran from horizon to horizon, like one of the great Martian escarpments, only covered everywhere with snow, everywhere except for on triangular north faces of exposed rock, rock of a light gray color, unlike anything on Mars: granite. Granite mountains, raised by tectonic-plate collision. And the violence of these origins showed.

Between this majestic