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By Root 2217 0

was good at working without plans, and it had already been a cooperative concentrating on the production of basic goods and services, including the longevity treatment. So it only had to accelerate that process to take the lead in showing what could be done in the emergency. The four travelers had seen the results in Trinidad; local movements did most of it, but Praxis was helping projects like that all over the world. William Fort was said to have been critical in leading the fluid response of the “collective transnat,” as he called Praxis. And his mutant metanational was only one of hundreds of service agencies that had come to the fore. All over the world they were taking on the problem of relocating the coastal populations, and building or relocating a new coastal infrastructure on higher ground.

This loose network of reconstruction efforts, however, was running into some resistance from the metanats, who complained that a good deal of their infrastructure, capital and labor were being nationalized, localized, appropriated, salvaged, or stolen outright. Fighting was not infrequent, especially where fights had already been ongoing; the flood, after all, had arrived right in the middle of one of the world’s paroxysms of breakdown and reordering, and although it had altered everything, that struggle was often still happening, sometimes under the cover of the relief efforts.

Sax Russell was particularly aware of this context, convinced as he was that the global wars of 2061 had never resolved the basic inequities of the Terran economic system. In his own peculiar fashion he was insistent on this point in the meetings, and over time it seemed to Nirgal that he was managing to convince the skeptical listeners of the UN and the metanats that they all needed to pursue something like the Praxis method if they wanted themselves and civilization to survive. It did not matter much which of the two they really cared about, he said to Nirgal in private, themselves or civilization; it didn’t matter if they only instituted some Machiavellian simulacrum of the Praxis program; the effect would be much the same in the short term, and everyone needed that grace period of peaceful cooperation.

So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent and engaged, especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to Earth. And Sax Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current living avatar of The Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran culture, Nirgal thought— something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing reincarnation of the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture that only seemed to be able to handle one scientist at a time. Also, to the metanats Sax was the principal creator of the biggest new market in history— not an inconsiderable part of his aura. And, as Maya had pointed out, he was one of that group that had returned from the dead, one of the leaders of the First Hundred.

As all these things, his odd halting style actually helped to build the Terrans’ image of him. Simple verbal difficulty turned him into a kind of oracle; the Terrans seemed to believe that he thought on such a lofty plane that he could only speak in riddles. This was what they wanted, perhaps. This was what science meant to them— after all, current physical theory spoke of ultimate reality as ultramicroscopic loops of string, moving supersymmetrically in ten dimensions. That kind of thing had inured people to strangeness from physicists. And the increasing use of translation AIs was getting everyone used to odd locutions of all types; almost everyone Nirgal met spoke English, but they were all slightly different Englishes, so that Earth seemed to Nirgal an explosion of idiolects, no two persons employing the same tongue.

In that context, Sax was listened to with the utmost seriousness. “The flood marks a break point in history,” he said one morning, to a large general meeting in the Bundeshaus’s National Council Chamber. “It was a natural revolution. Weather on Earth is changed, also the