They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of the Alps, and landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through a cool Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically up and out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were in Bern.

In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters, everyone with an ID badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to them. The city was small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered power was palpable. Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly arcaded stone buildings, everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift river Aare S-ing through it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow. The people crowding that quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking white people, not as short as most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their talk, and always a good number of them clustering around the Martians and their escorts, who now were blue-uniformed Swiss military police.

Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis headquarters, in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed Nirgal how close to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river of even two meters would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they had the river under control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest mountain range Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the Swiss were good on Mars.

The Praxis building was just a few streets 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.