“But so many problems are rising— cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives— usually men attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, harassing the new settlements and so on. It’s big trouble. And this with immigration already much reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us about that, they want to send up even more. And if they do we’ll become a kind of human disposal site, and all our work will have gone to waste.”

“Hmm.” Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But it was depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the other side, just because the problem was getting hard. “Still, whatever you do has to take the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate anyway, and back it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That’s what’s been happening with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to keep it at the lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with the immigrants as they come.”

The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out at the fresh blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, “The exmetas are a problem as well. They want to come here even more than the UN.”

“Of course.” It was no surprise to Maya that the old metanationals were still such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the Praxis model to survive, and so with that fundamental change in their nature, they were no longer like totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but they were still big and strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of capital accumulated; and they still wanted to do business, to make their members’ livings. Strategies for doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes not: one could make things that people really needed, in a new and better way; or one could play the angles, try to press advantages, try to inflate false needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of strategies, of course, trying to stabilize by diversification as in their old investment days. But that made fighting the bad strategies even harder in a way, because everyone was pursuing them to some extent. And now a lot of exmetas were pursuing very active Martian programs, working for the Terran governments and shipping people up from Earth, building cities and starting farms, mining, production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that emigration from Earth to Mars would not cease until there was an exact balance in their fullnesses; which given the hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would be a disaster for Mars.

“Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently. “Nevertheless, we have to try to help, and we have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis à vis Earth. Or else it will be war.”