That night when Maya went home, Michel said that this assault marked a new level of respect for the World Court, in that Consolidated had timed its move to the court’s recess; but given the devastation in Kashmir, and the reversal for Praxis, Maya was in no mood to listen to him. Michel was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around. One had to admit it; they lived in a darkening situation. The cycle of madness on Earth was coming around again, caught in its inexorable sine wave, a sine wave more awful even than Maya’s, and soon they would be back in the midst of one of those paroxysms, out of control, struggling to avoid obliteration. She could feel it. They were falling back in.

She began eating in the corner café regularly, to hear the band, and be alone. She sat with her back to the bar, but it was impossible not to think about things. Earth: their curse, their original sin. She tried to understand, she tried to see it as Frank would have seen it, tried to hear his voice analyzing it. The Group of Eleven (the old G-7 plus Korea, Azania, Mexico, and Russia) were still in titular command of much of Terra’s power, in the form of their militaries and their capital. The only real competitors to these old dinosaurs were the big metanationals, which had coalesced like Athenas out of the transnats. The big metanats— and there was only room in the two-world economy for about a dozen of them, by definition— were of course interested in taking over countries in the Group of Eleven, as they had so many smaller countries; the metanats that succeeded in this effort would probably win the dominance game among themselves. And so some of them were trying to divide and conquer the G-11, doing their best to pit the Eleven against each other, or to bribe some to break ranks. All the while competing among themselves, so that while some had allied themselves with G-11 countries, in an attempt to subsume them, others had concentrated on poor countries, or the baby tigers, to build up their strength. So there was a kind of complex balance of power, the strongest old nations against the biggest new metanationals, with the Islamic League, India, China, and the smaller metanats existing as independent loci of power, forces that could not be predicted. Thus the balance of power, like any moment of temporary equipoise, was fragile— necessarily so, as half the population of the Earth lived in India and China, a fact Maya could never quite believe or comprehend— history was so strange— and there was no knowing what side of the balance this half of humanity might come down on.