And of course all this begged the question of why there was so much conflict to begin with. Why, Frank? she thought as she sat listening to the cutting melancholy tangos. What is the motivation of these metanational rulers? But she could see his cynical grin, the one from the years when she had known him. Empires have long half-lives, as he had remarked to her once. And the idea of empire has the longest half-life of all. So that there were people around still trying to be Genghis Khan, to rule the world no matter the cost— executives in the metanats, leaders in the Group of Eleven, generals in the armies. . . .

Or, suggested her mental Frank, calmly, brutally— Earth had a carrying capacity. People had overshot it. Many of them would therefore die. Everyone knew this. The fight for resources was correspondingly fierce. The fighters, perfectly rational. But desperate.

The musicians played on, their tart nostalgia made even more poignant as the months passed, and the long winter came on, and they played through the snowy dusks with the whole world darkening, entre chien et loup. Something so small and brave in that bandoneon wheeze, in those little tunes pattering on in the face of it all: normal life, clung to so stubbornly, in a patch of light under bare-branched trees.

So familiar, this apprehension. This was how it had felt in the years before ‘61. Even though she could not remember any of the individual incidents and crises that had constituted the prewar period last time around, she could still remember the feel of it as fully as if stimulated by a familiar scent; how nothing seemed to matter, how even the best days were pale and chill under the black clouds that lay massed to the west. How the pleasures of town life took on an antic, desperate edge, everyone with their backs to the bar, so to speak, doing their best to counteract a feeling of diminution, of helplessness. Oh yes, this was déjà vu all right.

7

So when they traveled around Hellas and met with Free Mars groups, Maya was thankful to see the people who came, who made the effort to believe that their actions could make a difference, even in the face of the great vortex swirling below them. Maya learned from them that everywhere he went, Nirgal was apparently insisting to the other natives that the situation on Earth was critical to their own fortunes, no matter how distant it seemed. And this was having an effect; now the people who came to the meetings were full of the news of Consolidated and Amexx and Subarashii, and of the recent new incursions into the southern highlands by the UNTA police, incursions which had forced the abandonment of Overhangs, and many hidden sanctuaries. The south was being emptied, all the hidden ones flooding into Hiranyagarbha or Sabishii, or Odessa and the east Hellas canyons.