‘Yet there’s enough funding for maintaining the Inspectorate and projects like the Argus Network?’ He paused for just a second. ‘Don’t bother answering that – just tell me more about this general picture you’re building.’

Janus sketched out more of that picture and filled in the colours, mostly shit-brown and battleship-grey. As well as energy stocks, water supplies across the world were low – it sometimes happened, just like here, that officials had to make a choice between supplying a thirsty population or crop irrigation, and, managing to make no choice at all, ended up with dying crops and a thirsty population. Janus was able to report one instance of great quantities of food rotting inside warehouses because of the lack of power to supply either the refrigeration systems or the vehicles for transporting it. Meanwhile, just a few kilometres away, a scramjet airport was being extended at great cost, just so that Committee delegates and their numerous personal secretaries and bodyguards could more rapidly zip from location to location while going about their important government business.

The overall picture was that, yes, resources were in short supply for the general population, but only because Earth’s massive government apparatus sucked up nearly 80 per cent of them. And, though Saul instinctively attributed that to the Committee’s huge parasitic bureaucracy, something still didn’t quite add up. At the same time, government organizations seemed busier than ever, killing off industries, rerouting supply lines, while huge amounts of materials and equipment were being shifted to unknown locations.

‘I’d like to believe that this crisis is going to result in Committee rule collapsing,’ Saul remarked.

‘No,’ Janus replied, ‘the Committee controls far too large a proportion of world resources.’

Saul nodded to himself, seeing hints of another picture that perhaps Janus had not spotted.

‘A resources crash was inevitable, wasn’t it?’

‘With the world population at its present levels, yes.’

‘So Messina and the rest of those shits take an even tighter grasp on the reins of power, and hoard resources for their own use. After it’s over, they’ll still be holding those reins very tightly indeed.’

‘Yes, that seems to be their intention.’

‘How many people will die before the situation stabilizes?’

‘Stability will not be achieved until the population level returns to that of the early twenty-first century.’

‘So that means about twelve billion people dead. And the remaining six billion ruled by a government that would even like to control their thoughts.’

‘Yes.’

Moving higher up the hill, Saul gazed back to see columns of smoke now rising, big aeros hovering about them like steel vultures, lit up by the fires below, through which shepherds were striding. The stars were starting to come out, as they always would, no matter what happened down here.