Epilogue, Part 3: The Future
Paris and Lausanne
December 13, 2015
The dibiterie stood where it had stood for more than a century, and the same family still owned it, but the neighborhood had changed. The nineteenth arrondissement was no longer West African; most of the African inhabitants had dispersed to other parts of the city, and most of the new arrivals were immigrants from Hungary and the Balkans. They’d learned to enjoy Senegalese lamb as much as any other Frenchmen, but they had their own meeting-places, so the restaurant was no longer a center of music and literature and local politics. It had become, simply and only, a place to have a meal.
To be sure, it was a place to have a good meal – the kitchen still set a high standard. But for Mélisande, who’d grown up on stories of this place, it was still disappointing. “Monsieur Sarkozy,” she called – the owners lived across the city now, so the waiters were all local – and when he came, she paid the bill.
She rose from the table, carefully transferring eight-month-old Ibrahim from her lap to a pushchair, and Bakare did the same for Funmilayo. They made their way out past the sign above the entrance – “Dibiterie Souleymane, depuis 1881” – and into the cool December air.
“I think this was more my aunt’s place than mine,” Mélisande said, and wondered why she was realizing that only now. She’d been to Paris before, and she’d even been in this restaurant as a child. Why hadn’t she noticed then? Or hadn’t there been anything to notice?
“Me too, I think,” said Bakare, and she wondered what he’d noticed. “Does this mean you’ll go to the other interviews?”
“Yes. I’m not sold on Paris. Not until I’ve seen the alternatives. And the next interview is for an eight-tenths time job – I’d be home more.”
Bakare nodded. Like many couples had done since the advent of Congo fever, they’d married young but delayed childbearing. She’d spent the years between as an investigator for the Court of Arbitration and he as a press-service stringer, but now, with children in the picture, they both needed something more sedentary and with regular hours. Hence the interviews for Consistory staff jobs and junior magistracies at the Court of Arbitration: she’d done four so far, and though Paris had come closest, she still wasn’t certain.
The Gare Impératrice Marianne was in the twelfth arrondissement, about four kilometers away, and the walk was a panorama of Paris old and new. Many of the more decrepit parts of the city had been built over during the Red Twenty and the quarantes glorieuses, and some of that had been built over again in the new century. The futurist buildings should have looked out of place amid the remaining nineteenth-century city, but somehow they didn’t. They’d built large during the Red Twenty, but even the PRT had better sense than to build charmless boxes; instead, the apartment blocks and community centers stood among the old buildings like boulders and glass crystals amid a rock garden. The irregular green spaces, canals and artificial lakes that fringed the “social blocks” added to the rock-garden atmosphere; in a couple of places, where sculpture gardens were set amid sand, it seemed almost deliberate. People used the sports fields and community spaces, too; since the thirties, even the futurists had taken pains to make their construction livable, and what might have been sterile under the PRT was full of life and motion.
All this reminded Mélisande why so many of her family had lived here, and why it had been attractive to so many other West Africans: more than a sixth of the people in the city had African ancestors, similar to the number with some Algerian descent. But it also reminded her that she’d grown up on stories of Paris in another time, and that this wasn’t the city in which her family memories lived.
The thought carried her to the station, which they reached with fifteen minutes to spare. At 13:25, the train departed; at 16:10, it arrived in Lausanne.
It was about a kilometer from the station to the lakefront, and they decided to walk it rather than navigate the metro. The air outside was bracing: it was just four degrees above, and with the wind from the mountains, it felt much colder than Paris. Mélisande pulled her coat close and looked anxiously at the twins, but they seemed to be enjoying both the weather and the scenery.
“They’ve been living in Europe most of their lives,” said Bakare. “We’re the ones who need to adjust.”
“It’s been too long since I lived anyplace where there was winter,” Mélisande answered, but she was already feeling it less, and her eyes, as much as Ibrahim’s and Funmi’s, took in the scene around her.
There was nothing futurist about Lausanne. Near the water, where their hotel was and where she would meet with the local Court of Arbitration chambers tomorrow, the buildings dated from the nineteenth century, and the more recent construction in the center city had been carefully built in the same style. There was plenty of green space here too, and the waterfront promenade stretched for miles, but there wasn’t the same sense of perpetual motion: the people were deliberate and unhurried, and the cafés were full of those who’d just left work.
“Here, I think,” said Mélisande.
“Here? You want to be the first African in Switzerland?” That wasn’t quite so, but there were only 50,000 Africans in the confederation and many fewer than that in this city; Mélisande and Bakare drew few glances, but they stood out much more than in Paris or Berlin or even a small French town.
“Not the first African, no. But the first of the family.” She was silent for a moment as they turned a corner. “I was thinking about it on the train – I think it would be good to live in a place with no Abacar memories in it. Here, we can write our own stories.”
“To put the Abacar stamp on a new place? This would be a judicial appointment, so you’d certainly have the chance.”
“We can do that just by living here, if you’re willing.”
Bakare considered for a moment, and then nodded. “If you want to claim Lausanne for the Malê, I’m game. I hope they know what’s about to hit them.”
“We’re not coming with an army.”
“Funmi and Ibrahim might dispute that. Let’s get settled before they do.”
The hotel was in front of them, and as the sun began to set, they walked in.
Hyderabad
December 14, 2015
It seemed that every time Sarah Kaur Singh visited Hyderabad, it took longer to get into the city. The population had doubled since the All-Indian Union moved most of its offices here, industries and universities had streamed in, and the city council was still trying to catch up. It was getting a handle on congestion and pollution, but the key word was “getting.” Maybe things would improve in two years when the high-speed line across the Vindhyas was completed, and they’d get better still when the metro expansion was finished, but for now, the trip in from the airport was a choice between a jammed train and a jammed highway.
At least, if she went by fiacre, she could catch up on work.
The local AS Group office had dispatched a fi, and she scanned her e-mails as she settled in for the trip. Negotiations with the electronics workers’ union in Mysore had gone into overtime, but they were close to resolution. The Bank of India was offering better terms for a construction loan in Delhi. Meetings with the Indian Republic government on the upgrade to the Kismayo launch site were going well but they had some questions, and not entirely coincidentally, a couple of Sanaag subclans in the northern suburbs were demanding more money and jobs. She answered the ones that needed answering, and when she looked up, she saw that the fi was crossing the Musi.
The realtor met her a few blocks north of the river, and after the usual pleasantries, they went looking at offices. The first wasn’t large enough and the second wasn’t modern enough, but the third one was the charm: it was an entire top floor in one of the new towers in Afzal Gunj, and it had all the amenities one could ask for. She walked to the southern end and looked down across the river to the Charminar, and decided that was where her own office would be.
“I think this one will do, Manohar,” she said.
“Good. I had to bribe the owner to keep it open – the half-life of office space these days is measured in hours.” The realtor started to ask something else, then stopped, and then his curiosity got the better of him. “You’re more than tripling your space here – should I be buying shares?”
“We’re going to announce it tomorrow, so I guess I can tell you,” she answered. “We’re moving our head office here.”
“After ninety years in Benares?”
“We’ll keep our space there, but this is where things are happening.” That answer was a bit flippant, Sarah reflected, but it was true. AS Aerospace had opened up a new plant outside Hyderabad last year, more of the universities and government offices that the corporate group partnered with were located here, and the green energy and transportation initiatives were being coordinated through the Union. It wasn’t enough anymore to have government relations offices here and in Delhi and Madras; the company had to go where the action was.
“That will be quite a change,” Manohar said noncommittally. “I’ll let the owner know, and I can be at the AS offices tomorrow morning with a draft lease. I think you’ll find that the terms are very favorable, given the state of the market.”
It’s those last five words that are the important ones, Sarah thought. With the way central Hyderabad real estate was going these days, she suspected that “very favorable” meant “slightly less astronomical.” There also wouldn’t be much room to bargain. She’d have to live with that, and she’d known the move wouldn’t be cheap.
She took her leave of the realtor and, rather than calling for the car again, she left the building on foot and wandered south. The old city was across the bridge, and in the middle distance, the Charminar stood against the gathering dusk; a street market stretched nearly all the way, with stalls selling biryanis and fried kheema and others with saris and jewelry and electronics. The traffic was, if anything, even worse than it had been during the day, and though the flow of people in and out of the metro stations was constant, it could hardly keep up with demand.
She bought some kheema and let her ears go out of focus, taking in the music from the coffee-houses and the conversation that competed with it. Hyderabad was a more polyglot city now than when Sarah was a child: it had been a Telugu and Hindustani town then, but now it had as many languages as India, and the merchants seemed to have a bit of all of them and English besides. This district teemed with newcomers from throughout the Union and from beyond it: many of the member-state embassies were here, as were foreign ones and the offices of the Court of Arbitration and Consistory. Qawwali met popular music, Telugu met Urdu, and both combined into something that was a bit of each.
Further down the road, she picked up an English and a Telugu paper and compared. The English one put the Union and foreign news on the front page: Madras figuring out whether it could become a republic and stay in the Commonwealth, the prime minister of Mysore refusing to step down amid a widening corruption scandal, another round of democracy protests in the Nepali rajyas, the Republic’s budget vote in doubt after defections in the Sansad. The Telugu one gave pride of place to news from the city, and after last year’s decentralization, much of it was about local development projects and environmental controversies and debates in the citizens’ assemblies. The number of Arabic and Sudanic words in the political articles brought her up short, and she realized that devolution and participatory institutions had given an Abacarist cast to the local political vocabulary. You can’t keep the family out of anything, she reflected, and she put the paper down.
“The family,” she repeated. Her family had lived in Benares for ninety years, and that was where Akhtar & Singh had been born and grown into the AS Group. It would feel strange to leave. But her grandfather’s good fortune had begun when he left the place of his birth, hadn’t it? If he’d stayed in the village, what would he have become?
She turned to look north and tried to find her new office. She couldn’t, not today, but there would be time.
Lagos
December 16, 2015
“Using the gene-editing techniques we developed in cooperation with the University of Ilorin,” Amina said, “we succeeded in making several coral species more tolerant of temperature and pH variance than they are currently.” She clicked through a series of images, all showing the genetically engineered coral thriving under conditions where existing coral died, explaining the details of the process as she went.
“We estimate,” she said finally, “that if the edits are introduced at strategic points along a fringing reef, they will spread through the reef within twenty to thirty years, which is sufficient time to ensure its survival at current rates of environmental change.”
With that, the presentation was done and Amina sat down gratefully. She’d just turned twenty-four and was a junior member of the research team, and she felt keenly that she shouldn’t be the one to deliver the project to the Consistory. Her boss had told her she was the best speaker, and that was at least plausible: with her father a professor, one of her mothers a writer and the other a diplomat and politician, communication came naturally. But underneath all that was who her parents were and what family she came from, and she hoped that wasn’t the reason she’d been chosen.
“Senhora,” said the representative from the Amazon Basin Authority, “I congratulate you on the achievement, but I’ve stated my reservations before about the genetic-editing approach. It seems like we’re trying to change the natural world to accommodate the mess we’ve made, and I’m concerned that could become an excuse for continuing to make that mess.”
“And as I’ve said before, I’m fairly sure that’s a red herring,” said the Réseau Jules Verne delegate. “Sea levels and weather will be enough to keep us on course even if we create more adaptable species. Your member states are well aware of what could happen to people and cities if we don’t keep warming below two Celsius even if the fish and trees survive. And if they aren’t, the Pacific states certainly will be.”
This was obviously a long-running argument between the two of them, but it seemed to Amina that there was something more. Beneath the surface arguments against genetic editing was the age-old fear of playing God, and there was also the concern about whether the Consistory Environmental Section ought to making these decisions at all. Most countries accepted that a global crisis called for a global response, but with the Section’s budget this year approaching a trillion dollars, its coordination of efforts sometimes looked a lot like governing. Its grants had become a significant part of the alternative-energy, transport and biotech economies, and even more than that: the neighborhood where the local Consistory offices stood, with experimental zero-carbon-footprint architecture and waste management, had been built in part with Environmental Section loans. The signatories to the environmental change treaty had held out for limits on authority and World People’s Chamber oversight, but that raised the question of whether the Chamber might be turning into a government in disguise…
“My concerns are somewhat different,” said the European observer. “Attempts to introduce new species in existing ecosystems haven’t done well in the past…”
“This isn’t an invasive species, though,” Amina answered. “We’re making some edits to a species that’s already part of the local ecosystem – a vital part of it, in fact. We’re not really introducing anything new, just making the existing system more tolerant of change.”
“But there is something new in all this,” said Salifou from the League of the Tree of Ténéré. “If I understand correctly, part of the way your edited coral deals with increasing acidity is through waste elimination. Wouldn’t that create concentrations of acidity, and damage the algae that depend on coral waste? Reef ecosystems are a very fragile balance, and nobody wants to save one part of them at the expense of the others.”
“We took that into account,” Amina said. That had been drilled into her from day one, and it was something her parents had taught her even before she’d gone into biotech: an ecosystem is a society, and if you change one thing, everything else changes. And if you change one thing, you might never be able to stop…
She shook her head clear and continued. “We believe – and our preliminary tests confirm – that the breakdown process reduces the acidity in the waste to acceptable levels, and we’ve introduced modifications to minimize the effect on algae and fish. We’re actually hoping that some of the modifications might help the reef defend against invasive species, but that’s still in a very early stage of development.”
Salifou nodded, and the American representative, who hadn’t said a word thus far, nodded along with him. There was a little more discussion and then, by consensus, it was finished. “Give us a few minutes,” Salifou said, and the delegation adjourned to executive session.
Amina, now alone in the room, wondered what was being said behind closed doors. The representatives who’d heard her presentation wouldn’t have the final say about the project’s continued funding – that would have to be voted on by hundreds of Environmental Section members and a People’s Chamber committee – but their report would carry a great deal of weight. They’d been the ones who approved the loans for Green Lekki, and their opinion would be even more important here, because Amina’s project wouldn’t deliver a profit to the Consistory.
She tried not to be anxious, but she couldn’t succeed, and when the delegates returned to the conference room, she let her breath out a little too audibly. Fortunately, there was no reaction beyond Salifou’s amused expression and a trace of laughter from the European Union delegate – Zdzisława, her name was.
“We’re going to recommend this project for further testing,” Salifou said. “We’ll want at least two years of simulated ecosystem research in environments as close as possible to the reefs, and we’ll want a representative sample of reef ecosystems simulated. We’d like to see a computer simulation workup too, and more development on the metabolic waste breakdown. Subject to that, we’ve voted to recommend three years of funding, at which point, if the results look promising, we’ll look at controlled biosphere introduction.”
“Thank you,” said Amina, and hoped that the gratitude didn’t show too strongly. There was hard work to be done, but that at least wouldn’t depend on the Consistory’s petty politics, and at least it wouldn’t depend on her persuasion.
Tehran
December 17, 2015
For twenty-five years, when they were both at home, Taraneh Farrokhzad and Ladan Kamrani had met for lunch on Thursdays. Taraneh hadn’t been home for the last six months, and they missed the ritual; when they met at the end of a half-day of work, both were eager to pick up where they’d left off.
No one gave them a second glance as they found a table at the coffee-house. When they’d started their meetings, they’d collected many. It had been unusual in those days for a woman in a chador like Taraneh to meet socially with one like Ladan who looked like she’d stepped off a street in Berlin. It had been rare, even, for someone who lived in the industrial suburbs and taught at the open university to come to the center city if she didn’t have business there, and most had kept their business as short as possible.
That had changed. A friendship like theirs still wasn’t precisely normal, but it was far from unique. Traditional people came to eat in downtown restaurants and stayed for the galleries and concerts; people from the center sometimes went to the suburbs for theirmusical shows and plays. The two worlds were still separate, but they acknowledged each other, and sometimes even looked on one another with appreciation.
“Tell me where you’ve been,” said Ladan, settling to her coffee; she certainly was one of those who appreciated.
“All over. Rwanda, Bornu, South Carolina, Russia, Italy, Honduras…”
“Am I supposed to guess what they all have in common?”
Taraneh had been about to say something more, but stopped. “Well, can you?”
“Anarchist communities? But that doesn’t explain Bornu or South Carolina…”
“Close. It was for my book on parallel institutions, and what happens when they become the state.”
Ladan put down her coffee and considered. “I’m not sure you could ever call the Rwandan communities parallel, but the way they formed was close enough… I guess you’re concerned with their survival?”
“Or fall. These communities always form around a strong consensus – if there weren’t one, there’d be no need for them – and if the consensus breaks, they have to adapt or die. South Carolina, when the Circles became corrupt – they’re social clubs now. Other Americans think South Carolina is strange socially, especially in the lowlands, but the government’s the same as everywhere else. Or parts of Russia when the region-states started forming – I got to see a couple that are in the process of forming now.”
“And in Rwanda, they’ve adapted…”
“In Honduras too, but what’s interesting about Honduras is that the cofradistas’ consensus exists side by side with another one.”
Ladan stopped short again. “Why do I think you’re really talking about here?”
“Because I am. It’s one thing when parallel communities become the state, but another when they only become part of the state. In a decentralized country like Honduras or this one, things can be stable for a long time, but the encounters still cause friction… Not everyone is like us, or like the people you see in chadors at the opera house. You should hear some of the preaching where I live and out in the country, and I know some of what they say here about us – there’s more understanding now, but also more hate.”
“I’ve noticed, yes.” Ladan’s plate was in front of her, temporarily forgotten. “So in Honduras, in Italy – what happens?”
“There’s a crisis. There’s always a crisis. And it depends on whether the two societies are on the same or opposite sides.”
They sipped coffee for a while in silence, and were about to resume the conversation when they heard the sound of chanting on the street, loud and coming closer. “Ya Hossein!” was the cry, and it was coming from thousands of throats like it had in the revolution.
“What’s that?” Taraneh asked, and she rushed to the window to look.
Ladan was beside her, and was the first to see the signs the marchers carried. “They’re protesting against the security law,” she said. “Some Deobandis crossed the Afghan border last month with a bomb, and the prime minister wants more police power. This happened when you were gone – there’s been a lot of argument, and the vote in the Majlis looks close.”
“Now? The last Deobandi attack was years ago…”
“That’s why people are scared. And before, there was a different prime minister.”
The first of the protesters were passing now. “We should join them,” Ladan said.
“There will be police…”
“Every day is Ashura.”
“You say this?” Taraneh laughed out loud. “You, who doesn’t believe in God? I think I’ll come with you just to hear you say ‘Ya Hossein.’”
“It’s important.”
Taraneh nodded, and they put on their coats and went out onto the street. It was an avenue of shops and cafés, and they joined the stream of women in chadors and women in jeans, bearded imams and youths in German clothes. Somewhere ahead was Revolution Square, with the Majlis to one side and the Republic Monument in the center, and what would happen when they got there, no one knew.
530 km above Cape Town
December 19, 2015
Martin Chibulu turned the last bolt on the weather satellite he was repairing, ran the test cycle, and let himself drift back on his tether. There were twenty minutes left in his shift and he had nothing more to do, and three hundred miles below, South Africa was approaching.
He looked around the curve of the world, watched the clouds move across the land, saw the rivers and plains and deserts. Somewhere near the limit of his vision was Kazembe and the city of his birth. He looked for it in the haze and couldn’t find it, but it didn’t matter: two more orbits and it would be night in this part of the world, and he’d be able to see the lights. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before.
The vista swept east and north, and Chibulu hung from the crane arm and let it pass. He would never get tired of this view. The job up here paid well, but the truth was he’d have done it for free, and so would most of the other Bazembe on the station. They said that every Muzembe had three homes, Kazembe, Germany, and the stars; he’d lived in two of them, and this was as close as he’d get to the third.
Almost before he realized, it was sixteen hundred by station time, and he gripped the tether and hauled himself in. He reached the arm, unclipped his harness and began hand-over-handing toward the station proper. Ahead of him was the warren of interconnected modules that had grown in all directions over the past forty years, along with the cranes, cables and mooring bars that everyone called “the yard.” It wasn’t a true shipyard – it still made no economic sense to manufacture parts up here – but there were always things being put together and fixed, and there was plenty to keep a crew of mechanics busy. He wasn’t the only one making his way toward the airlock for shift change.
He greeted Thibodeaux and Reddy at the entrance and gave them a quick safety briefing before they headed out. Inside, he hung up his suit and went looking for the gym; he wanted a workout and a meal, and then a movie or some improvised music in a common room. But Mutale, his boss, caught him halfway.
“Martin! Good, I was hoping I’d catch you.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” Martin said, but he reached out and grabbed a handle to stop his forward motion. “Paperwork I need to sign?”
“No, not this time. They’re recruiting for Mars – chief of maintenance. I could put in a good word for you if you want it. You’d have to take a few engineering classes, but that shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
No, it wouldn’t be – Martin still had his university math, and anyone who worked here couldn’t help picking up some engineering. And Mars tempted him more than he could say – it would have tempted any of the Bazembe who made up one in five of the station personnel. The mission would leave in two years, and it would give humanity its first practice in surviving long journeys; it would also build on what the moon had taught about sustaining life and using the resources of hostile environments. What this and future missions learned would feed the technologies that might one day be used in terraforming – technologies that wouldn’t pay off for hundreds or even thousands of years, but to someone raised on Masumba’s Starwind Epic, a thousand years seemed a reasonable length of time.
But temptation passed, and slowly, Martin shook his head. “That job is for someone without a family,” he said. “Three months on and three off are livable, but three years…”
“I understand,” Mutale answered. “I’ll be putting out a general call tomorrow – I just wanted to give you first refusal.”
“I wish I didn’t have to refuse.”
“Me too. They’ll need someone to keep them from falling apart out there.”
“Oh, they’ll find someone. All the young ones will want to go.”
Mutale patted Martin’s shoulder and they drifted in opposite directions. The gym was on the other side of the garden modules, and there was a galley and common room not far off. But Martin was still preoccupied, and after he’d eaten, he decided to forgo the movie.
He went to the observation room instead, and by chance or otherwise, southern Africa was again below him. He could see the lights of Ndola clearly now, part of the belt of cities stretching like a constellation across northern Kazembe. Somewhere down there, his family was getting ready to end its day. But past the city lights, beyond the curve of the world, were the stars in their thousands, and the unseen billions beyond them.
It seemed that they were waiting.
Paris and Lausanne
December 13, 2015
The dibiterie stood where it had stood for more than a century, and the same family still owned it, but the neighborhood had changed. The nineteenth arrondissement was no longer West African; most of the African inhabitants had dispersed to other parts of the city, and most of the new arrivals were immigrants from Hungary and the Balkans. They’d learned to enjoy Senegalese lamb as much as any other Frenchmen, but they had their own meeting-places, so the restaurant was no longer a center of music and literature and local politics. It had become, simply and only, a place to have a meal.
To be sure, it was a place to have a good meal – the kitchen still set a high standard. But for Mélisande, who’d grown up on stories of this place, it was still disappointing. “Monsieur Sarkozy,” she called – the owners lived across the city now, so the waiters were all local – and when he came, she paid the bill.
She rose from the table, carefully transferring eight-month-old Ibrahim from her lap to a pushchair, and Bakare did the same for Funmilayo. They made their way out past the sign above the entrance – “Dibiterie Souleymane, depuis 1881” – and into the cool December air.
“I think this was more my aunt’s place than mine,” Mélisande said, and wondered why she was realizing that only now. She’d been to Paris before, and she’d even been in this restaurant as a child. Why hadn’t she noticed then? Or hadn’t there been anything to notice?
“Me too, I think,” said Bakare, and she wondered what he’d noticed. “Does this mean you’ll go to the other interviews?”
“Yes. I’m not sold on Paris. Not until I’ve seen the alternatives. And the next interview is for an eight-tenths time job – I’d be home more.”
Bakare nodded. Like many couples had done since the advent of Congo fever, they’d married young but delayed childbearing. She’d spent the years between as an investigator for the Court of Arbitration and he as a press-service stringer, but now, with children in the picture, they both needed something more sedentary and with regular hours. Hence the interviews for Consistory staff jobs and junior magistracies at the Court of Arbitration: she’d done four so far, and though Paris had come closest, she still wasn’t certain.
The Gare Impératrice Marianne was in the twelfth arrondissement, about four kilometers away, and the walk was a panorama of Paris old and new. Many of the more decrepit parts of the city had been built over during the Red Twenty and the quarantes glorieuses, and some of that had been built over again in the new century. The futurist buildings should have looked out of place amid the remaining nineteenth-century city, but somehow they didn’t. They’d built large during the Red Twenty, but even the PRT had better sense than to build charmless boxes; instead, the apartment blocks and community centers stood among the old buildings like boulders and glass crystals amid a rock garden. The irregular green spaces, canals and artificial lakes that fringed the “social blocks” added to the rock-garden atmosphere; in a couple of places, where sculpture gardens were set amid sand, it seemed almost deliberate. People used the sports fields and community spaces, too; since the thirties, even the futurists had taken pains to make their construction livable, and what might have been sterile under the PRT was full of life and motion.
All this reminded Mélisande why so many of her family had lived here, and why it had been attractive to so many other West Africans: more than a sixth of the people in the city had African ancestors, similar to the number with some Algerian descent. But it also reminded her that she’d grown up on stories of Paris in another time, and that this wasn’t the city in which her family memories lived.
The thought carried her to the station, which they reached with fifteen minutes to spare. At 13:25, the train departed; at 16:10, it arrived in Lausanne.
It was about a kilometer from the station to the lakefront, and they decided to walk it rather than navigate the metro. The air outside was bracing: it was just four degrees above, and with the wind from the mountains, it felt much colder than Paris. Mélisande pulled her coat close and looked anxiously at the twins, but they seemed to be enjoying both the weather and the scenery.
“They’ve been living in Europe most of their lives,” said Bakare. “We’re the ones who need to adjust.”
“It’s been too long since I lived anyplace where there was winter,” Mélisande answered, but she was already feeling it less, and her eyes, as much as Ibrahim’s and Funmi’s, took in the scene around her.
There was nothing futurist about Lausanne. Near the water, where their hotel was and where she would meet with the local Court of Arbitration chambers tomorrow, the buildings dated from the nineteenth century, and the more recent construction in the center city had been carefully built in the same style. There was plenty of green space here too, and the waterfront promenade stretched for miles, but there wasn’t the same sense of perpetual motion: the people were deliberate and unhurried, and the cafés were full of those who’d just left work.
“Here, I think,” said Mélisande.
“Here? You want to be the first African in Switzerland?” That wasn’t quite so, but there were only 50,000 Africans in the confederation and many fewer than that in this city; Mélisande and Bakare drew few glances, but they stood out much more than in Paris or Berlin or even a small French town.
“Not the first African, no. But the first of the family.” She was silent for a moment as they turned a corner. “I was thinking about it on the train – I think it would be good to live in a place with no Abacar memories in it. Here, we can write our own stories.”
“To put the Abacar stamp on a new place? This would be a judicial appointment, so you’d certainly have the chance.”
“We can do that just by living here, if you’re willing.”
Bakare considered for a moment, and then nodded. “If you want to claim Lausanne for the Malê, I’m game. I hope they know what’s about to hit them.”
“We’re not coming with an army.”
“Funmi and Ibrahim might dispute that. Let’s get settled before they do.”
The hotel was in front of them, and as the sun began to set, they walked in.
*******
Hyderabad
December 14, 2015
It seemed that every time Sarah Kaur Singh visited Hyderabad, it took longer to get into the city. The population had doubled since the All-Indian Union moved most of its offices here, industries and universities had streamed in, and the city council was still trying to catch up. It was getting a handle on congestion and pollution, but the key word was “getting.” Maybe things would improve in two years when the high-speed line across the Vindhyas was completed, and they’d get better still when the metro expansion was finished, but for now, the trip in from the airport was a choice between a jammed train and a jammed highway.
At least, if she went by fiacre, she could catch up on work.
The local AS Group office had dispatched a fi, and she scanned her e-mails as she settled in for the trip. Negotiations with the electronics workers’ union in Mysore had gone into overtime, but they were close to resolution. The Bank of India was offering better terms for a construction loan in Delhi. Meetings with the Indian Republic government on the upgrade to the Kismayo launch site were going well but they had some questions, and not entirely coincidentally, a couple of Sanaag subclans in the northern suburbs were demanding more money and jobs. She answered the ones that needed answering, and when she looked up, she saw that the fi was crossing the Musi.
The realtor met her a few blocks north of the river, and after the usual pleasantries, they went looking at offices. The first wasn’t large enough and the second wasn’t modern enough, but the third one was the charm: it was an entire top floor in one of the new towers in Afzal Gunj, and it had all the amenities one could ask for. She walked to the southern end and looked down across the river to the Charminar, and decided that was where her own office would be.
“I think this one will do, Manohar,” she said.
“Good. I had to bribe the owner to keep it open – the half-life of office space these days is measured in hours.” The realtor started to ask something else, then stopped, and then his curiosity got the better of him. “You’re more than tripling your space here – should I be buying shares?”
“We’re going to announce it tomorrow, so I guess I can tell you,” she answered. “We’re moving our head office here.”
“After ninety years in Benares?”
“We’ll keep our space there, but this is where things are happening.” That answer was a bit flippant, Sarah reflected, but it was true. AS Aerospace had opened up a new plant outside Hyderabad last year, more of the universities and government offices that the corporate group partnered with were located here, and the green energy and transportation initiatives were being coordinated through the Union. It wasn’t enough anymore to have government relations offices here and in Delhi and Madras; the company had to go where the action was.
“That will be quite a change,” Manohar said noncommittally. “I’ll let the owner know, and I can be at the AS offices tomorrow morning with a draft lease. I think you’ll find that the terms are very favorable, given the state of the market.”
It’s those last five words that are the important ones, Sarah thought. With the way central Hyderabad real estate was going these days, she suspected that “very favorable” meant “slightly less astronomical.” There also wouldn’t be much room to bargain. She’d have to live with that, and she’d known the move wouldn’t be cheap.
She took her leave of the realtor and, rather than calling for the car again, she left the building on foot and wandered south. The old city was across the bridge, and in the middle distance, the Charminar stood against the gathering dusk; a street market stretched nearly all the way, with stalls selling biryanis and fried kheema and others with saris and jewelry and electronics. The traffic was, if anything, even worse than it had been during the day, and though the flow of people in and out of the metro stations was constant, it could hardly keep up with demand.
She bought some kheema and let her ears go out of focus, taking in the music from the coffee-houses and the conversation that competed with it. Hyderabad was a more polyglot city now than when Sarah was a child: it had been a Telugu and Hindustani town then, but now it had as many languages as India, and the merchants seemed to have a bit of all of them and English besides. This district teemed with newcomers from throughout the Union and from beyond it: many of the member-state embassies were here, as were foreign ones and the offices of the Court of Arbitration and Consistory. Qawwali met popular music, Telugu met Urdu, and both combined into something that was a bit of each.
Further down the road, she picked up an English and a Telugu paper and compared. The English one put the Union and foreign news on the front page: Madras figuring out whether it could become a republic and stay in the Commonwealth, the prime minister of Mysore refusing to step down amid a widening corruption scandal, another round of democracy protests in the Nepali rajyas, the Republic’s budget vote in doubt after defections in the Sansad. The Telugu one gave pride of place to news from the city, and after last year’s decentralization, much of it was about local development projects and environmental controversies and debates in the citizens’ assemblies. The number of Arabic and Sudanic words in the political articles brought her up short, and she realized that devolution and participatory institutions had given an Abacarist cast to the local political vocabulary. You can’t keep the family out of anything, she reflected, and she put the paper down.
“The family,” she repeated. Her family had lived in Benares for ninety years, and that was where Akhtar & Singh had been born and grown into the AS Group. It would feel strange to leave. But her grandfather’s good fortune had begun when he left the place of his birth, hadn’t it? If he’d stayed in the village, what would he have become?
She turned to look north and tried to find her new office. She couldn’t, not today, but there would be time.
*******
Lagos
December 16, 2015
“Using the gene-editing techniques we developed in cooperation with the University of Ilorin,” Amina said, “we succeeded in making several coral species more tolerant of temperature and pH variance than they are currently.” She clicked through a series of images, all showing the genetically engineered coral thriving under conditions where existing coral died, explaining the details of the process as she went.
“We estimate,” she said finally, “that if the edits are introduced at strategic points along a fringing reef, they will spread through the reef within twenty to thirty years, which is sufficient time to ensure its survival at current rates of environmental change.”
With that, the presentation was done and Amina sat down gratefully. She’d just turned twenty-four and was a junior member of the research team, and she felt keenly that she shouldn’t be the one to deliver the project to the Consistory. Her boss had told her she was the best speaker, and that was at least plausible: with her father a professor, one of her mothers a writer and the other a diplomat and politician, communication came naturally. But underneath all that was who her parents were and what family she came from, and she hoped that wasn’t the reason she’d been chosen.
“Senhora,” said the representative from the Amazon Basin Authority, “I congratulate you on the achievement, but I’ve stated my reservations before about the genetic-editing approach. It seems like we’re trying to change the natural world to accommodate the mess we’ve made, and I’m concerned that could become an excuse for continuing to make that mess.”
“And as I’ve said before, I’m fairly sure that’s a red herring,” said the Réseau Jules Verne delegate. “Sea levels and weather will be enough to keep us on course even if we create more adaptable species. Your member states are well aware of what could happen to people and cities if we don’t keep warming below two Celsius even if the fish and trees survive. And if they aren’t, the Pacific states certainly will be.”
This was obviously a long-running argument between the two of them, but it seemed to Amina that there was something more. Beneath the surface arguments against genetic editing was the age-old fear of playing God, and there was also the concern about whether the Consistory Environmental Section ought to making these decisions at all. Most countries accepted that a global crisis called for a global response, but with the Section’s budget this year approaching a trillion dollars, its coordination of efforts sometimes looked a lot like governing. Its grants had become a significant part of the alternative-energy, transport and biotech economies, and even more than that: the neighborhood where the local Consistory offices stood, with experimental zero-carbon-footprint architecture and waste management, had been built in part with Environmental Section loans. The signatories to the environmental change treaty had held out for limits on authority and World People’s Chamber oversight, but that raised the question of whether the Chamber might be turning into a government in disguise…
“My concerns are somewhat different,” said the European observer. “Attempts to introduce new species in existing ecosystems haven’t done well in the past…”
“This isn’t an invasive species, though,” Amina answered. “We’re making some edits to a species that’s already part of the local ecosystem – a vital part of it, in fact. We’re not really introducing anything new, just making the existing system more tolerant of change.”
“But there is something new in all this,” said Salifou from the League of the Tree of Ténéré. “If I understand correctly, part of the way your edited coral deals with increasing acidity is through waste elimination. Wouldn’t that create concentrations of acidity, and damage the algae that depend on coral waste? Reef ecosystems are a very fragile balance, and nobody wants to save one part of them at the expense of the others.”
“We took that into account,” Amina said. That had been drilled into her from day one, and it was something her parents had taught her even before she’d gone into biotech: an ecosystem is a society, and if you change one thing, everything else changes. And if you change one thing, you might never be able to stop…
She shook her head clear and continued. “We believe – and our preliminary tests confirm – that the breakdown process reduces the acidity in the waste to acceptable levels, and we’ve introduced modifications to minimize the effect on algae and fish. We’re actually hoping that some of the modifications might help the reef defend against invasive species, but that’s still in a very early stage of development.”
Salifou nodded, and the American representative, who hadn’t said a word thus far, nodded along with him. There was a little more discussion and then, by consensus, it was finished. “Give us a few minutes,” Salifou said, and the delegation adjourned to executive session.
Amina, now alone in the room, wondered what was being said behind closed doors. The representatives who’d heard her presentation wouldn’t have the final say about the project’s continued funding – that would have to be voted on by hundreds of Environmental Section members and a People’s Chamber committee – but their report would carry a great deal of weight. They’d been the ones who approved the loans for Green Lekki, and their opinion would be even more important here, because Amina’s project wouldn’t deliver a profit to the Consistory.
She tried not to be anxious, but she couldn’t succeed, and when the delegates returned to the conference room, she let her breath out a little too audibly. Fortunately, there was no reaction beyond Salifou’s amused expression and a trace of laughter from the European Union delegate – Zdzisława, her name was.
“We’re going to recommend this project for further testing,” Salifou said. “We’ll want at least two years of simulated ecosystem research in environments as close as possible to the reefs, and we’ll want a representative sample of reef ecosystems simulated. We’d like to see a computer simulation workup too, and more development on the metabolic waste breakdown. Subject to that, we’ve voted to recommend three years of funding, at which point, if the results look promising, we’ll look at controlled biosphere introduction.”
“Thank you,” said Amina, and hoped that the gratitude didn’t show too strongly. There was hard work to be done, but that at least wouldn’t depend on the Consistory’s petty politics, and at least it wouldn’t depend on her persuasion.
*******
Tehran
December 17, 2015
For twenty-five years, when they were both at home, Taraneh Farrokhzad and Ladan Kamrani had met for lunch on Thursdays. Taraneh hadn’t been home for the last six months, and they missed the ritual; when they met at the end of a half-day of work, both were eager to pick up where they’d left off.
No one gave them a second glance as they found a table at the coffee-house. When they’d started their meetings, they’d collected many. It had been unusual in those days for a woman in a chador like Taraneh to meet socially with one like Ladan who looked like she’d stepped off a street in Berlin. It had been rare, even, for someone who lived in the industrial suburbs and taught at the open university to come to the center city if she didn’t have business there, and most had kept their business as short as possible.
That had changed. A friendship like theirs still wasn’t precisely normal, but it was far from unique. Traditional people came to eat in downtown restaurants and stayed for the galleries and concerts; people from the center sometimes went to the suburbs for theirmusical shows and plays. The two worlds were still separate, but they acknowledged each other, and sometimes even looked on one another with appreciation.
“Tell me where you’ve been,” said Ladan, settling to her coffee; she certainly was one of those who appreciated.
“All over. Rwanda, Bornu, South Carolina, Russia, Italy, Honduras…”
“Am I supposed to guess what they all have in common?”
Taraneh had been about to say something more, but stopped. “Well, can you?”
“Anarchist communities? But that doesn’t explain Bornu or South Carolina…”
“Close. It was for my book on parallel institutions, and what happens when they become the state.”
Ladan put down her coffee and considered. “I’m not sure you could ever call the Rwandan communities parallel, but the way they formed was close enough… I guess you’re concerned with their survival?”
“Or fall. These communities always form around a strong consensus – if there weren’t one, there’d be no need for them – and if the consensus breaks, they have to adapt or die. South Carolina, when the Circles became corrupt – they’re social clubs now. Other Americans think South Carolina is strange socially, especially in the lowlands, but the government’s the same as everywhere else. Or parts of Russia when the region-states started forming – I got to see a couple that are in the process of forming now.”
“And in Rwanda, they’ve adapted…”
“In Honduras too, but what’s interesting about Honduras is that the cofradistas’ consensus exists side by side with another one.”
Ladan stopped short again. “Why do I think you’re really talking about here?”
“Because I am. It’s one thing when parallel communities become the state, but another when they only become part of the state. In a decentralized country like Honduras or this one, things can be stable for a long time, but the encounters still cause friction… Not everyone is like us, or like the people you see in chadors at the opera house. You should hear some of the preaching where I live and out in the country, and I know some of what they say here about us – there’s more understanding now, but also more hate.”
“I’ve noticed, yes.” Ladan’s plate was in front of her, temporarily forgotten. “So in Honduras, in Italy – what happens?”
“There’s a crisis. There’s always a crisis. And it depends on whether the two societies are on the same or opposite sides.”
They sipped coffee for a while in silence, and were about to resume the conversation when they heard the sound of chanting on the street, loud and coming closer. “Ya Hossein!” was the cry, and it was coming from thousands of throats like it had in the revolution.
“What’s that?” Taraneh asked, and she rushed to the window to look.
Ladan was beside her, and was the first to see the signs the marchers carried. “They’re protesting against the security law,” she said. “Some Deobandis crossed the Afghan border last month with a bomb, and the prime minister wants more police power. This happened when you were gone – there’s been a lot of argument, and the vote in the Majlis looks close.”
“Now? The last Deobandi attack was years ago…”
“That’s why people are scared. And before, there was a different prime minister.”
The first of the protesters were passing now. “We should join them,” Ladan said.
“There will be police…”
“Every day is Ashura.”
“You say this?” Taraneh laughed out loud. “You, who doesn’t believe in God? I think I’ll come with you just to hear you say ‘Ya Hossein.’”
“It’s important.”
Taraneh nodded, and they put on their coats and went out onto the street. It was an avenue of shops and cafés, and they joined the stream of women in chadors and women in jeans, bearded imams and youths in German clothes. Somewhere ahead was Revolution Square, with the Majlis to one side and the Republic Monument in the center, and what would happen when they got there, no one knew.
*******
530 km above Cape Town
December 19, 2015
Martin Chibulu turned the last bolt on the weather satellite he was repairing, ran the test cycle, and let himself drift back on his tether. There were twenty minutes left in his shift and he had nothing more to do, and three hundred miles below, South Africa was approaching.
He looked around the curve of the world, watched the clouds move across the land, saw the rivers and plains and deserts. Somewhere near the limit of his vision was Kazembe and the city of his birth. He looked for it in the haze and couldn’t find it, but it didn’t matter: two more orbits and it would be night in this part of the world, and he’d be able to see the lights. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before.
The vista swept east and north, and Chibulu hung from the crane arm and let it pass. He would never get tired of this view. The job up here paid well, but the truth was he’d have done it for free, and so would most of the other Bazembe on the station. They said that every Muzembe had three homes, Kazembe, Germany, and the stars; he’d lived in two of them, and this was as close as he’d get to the third.
Almost before he realized, it was sixteen hundred by station time, and he gripped the tether and hauled himself in. He reached the arm, unclipped his harness and began hand-over-handing toward the station proper. Ahead of him was the warren of interconnected modules that had grown in all directions over the past forty years, along with the cranes, cables and mooring bars that everyone called “the yard.” It wasn’t a true shipyard – it still made no economic sense to manufacture parts up here – but there were always things being put together and fixed, and there was plenty to keep a crew of mechanics busy. He wasn’t the only one making his way toward the airlock for shift change.
He greeted Thibodeaux and Reddy at the entrance and gave them a quick safety briefing before they headed out. Inside, he hung up his suit and went looking for the gym; he wanted a workout and a meal, and then a movie or some improvised music in a common room. But Mutale, his boss, caught him halfway.
“Martin! Good, I was hoping I’d catch you.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” Martin said, but he reached out and grabbed a handle to stop his forward motion. “Paperwork I need to sign?”
“No, not this time. They’re recruiting for Mars – chief of maintenance. I could put in a good word for you if you want it. You’d have to take a few engineering classes, but that shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
No, it wouldn’t be – Martin still had his university math, and anyone who worked here couldn’t help picking up some engineering. And Mars tempted him more than he could say – it would have tempted any of the Bazembe who made up one in five of the station personnel. The mission would leave in two years, and it would give humanity its first practice in surviving long journeys; it would also build on what the moon had taught about sustaining life and using the resources of hostile environments. What this and future missions learned would feed the technologies that might one day be used in terraforming – technologies that wouldn’t pay off for hundreds or even thousands of years, but to someone raised on Masumba’s Starwind Epic, a thousand years seemed a reasonable length of time.
But temptation passed, and slowly, Martin shook his head. “That job is for someone without a family,” he said. “Three months on and three off are livable, but three years…”
“I understand,” Mutale answered. “I’ll be putting out a general call tomorrow – I just wanted to give you first refusal.”
“I wish I didn’t have to refuse.”
“Me too. They’ll need someone to keep them from falling apart out there.”
“Oh, they’ll find someone. All the young ones will want to go.”
Mutale patted Martin’s shoulder and they drifted in opposite directions. The gym was on the other side of the garden modules, and there was a galley and common room not far off. But Martin was still preoccupied, and after he’d eaten, he decided to forgo the movie.
He went to the observation room instead, and by chance or otherwise, southern Africa was again below him. He could see the lights of Ndola clearly now, part of the belt of cities stretching like a constellation across northern Kazembe. Somewhere down there, his family was getting ready to end its day. But past the city lights, beyond the curve of the world, were the stars in their thousands, and the unseen billions beyond them.
It seemed that they were waiting.
