And so, a year after the eruptions began, Antarctica was only a bit over half as big as it had been— east Antarctic like a half-moon, the Antarctic peninsula like an iced-over New Zealand— in between them, a berg-clotted bubbling shallow sea. And around the rest of the world, sea level was seven meters higher than it had been before.
Not since the last ice age, ten thousand years before, had humanity experienced a natural catastrophe of such magnitude. And this time it affected not just a few million hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, but fifteen billion civilized citizens, living atop a precarious sociotechnological edifice which had already been in great danger of collapse. All the big coastal cities were inundated, whole countries like Bangladesh and Holland and Belize were awash. Most of the unfortunates who lived in such low-lying regions had time to move to higher ground, for the surge was more like a tide than a tidal wave; and then there they all were, somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world’s population— refugees.
It goes without saying that human society was not equipped to handle such a situation. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy, and the early twenty-second century had not been the best of times. Populations were still rising, resources were more and more depleted, conflicts between rich and poor, governments and metanats, had been sharpening everywhere: the catastrophe had struck in the midst of a crisis.
To a certain extent, the catastrophe canceled the crisis. In the face of worldwide desperation, power struggles of all kinds were recontextualized, many rendered phantasmagorical; there were whole populations in need, and legalities of ownership and profit paled in comparison to the problem. The United Nations rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos, and became the clearinghouse for the vast number of emergency relief efforts: migrations inland across national borders, construction of emergency accommodations, distribution of emergency food and supplies. Because of the nature of this work, with its emphasis on rescue and relief, Switzerland and Praxis were in the forefront of helping the UN. UNESCO returned from the dead, along with the World Health Organization. India and China, as the largest of the badly devastated countries, were also extremely influential in the current situation, because how they chose to cope made a big difference everywhere. They made alliances with each other, and with the UN and its new allies; they refused all help from the Group of Eleven, and the metanationals that were now fully intertwined into the affairs of most of the G11 governments.
In other ways, however, the catastrophe only exacerbated the crisis. The metanationals themselves were cast into a very curious position by the flood. Before its onset they had been absorbed in what commentators had been calling the metanatricide, fighting among themselves for final control of the world economy. A few big metanational superclusters had been jockeying for ultimate control of the largest industrial countries, and attempting to subsume the few entities still out of their control: Switzerland, India, China, Praxis, the so-called World Court countries, and so on. Now, with much of the population of Earth occupied in dealing with the flood, the metanats were mostly struggling to regain what control they had had of affairs. In the popular mind they were often linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished sinners— a very convenient bit of magical thinking for Mars and the other antimetanational forces, all of whom were doing their best to seize this chance to beat the metanats to pieces while they were down. The Group of Eleven and the other industrial governments previously associated with the metanats were scrambling to keep their own populations alive, and so could spare little effort to help the great conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning their previous jobs to join the various relief efforts; Praxis-style employee-owned enterprises were gaining in popularity as they took on the emergency, at the same time offering all their members the longevity treatment. Some of the metanats held on to their workforce by reconfiguring along these same lines. And so the struggle for power continued on many levels, but everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.
In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant. Oh it made for an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as ungrateful children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it was one example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to the equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over these days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking ship. Others regarded them as potential saviors, in some ill-defined way: another bit of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful in the notion of a new society forming on the next world out.