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transborder territory with lax legal standards, were attracting investors, capital, and research centers in droves. Even before the Windsor International Astroport was completed, more than thirty-five years ago. It might truthfully be said, in fact, that many people died before they were ever able to leave for the High Frontier.
    He learns all this as he walks through the aerostation; he learns it while the topological network of the disaster sketches itself in his brain; he learns it as he travels toward the darkest night that has fallen on Earth.
    The enormous discrepancy between supply and demand had been amplified by the horrors of the Grand Jihad, its psychological consequences, and the progressive abandonment of “unused” space by bloated government bureaucracies.
    There had been some who had tried to survive on makeshift boats, reclamation freighters, unused or pirated offshore platforms in international waters turned into shelters for stateless refugees of ethnic conflict, or even houses floating just off coastlines submerged by rising ocean waters. Others had abandoned the traditional large cities, riddled as they were with every type of civil disorder, for what remained of nature—but this too had soon been corrupted, full of knots of humanity; enormous, metastasizing shantytowns with ever-changing borders; nomadic colonies of Recyclo™ particleboard folding houses swarming like so many ants and devouring trees, earth, and water as they went.
    And then there had been those who attempted to take their chances up there in the Ring.
    Of course, not
everything
was entirely ruined here below, because UniWorld would have nothing left to manage if the world ended. But—and Plotkin asked himself if the feeling might possibly be shared by anyone else on the planet—the overall impression was definitely that
something had been seriously fucked up.
    Why had the giant cartels left the High Frontier? Only the military and the media sent satellites there now. Only the Global Control Bureau—the UHU militia—maintained a handful of stations in circumterrestrial or circumlunar orbit. True, aerospace companies had ended up developing supersonic planes, then transatmospheric ones that could fly businessmen and tourists from Helsinki to Buenos Aires in an hour, but all large-scale space-colonization projects had been frozen during the war, and never taken up again.
    Only a few adventurous souls and mafia associations had persevered.
    Space had become a true Far West, a
Far Sky,
a Frontier that the paltry legal provisions of the UHU Space Development Authority could never hope to regulate. By definition, the Frontier was marginal. It did not move; the margin would remain the margin, and the World was at no risk for change. And one could assume, without too much chance of being mistaken, that the World understood things would remain as they were for a long time to come.
    The bureaucrats of the Global Governance Bureau, who were in charge of Unimanity and the institutions of the UHU, lost all interest in any subsequent development in the Ring. The only thing that mattered was that it did not interfere with daily civil and military operations, global telecommunications, or social and climatic control satellites.
    It was strange, this feeling that in fact the twenty-first century was the first one in which not only had human history more or less stopped, it had actually begun to move in reverse. The state of the space industry, one hundred years after the launch of
Sputnik I,
was unequivocally characteristic of the state of everything, and in any case, there was no equivalent to the current atmosphere of decadence in the long history of human empires.
    For UniWorld, a few eccentric billionaires and a pack of dingoes trying to shut themselves up inside a pressurized sardine can while continuing to pay taxes to the Universal Fiscal Agency might just as well have wanted to hold transsexual orgies on the moon; they were free citizens,