They are angling across the terminator—not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction of the sun’s light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little spectral doppelgangers—probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some of the Palawan’s rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they’ll be able to make the jump into hyperspace—some kind of knowledge economy, presumably—before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.