Two Hundred and Six

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Two sincere movements. One disagreement about a timetable. Eleven thousand dead in a city neither of them had any quarrel with. The condition requires one government, one currency and a demonstrable equality. There are two hundred and six sovereign states, and every one of them is the best thing some group of people managed to build out of a catastrophe. Asha Varghese argues for speed, because delay has victims and the victims are the poorest. Idris Oyelaran - a constitutional lawyer from Ibadan, and the finest opponent she will ever have - argues that a species should not make an irreversible change on the first attempt, quickly, on the promise of a gift, from a giver who has said it will not be there afterwards. Both of them are right. There is no fact in the world that decides between them. In the first week of March 2033, three secretariats book venues in Lagos in the same district, because the dates were free. What happens next is not caused by anybody. A banner on a footbridge, a fuel stall, a generator, and a hydrant network at a fifth of its nominal pressure - and four hundred and forty of the best hydrologists in the world in a hotel four kilometres away with a map of the district, every one of whom knows exactly what to do and none of whom has any authority to do it. The middle book of the series and the one that turns it. A disaster that nobody caused, an inquiry that finds nobody responsible, and the reason that finding is the most important thing in its report. No aliens appear in this book. They said their piece in 2031 and went away. What replaces them is a duty roster on a wall in Rotterdam with eleven telephone numbers on it - the first body in human history that can both see a problem whole and act on it, built by municipal engineers who had no position on any of this and simply wanted the water to be able to cross a boundary. Book Three of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.