Distress

20

The easiest way to travel beyond the tram lines turned out to be hitching a ride on one of the balloon-tired trucks used to carry produce inland. The trucks were automated, and followed predetermined routes; people seemed to treat them as public transport, although the sea farmers effectively controlled the schedule by the delays they imposed, loading and unloading them. The bed of each truck was divided crosswise by a dozen low barriers, forming spaces into which crates were slotted, and doubling as benches for the passengers.

There was no sign of Kuwale; ve seemed to have found another route, or left for the rendezvous point much earlier. I sat with about twenty other people on the ride northeast from the terminus, resisting the urge to ask the woman beside me what would happen if one of the farmers insisted on loading so many crates that there was no room for anyone to return—or what discouraged passengers from looting the food. The harmony of Stateless still seemed precarious to me, but I was growing increasingly reluctant to give voice to questions which amounted to asking: Why don’t you people all run amok, and make your own lives as miserable as possible?

I didn’t believe for a moment that the rest of the planet could ever function like this—or that anyone on Stateless would particularly want it to—but I was beginning to understand Monroe’s cautious optimism. If I lived here, myself, would I try to tear the place down? No. Would I bring about riots and massacres inadvertently, in pursuit of some short-term gain? Hopefully not. So, what ludicrous vanity allowed me to imagine that I was so much more reasonable or intelligent than the average resident of the island? If I could recognize the precariousness of their society, so could they—and act accordingly. It was an active balance, flying by wire, survival through self-awareness.

A tarpaulin sheltered the bed of the truck, but the sides were open. As we drew nearer to the coast, the terrain began to change: incursions of partly compacted coral appeared, moist and granular, glistening in the sun like rivers choked with powdery gray-and-silver snow. Entropy should have favored the solid reef-rock banks dissolving into this sludge and washing away—but it favored more strongly the flow of energy from the sun into the lithophilic bacteria infesting the coral debris, which labored to stitch the loose aggregate of limestone into the denser polymer-mineral matrix around it. Cool, efficient biological pathways, catalyzed by perfectly shaped enzymes like molecule-sized injection molds, had always mocked the high-temperature-and-pressure industrial chemistry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, they mocked geology itself. The conveyor belt of subduction, feeding ocean sediments deep into the earth to be crushed and metamorphized over eons, was as obsolete on Stateless as the Bessemer process for steel, the Haber process for ammonia.

The truck moved between two broad streams of crushed coral. In the distance, other streams widened and merged, the fingers of reef-rock between them narrowing then vanishing, until the land around us was more than half sludge. The part-digested coral grew coarser, the surface of the channels less even; glistening pools of water began to appear. I noticed occasional streaks of color surviving within the bleached limestone—not the muted trace minerals of the city’s masonry, but vivid, startling reds and oranges, greens and blues. The truck already stank of the ocean, but soon the breeze—which had been carrying the scent away—began to compound it.

Within minutes, the landscape was transformed. Vast banks of living coral, inundated with ocean water, surrounded narrow, winding causeways. The reefs were dazzling, polychromatic; the algal symbionts living within the various species of coral-building polyps employed a rainbow of distinct photosynthetic pigments—and even from a distance I could make out wild variations of morphology between the mineralized skeletons of each colony: pebbled aggregates, riots of thick branched tubing, delicate fernlike structures—no doubt a pragmatic exercise in diversity for the sake of ecological robustness, as well as a deliberately opulent display of bioengineering virtuosity.

The truck stopped, and everyone else clambered off—except for the two people I’d seen shifting crates onto a freight tram back at the terminus.

I hesitated, then followed the crowd; I had further to go, but I didn’t want to attract attention.

The truck moved on. Most of the other passengers were carrying masks, snorkels, flippers; I wasn’t sure if they were tourists or locals, but they all headed straight for the reefs. I wandered along with them, and stood for a while, watching, as they stepped gingerly out onto the half-protruding coral, heading for deeper water. Then I turned and strolled north along the shoreline, away from the divers.

I caught my first glimpse of the open ocean, still hundreds of meters ahead. There were a dozen small boats moored in the harbor—one of the six armpits of the giant starfish. The view from the air came back to me, fragile and exotic. What exactly was I standing on? An artificial island? An ocean-going machine? A bioengineered sea monster? The distinctions blurred into meaninglessness.

I caught up with the truck at the harbor; the two workers loading it glanced at me curiously, but didn’t ask what I was doing here. My idleness made me feel like a trespasser; everyone else in sight was shifting crates or sorting seafood. There was machinery, but most of it was very low-tech: electric forklifts, but no giant cranes, no vast conveyor belts feeding processing plants; the reef-rock was probably too soft to support anything heavy. They could have built a floating platform out on the harbor to take the weight of a crane, but apparently no one felt it was worth the investment. Or maybe the farmers simply preferred it this way.

There was still no sign of Kuwale. I moved away from the loading bay and wandered closer to the water’s edge. Biochemical signals diffusing out from the rock kept the harbor free of coral, and plankton transported sediment to the reefs where it was needed; the water here looked bottomless, deep blue-green. Amidst the froth of the gently breaking swell, I thought I could discern an unnatural effervescence; bubbles were rising up everywhere. The outgassing from the pressurized rock, which I’d seen—second hand—on the underside of Stateless, was escaping here to the surface.

Out on the harbor, farmers were winching aboard what might have been a fishing net bursting with produce. Gelatinous tendrils embracing the bounty glistened in the sun. One worker stretched up and touched the top of the “net” with something on the end of a long pole, and the contents abruptly spilled onto the deck, leaving the slack tendrils quivering; within seconds, when the last scraps had fallen, the translucent creature was almost invisible. I had to strain my eyes to follow it, as they lowered it back into the ocean.

Kuwale said, “Do you know what non-renegades pay Ocean Logic for a harvester like that? All its genes were taken straight from existing species—all the company ever did was patent them, and rearrange them.”

I turned. “Spare me the propaganda. I'm on your side—if you’ll give me some straight answers.”

Kuwale looked troubled, but said nothing. I spread my arms in a gesture of frustration. “What do I have to do to convince you to trust me as much as you trusted Sarah Knight? Do I have to die for the cause first?”

“I'm sorry you were infected. The wild type’s bad enough; I know, I’ve had it.” Ve was wearing the same black T-shirt I’d seen ver in at the airport, flickering with random points of brightness. It suddenly struck me again just how young ve was: little more than half my age—and in at the deep end.

I said, begrudgingly, “That wasn’t your fault. And I'm grateful for what you did.” Even if saving my life wasn’t the point.

Kuwale looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if I’d just showered ver with undeserved praise. I hesitated. “It wasn’t your fault, was it?”

“Not directly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? The weapon was yours?”

“No!” Ve looked away, and said bitterly, “But I still have to take some responsibility for everything they do.”

“Why! Because they’re not working for the biotech companies? Because they’re technoliberateurs, like you?” Ve wouldn’t meet my eyes; I felt a small surge of triumph. I’d finally got something right.

Kuwale replied impatiently, “Of course they’re technoliberateurs.” As if to say: isn’t everyone? “But that’s not why they’re trying to kill Mosala.”

A man was walking toward us with a crate on his shoulder. As I glanced in his direction, red lines flashed up across my vision. He kept his face half-turned away from us, and a wide-brimmed hat concealed half of the rest, but Witness—reconstructing the hidden parts by symmetry and anatomical extrapolation rules—saw enough to be convinced.

I fell silent. Kuwale waited until the man was out of earshot, then said urgently, “Who was it?”

“Don’t ask me. You wouldn’t give me any names to go with the faces, remember?” But I relented, and checked with the software. “Number seven in your list, if that means anything to you.”

“What kind of swimmer are you?”

“Very mediocre. Why?”

Kuwale turned and dived into the harbor. I crouched by the edge of the water, and waited for ver to surface.

I called out, “What are you doing, you lunatic? He’s gone.”

“Don’t follow me in yet.”

“I have no intention—”

Kuwale swam toward me. “Wait until it’s clear which one of us is doing better.” Ve held up vis right hand; I reached down and took it, and began to haul ver up; ve shook vis head impatiently. “Leave me in, unless I start to falter.” Ve trod water. “Immediate irrigation is the best way to remove some transdermal toxins—but for others, it’s the worst thing you can do: it can drive the hydrophobic spearheads into the skin much faster.” Ve submerged completely, dragging me in up to the elbow, almost dislocating my shoulder.

When ve surfaced again, I said, “What if it’s a mixture of both?”

“Then we’re fucked.”

I glanced toward the loading bay. “I could go and get help.” In spite of everything I’d just been through—no doubt thanks to a passing stranger with an aerosol—part of me still flatly refused to believe in invisible weapons. Or maybe I just imagined that some principle of double jeopardy meant that the molecular world had no more power over me, no right to a second attempt to claim me. Our presumed assailant was walking calmly off into the distance; it was impossible to feel threatened.

Kuwale watched me anxiously. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Except you’re breaking my arm. This is insane.” My skin began to tingle. Kuwale groaned, a worst-expectations-come-true sound. “You’re turning blue. Get in.”

My face was growing numb, my limbs felt heavy. “And drown? I don’t think so.” My speech sounded slurred; I’d lost all feeling in my tongue.

“I’ll hold you up.”

“No. Climb out and get help.”

“You don’t have time.” Ve yelled toward the loading bay; vis cry sounded weak to me—either my hearing was fading, or ve’d inhaled enough of the toxin to affect vis voice. I tried turning my head to see if there was any response; I couldn’t.

Cursing my stubborness, Kuwale raised verself up and dragged me over the edge.

I sank. I was paralyzed and numb, unsure if we were still connected. The water would have been transparent if not for the air bubbles; it was like falling through flawed crystal. I desperately hoped that I wasn’t inhaling—it seemed impossible to tell.

Bubbles drifted past my face in contradictory wavering streams, refusing to define the vertical. I tried to orient myself by the gradient of light, but the cues were ambiguous. All I could hear was my heart pounding— slowly, as if the toxin was blocking the pathways that should have had it racing in agitation. I had a weird sense of déjà vu; with no feeling in my skin, I felt no wetter than when I’d stood on dry land watching the image from the tunnel diver’s camera. I was having a vicarious experience of my own body.

The bubbles suddenly blurred, accelerated. The turbulence around me grew brighter, then without warning my face emerged into the air, and all I could see was blue sky.

Kuwale shouted in my ear, “Are you okay? I’ve got you now. Try to relax.” Ve sounded distant; all I could manage was an indignant grunt. “A couple of minutes, and we should be safe. My lungs are affected, but I think that’s passing.” I stared up into the unfathomable sky, drowning in reverse.

Kuwale splashed water over my face. I was improving; at least I could tell that I was swallowing most of it. I coughed angrily. My teeth started chattering; the water was colder than I’d imagined. “Your friends are pathetic. One amateur burglar, caught out by a backup alarm. Cholera that gets confused by a melatonin patch. Toxins that wash off in seawater. Violet Mosala has nothing to fear.”

Someone grabbed my foot and dragged me under.

I counted five figures in wetsuits and scuba gear; they were all clad in polymer from ankles to wrists, and all wore gloves and hoods as well. No skin exposed. Why? I struggled weakly, but two divers held me tight, trying to thrust some kind of metal device into my face. I pushed it away.

The harvester emerged from the translucent distance, barely visible against the sunlit water, and I felt my first real shock of visceral fear. If they’d poisoned the tentacles—restored the natural gene to the engineered species—we were dead. I broke free long enough to turn and see the other three divers thrashing around Kuwale, trying to hold ver still.

One of my captors waved the device in front of me again. It was a regulator, attached to an air hose. I turned to stare at her; I could barely make out her expression through the faceplate, though Witness instantly recognized another target. The air hose led to a second tank on her back. I had no way of knowing what the tank contained—but if it was harmful, I was only minutes away from drowning anyway.

The diver’s eyes seemed to say: It’s your decision. Take it or leave it.

I looked around again. Kuwale’s arms were tied behind vis back, and ve’d given in and accepted the unknown gas. I was still weak from the toxin, and short of breath. I had no chance of escaping.

I let them bind my hands together, then I opened my mouth and bit hard on the regulator tube. I sucked in air gratefully, reeling between panic and relief. If they’d wanted us dead, they would have run a fishing knife through our ribs by now—but I still wasn’t ready for the alternative.

The harvester approached, and the divers swam forward to meet it, dragging us along. I wanted to shield my face with my hands, but I couldn’t. The medusa s knot of transparent tentacles opened up around us, writhing like the pathological topologies of pre-space, like the vacuum come to life.

Then the net closed tight.

21

The harvester’s toxins were enervating, but not painful. If anything, they made the ride more bearable: relaxing muscles tensed in revulsion and claustrophobia, dulling the sense of being eaten alive. The creature was probably just a commercial species, not the privately engineered weapon I’d imagined. Belatedly, I started recording; my eyes stung from the salt, but closing them gave me vertigo. I could see Kuwale and the divers guarding ver, blurred as if through frosted glass. Pacified by the toxins, cocooned in translucent jelly, we moved through the bright water.

I pictured us being winched into the air and dropped unceremoniously onto the deck, like the catch I’d seen disgorged earlier. Instead, someone relaxed the harvester with a hormonal wand while we were still in the water, and the divers hauled us up over the side, climbing rope ladders. On deck, Witness matched three more faces. No one spoke to us, and I was still too spaced-out to compose an intelligent question. The woman who’d offered me the regulator bound my feet together, then tied my hands, already joined, to Kuwale’s, linking us back-to-back. Another of the divers took away our notepads, wrapped a length of (non-living) fishing net around us—threading it under our arms—then hooked it to the winch and lowered us into an empty hold. When they closed the hatch, we were in total darkness.

I felt my biochemical stupor lifting; the odor of decaying seaweed seemed to help. I waited for Kuwale to volunteer an assessment of our situation; after several minutes of silence, I said, “You know all their faces; they know all your communications codes. Now tell me who’s winning the intelligence war.”

Ve shifted irritably. “I’ll tell you this much: I don’t think they’ll harm us. They’re moderates; they just want us out of the way.”

“While they do what?”

“Kill Mosala.”

My head swam from the stench; the smelling-salts effect had outlived its usefulness and gone into reverse. “If moderates want to kill Mosala, what do the extremists have in mind?”

Kuwale didn’t answer.

I stared out into the blackness. Back on the docks, ve’d insisted that the threat to Mosala had nothing to do with technoliberation. I said, “Do you want to clear up one small point of Anthrocosmological doctrine for me.

“No.”

“If Mosala dies before becoming the Keystone… nothing happens, nothing changes. Right? Someone else will take her place—eventually— or we wouldn’t even be here to talk about it.”

No reply.

“Yet you still feel responsible for keeping her safe? Why?” I cursed myself silently; the answer had been staring me in the face ever since I’d spoken to Amanda Conroy. “These people are not the political enemies of someone who just happens to be a potential Keystone. Are they? They’re a walking affront to every mainstream Anthrocosmologist— because they’ve stolen your ideas, and pushed them to their logical conclusion. They’re AC, just like you, except that they’ve decided they don’t want Violet Mosala as creator of the universe.”

Kuwale responded venomously, “It’s no ‘logical conclusion.’ Trying to choose the Keystone is insanity. The universe exists because the Keystone is given. Would you try to change the Big Bang?”

“No. But this act of creation still hasn’t happened, has it?”

“That makes no difference. Time is a part of what is created. The universe exists—now—because the Keystone will create it.”

I persisted, “But there’s still room left to change things, isn’t there? No one knows yet exactly which TOE is true.”

Kuwale shifted again; I could feel vis body grow rigid with anger. “That’s the wrong way to look at it! The Keystone is given! The TOE is fixed!”

I said, “Don’t waste your breath defending the mainstream to me. I think you’re all equally braindead; I'm just trying to come to grips with the more dangerous version. Don’t you think I have a right to know what we’re up against?”

I could hear ver breathing slowly, trying to calm verself. Then ve explained, reluctantly: “They believe that the identity of the Keystone is determined, preordained… along with everything else in history, including the killing of any ‘rivals.’ But determinism doesn’t take away the illusion of power—have you ever known an Islamic fatalist to be passive? It’s not as if the hand of God is going to reach out of the sky and make sure that they spare the Keystone—or some improbable conspiracy of fate will frustrate them, if they go after the wrong physicist. There’s no need for supernatural intervention, when the whole universe and everyone in it is just a conspiracy to explain the Keystone’s existence. Whoever they murder, for whatever reason, they can’t get it wrong.

“So… if they kill all the rivals of the theorist with the TOE they favor, then that TOE must be the one that brings the universe into being. And whether they’ve really chosen anything or not, the result is the same. The TOE they want, and the TOE they get, end up being identical.”

It hit me, belatedly. “And they’re in Kyoto, too? You think they got to Nishide—that’s why he’s sick? And they got to Sarah, before she could expose them?”

“Most likely.”

“Have you told the Kyoto police? Do you have people, there—?” I stopped; ve could hardly discuss countermeasures, when we were almost certainly being monitored. I said wearily, “What’s so wonderful about Buzzo’s TOE, anyway?”

Kuwale was derisive. “They think it leaves open a chance of access to other universes, seeded from pre-space by other Big Bangs. Mosala and Nishide both rule that out completely; other universes might still exist, but they’re unreachable. Black holes, wormholes, in their TOEs, all lead back to this one cosmos.”

“And they’re willing to kill Mosala and Nishide—because one universe isn’t enough for them?”

Kuwale protested sardonically, “Think of the infinite riches we’d be throwing away, if we chose a self-contained cosmos. Take a long-term perspective. Where would we flee to, when the Big Crunch came? One or two lives is a small price to pay for the future of all humanity, isn’t it?”

I thought of Ned Landers again, trying to step outside the human race, in order to take control of it. You couldn’t step outside the universe—but out-explaining every TOE theorist with Anthrocosmology, and then playing choose-your-own-creator, came close.

Kuwale said despondently, “Maybe Mosala is right to despise us, if this is where our ideas have led.”

I wasn’t going to argue. “Does she know? That there are ACs who want to kill her?”

“She does and she doesn’t.”

“Meaning what?”

“We’ve tried to warn her. But she loathes even the mainstream so passionately that she won’t take the threat seriously. I think she thinks… bad ideas can’t touch her. If Anthrocosmology is nothing but superstition, it has no power to harm her.”

“Tell that to Giordano Bruno.” My eyes were adapting to the darkness; I could see a faint strip of light on the floor of the hold in the distance.

I said, “Have I missed something—or have we been talking all this time about the people you call moderates?” Kuwale didn’t reply, but I felt ver move—slumping forward, as if in a final surrender to shame. “What do the extremists believe? Break it to me gently, but break it to me now. I don’t want any more surprises.”

Kuwale confessed miserably, “You might say they… hybridized with the Ignorance Cults. They’re still ACs, in the broadest sense: they believe that the universe is explained into being. But they believe it’s possible—and desirable—to have a universe without any TOE at all: without a final equation, a unifying pattern. No deepest level, no definitive laws, no unbreakable proscriptions. No end to the possibility of transcendence.

“But the only way to guarantee that… is to slaughter everyone who might become the Keystone.”

My clothes seemed to reach an equilibrium with the hold’s moist air at the most uncomfortable level of dampness possible. I needed to urinate, but I held off for the sake of dignity—hoping that I’d be able to judge correctly when the problem became life-threatening. I thought of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who’d died after rupturing his bladder during a banquet, because he was too embarrassed to ask to be excused.

The strip of light on the floor didn’t move, but it grew slowly brighter, and then dim again, as the hours wore on. The sounds reaching the hold meant little to me; random creaking and clanking, muffled voices and footsteps. There were distant hums and throbbing noises, some constant, some intermittent; no doubt the most casual boating enthusiast could have discerned the signature of an MHD engine, propelling a jet of sea-water backward with superconducting magnets—but I couldn’t have picked the difference between maximum thrust and a crew member taking a shower.

I said, “How does anyone ever become an Anthrocosmologist, when no one knows you exist?”

Kuwale didn’t answer; I nudged ver with my shoulder.

“I'm awake.” Ve sounded more dispirited than I was.

“Then talk to me, I'm going out of my mind. How do you find new members?”

“There are net discussion groups, dealing with related ideas: fringe cosmology, information metaphysics. We take part—without revealing too much—but we approach people individually if they seem sympathetic and trustworthy. Someone, somewhere, re-invents Anthrocosmology two or three times a year. We don’t try to persuade anyone that it’s true—but if they reach the same conclusions for themselves, we let them know that there are others.”

“And the non-mainstream do the same? Pluck people off the nets?”

“No. They’re all defectors. They all used to be with the rest of us.”

“Ah.” No wonder the mainstream felt such a strong obligation to protect Mosala. Mainstream Anthrocosmologists had literally recruited her would-be murderers.

Kuwale said quietly, “It’s sad. Some of them really do see themselves as the ultimate technoliberateurs: taking science into their own hands, refusing to be steam-rollered by someone else’s theory—refusing to have no say in the matter.”

“Yeah, very democratic. Have they ever thought of holding an election for the Keystone, instead of killing off all the rival candidates to their own pretender?”

“And give up all that power, themselves? I don’t think so. Muteba Kazadi had a ’democratic’ version of Anthrocosmology which didn’t involve murdering anyone. No one could understand it, though. And I don’t think he ever got the mathematics to work.”

I laughed, astonished. “Muteba Kazadi was AC?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think Violet Mosala knows that.”

“I don’t think Violet Mosala knows anything she doesn’t want to.”

“Hey, show some respect for your deity.”

The boat lurch slightly. “Are we moving? Or did we just stop?” Kuwale shrugged. Adaptive ballast smoothed the ride so thoroughly that it was almost impossible to judge what was going on; I’d felt no wave motion in all the time we’d been on board, let alone the subtle accelerations of the journey.

I said, “Do you know any of these people, personally?”

“No. They all left the mainstream before I joined.”

“So you can’t really be sure how moderate they are.”

“I'm sure of the faction they belong to. And if they were going to kill us, we’d be dead.”

“There must be good and bad places for disposing of corpses. Points where illegal discharge is least likely to wash ashore—computable by any half-decent piece of marine navigation software.”

The boat lurched again, then something struck the hull; it resonated all around us, setting my teeth on edge. I waited, tensed. The sound died down, and nothing followed.

I struggled to fill the silence. “Where are you from? I still can’t place the accent.”

Kuwale laughed wearily. “You’d be wrong if you could. I was born in Malawi, but I left when I was eighteen months old. My parents are diplomats—trade officials; we traveled all over Africa, South America, the Caribbean.”

“Do they know you’re on Stateless?”

“No. We parted company. Five years ago. When I migrated.”

To asex. “Five years ago? How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Isn’t that too young for surgery?” I was, still, only guessing, but it would take more than superficial androgyny to split up most families.

“Not in Brazil.”

“And they took it badly?”

Ve said bitterly, “They didn’t understand. Technoliberation, asex—everything that mattered to me—none of it made sense to them. Once I had a mind of my own, they started treating me like some kind of… alien foundling. They were highly educated, highly paid, sophisticated, cosmopolitan… traditionalists. They were still tied to Malawi—and to one social stratum, and all its values and prejudices—wherever they went. I had no homeland. I was free.” Ve laughed. “Travel shows up the invariants: the same hypocrisies repeating themselves, over and over. By the time I was fourteen, I’d lived in thirty different cultures—and I’d figured out that sex was for dumb conformists.”

That almost shut me up. I asked tentatively, “You mean gender or intercourse?”

“Both.”

I said, “Some people need both. Not just biologically—I know, you can switch that off. But… for identity. For self-esteem.”

Kuwale snorted, highly amused. “Self-esteem is a commodity invented by twentieth-century personal growth cults. If you want self-esteem—or an emotional center—go to Los Angeles and buy it.” Ve added, more sympathetically, “What is it with you Westerners? Sometimes it sounds to me like all the pre-scientific psychology of Freud and Jung—and all its market-driven US regurgitations—has hijacked your language and culture so completely that you can’t even think about yourselves anymore, except in cult-speak. And it’s so ingrained now, you don’t even know when you’re doing it.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I was beginning to feel unspeakably old and traditionalist myself. If Kuwale was the future, the generation after ver was going to be entirely beyond my comprehension. Which was probably no bad thing, but it was still a painful realization. “But what do you put in place of Western psychobabble? Asex and technoliberation I can almost understand—but what’s the great attraction of Anthrocosmology? If you want a dose of cosmic reassurance, why not at least choose a religion with an afterlife?”

“You should join the murderers up on deck, if you think you can choose what’s true and what isn’t.”

I stared out across the dark hold. The faint strip of light was fading rapidly; it looked like we were going to spend a freezing night here. My bladder felt close to bursting but I was having trouble forcing myself to let go. Every time I thought I’d finally accepted my body and all it could do to me, the underworld tugged the leash again. I’d accepted nothing. I’d had one brief glimpse beneath the surface, and now I wanted to bury everything I’d learned, to carry on as if nothing had changed.

I said, “The truth is whatever you can get away with.”

“No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”

I was woken by torchlight in my face, and someone jagging an enzyme-coated knife through the polymer net which bound me to Kuwale. It was so cold it had to be early morning. I blinked and shivered, blinded by the glare. I couldn’t see how many people there were, let alone what weapons they carried, but I sat perfectly still while they cut me free, working on the assumption that anything less could earn me a bullet through the brain.

I was winched up in a crude sling, then left suspended in midair while three people clambered out of the hold on a rope ladder, leaving Kuwale behind. I looked around at the moonlit deck and—so far as I could see— open ocean. The thought of leaving Stateless behind chilled my blood; if there was any chance of help, it was surely back on the island.

They slammed the hatch closed, lowered me and untied my feet, then started hustling me toward a cabin at the far end of the boat. After some pleading, I was allowed to stop and piss over the side; for several seconds afterward, I was so overcome with gratitude that I would have been willing to despatch Violet Mosala personally with my bare hands, if anyone had asked.

The cabin was packed with display screens and electronic equipment. I’d never been on a fishing boat before in my life, but this looked distinctly like overkill, when the average fleet could probably be run by a single microchip.

I was tied to a chair in the middle of the cabin. There were four people present; Witness had already matched two of them—numbered three and five in Kuwale’s gallery—but it came up blank on the others, two women about my age. I captured and filed their faces: nineteen and twenty.

I said, to no one in particular, “What was all the noise, before? I thought we’d run aground.”

Three said, “We were rammed. You missed all the excitement.” He was a Caucasian umale, heavily muscled, with Chinese characters tattooed on both forearms.

“Rammed by who?” He ignored the question, a little too coolly; he’d already said too much.

Twenty had waited in the cabin while the others fetched me; now she took charge. “I don’t know what fantasies Kuwale’s been feeding you. Portraying us as rabid fanatics, no doubt.” She was a tall, slender black woman with a Francophone accent,

“No, ve told me you were moderates. Weren’t you listening?”

She shook her head innocently, bemused, as if it were self-evident that eavesdropping was beneath her dignity. She had an air of calm authority which unnerved me; I could imagine her instructing the others to do just about anything, while retaining a demeanor of absolute reasonableness. “‘Moderate’—but still ‘heretical,’ of course.”

I said wearily, “What do you expect other ACs to call you?”

“Forget other ACs. You should make your own judgment—once you’ve heard all the facts.”

“I think you blew any chance of a favorable opinion when you infected me with your home-brewed cholera.”

“That wasn’t us.”

“No? Who was it, then?”

“The same people who infected Yasuko Nishide with a virulent natural strain of pneumococcus.”

A chill ran through me. I didn’t know if I believed her, but it fit with Kuwale’s description of the extremists.

Nineteen said, “Are you recording, now?”

“No.” It was the truth; although I’d captured their faces, I’d stopped continuous filming hours before, back in the hold.

“Then start. Please.” Nineteen looked and sounded Scandinavian; it seemed every faction of AC was relentlessly internationalist. Those cynics who claimed that people who forged transglobal friendships on the nets never came together in the flesh were wrong, of course. All it required was a good enough reason.

“Why?”

“You’re here to make a documentary about Violet Mosala, aren’t you? Don’t you want to tell the whole story? Right to the end?”

Twenty explained, “When Mosala’s dead, there’ll be an uproar, naturally, and we’ll have to go into hiding. And we’re not interested in martyrdom—but we’re not afraid of being identified, once the mission’s over. We’re not ashamed of what we’re doing here; we have no reason to be. And we want someone objective, non-partisan, trustworthy, to carry our side of the story to the world.”

I stared at her. She sounded perfectly sincere—and even formally apologetic, as if she was asking for a slightly inconvenient favor.

I glanced at the others. Three regarded me with studied nonchalance. Five was tinkering with the electronics. Nineteen stared back, unwavering in her solidarity.

I said, “Forget it. I don’t do snuff movies.” It was a nice line; if I hadn’t recalled Daniel Cavolini’s interrogation the moment the words were out, I might have had a warm inner glow for hours.

Twenty put me straight, politely. “No one expects you to film Mosala’s death. That would be impractical, as well as tasteless. We only want you to be in a position to explain to your viewers why her death was necessary.”

My grasp on reality was slipping. In the hold, I’d anticipated torture. I’d imagined, in detail, the process of being made to look like a plausible victim of a shark attack.

But not this.

I forced myself to speak evenly. “I'm not interested in an exclusive interview with my subject’s murderers.” The thought crossed my mind that half of SeeNet’s executives would never forgive those words, if they ever found out that I’d uttered them. “Why don’t you take out a paid spot on TechnoLalia? I'm sure their viewers would give you an unqualified vote of support—if you pointed out that it was necessary to kill Mosala in order to preserve the possibility of wormhole travel to other universes."

Twenty frowned, unjustly slandered. “I knew Kuwale was feeding you poisonous lies. Is that what ve told you?”

I was growing light-headed, disbelieving; her obsessive concern with exactly the wrong proprieties was surreal. I shouted, “It doesn’t matter what the fucking reason is!” I tried to stretch my hands out, to implore her to see sense; they were tied firmly to the back of the chair. I said numbly, “I don’t know… maybe you just think Henry Buzzo has more gravitas, more presidential style. A suitably Jehovian manner. Or maybe you think he has more elegant equations.” I very nearly told them what Mosala had told me: Buzzo’s methodology was fatally flawed; their favorite contender could never be the Keystone. I caught myself in time. “I don’t care. It’s still murder.”

“But it’s not. It’s self-defense.”

I turned. The voice had come from the doorway of the cabin.

Helen Wu met my eyes, and explained sadly, “Wormholes have nothing to do with it. Buzzo has nothing to do with it. But if we don’t intervene, Violet will soon have the power to kill us all.”

22

After Helen Wu entered the cabin, I recorded everything. Not for SeeNet. For Interpol.

“I’ve done all I can to try to steer her onto safer ground,” Wu insisted solemnly. “I thought, if she understood where she was heading, she’d change her methods—for conventional scientific reasons. For the sake of a theory with physical content—which is what most of her peers expect of a TOE.” She raised her hands in a gesture of despair. “Nothing stops Violet! You know that. She absorbed every criticism I offered—and turned it into a virtue. I’ve only made things worse.”

Twenty said, “I don’t expect Amanda Conroy even began to convey a true picture of the richness of information cosmology. What did she describe to you? One model only: a Keystone creating a perfect, seamless universe—with no observable effects, ever, violating the TOE? No prospect of seeing through to the metaphysics beneath?”

“That’s right.” I’d given up expressing outrage; the best strategy I could think of was to play along, let them incriminate themselves as much as they wanted, and cling to the hope that I might still have a chance to warn Mosala.

“That’s only one possibility, among millions. And it’s about as simplistic as the earliest cosmological models of General Relativity from the nineteen twenties: perfectly homogeneous universes, bland and empty as giant toy balloons. They were only studied because anything more plausible was too difficult to analyze, mathematically. Nobody ever believed that they described reality.”

Wu took up the thread. “Conroy and her friends are not scientists; they’re enthusiastic dilettantes. They seized hold of the very first solution that came along, and decided it was everything they wanted.” I didn’t know about the others, but Wu had a career, a comfortable life, which she was tearing to shreds before my eyes. Maybe the intellectual energy she’d devoted to Anthrocosmology had already cost her any success she might have had with ATMs—but now she was sacrificing everything.

“That kind of perfect, stable cosmos isn’t impossible—but it depends entirely on the structure of the theory. The observable physics, and the information metaphysics underlying it, can only be guaranteed independent and separable under certain rigorous constraints. Mosala’s work shows every sign of violating those constraints in the most dangerous manner possible.”

Wu stared at me for a moment longer, as if trying to judge whether or not she’d hammered home the gravity of the situation. Nothing in her manner betrayed any hint of paranoia or fanaticism; however mistaken she was, she seemed as sober to me as a Manhattan Project scientist, terrified that the first A-bomb test might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would engulf the world.

I must have looked suitably dismayed; she turned to Five, and said, “Show him.” Then she left the room.

My heart sank. I said, “Where’s she going?” Back to Stateless, in another boat! No one here had a better chance of getting close to Mosala than Wu. I remembered the two of them walking through the hotel lobby, laughing, almost arm in arm.

“Helen already knows too much about Mosala’s TOE—and too much information cosmology,” Nineteen explained. “Pushing that any further could make a dangerous combination, so she no longer attends sessions where we discuss new results. There’s no point taking risks.”

I absorbed that in silence. The ACs’ obsessive secrecy went far beyond Conroy’s fear of media ridicule, or the need to plot assassinations unobserved. They really did believe that their ideas alone were as perilous as any physical weapon.

I could hear the ocean moving gently around us, but the windows only mirrored the scene within. My reflection looked like someone else: hair sticking out oddly, eyes sunken, context all wrong. I pictured the boat perfectly becalmed, the cabin a tiny island of light fixed in the darkness. I forced my wrists apart experimentally, gauging the strength of the polymer, the topology of the knot. There was no give, no slippage. Since I’d been woken and hauled above the deck, I’d been sick with dread, wired and ragged—but for a moment I felt something like the clarity of the hospital ward returning. The world lost all pretense of meaning: no comfort, no mystery, no threat.

Five—a middle-aged Italian man—finished tinkering with the electronics. He addressed me as self-consciously as if I was pointing a thousand-watt floodlight and a nineteen-fifties movie camera in his face.

“This is our latest supercomputer run, based on everything Mosala has published so far. We’ve deliberately avoided trying to extrapolate to a TOE, for obvious reasons—but it’s still possible to approximate the effects which might result if the work was ever completed.”

The largest display screen in the cabin, some five meters wide and three high, suddenly lit up. The image it showed resembled an elaborately interwoven mass of fine, multicolored thread. I’d seen nothing like it at the conference; this wasn’t the writhing, anarchic foam of the quantum vacuum. It looked more like a compact ball of neon-luminous twine, which had been wound by Escher and Mandelbrot in turn, with exquisite care, over several centuries. There were symmetries within symmetries, knots within knots, details and patterns which seized the eye, but were too intricate and convoluted to follow to any kind of closure.

I said, “That’s not pre-space, is it?”

“Hardly.” Five regarded me dubiously, as if he suspected that my ignorance would prove insurmountable. “It’s a very crude map of information space, at the instant the Keystone ‘becomes’ the Keystone. We call this initial configuration ‘Aleph,’ for short.” I didn’t respond, so he added with distaste, as if forced to resort to baby-talk, “Think of it as a snapshot of the Explanatory Big Bang."

“This is the starting point of… everything? The premise for an entire universe?”

“Yes. Why are you surprised? The physical, primordial Big Bang is orders of magnitude simpler; it can be characterized by just ten numbers. Aleph contains a hundred million times more information; the idea of creating galaxies and DNA out of this is far less outlandish.”

That remained a matter of opinion. “If this is meant to be the contents of Violet Mosala’s skull, it doesn’t look like any kind of brain map I’ve ever seen.”

Five said drily, “I should hope not. It’s not an anatomical scan—or a functional neural map, or even a cognitive symbolic network. The Keystone’s neurons—let alone vis skull—don’t even exist, ‘yet.’ This is the pure information which logically precedes the existence of all physical objects. The Keystone’s ‘knowledge’ and ‘memory’ come first. The brain which encodes them follows.”

He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. “The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE, and aware of both vis own existence, and a canonical body of observations of experimental results—whether vis own, or ’second hand'—which need to be accounted for. If ve lacked either the information density or the organizational schema to explain vis own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-critical: there’d be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won’t stop until an entire physical cosmos is created.

“Of course, the process never ’starts’ or ’stops’ in the conventional sense—it doesn’t take place in time at all. Successive frames in this simulation simply correspond to increments in logical extension—like steps in a mathematical proof, adding successive layers of consequences to an initial set of premises. The history of the universe is embedded in those consequences like… the sequence of a murder, pieced together by pure deduction from evidence at the scene of the crime.”

As he spoke, the patterns I’d glimpsed on the surface of “Aleph” were woven and re-woven in the surrounding “information vacuum.” It was like watching a dazzling new tapestry being created every second from the one beneath—threads picked loose enough to drag a little further, and then re-combined by a million invisible hands. A thousand subtle variations echoed the original canon, but there were also startling new themes emerging, apparently from nowhere. Intermeshing fractal islands, red and white, drifted apart and recombined, struggled to engulf each other, then melted into an archipelago of hybrids. Hurricanes within hurricanes, violet and gold, spun the thread ever tighter—and then the tiniest vortices counter-rotated, and the whole hierarchy dissolved. Tiny jagged shards of crystalline silver slowly diffused through all the chaos and regularity, infiltrating and interacting with everything.

I said, “This is beautiful technoporn—but what exactly is it meant to be showing?”

Five hesitated, but then condescended to point out a few features. “This is the age of the Earth, being refined toward a definite value, as various geophysical and biological conclusions feed into it. This is the commonality of the genetic code, on the way toward giving rise to a sharp set of possibilities for the origins of life. Here, the underlying regularity in the chemistry of the elements—”

“And you expect Violet Mosala to fall into some kind of trance, and think all these things through, right after her moment of apotheosis?”

He scowled. “No! All of this follows logically from the Keystone’s information content at the Aleph moment—it’s not a prediction of the Keystone’s thought processes. Do you imagine that… the Keystone has to count from one to a trillion—out loud—to create all the numbers in between, before arithmetic can make use of them? No. Zero, one, and addition are enough to imply all of them, and more. The universe is no different. It just grows out of a different seed.”

I glanced at the others. They were watching the screen with uneasy fascination, but no sign of anything remotely like religious terror. They might have been observing a runaway Greenhouse climate model, or a simulation of a meteor strike. Secrecy had insulated these people from any serious challenges to their ideas, but they still clung to some semblance of rationality. They hadn’t plucked the supposed need to kill Mosala out of thin air, and then invented Anthrocosmology after the fact, to justify it. They really did believe that they’d been forced to this unpalatable conclusion by reason alone.

And maybe the same relentless logic could still be used to change their minds. I was an ignorant outsider, but they’d invited my scrutiny for the sake of explaining their actions to the world. They’d brought me up here so they could argue their case for posterity, but if I accepted their terms as given, and argued back at them in their own language… maybe there was still a small chance that I could inject enough doubt to persuade them to spare Mosala.

I said carefully, “All right. Logical implication is enough; the Keystone doesn’t have to think through every last microscopic detail. But wouldn’t ve still have to sit down, eventually, and at least… map out the full extent of whatever vis TOE implies? And satisfy verself that there were no loose ends? That would still be a lifetime’s work. Maybe the race to complete the TOE is only the first step in the race to become the Keystone. How can anything be explained into being, until the Keystone knows that it’s been explained?”

Five cut me off impatiently. “A Keystone with a TOE is inexplicable without all of human history, and all prior human knowledge. And just as every biological ancestor or cousin requires their own quota of space and time to inhabit and observe—their own body, their own food and air, their own patch of ground to stand on—every intellectual predecessor or contemporary requires their own partial explanation of the universe. It all fits together, in a mosaic reaching back to the Big Bang. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.

“But the Keystone’s burden is to occupy the point where all explanations converge into a kernel concise enough to be apprehended by a single mind. Not to recapitulate all of science and history—merely to encode it.”

This was futile. I couldn’t beat them at their own game; they’d had years in which to ponder all the obvious objections, and convince themselves that they’d answered them. And if mainstream ACs sharing almost the same mindset hadn’t been able to sway them, what hope did I have?

I tried another angle. “And you’re happy to believe that you’re nothing but a bit player in some jumped-up TOE theorist’s dream? Dragged into the plot to save ver from having to invent a way for intelligence to evolve in a species with only one member?”

Five regarded me with pity. “Now you’re talking in oxymorons. The universe is not a dream. The Keystone is not… the avatar of some slumbering god-computer in a higher reality, threatening to wake and forget us. The Keystone anchors the universe from within. There’s nowhere else to do it.

“A cosmos can have no more solid foundation than a single observer’s coherent explanation. What would you consider less ethereal than that? A TOE which is simply true—for no reason? And what would we be, then? A dream of inanimate pre-space? Figments of the vacuum’s imagination? No. Because everything is exactly what it seems to be, whatever underlies it. And whoever the Keystone is, I'm still alive, I'm still conscious"—he kicked the leg of my chair—"the world I inhabit is solid. The only thing that matters to me is keeping it that way."

I turned to the others. Three was gazing at the floor; he seemed embarrassed by the whole unnecessary business of trying to justify anything to an ungrateful world. Nineteen and Twenty regarded me hopefully, as if expecting that the stupidity of my reluctance to embrace their ideas would dawn on me at any moment.

How could I argue with these people? I no longer knew what was reasonable. It was three in the morning; I was damp, freezing cold, captive, isolated, and outnumbered. They had all the insider jargon, all the computing power, all the slick graphics, all the condescending rhetoric. Anthrocosmology possessed all the intimidating weapons it could possibly need—according to Culture First—to be a science, as good or bad as any other.

I said, “Name one single experiment you can do, to distinguish all this information cosmology from a TOE which is ’true for no reason.'”

Twenty said quietly, “Here’s an experiment for you. Here’s an empirical test. We can leave Violet Mosala to finish her work, unmolested. And if you’re right, nothing will happen. Ten billion people will live through the eighteenth of April—most of them not even knowing that a Theory of Everything has been completed, and proclaimed to the world.”

Five said, “If you’re wrong, though…” He gestured at the screen, and the animation accelerated. “Logically, the process has to reach right back to the physical Big Bang, to set the ten parameters of the Standard Unified Field Theory, to explain the entire history of the Keystone. That’s why it takes so long to compute the simulation. In real-time, though, the observable consequences will begin within seconds of the Aleph moment—and locally at least, they should only last a matter of minutes.”

“Locally? You mean, on Stateless—?”

“I mean the Solar System. Which itself should only last a matter of minutes.”

As he spoke, a small dark patch on the outermost layer of the information tapestry began to grow. Around it, the thread of explanation was unwinding, knots which weren’t really knots were unraveling. I had a sickening, giddy sense of déjà vu; my fanciful metaphor for Wu’s complaints about Mosala’s circular logic was being paraded in front of me as supporting evidence for a death sentence.

Five said, “Conroy and the ‘mainstream’ take it for granted that every information cosmology must be time-symmetric, with the same physics holding true after the Aleph moment as before. But they’re wrong. After Aleph, Mosala’s TOE would begin to undermine all of the physics it first implied. It goes through all the labor of creating a past—only to reach the conclusion that it has no future.”

The darkness on the screen spread faster, as if on cue. I said, “This isn’t proof of anything. Nothing behind this so-called ‘simulation’ has ever been tested, has it? You’re just… grinding away at a set of equations from information theory, with no way of knowing whether or not they describe the truth.”

Five agreed. “There is no way of knowing. But suppose it happens, unproven?”

I pleaded, “Why should it? If Mosala is the Keystone, she doesn’t need this”—I tugged at my hands, wishing I could point at the travesty—"to explain her own existence! Her TOE doesn’t predict it, doesn’t allow it!”

“No, it doesn’t. But her TOE can’t survive its own expression. It can make her the Keystone. It can grant her a seamless past. It can manufacture twenty billion years of cosmology. But once it’s been stated explicitly, it will resolve itself into pure mathematics, pure logic.” He joined his hands together, fingers interlocked—and then dragged them slowly apart. “You can’t hold a universe together with a system which spells out its own lack of physical content. There’s no… friction anymore. No fire in the equations.”

Behind him, the tapestry was coming apart; all the ornate dazzling patterns of knowledge were disintegrating. Not devoured by entropy, or halted and reversed like the galaxies’ flight; the process was simply pushing on, relentlessly, toward a conclusion which had been implicit from the start. Every possible rearrangement of meaning had been extracted from the Aleph ‘knot’—except the very last. It wasn’t a knot at all: it was a simple loop, leading nowhere. The colors of a thousand different explanatory threads had encoded only the lack of awareness of their hidden connections. And the universe which had bootstrapped itself into existence by spinning those explanations into a billion tangled hierarchies of ever-increasing complexity… was finally unwinding into a naked statement of its own tautology.

A plain white circle spun in the darkness for a second, and then the screen switched off.

The demonstration was over. Three began to untie me from the chair.

I said, “There’s something I have to tell you. I’ve kept it from everyone—SeeNet, Conroy, Kuwale. Sarah Knight never found out. No one else knows, except me and Mosala. But you really need to hear it.”

Twenty said, “We’re listening.” She stood by the blank display screen, watching me patiently, the model of polite interest.

This was the last chance I had to change their minds. I struggled to concentrate, to put myself in their place. Would it make any difference to their plans, if they knew that Buzzo was wrong? Probably not. With or without other candidates to take her place, Mosala would be equally dangerous. If Nishide died, his intellectual legacy could still be pursued—and they’d simply race to protect his successors, and to slaughter Mosala’s.

I said, “Violet Mosala completed her TOE back in Cape Town. The computing she’s doing now is all just cross-checking; the real work was finished months ago. So… she’s already become the Keystone. And nothing’s happened, the sky isn’t falling, we’re all still here.” I tried to laugh. “The experiment you think is too dangerous to risk is already over. And we’ve survived.”

Twenty continued to watch me, with no change of expression. A wave of intense self-consciousness swept over me. I was suddenly aware of every muscle in my face, the angle of my head, the stoop of my shoulders, the direction of my gaze. I felt like a barely man-shaped lump of clay, which would need to be molded, painstakingly, into a convincing likeness of a human being speaking the truth.

And I knew that every bone, every pore, every cell in my body was betraying the effort I was making to fake it.

Rule number one: never let on that there are any rules at all.

Twenty nodded at Three, and he untied me from the chair. I was taken back to the hold, lowered in with the winch, and bound to Kuwale again.

As the others began to climb out on the rope ladder, Three hesitated. He crouched down beside me and whispered, like a good friend offering painful but essential advice: “I don’t blame you for trying, man. But hasn’t anyone ever told you that you’re the worst liar in the world?”

23

When I’d finished my account of the killers’ media presentation, Kuwale said flatly, “Don’t kid yourself that you ever had a chance. No one could have talked them out of it.”

“No?” I didn’t believe ver. They’d talked themselves into it, systematically enough. There had to be a way to unravel their own supposedly watertight logic before their eyes—to force them to confront its absurdity.

I hadn’t been able to find it, though. I hadn’t been able to get inside their heads.

I checked the time with Witness; it was almost dawn. I couldn’t stop shivering; the slick of algae on the floor felt damper than ever, and the hard polymer beneath had grown cold as steel.

“Mosala will be under close protection.” Kuwale had been despondent when I left ver, but in my absence ve seemed to have recovered a streak of defiant optimism. “I sent a copy of your mutant cholera genome to conference security, so they know the kind of risk she’s facing—even it she won’t acknowledge it herself. And there are plenty of other mainstream AC back on Stateless.”

“No one back on Stateless knows that Wu is involved, do they? And anyway… Wu could have infected Mosala with a bioweapon days ago. Do you think they would have confessed everything, on camera, if the assassination wasn’t already a fait accompli?. They wanted to ensure that they’d receive due credit, they had to get in early and avoid the rush, before everyone from PACDF to EnGeneUity comes under suspicion. But it would have to be the last thing they’d do, before confirming that she’s dead, and fleeing Stateless.” Meaning that nothing I’d said above deck could have made the slightest difference? Not quite. They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.

Kuwale fell silent. I listened for distant voices or footsteps, but there was nothing: the creaking of the hull, the white noise of a thousand waves.

So much for my grandiose visions of rebirth through adversity as a fearless champion of technoliberation. All I’d done was stumble into a vicious game between rival lunatic god-makers—and been cut back down to my proper station in life: conveyor of someone else’s messages.

Kuwale said, “Do you think they’re monitoring us, right now? Up on deck?”

“Who knows?” I looked around the dark hold; I wasn’t even sure if the faint gray light which might have been the far wall was real, or just retinal static and imagination. I laughed. “What do they think we’re going to do? Jump six meters into the air, punch a hole in the hatch, and then swim a hundred kilometers—all dressed as Siamese twins?”

I felt a sudden sharp tug on the rope around my hands. Irritated, I almost protested aloud—but I stopped myself in time. It seemed Kuwale had made good use of an hour without vis wrists jammed between our backs. Working some slack into vis own bonds and then hiding the loop between vis hands… which in turn might have helped ver keep them slightly apart, when we were tied together again? Whatever houdini ve’d used, after a few more minutes of painstaking manipulation the tension on the rope vanished. Kuwale pulled vis arms free of the space between us, and stretched them wide.

I couldn’t help feeling a rush of pure, dumb elation—but I waited for the inevitable sound of boots on the deck. IR cameras in the hold, monitored non-stop by software, would have registered this transgression easily.

The silence stretched on. Grabbing us must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when they intercepted my call to Kuwale—if they’d planned it in advance, they would have had handcuffs, at the very least. Maybe their surveillance technology, at short notice, was as down-market as their ropes and nets.

Kuwale shuddered with relief—I envied ver; my own shoulders were painfully cramped—then squeezed vis hands back into the gap.

The polymer rope was slippery, and knotted tight—and Kuwale’s fingernails were cut short (they ended up in my flesh several times). When my hands were finally untied, it was an anticlimax; the surge of elation had long faded, I knew we didn’t have the slightest chance of escape. But anything was better than sitting in the dark and waiting for the honor of announcing Mosala’s death to the world.

The net was made from a smart plastic which adhered selectively to its own opposite surface—presumably for ease of repair—and the join was as strong as the stuff itself. We’d been wrapped tight with our arms behind us, though; now that they were free, there was some slack—four or five centimeters. We rose to our feet awkwardly, shoes slipping on the algal slime. I exhaled, and flattened my stomach, glad of my recent fast.

The first dozen attempts failed. In the dark, it took ten or fifteen minutes of tortuous repositioning to find a way of standing which minimized our combined girth all the way down. It seemed like the kind of arduous, inane activity contestants would have to go through on game shows in Hell. By the time the net touched the floor, I’d lost all feeling in my calves;

I took a few steps across the hold and almost keeled over. I could hear the faint click of fingernails slipping over plastic; Kuwale was already working on the rope around vis feet. No one had bothered to bind my legs, the second time; I paced a few meters in the darkness, working out the kinks, making the most of the visceral illusion of freedom while it lasted.

I walked back to where Kuwale was sitting, and bent down until I could make out the whites of vis eyes; ve reached up and pressed a vertical finger to my lips. I nodded assent. So far, it seemed we’d been lucky— no IR camera—but there might still be audio surveillance, and there was no way of knowing how smart the listening software might be.

Kuwale stood up, turned and vanished; vis T-shirt had gone dead, deprived of sunlight for so long. I heard occasional squeaks from the wet soles of vis shoes; ve seemed to be slowly circumnavigating the hold. I had no idea what ve was hoping to find—some unlikely breach in the structure itself? I stood and waited. The faint line of light on the floor was visible again, just barely. Dawn was breaking, and daylight could only mean more people awake on deck.

I heard Kuwale approach; ve tapped my arm, then took my elbow. I followed ver to a corner of the hold. Ve pressed my hand to the wall, about a meter up. Ve’d found some kind of utilities panel, guarded by a protective cover, a small spring-loaded door flush with the wall. I hadn’t noticed it when we were being lowered in, but the walls were heavily stained and spattered, an effective camouflage pattern.

I explored the exposed panel with my fingertips. There was a low voltage DC power socket. Two threaded metal fittings, each a couple of centimeters wide, with flow-control levers beneath them. Whatever they supplied—or whatever they were meant to pump out—they didn’t strike me as much of an asset. Unless Kuwale had visions of flooding the hold, so we could float up to the hatch?

I almost missed it. At the far right of the panel, there was a shallow-rimmed circular aperture, just five or six millimeters wide. An optical interface port.

Connected to what? The boat’s main computer? If the vessel’s original design had allowed for carrying cargo, maybe a crew member with a portable terminal would have fed in inventory data from here. In a fishing boat leased to Anthrocosmologists, I didn’t have high hopes that it was configured to do anything at all.

I unbuttoned my shirt, while invoking Witness. The software had a crude “virtual terminal” option which would let me view any incoming data, and mime-type as if on a keyboard. I unsealed the interface port in my navel, and stood pressed against the wall, trying to align the two connectors. It was awkward—but after wriggling out of the fishing net, this seemed like no challenge at all.

The best I could get was a brief surge of random text—and then an error message from the software itself. It was picking up an answering signal but the data was scrambled beyond recognition. Both ports were sockets, designed to be joined to an umbilical’s connector. Their identical protective rims kept them too far apart—their photodetectors a millimeter beyond the plane of focus of each others signal lasers.

I stepped back, trying not to vent my frustration audibly. Kuwale touched my arm, inquiringly. I put vis hand to my face, shook my head, then guided vis finger to my artificial navel. Ve clapped me on the shoulder: I understand. Okay. We tried.

I stood slumped against the wall beside the panel. It occurred to me that if I buried the ACs’ confession, EnGeneUity might still get the blame. If Helen Wu and friends, in hiding, tried claiming responsibility after the fact, they were more than likely to be written off as obscure cranks. No one had ever heard of Anthrocosmologists. Mosala’s martyrdom could, still, break the boycott wide open.

I could already hear myself reciting the comforting rationalization over and over in my head: It would have been what she wanted.

I took off my belt and forced the prong of the buckle into the flesh around my metal navel. There was a thin layer of bioengineered connective tissue around the surgical steel, sealing the permanent wound against infection; the sound of tearing collagen set my teeth on edge, but there were no nerve endings to register the damage. A couple of centimeters down, though, I hit the metal flange which anchored the port in place. I levered the flesh away from the tube, and managed to force the prong past the edge of the flange.

It had seemed like a small enough piece of DIY surgery: enlarging the existing hole in the abdominal wall by seven or eight millimeters. My body disagreed. I persisted, digging around under the flange and trying to twist it free, while conflicting waves of chemical messengers flooded out from the site, delivering razor-sharp rebukes and analgesic comfort in turn. Kuwale came over and helped me, pulling the aperture open. As vis warm fingers brushed the scars where I’d slashed myself in front of Gina, I found I had an erection; it was the wrong response for so many reasons that I almost burst out laughing. Sweat ran into my eyes, blood trickled down toward my groin—and my body kept on blindly signaling desire. And the truth was, if ve’d been willing, I would have happily lain down on the floor and made love in any way possible. Just to feel more of vis skin against my skin. Just to believe that we’d made some kind of connection.

The buried steel tube emerged, trailing a short length of blood-slick optical fiber. I turned away and spat out a mouthful of acid. Mercifully, nothing followed.

I waited for my fingers to stop shaking, then wiped everything clean on my shirt, and unscrewed the whole end assembly, leaving the windowed port naked, unencumbered. More like circumcision than phalloplasty—and a lot of trouble to go through for a millimeter of penetration. I pocketed the metal foreskin, then found the wall socket and tried again.

Large, cheerful, blue-on-white letters appeared in front of me— unable to dazzle, but no less of a shock.

Mitsubishi Shanghai Marine

Model Number LMHDV-12-5600

Emergency Options:

F—launch Flares

B—activate radio Beacon

I hit all the possible escape codes, in the hope of finding some wider menu—but this was it, the complete list of choices. All the glorious fantasies I hadn’t dared entertain had involved reaching the ship’s main computer, gaining instant access to the net, and archiving the ACs’ pre-recorded confession in twenty safe places, while simultaneously sending copies to everyone at the Einstein Conference. This was nothing but a vestigial emergency system—probably built into the design as a minimum statutory requirement, and then ignored when the ship was fitted out by a third party with proper communications and navigation equipment. Ignored—or disconnected? I mimed typing B.

The text of a simple mayday broadcast flowed across the virtual screen. It gave the ship’s model number, serial number, latitude and longitude—if I remembered the map of Stateless correctly, we were closer to the island than I’d thought—and stated that “survivors” were located in the “main cargo hold.” I suddenly had a strong suspicion that if we’d bothered to search the rest of the hold, we might have found another panel, hiding two fist-sized red buttons labeled BEACON and FLARES—but I didn’t want to think about that.

Somewhere up on deck, a siren started screaming. Kuwale was dismayed. “What did you do? Trigger a fire alarm?”

“I broadcast a mayday. I thought flares might get us into trouble.” I closed the panel and started rebuttoning my bloody shirt, as if hiding the evidence might help.

I heard someone heavy running across the deck. A few seconds later, the siren shut off. Then the hatch was wound halfway open, and Three peered down at us. He was holding a gun, almost absent mindedly. “What good do you think that’s going to do you? We’re sending out the false-alarm code already; no one’s going to take any notice.” He seemed more bemused than angry. “All you have to do is sit tight and stop fucking about, and you’ll be free soon enough. So how about some cooperation?”

He unfurled the ladder and came down, alone. I stared up at the strip of pale dawn sky behind him; I could see a fading satellite, but I had no way to reach it. Three picked up two pieces of discarded rope and tossed them at us. “Sit down and tie your feet together. Do it properly and you might get breakfast.” He yawned widely, then turned and yelled, “Giorgio! Anna! Give me a hand!”

Kuwale rushed him, faster than I’d seen anyone move in my life. Three raised the gun and shot ver in the thigh. Kuwale staggered, pirouetting, still moving forward. Three kept the gun aimed squarely on ver, as vis knees buckled and vis head sagged. As the shot’s reverb faded from my skull, I could hear ver gasping for breath.

I stood and shouted abuse at him, barely conscious of what I was saying. I’d lost it: I wanted to take the hold, the ship, the ocean, and wipe them all away like cobwebs. I stepped forward, waving my arms wildly, screaming obscenities. Three glanced at me, perplexed, as if he couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. I took another step, and he aimed the gun at me.

Kuwale sprang forward and knocked him off his feet. Before he could rise, ve leapt on him and pinned his arms, slamming his right hand against the floor. I was paralyzed for a second, convinced that the struggle was futile, but then I ran to help.

Three must have looked like an indulgent father playing with two belligerent five-year-olds. I tugged at the gun barrel protruding from his huge fist; the weapon might as well have been set in stone. He seemed ready to climb to his feet as soon as he caught his breath, with or without Kuwale’s slender frame attached.

I kicked him in the head. He protested, outraged. I attacked the same spot repeatedly, fighting down my revulsion. The skin above his eye split open; I ground my heel hard into the wound, crouching down and pulling on the gun. He cried out in pain and let it slip free—and then half sat up, throwing Kuwale to one side. I fired the gun into the floor behind me, hoping to discourage him from making me use it. Another shot rang out, above. I looked up. Nineteen—Anna?—was lying on her stomach at the edge of the hold.

I aimed the gun at Three, stepping back a few paces. He stared at me, bloodied and angry—but still curious, trying to fathom my senseless actions.

“You want it, don’t you? The unraveling. You want Mosala to take the world apart.” He laughed and shook his head. “You’re too late.”

Anna called out, “There’s no need for any of this. Please. Put the gun down, and you’ll be back on Stateless in an hour. No one wants to harm you.”

I shouted back, “Bring me a working notepad. Fast. You have two minutes before I blow his brains out.” I meant it—if only for as long as it took to get the words out.

Anna crawled back from the edge; I heard a murmur of angry low voices as she consulted with the others.

Kuwale limped over to me. Vis wound was bleeding steadily; the bullet had clearly missed the femoral artery, but vis breathing was ragged, ve needed help. Ve said, “They’re not going to do it. They’ll just keep stalling. Put yourself in their place—”

Three said calmly, “Ve’s right. Whatever value anyone puts on my life… if Mosala becomes the Keystone, we all die anyway. If you’re trying to save her, you’ve got nothing to trade—because whatever you threaten, it’s forfeit either way.”

I glanced up toward the deck; I could still hear them arguing. But if they had enough faith in their cosmology to kill Mosala—and to trash their own lives and become self-righteous fugitives, hiding out in rural Mongolia or Turkistan without so much as a share of the media rights… the threat of one more death was not going to dent their conviction. I said, “I think your work is in urgent need of peer review.” I handed Kuwale the gun, then took off my shirt and tied it around the top of vis leg. I’d stopped bleeding, myself; the ruptured sealant tissue was oozing a colorless balm of antibiotics and coagulants.

I returned to the utilities panel and plugged myself in again. Independent of the main computer, the emergency system couldn’t be shut down; I repeated the mayday, then fired the flares. I heard three loud hisses of expanding gas—and then a merciless actinic glare began to spread down the far wall, displacing the soft dawn light. The brown patina of algal stains had never been clearer—but it lost its camouflage value completely: the edges of another recessed compartment appeared, the gap around the protective cover starkly etched in black. I looked inside; there were two large buttons, just as I’d suspected, and an emergency air supply as well. On close inspection, the faintest hint of a cryptic logo—incomprehensible across all languages and cultures—showed through the stains on the compartment’s door.

The conversation above had fallen silent. I was just hoping they wouldn’t panic, and rush us.

Three seemed tempted to say something disparaging, but he kept his mouth shut. He eyed Kuwale nervously; maybe he’d decided that ve was the real fanatic who wanted the unraveling, and I’d merely been duped into helping ver.

The flare rose toward the zenith, its light filling the hold. I said, “I don’t understand. How do you get to the point where you’re ready to kill an innocent woman—just because some computer tells you she can bring on Armageddon?” Three mimed indifference in the presence of fools. I said, “So you found a theory that could swallow any TOE. A system that could out-explain any kind of physics. But don’t kid yourself: it’s not science. You might as well have stumbled on some way to add up the gematria numbers of ‘Mosala’ to get 666.”

Three said mildly, “Ask Kuwale if it’s all cabalistic gibberish. Ask ver about Kinshasa in ’43.”

“What?”

“That’s just… apocryphal bullshit.” Kuwale was drenched in sweat, and showing signs of going into shock. I took the gun, and ve went to sit against the wall.

Three persisted, “Ask ver how Muteba Kazadi died.”

I said, “He was seventy-eight years old.” I struggled to recall what his biographers had said about his death; given his age, I hadn’t paid much attention. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘cerebral hemorrhage.'”

Three laughed, disbelieving, and a chill ran through me. Of course they had more than pure information theory behind their beliefs: they also had at least one mythical death by forbidden knowledge—to validate everything, to convince them that the abstractions had teeth.

I said, “Okay. But if Muteba didn’t bring down the universe when he went… why should Mosala?”

“Muteba wasn’t a TOE theorist; he couldn’t have become the Keystone. No one knows exactly what he was doing; all his notes have been lost. But some of us think he found a way to mix with information—and when it happened, the shock was too much for him.”

Kuwale snorted derisively.

I said, “What’s ‘mix with information’ supposed to mean?”

Three said, “Every physical structure encodes information—but normally it’s the laws of physics alone which control how the structure behaves.” He grinned. “Drop a Bible and a copy of the Principia together, and they’ll fall side-by-side all the way. The fact that the laws of physics are themselves information is invisible, irrelevant. They’re as absolute as Newtonian space-time—a fixed backdrop, not a player.

“But nothing’s pure, nothing’s independent. Time and space mix at high velocities. Macroscopic possibilities mix at the quantum level. The four forces mix at high temperatures. And physics and information mix… by an unknown process. The symmetry group isn’t clear, let alone the detailed dynamics. But it could just as easily be triggered by pure knowledge—knowledge of information cosmology itself, encoded in a human brain—as by any physical extreme.”

“To what effect?”

“Hard to predict.” The blood on his face resembled a black caul in the flare’s light. “Maybe… exposing the deepest unification: revealing precisely how physics is created by explanation—and vice versa. Spinning the vector, rotating all the hidden machinery into view.”

“Yeah? If Muteba had such a great cosmic revelation… how do you know it didn’t turn him into the Keystone? The instant before he died?” I knew I was probably wasting my breath, but I couldn’t stop trying to get Mosala off the hook.

Three smirked at my ignorance. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen models of an information cosmos with a Keystone who mixed. And I know we don’t live in that universe.”

“Why?”

“Because after the Aleph moment, everyone else would get dragged along. Exponential growth: one person mixing, then two, four, eight… if that had happened in ’43, we’d all have followed Muteba Kazadi by now. We’d all know, firsthand, exactly what killed him.”

The flare descended out of sight, plunging the hold into grayness again. I invoked Witness, adapting my eyes to the ambient light again instantly.

Kuwale said, “Andrew! Listen!”

There was a deep rhythmic pulsing sound coming through the hull, growing steadily louder. I’d finally learned to recognize an MHD engine—and this one wasn’t ours.

I waited, sick with uncertainty. My hands were beginning to shake as badly as Kuwale’s. After a few minutes, there was shouting in the distance. I couldn’t make out the words—but there were new voices, with Polynesian accents.

Three said quietly, “You keep your mouth shut, or they’ll all have to die. Or is Violet Mosala worth a dozen farmers to you?”

I stared at him, light-headed. Would the rest of the ACs think like that! How many real deaths would they have to confront, before they admitted that they might be mistaken? Or had they surrendered completely to a moral calculus where even the smallest chance of the unraveling outweighed any crime, any atrocity?

The voices grew nearer, then the engine stopped; it sounded as if the fishing boat had pulled up right beside us. But I could already hear another one in the distance.

I caught snatches of a conversation: “But I leased you this boat, so it’s my responsibility. The emergency system should not have malfunctioned.” It was a deep voice, a woman’s, puzzled, reasonable, persistent. I glanced at Kuwale; vis eyes were shut, vis teeth clenched tight. The sight of ver in pain cut me up badly; I didn’t trust what I was beginning to feel for ver, but that wasn’t the point. Ve needed treatment, we had to get away.

But if I called out… how many people would I endanger?

I heard a third ship approaching. Mayday… false-alarm code… mayday… flares. The whole local fleet seemed to think that was strange enough to be worth looking into. Even if all these people were unarmed, the ACs were now completely outnumbered.

I raised my head and bellowed, “In here!”

Three tensed, as if preparing to move. I fired the gun into the floor near his head, and he froze. A wave of vertigo swept over me—and I waited for a barrage of automatic fire. I was insane—what had I done?

There were heavy footfalls on the deck, more shouting.

Twenty—and a tall Polynesian woman in blue coveralls—approached the edge of the hold.

The farmer glanced down at us, frowning. She said, “If they’ve threatened violence, gather your evidence and take it to an adjudicator back on the island. But whatever’s gone on here—don’t you think both sides would be better off separated?”

Twenty faked outrage. “They hide on board, they intimidate us with firearms, they take a man hostage! And you expect us to hand them over to you, so you can let them go free!”

The farmer looked straight at me. I couldn’t speak, but I met her gaze, and I let my right hand drop to my side. She addressed Twenty again, deadpan. “I'm happy to testify for you, about what I’ve seen here. So if they’re willing to give up their hostage and come with us—you have my word, justice won’t be compromised.”

Four other farmers appeared at the edge of the hold. Kuwale, still sitting by the wall, raised a hand in greeting, and called out something in a Polynesian language. One of the farmers laughed raucously, and replied. I felt a surge of hope. The ship was swarming with people—and when it came down to the prospect of a massacre, face-to-face, the ACs had buckled.

I put the gun in my back pocket. I shouted up, “He’s free to go!”

Three rose to his feet, looking surly. I said quietly, “She’s dead anyway. You said so yourself. You’re already savior of the universe.” I tapped my stomach. “Think of your place in history. Don’t tarnish your image now.” He exchanged glances with Twenty, then started climbing the rope ladder.

I threw the gun into a corner of the hold, then went to help Kuwale. Ve took the ladder slowly; I followed close behind, hoping I’d be able to catch ver if ve lost vis grip.

There must have been thirty farmers on deck—and eight ACs, most of them with guns, who seemed far more tense than the unarmed anarchists. I felt a reprise of horror at the thought of what might have happened. I looked around for Helen Wu, but she was nowhere in sight. Had she returned to the island during the night, to oversee Mosala’s death? I’d heard no boat… but she might have donned scuba gear, and ridden the harvester.

As we started making our way toward the edge of the deck, where a concertina bridge linked the two ships, Twenty called out, “Don’t think you’re going to walk away with stolen property.”

The farmer was losing patience; she turned to me. “Do you want to empty out your pockets, and save us all some time? Your friend needs a doctor.”

“I know.”

Twenty approached me. She looked around the deck, meaningfully, and my blood froze. It wasn’t over yet. They hoped that whatever they’d done to Mosala was irreversible by now… but they weren’t certain, and they were ready to start shooting rather than turn me loose with footage which proved that the danger was real.

They knew Mosala too well. I had no idea how I’d convince her, without it; she already believed that I’d cried wolf, once.

I had no choice, though. I invoked Witness, and wiped everything. “Okay. It’s done. It’s erased.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I gestured at the protruding fiber. “Plug in a notepad, do an inventory. See for yourself.”

“That’s no proof. You could fake that.”

“Then… what do you want? Do you want to put me in a tuned microwave field, and fry all the RAM?”

She shook her head solemnly. “We don’t have that kind of equipment here.”

I glanced at the bridge, which was sighing with the shifting pressure as the boats bobbed and swayed in the gentle swell. “Okay. Let Kuwale go. I’ll stay.”

Kuwale groaned. “Don’t. You can’t trust—”

Twenty cut ver off. “It’s the only way. And you have my word that you’ll be returned to Stateless, unharmed, once this is over.”

She gazed at me calmly; so far as I could tell, she was perfectly sincere. Once Mosala was dead, I’d be free.

But if she survived, and completed her TOE—proving that these people were nothing but failed homicidal conspirators? How would they feel about their chosen messenger then?

I sank to my knees. I thought, among other things: The sooner I start, the sooner it’s over.

I wrapped the fiber around my hand and started hauling the memory chips out of my gut. The wound left by the optical port was too small— but the chips’ capsule-shaped protective casings forced it open, and they emerged into the light one by one, like the gleaming segments of some strange cybernetic parasite which was fighting hard to stay inside its host. The farmers backed away, alarmed and confused. The louder I bellowed, the more it dulled the pain.

The processor emerged last, the buried head of the worm, trailing a fine gold cable which lead to my spinal cord, and the nerve taps in my brain. I snapped it off where it vanished into the chip, then rose to my feet, bent double, a fist pressed against the ragged hole.

I pushed the bloody offering toward Twenty with my foot. I couldn’t stand up straight enough to look her in the eye.

“You can go.” She sounded shaken, but unrepentant. I wondered what kind of death she’d chosen for Mosala. Clean and painless, no doubt: straight into a fairytale coma, without a speck of blood or shit or vomit.

I said, “Mail it back to me, once you’re finished with it. Or you’ll be hearing from my bank manager.”

24

In the cramped sick bay, a scan of Kuwale’s leg revealed ruptured blood vessels and broken ligaments, a trail of damage like an aircraft’s crash path leading to the bullet buried at the back of vis thigh. Ve watched the screen with grim amusement, sweat dripping from vis face as the ancient software ground away at a detailed assessment; the final line read: Probable gunshot injury. “Oh, I was hit!” One of the farmers, Prasad Jwala, cleaned and dressed our wounds, and pumped us full of (off-the-shelf) drugs to limit bleeding, infection, and shock. The only strong painkillers on board were crude synthetic opiates which left me so high that I couldn’t have given a coherent account of the ACs’ plans to anyone if the fate of the universe had depended on it. Kuwale lost consciousness completely; I sat beside ver, fantasizing about gathering my thoughts. It was just as well that my stomach was tightly bandaged; I had a strong urge to reach through the portal I’d made and probe the machinery which remained inside me: the tight smooth coil of the intestines, the demon snake which Kuwale’s magic bullet had tamed; the warm, blood-drenched liver, ten billion microscopic enzyme factories plugged straight into the circulation, a bootleg pharm dispensing whatever its chemical intuition desired. I wanted to drag every dark mysterious organ out into the daylight one by one, and arrange them all in front of me in their proper positions, until I was nothing but a shell of skin and muscle, face-to-face at last with my inner twin.

After about fifteen minutes, the same enzyme factories finally began degrading the opiates in my blood, and I clawed my way down from marshmallow heaven. I begged for a notepad; Jwala obliged, then left to help out on deck.

I managed to get through to Karin De Groot immediately. I stuck to the essentials. De Groot heard me out in silence; my appearance must have given the story a degree of credibility. “You have to talk Violet into heading back to civilization. Even if she’s not convinced of the danger… what has she got to lose? She can always deliver her final paper from Cape Town.”

De Groot said, “Believe me, she’ll take every word of this seriously. Yasuko Nishide died last night. It was pneumonia—and he was very frail —but Violet’s still badly shaken. And she’s seen the cholera genome analysis, which was done by a reputable Bombay lab. But—”

“So you’ll fly out with her?” Nishide’s death saddened me, but Mosala’s loss of complacency was pure good news. “I know, it’s a risk, she might get sick on the plane, but—”

De Groot cut me off. “Listen. There’ve been some problems here, while you were away. No one’s flying anywhere.”

“Why? What kind of problems?”

“A boatload of… mercenaries, I don’t know… arrived on the island overnight. They’ve occupied the airport.”

Jwala had come back to check on Kuwale; he caught the last part of the conversation, and interjected derisively, “Agents provocateurs. Every few years a different pack of apes in designer camouflage show up, try to make trouble… fail, and go away.” He sounded about as concerned as someone from an ordinary democracy, complaining about the periodic irritation of election campaigns. “I saw them last night, landing in the harbor. They were heavily armed, we had to let them pass.” He grinned. “But they’re in for some surprises. I’ll give them six months, at the most.”

“Six months?”

He shrugged. “It’s never been longer.”

A boatload of mercenaries, trying to make trouble—the boat which had rammed the ACs? In any case, Twenty and her colleagues must have known by morning that the airport had been seized—and that my testimony would make little difference to Mosala’s chances.

The timing could not have been worse, but it was hardly surprising. The Einstein Conference was already lending Stateless too much respectability, and Mosala’s planned migration would be an even greater embarrassment. But EnGeneUity and their allies wouldn’t try to assassinate her, creating an instant martyr. Nor would they dissolve the island back into the ocean, and risk scaring off legitimate customers worth billions of dollars. All they could do was try, one last time, to bring the social order of Stateless crashing down—proving to the world that the whole naive experiment had been doomed from the start.

I said, “Where’s Violet now?”

“Talking to Henry Buzzo. She’s trying to convince him to go with her to the hospital.”

“Good idea.” Immersed in the schemes of the “moderates,” I’d almost forgotten that Buzzo was also in danger—and Mosala was at risk on two fronts. The extremists had already triumphed in Kyoto—and whoever had infected me with the cholera, en route from Sydney, was probably on Stateless right now, looking for a chance to make up for the botched first attempt.

De Groot said, “I’ll show them this conversation immediately.”

“And give a copy to security.”

“Right. For what that’s worth.” She seemed to be holding up under the pressure far better than I was; she added wrily, “No sign of Helen Wu in flippers, so far. But I’ll keep you posted.”

We arranged to meet at the hospital. I signed off, and closed my eyes, fighting the temptation to sink back into the lingering opiate fog.

It had taken the mainstream ACs five days to smuggle in a cure for me even with the airport open. After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t ready to swallow the fact that Mosala was now a walking corpse—but short of a counter-invasion by African technoliberateurs, over a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers, in the next day or two, at the latest… I could see no hope of her surviving.

As the boat approached the northern harbor, I sat watching over Akili. I badly wanted to take vis hand, but I was afraid it would only make things worse. How could I have fallen for someone who’d surgically excised even the possibility of desire?

Easily enough, apparently: a shared trauma, an intense experience, the confusing absence of gender cues… it was no great mystery. People became infatuated with asex all the time. And no doubt it would pass, soon enough—once I accepted the simple fact that nothing I felt could ever be reciprocated.

After a while, I found I could no longer bear to look at vis face; it hurt too much. So I watched the glowing traces on the bedside monitor, and listened for each shallow exhalation, and tried to understand why the ache I felt would not go away.

The trams were reportedly still running, but one of the farmers offered to drive us all the way to the city. “Quicker than waiting for an ambulance,” she explained. “There are only ten on the island.” She was a young Fijian named Adelle Vunibobo; I remembered seeing her looking down into the hold on the ACs’ boat.

Kuwale sat between us in the cab of the truck, half awake but still stupefied. I watched the vivid coral inlets shrinking around us, like a fast-motion view of the reefs’ slow compaction.

I said, “You risked your life back there.”

“Maydays at sea are taken very seriously.” Her tone was gently mocking, as if she was trying to puncture my deferential manner.

“Lucky we weren’t on land.” I persisted, “But you could see that the boat wasn’t in danger. The crew told you to clear off and mind your own business. Underlining the suggestion with guns.”

She glanced at me curiously. “So you think it was reckless? Foolish? There’s no police force here. Who else would have helped you?”

“No one,” I admitted.

She fixed her eyes on the uneven terrain ahead. “I was in a fishing boat that capsized, five years ago. We were caught in a storm. My parents, and my sister. My parents were knocked unconscious, they drowned straight away. My sister and I spent ten hours in the ocean, treading water, taking turns holding each other up.”

“I'm sorry. The Greenhouse Storms have claimed so many people—”

She groaned. “I don’t want your sympathy. I'm just trying to explain.”

I waited in silence. After a while, she said, “Ten hours. I still dream about it. I grew up on a fishing boat—and I’d seen storms sweep away whole villages. I thought I already knew exactly how I felt about the ocean. But that time in the water with my sister changed everything.”

“In what way? Do you have more respect, more fear?”

Vunibobo shook her head impatiently. “More lifejackets, actually, but that’s not what I'm talking about.” She grimaced, frustrated, but then she said, “Would you do something for me? Close your eyes, and try to picture the world. All ten billion people at once. I know it’s impossible— but try.”

I was baffled, but I obliged. “Okay.”

“Now describe what you see.”

“A view of the Earth from space. It’s more like a sketch than a photograph, though. North is up. The Indian Ocean is in the center—but the view stretches from West Africa to New Zealand, from Ireland to Japan. There are crowds of people—not to scale—standing on all the continents and islands. Don’t ask me to count them, but I’d guess there are about a hundred, in all.”

I opened my eyes. I’d left her old and new homes right off the map, but I had a feeling this wasn’t a consciousness-raising exercise in the marginalizing force of geographical representations.

She said, “I used to see something like that, myself. But since the accident, it’s changed. When I close my eyes and imagine the world, now… I see the same map, the same continents… but the land isn’t land at all. What looks like solid ground is really a solid mass of people; there is no dry land, there is nowhere to stand. We’re all in the ocean, treading water, holding each other up. That’s how we’re born, that’s how we die. Struggling to keep each other’s heads above the waves.” She laughed, suddenly self-conscious, but then she said defiantly, “Well, you asked for an explanation.”

“I did.”

The dazzling coral inlets had turned to rivers of bleached limestone sludge, but the reef-rock around us now shimmered with delicate greens and silver-grays. I wondered what the other farmers would have told me, if I’d asked them the same question. A dozen different answers, probably;

Stateless seemed to run on the principle of people agreeing to do the same thing for entirely different reasons. It was a sum over mutually contradictory topologies which left the calculus of pre-space for dead; no imposed politics, philosophy, religion, no idiot cheer-squad worship of flags or symbols—but order emerged nonetheless.

And I still couldn’t decide if that was miraculous, or utterly unmysterious. Order only arose and survived, anywhere, because enough people desired it. Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonored. The ultimate safety nets were inertia, apathy and obfuscation. On Stateless, they’d had the— possibly insane—courage to unravel the whole political knot into its simplest form, to gaze at the undecorated structures of power and responsibility, tolerance and consensus.

I said, “You kept me from drowning. So how do I repay you?” Vunibobo glanced at me, measuring my seriousness. “Swim harder. Help us all to stay afloat.”

“I’ll try. If I ever have the chance.”

She smiled at this crudely hedged half-promise, and reminded me, “We’re heading straight into a storm, right now. I think you’ll get your chance.”

I’d expected, at least, deserted streets in the center of the island, but at first sight little seemed to have changed. There were no signs of panic— no queues of hoarders, no boarded-up shopfronts. When we passed the hotel, though, I saw that the Mystical Renaissance carnival had gone to ground; I wasn’t the only tourist who was suffering from a sudden desire to be invisible. Back on the boat, I’d heard that one woman had been injured slightly when the airport was captured, but most of the staff had simply walked away. Munroe had spoken of a militia on the island, and no doubt they outnumbered the invaders—but how their equipment, training and discipline compared, I had no idea. The mercenaries seemed content, so far, to dig themselves in at the airport—but if the ultimate aim was not to take power, but to bring “anarchy” to Stateless, I had a queasy suspicion that there’d be something a lot less palatable than the bloodless seizure of strategic assets, very soon.

The atmosphere at the hospital was calm. Vunibobo helped me get Kuwale into the building; ve smiled dreamily and tried to limp forward, but it took the two of us to keep ver from falling flat on vis face. Prasad Jwala had sent the scan of Kuwale’s bullet wound ahead, and an operating theater was already prepared. I watched ver being wheeled in, trying to convince myself that I felt nothing but the same anxiety that I would have felt for anyone else. Vunibobo bid me farewell.

After waiting my turn in casualty, I was sewn up under local anesthetic. I’d managed to kill the bioengineered graft—which would have accelerated healing and formed a good seal—but the medic who treated me packed the wound with a spongy antibacterial carbohydrate polymer, which would slowly degrade in the presence of the growth factors secreted by the surrounding flesh. She asked what had made the hole. I told her the truth, and she seemed greatly relieved. “I was beginning to wonder if something had eaten its way out.”

I stood up carefully, numb at the center, but feeling the pinched absence of skin and muscle tug on every part of me. The medic said, “Try to avoid strenuous bowel movements. And laughter.”

I found De Groot and Mosala in the anteroom to the Medical Imaging suite. Mosala looked drawn and nervous, but she greeted me warmly, shaking my hand, clasping my shoulder. “Andrew, are you all right?”

“I'm fine. But the documentary may have a small gap in it.”

She managed to smile. “Henry’s being scanned right now. They’re still processing my data; it could take a while. They’re looking for foreign proteins, but there’s some doubt as to whether the resolution’s up to it. The machine’s second-hand, twenty years old.” She hugged herself, and tried to laugh. “Listen to me. If I'm planning to live here, I’d better get used to the facilities.”

De Groot said, “No one I’ve spoken to has seen Helen Wu since early last night. Conference security checked out her room; it’s empty.”

Mosala still seemed stunned by the revelation of Wu’s allegiance. “Why would she get involved with the Anthrocosmologists? She’s a brilliant theorist in her own right—not some pseudoscientific hanger-on! I can understand how… a certain kind of person might think there’s something mystical about working on TOEs, when they find they can’t grasp the details, themselves… but Helen understands my work almost better than I do!” I didn’t think it was a good time to point out that that was half the problem. “As for these other thugs, who you think killed Yasuko… I’ll be giving a media conference this afternoon, outlining the problems with Henry Buzzo’s choice of measure and what it means for his TOE. That should concentrate their tiny minds.” Her voice was almost calm—but she held her arms crossed in front of her, one hand clasped around the other wrist, trying to mask the faint tremor of rage. “And when I announce my own TOE on Friday morning… they can kiss their transcendence goodbye.” “Friday morning?”

“Serge Bischoff’s algorithms are working wonders. All my calculations will be finished by tomorrow night.”

I said carefully, “If it turns out that you’ve been infected with a bioweapon—and if you become too sick to work—is there anyone else who could interpret these results, and put the whole thing together?”

Mosala recoiled. “What are you asking me to do? Anoint a successor to be targeted next?”

“No! But if your TOE is completed and announced, the moderates will have to admit that they’ve been proven wrong—and there’s a chance they might hand over the antidote. I'm not asking you to publicize anyone’s name! But if you can arrange for someone to put the finishing touches—”

Mosala said icily, “I have nothing to prove to these people. And I'm not risking someone else’s life, trying.”

Before I could pursue the argument any further, De Groot’s notepad chimed. The head of security for the conference, Joe Kepa, had viewed the copy De Groot had sent him of my call from the fishing boat, and he wanted to talk to me. In person. Immediately.

In a small meeting room on the top floor of the hotel—with two large umale associates looking on—Kepa grilled me for almost three hours, questioning everything right back to the moment when I’d begged SeeNet to give me the documentary. He’d already seen reports from some of the farmers about events on the ACs’ boat (they’d posted their accounts directly onto the local news nets), and he’d seen the cholera analysis—but he was still angry and suspicious, he still seemed to want to tear my story to pieces. I resented the hostile treatment, but I couldn’t really blame him. Until the seizure of the airport, his biggest problem had been buskers in clown suits; now it was the threat of anything up to a full-scale military engagement around the hotel. Talk of information theorists armed with amateur bioweapons targeted at the conference’s highest profile physicists must have sounded like either a sick hoax, or proof that he’d been singled out for divine punishment.

By the time Kepa told me the interview was over, though, I believed I’d convinced him. He was angrier than ever.

My testimony had been recorded to international judicial standards: each frame stamped with a centrally generated time code, and an encrypted copy lodged with Interpol. I was invited to scan through the file to verify that there’d been no tampering, before I electronically signed it. I checked a dozen points at random; I wasn’t going to view the whole three hours.

I went to my room and took a shower, instinctively shielding the freshly bandaged wound although I knew there was no need to keep it dry. The luxury of hot water, the solidity of the plain elegant decor, seemed surreal. Twenty four hours before, I’d planned to do everything I could to help Mosala smash the boycott, reshaping the documentary around the news of her emigration. But what could I do for technoliberation, now? Buy an external camera, and proceed to document her meaningless death, while Stateless collapsed in the background? Was that what I wanted? To claw back my delusions of objectivity, and calmly record whatever fate befell her?

I stared at myself in the mirror. What use was I to anyone now? The room had a wallphone; I called the hospital. There’d been no problems with the operation, but Akili was still sleeping off the anesthetic. I decided to visit ver anyway.

I walked through the hotel lobby just as the morning sessions were breaking up. The conference was still running on schedule—although screens announced a memorial for Yasuko Nishide later in the day—but the participants were visibly nervous and subdued, talking quietly in small groups, or looking around furtively as if hoping to overhear some vital piece of news about the occupation, however unreliable.

I spotted a group of journalists, all people I knew slightly, and they let me join in as they swapped rumors. The consensus seemed to be that foreigners would be evacuated by the US (or New Zealand, or Japanese) navy within a matter of days, although no one could offer any firm evidence for this belief. David Connolly—Janet Walsh’s photographer— said confidently, “There are three US Nobel prize-winners here. Do you really think they’re going to be left stranded, indefinitely, while Stateless goes to hell?”

The other consensus was that the airport had been taken by “rival anarchists"—the infamous US gun law “refugees.” Biotech interests didn’t rate a mention, and if Mosala’s plan to migrate was common knowledge on the island, nobody here had bothered to talk to the locals long enough to find out.

These people would be reporting everything that happened on Stateless to the world—and none of them had the slighest idea of what was really going on.

On my way to the hospital, I spotted an electrical retailer. I bought a new notepad and a small, shoulder-mounted camera. I typed my personal code into the notepad, and the last satellite backup from the old machine flowed down from deep freeze and started catching up with real-time. The screen was a blur of activity for several seconds—and then Sisyphus announced, “Reported cases of Distress have exceeded three thousand.”

“I do not wish to know that.” Three thousand? That was a sixfold increase in a fortnight. “Show me a case map.” It looked more like the plot for a spontaneous cancer than any kind of infectious disease: a random scatter across the globe, ignoring every social and environmental factor, concentrated only by population density itself.

How could the numbers be increasing so rapidly—without any localized outbreaks? I’d heard that models based on airborne transmission, sexual contact, water supplies, parasites, had all failed to match the epidemiology—

“Any other news on this?”

“Not officially. But footage logged in SeeNet’s library by your colleague John Reynolds includes the first reports of coherent speech by sufferers.”

“Some people are recovering?”

“No. But some new sufferers have shown an intermittent change in the pathology.”

“Change, or reduction?”

“The speech is coherent, but the subject matter is contextually inappropriate.”

“You mean they’re psychotic? When they finally stop screaming, and calm down long enough to string two words together… it’s only to pass on the news that they’ve gone insane?”

“That’s a matter for expert opinion.”

I was almost at the hospital. I said, “Okay, show me some of this changed pathology. Show me some of the joys I’ve missed out on.”

Sisyphus raided the library and brought me a clip. It was questionable etiquette to peek at other people’s unfinished work, but if Reynolds had wanted the footage to be inaccessible to his colleagues, he would have encrypted it.

I watched the scene in the hospital elevator, alone—and I felt the blood draining from my face. There was no explanation for this, no possible way to make sense of it.

Reynolds had archived three other scenes of “coherent speech” from Distress patients. I viewed them all, unwinding the notepad’s headset so I could listen in private as I made my way along the busy corridors. The exact words the patients used were different in every case—but the implications were the same.

I suspended judgment. Maybe I was still in shock or still affected by the drugs I’d been given on the boat. Maybe I was seeing connections which simply weren’t there.

By the time I reached the ward, Akili was awake. Ve smiled ruefully when ve saw me—and I knew I had it bad. It wasn’t just the fact that vis face seemed to have burned itself into my brain so deeply that I could no longer believe that I’d ever been attracted to anyone else. Beauty, after all, was the shallowest thing. But ver dark eyes showed a depth of passion, humor, and intelligence that no one else I’d known had ever possessed…

I caught myself. This was ludicrous. To a total asex, these were the sentiments of a hormone-driven wind-up toy, a pathetic biological robot. If ve ever found out how I felt… the most I could expect in return was to be pitied.

I said, “Have you heard about the airport?”

Ve nodded, dismayed. “And Nishide’s death. How’s Mosala taking all this?”

“She’s not falling to pieces—but I'm not sure she’s thinking straight.” Not like me.

I recounted my conversation with her. “What do you think? If she can be kept alive until someone announces the TOE on her behalf, would the moderates recant and hand over the cure?”

Kuwale didn’t look hopeful. “They might. If there was a clear proof that the TOE really had been completed, with no room for doubt. But they’re on the run, now, they can’t hand over anything.”

“They could still transmit the molecule’s structure.”

“Yeah. And then we just hope there’s a machine on Stateless which can synthesize it in time.”

“If the whole universe is a conspiracy to explain the Keystone, don’t you think she might get lucky?” I didn’t believe a word of this, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

“Explaining the Aleph moment doesn’t stretch to miraculous reprieves. Mosala doesn’t have to be the Keystone—even with Nishide dead, and Buzzo’s TOE refuted. If she survives, it will only be because the people who struggled to save her fought harder than those who struggled to kill her.” Ve laughed wearily. “That’s what a Theory of Everything means: there are no miracles, not even for the Keystone. Everyone lives and dies by exactly the same rules.”

“I understand.” I hesitated. “There’s something I have to show you. Some news that’s just broken, about Distress.”

“Distress?”

“Humor me. Maybe it means nothing, but I need to know what you think.”

I had an obligation to Reynolds not to splash his unreleased footage around. The ward was full, but there were screens either side of us, and the man in a cast in the opposite bed appeared to be sleeping. I handed Kuwale my notepad, and had it replay one of the clips, with the volume down low.

A pale, disheveled, middle-aged woman with long black hair, restrained in a hospital bed, faced the viewer squarely. She didn’t look drugged, and she certainly wasn’t exhibiting the syndrome’s characteristic behavior—but she regarded Reynolds with intense, horrified fascination.

She said, “This pattern of information, this state of being conscious and possessing these perceptions, wraps itself in ever-growing layers of corollaries: neurons to encode the information, blood to nourish the neurons, a heart to pump the blood, intestines to enrich it, a mouth to supply the intestines, food to pass through it, fields of crops, earth, sunlight, a trillion stars.” Her gaze shifted slightly as she spoke, scanning back and forth across Reynolds’ face. “Neurons, heart, intestines, cells of proteins and ions and water wrapped in lipid membranes, tissues differentiated in development, genes switched on by intersecting marker hormone gradients, a million interlocking molecular shapes, tetravalent carbon, monovalent hydrogen, electrons shared in bonds between nuclei of protons, neutrons to balance electrostatic repulsion, quarks spinning in both to partner the leptons in a hierarchy of field excitations, a ten-dimensional manifold to support them… defining a broken symmetry on the space of all topologies.” Her voice quickened. “Neurons, heart, intestines, morphogenesis converging back to a single cell, a fertilized egg in another body. Diploid chromosomes requiring a separate donor. Ancestry iterates. Mutations split species from earlier lineages, unicellular life, self-replicating fragments, nucleotides, sugars, amino acids, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen. A condensing protostellar cloud—rich in heavy elements synthesized in other stars, flung throughout a gravitationally unstable cosmos which starts and ends in singularities.”

She fell silent, but her eyes kept moving; I could almost see the outline of Reynolds’ face in the sweep of her gaze. And if he’d appeared to her, at first, as a bizarre apparition, flashes of intense comprehension now seemed to break through her astonishment—as if she was pushing her cosmological reasoning to its limits, and weaving this stranger, this logically necessary distant cousin, into the same unified scheme.

But then something happened to put an end to her brief remission: an upwelling of horror and panic distorted her features. Distress had reclaimed her. I halted the replay before she could begin to thrash and scream.

I said, “There are three other cases, more or less the same. So am I putting my own spin on this raving—or does it sound the same to you? Because… what kind of plague could make people believe that they’re the Keystone?”

Kuwale put the notepad down on the bed and turned to face me. “Andrew, if this is a hoax—”

“No! Why would I—?”

“To save Mosala. Because if it’s a hoax, you’ll never pull it off.”

I groaned. “If I was going to invent a Keystone to get her off the hook, I would have simulated Yasuko Nishide on his deathbed having all the cosmic revelations—not some random psychiatric case.” I explained about Reynolds and the SeeNet documentary.

Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then… amusement? I couldn’t tell—and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.

I said, “Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet…” I was grasping at straws, but I couldn’t make sense of this any other way.

Kuwale said flatly, “No. I would have heard.”

“Then—?”

“It’s genuine.”

“How can it be?”

Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. “Because everything we thought was true, is true—but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different assumptions—and we were all wrong.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. We all will.”

I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi’s death. “You think Distress comes from… mixing with information?”

“Yes.”

“If the Keystone does it, everyone else gets dragged along? Exponential growth? Just like a plague?”

“Yes.”

“But—how? Who was the Keystone? Who started it? Muteba Kazadi, all those years ago?”

Kuwale laughed crazily. “No!” The man in the opposite bed was awake now, and listening to every word, but I was past caring. “Miller didn’t get around to telling you the strangest thing about that cosmological model.”

Miller was the umale, the one I’d thought of as “Three.”

“Which is—?”

“If you follow through with the calculations… the effect reaches back in time. Not far: exponential growth forward means exponential decay backward. But the absolute certainty of the Keystone mixing at the Aleph moment implies a small probability of other people being ’dragged along’ at random even before the event. It’s a continuity condition; there’s no such thing in any system as an instantaneous jump from zero to one.”

I shook my head, uncomprehending. I couldn’t take this in.

Akili took my hand and squeezed it hard, unthinking, transmitting vis fear—and a vertiginous thrill of anticipation—straight into my body, from skin to skin.

“The Keystone isn’t the Keystone yet. The Aleph moment hasn’t even happened—but we’re already feeling the shock.”

25

Kuwale borrowed my notepad and rapidly sketched out the details of the information flows which ve believed lay behind Distress. Ve even attempted to fit a crude computer model of the process to the epidemiological data—although ve ended up with a curve far less steep than the actual case figures (which had risen faster than exponential growth—"probably distorted by early under-reporting"), and a predicted date for the Aleph moment somewhere between February 7, 2055… and June 12, 3070. Undeterred, ve struggled to refine the model. Graphs, network diagrams, and equations flickered across the screen beneath vis fingertips; it looked as impressive as anything I’d seen Violet Mosala do—and I understood it about as well.

On one level, I couldn’t help but be swept along with vis urgent logic—but as the initial shock of recognition faded, I began to wonder again if we weren’t simply reading our own meaning into the four patients’ bizarre soliloquies. Anthrocosmology had never before made a single testable prediction. I didn’t doubt that it could provide an elegant mathematical underpinning to any TOE—but if the first distinct evidence for the theory itself consisted of the rantings of four people suffering from a new and exotic mental disease, that was a slender basis on which to throw out everything I believed about the universe.

And as for the prognosis, if Kuwale was right, of a world completely afflicted by Distress… that was a cataclysm as unthinkable as the moderates’ unraveling.

I kept my doubts to myself, but by the time I left the ward—leaving Kuwale immersed in a conference with the other mainstream ACs—I had my feet back on the ground. All this talk of echoes of the future Aleph moment had to be ranked as less plausible than even the most far-fetched conventional alternatives.

Maybe a neuroactive military pathogen gone wrong, targeting a specific region of the brain, could induce the ordinary symptoms of Distress in most of its victims—plus these outbursts of manic-but-precise observations in four out of three thousand cases. Reasoning was the product of organic events in the brain, like every other mental process—and if a paranoid schizophrenic, injured by crude accidents of genetics and disease, could find personal significance in every advertising sign, every cloud, every tree… maybe the combination of the right scientific background with the highly focused damage wrought by this viral weapon could trigger an equally uncontrollable—but much more rigorous—avalanche of meaning. If the original aim of the weapon had been to impair analytical thought, it wasn’t inconceivable that a wild version might end up overstimulating the very neural pathways it had been designed to destroy.

I went back to the electrical shop and bought myself another notepad. I called De Groot from the street; she seemed upset, but she didn’t want to talk on the net.

We met at the hotel, in Mosala’s suite. De Groot ushered me in, in silence. “Is Violet—?” Dust motes swam beneath the skylight; when I spoke, the room sounded hollow.

“She’s been admitted. I wanted to stay at the hospital, but she sent me away.” De Groot stood opposite me, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. She said quietly, “You know, we’ve had crank mail from just about everyone. Every cult, every lunatic on the planet wanted to let Violet in on their amazing cosmic revelations—or let her know that she was desecrating their precious mythology, and would burn in Hell for it… or drive away all the Buddha-nature… or crush the world’s great civilizations into nihilistic rubble, with her male Western reductionist hubris. The Anthrocosmologists were just… one more voice shouting noise.” She looked at me squarely. “Would you have picked them as the threat? Not the fundamentalists. Not the racists. Not the psychotics who gave detailed descriptions of what they planned to do to her corpse. People who sent us long dissertations on information theory—and P.S., we’d be happy to see you create the universe, but certain other parties may try to stop you.”

I said, “No one could have picked them.”

De Groot ran a hand across her temple, then stood in silence, shielding her eyes.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, and laughed humorlessly. “Headache, that’s all.” She inhaled deeply, visibly steeling herself to push on. “They found traces of foreign proteins in her bloodstream, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. They can’t resolve the molecular structures, though—and she’s showing no symptoms, so far. So they’ve put her on a mixture of strong antiviral drugs—and until something happens, all they can do is watch her.”

“Is security—?”

“She’s under guard. For what that’s worth now.”

“And Buzzo?”

“Apparently his scan was clear.” De Groot snorted, angry and bewildered. “He’s unmoved by… all of this. He believes that Nishide simply died of natural causes, Violet has some harmless pollutant in her body, and your cholera analysis was some kind of forgery for the sake of a media beat-up. The only thing he seems worried about is how he’s going to get home at the end of the conference if the airport is still closed.”

“But he has bodyguards—?”

“I don’t know; you’d have to ask him that. Oh—and Violet asked him to give a media conference himself, announcing the flaw in his TOE. The antiviral drugs are debilitating; she’s so nauseous that she can barely speak. Buzzo made some vague promise to her—but then he muttered something to me about looking at the issues more closely before he retracted anything. So I don’t know what he’ll do.”

I felt a stab of anger and frustration, but I said, “He’s heard all the evidence, it’s his decision.” I didn’t much want to think about Buzzo’s enemies, myself. Sarah Knight’s body hadn’t even been found yet—but the possibility that her killer was on Stateless unnerved me more than anything else. The moderates had let me walk free, once they’d reasoned that they could still get what they wanted. The extremists had nearly killed me, once already—and they hadn’t even been trying.

I said, “Even if this weapon is about to go off at any moment… there’s nothing anyone can do on Stateless that couldn’t be done in an air ambulance. Right? And… surely your government would be willing to send a fully equipped military hospital jet—”

De Groot gave a hollow laugh. “Yeah? You make it sound so easy. Violet has some friends in high places—and some sworn enemies… but most of all, a lot of fucking pragmatists who’ll happily use her in whatever way they see fit. It would take a small miracle for them to weigh up the pros and cons, take sides, battle it out, and make a decision, all in one day—even if Stateless was at peace, and the jet could land right at the airport.”

“Come on! The whole island’s as flat as a runway! Okay, it’s soft at the edges, but there must be a… twenty-kilometer radius in which the ground is hard enough,”

“All within reach of a missile from the airport.”

“Yeah, but why should the mercenaries care about a medical evacuation? They must be expecting foreign navies to start moving in soon to take their nationals off the island. This is no different; it’s just faster.”

De Groot shook her head sadly; she wanted to be convinced, but I wasn’t making sense to her. “Whatever you and I might think about the risks, it’s just guesswork and wishful thinking. The government is still going to assess the situation from their own point of view—and they’re not going to make a decision in thirty seconds. Tens of thousands of dollars for a mercy flight is one thing. A plane shot down over Stateless is another. And the last thing Violet—or any sane person—would want is three or four innocent people blown out of the sky for no reason.”

I turned away from her, and crossed to the window. From what I could see of the streets below, Stateless was still at peace. But whatever bloody havoc the mercenaries were planning… surely the last thing their employers wanted was a world-famous martyr for technoliberation?. That was why EnGeneUity had never really made sense as her would-be assassins: her death would be as bad for them as her highly publicized emigration.

It was a delicate proposition, though. What would they be admitting, if they made an exception for her? And which scenario would they consider most damaging to the anti-boycott push: the cautionary tale of Mosala’s tragic death from a reckless flirtation with renegades—or the heart-warming story of survival when a mercy flight whisked her back into the fold (where every gene belonged to its rightful owner, and every disease had an instant cure)?

As yet, they probably didn’t even know about the difficult choice they were facing. So it was up to whoever broke the news to sell them on the right decision.

I turned to De Groot. “What if the mercenaries could be persuaded to guarantee safe passage for a rescue flight? To make a public statement to that effect? Do you think you could start things moving—on the chance of that?” I clenched my fists, fighting down panic. Did I have any idea what I was saying? Once I’d promised to do this, I couldn’t back out.

But I’d already made a promise to swim faster.

De Groot looked torn. “Violet hasn’t even told Wendy or Makompo yet. And she’s sworn me to silence. Wendy’s on a business trip in Toronto.”

“If she can lobby from Cape Town, she can lobby from Toronto. And Violet’s not thinking straight. Tell her mother everything. And her husband. Tell Marian Fox and the whole IUTP if you have to.”

De Groot hesitated, then nodded uncertainly. “It’s worth trying. Anything’s worth trying. But how do you imagine we’re going to get any kind of guarantee from the mercenaries?”

I said, “Plan A is to hope very hard that they’re answering the phones. Because I really don’t want to have to walk into the airport and negotiate in person.”

Most of the island’s center still appeared untouched by the invasion— but four streets away from the airport, everything changed. There were no barricades, no warning signs—and no people at all. It was early evening, and the streets behind me were abuzz, with shops and restaurants open for business just five hundred meters from the occupied buildings—but once I’d crossed that invisible line, it was as if Stateless had suddenly given birth to its own Ruins, an imitation in miniature of the dead hearts of the net-slain cities.

There were no bullets flying, this was not a war zone, but I had no experience to guide me, no idea of what to expect. I’d kept away from battlefields; I’d chosen science journalism happy in the knowledge that I’d never be required to film anything more dangerous than a bioethics conference.

The entrance to the passenger terminal was a wide rectangle of blackness. The sliding doors lay ten meters away, in fragments. Windows had been broken, plants and statues scattered; the walls were strangely scarred, as if something mechanically clawed had scaled them. I’d hoped for a sentry, signs of order, evidence of a coherent command structure. This looked more like a gang of looters were waiting in the darkness for someone to wander in.

I thought: Sarah Knight would have done this—for the story alone.

Yeah. And Sarah Knight was dead.

I approached slowly, scanning the ground nervously, wishing I hadn’t told Sisyphus fourteen years before to lose all junk mail from weapons manufacturers looking for technophile journalists to provide free publicity for their glamorous new anti-personnel mines. Then again… there’d probably been no helpful tips in those media releases for avoiding being on the receiving end—short of spending fifty thousand dollars on the matching sweepers.

The interior of the building was pitch black, but the floodlights outside bleached the reef-rock white. I squinted into the maw of the entrance, wishing I had Witness to rejig my retinas. The camera on my right shoulder was virtually weightless, but it still made me feel skewed and misshapen—about as comfortable, centered, and functional as if my genitals had migrated to one kneecap. And—irrationally or not—the invisible nerve taps and RAM had always made me feel shielded, protected. When my own eyes and ears had captured everything for the digital record, I’d been a privileged observer right up to the moment of being disemboweled or blinded. This machine could be brushed off like a speck of dandruff.

I’d never felt so naked in my life.

I stopped ten meters from the empty doorway, arms stretched out and hands raised. I yelled into the darkness: “I'm a journalist! I want to talk!”

I waited. I could still hear the crowds of the city behind me, but the airport exuded silence. I shouted again. And waited. I was almost ready to give up fear for embarrassment; maybe the passenger terminal was abandoned, the mercenaries had set up camp on the farthest corner of the runway, and I was standing here making a fool of myself to no one.

Then I felt a gentle stirring of the humid air, and the blackness of the entrance disgorged a machine.

I flinched, but stood my ground; if it had wanted me dead, I would never have seen it coming. The thing betrayed a flickering succession of partial outlines as it moved—faint but consistent distortions of the light which the eye seized upon as edges—but once it halted, I was left staring at nothing but afterimages and guesswork. A six-legged robot, three meters high? Actively computing my view of its surroundings, and programming an optically active sheath to match luminosities? No—more than that. It stood protruding halfway into the floodlit forecourt, without even casting a shadow—which meant it was realtime holographing the blocked light sources, its polymer skin lasing out a perfectly matched substitute beam, wavefront by wavefront. I had a sudden, sickening realization of what the people of Stateless were facing. This was alpha military tech, costing millions. EnGeneUity weren’t messing around with cheap aggravation, this time. They wanted their intellectual property back, product reputation unscathed—and anything which stood above the reef-rock would be cut down if it got in the way.

The insect said, “We’ve already chosen the journalists’ pool, Andrew Worth. You’re not on the invasion hit parade.” It spoke English, perfectly inflected right down to a hint of amusement, but with an unnerving geographical neutrality. Whether its speech was autonomous, or whether I was talking real-time to the mercenaries—or their PR people—I had no idea.

“I don’t want to cover the war. I'm here to offer you a chance to avoid some… undesirable publicity.”

The insect scuttled forward angrily, delicate moire patterns of interference fringes blossoming and fading on its camouflaged surface. I stayed rooted to the spot; my instinct was to flee, but my muscles felt like jelly. The thing came to a halt, two or three meters away—and vanished from sight again. I didn’t doubt that, at the very least, it could have raised its forelegs and decapitated me in an instant.

I steadied myself, and addressed the solid air. “There’s a woman on this island who’s going to die if she’s not evacuated in a matter of hours. And if that happens… SeeNet are ready to broadcast a documentary called Violet Mosala: Martyr to Technoliberation.” It was the truth—although Lydia had put up some resistance, at first. I’d sent her faked footage of Mosala talking about the reasons for her planned emigration—all more-or-less what had really been said, although I hadn’t actually filmed it. Three SeeNet newsroom editors were hard at work incorporating that—and some of the genuine material I’d filed—into an up-to-date obituary. I’d neglected to include anything about the Anthrocosmologists, though. Mosala had been about to become the figurehead for a major challenge to the boycott—and now she was infected with a viral weapon, and Stateless was occupied. Lydia had drawn her own conclusions, and the editors would have been instructed accordingly.

The insect was silent for several long minutes. I remained frozen, my hands still in the air. I imagined the blackmail threat being passed up the chain of command. Maybe the biotech alliance were exploring the option of buying SeeNet and killing the story? But then they’d have to lean on other networks, too; they’d have to keep on paying to ensure the right spin. They could get what they wanted for free, if they let her live.

I said, “If Mosala survives, you can stop her from returning. But if she dies here… she’ll be linked in the public imagination to Stateless for the next hundred years.”

I felt a stinging sensation on my shoulder. I glanced down at the camera; it had been incinerated, and the ashes were tumbling away from a tiny charred patch on my shirt.

“The plane can land. And you can leave with her. Once she’s out of danger, file a new story from Cape Town on her plans to emigrate—and what became of them.” It was the same voice as before—but the power behind the words came from far beyond the island.

There was no need to add: If the spin is right, you’ll be rewarded.

I bowed my head in assent. “I’ll do that.”

The insect hesitated. “Will you? I don’t think so.” A searing pain slashed my abdomen; I cried out and sank to my knees. “She’ll return alone. You can stay on Stateless and document the fall.” I glanced up to see a faint hint of green and violet shimmering in the air as the thing retreated, like a glint of sunlight through half-closed eyes.

It took me a while to rise to my feet. The laser flash had burned a horizontal welt right across my stomach—but the beam had lingered for whole microseconds on the existing wound; the carbohydrate polymer had been caramelized, and a brown watery fluid was leaking out of my navel. I muttered abuse at the empty doorway, then started hobbling away.

When I was back among the crowds, two teenagers approached me and asked if I needed help. I accepted gratefully. They held me up as I limped toward the hospital.

I called De Groot from casualty. I said, “They were very civilized. We have clearance to land.”

De Groot looked haggard, but she beamed at me. “That’s fantastic!”

“Any news about the flight?”

“Nothing yet, but I spoke to Wendy a few minutes ago, and she was waiting for a call from the President, no less.” She hesitated. “Violet’s developed a fever. It’s not dangerous yet, but…”

But the weapon had triggered. We’d be racing the virus every step of the way, now. What had I expected, though? Another timing error? Or magical immunity for the Keystone? “You’re with her?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

The same medic treated me as before. She’d had a long day; she said irritably, “I don’t want to hear your excuse this time. The last one was bad enough.”

I surveyed the pristine cubicle, the orderly cabinets of drugs and instruments, and I was gripped by despair. Even if Mosala was evacuated in time… there were one million people on Stateless, with nowhere to flee. I said, “What will you do, when the war starts?”

“There won’t be a war.”

I tried to imagine the machines being assembled, the fate being prepared for these people, deep inside the airport. I said gently, “I don’t think you’re going to have a choice about that.”

The medic stopped applying cream to my bums, and glared at me as if I’d said something unforgivably offensive and belittling. “You’re a stranger here. You don’t have the slightest idea what our choices are. What do you think? We’ve spent the last twenty years in some kind of… blissful Utopian stupor, content in the knowledge that our positive karmic energy would repel all invaders?” She started dispensing the cream again, roughly.

I was bemused. “No. I expect you’re fully prepared to defend yourselves. But this time, I think you’re going to be outgunned. Badly.”

She unrolled a length of bandage, eyeing me sharply. “Listen, because I'm only going to say this once. When the time comes, you’d better trust us.”

“To do what?”

“To know better than you.”

I laughed grimly. “That’s not asking much.”

When I turned into the corridor which led to Mosala’s room, I saw De Groot talking—in hushed tones, but with obvious excitement—to the two security guards. She spotted me and waved. I quickened my step.

When I reached them, De Groot silently held up her notepad and hit a key. A newsreader appeared.

“In the latest developments on the renegade island of Stateless, the violent anarchist splinter group occupying the airport have just acceded to a request from South African diplomats to allow the urgent evacuation of Violet Mosala, the twenty-seven-year-old Nobel laureate who has been attending the controversial Einstein Centenary Conference.” In the background, a stylized world globe spun beneath an image of Mosala, the view zooming in on Stateless, and then South Africa, on cue. “With the primitive healthcare facilities on the island, local doctors have been unable to provide an accurate diagnosis, but Mosala’s condition is believed to be life-threatening. Sources in Mandela say that President Nchabaleng herself sent a personal appeal to the anarchists, and received their reply just minutes ago.”

I threw my arms around De Groot, lifted her off her feet and spun around until I was giddy with joy. The guards looked on, grinning like children. Maybe it was a microscopic victory in the face of the invasion—but it still seemed like the first good thing that had happened for a very long time.

De Groot said gently, “That’s enough.” I stopped, and we disengaged. She said, “The plane lands at three a.m. Fifteen kilometers west of the airport.”

I caught my breath. “Does she know?”

De Groot shook her head. “I haven’t told her anything yet. She’s sleeping now; the fever’s still high, but it’s been stable for a while. And the doctors can’t say what the virus will do next, but they can carry a selection of drugs in the ambulance to cover the most likely emergencies.”

I said soberly, “Only one thing really worries me, now.”

“What?”

“Knowing Violet… when she finds out we’ve gone behind her back, she’ll probably refuse to leave—out of sheer stubbornness.”

De Groot gave me an odd look, as if she was trying to decide whether I was joking or not.

She said, “If you really believe that, then you don’t know Violet at all.”

26

I told De Groot I’d catch some sleep and be back by 2:30. I wanted to bid Mosala bon voyage.

I went looking for Akili to tell ver the good news, but ve’d been discharged. I sent ver a message, then returned to the hotel, washed my face, changed my laser-singed shirt. My bums were numb, absent; the local anesthetic had magicked them away. I felt battered, but triumphant—and too wired to stand still, let alone sleep. It was almost eleven, but the shops were still open; I went out and bought myself another shoulder camera, then wandered the city, filming everything in sight. The last night of peace on Stateless? The mood on the streets was nothing like the atmosphere of siege among the physicists and journalists inside the hotel, but there was an edge of nervous anticipation, like Los Angeles during a quake risk alert (I’d been through one, a false alarm). When people met my gaze they seemed curious—even suspicious—but they showed no sign of hostility. It was as if they thought I might, conceivably, be a spy for the mercenaries—but if I was, that was merely an exotic trait which they had no intention of holding against me.

I stopped in the middle of a brightly lit square, and checked the news nets. Buzzo had given no press conference admitting his error, but with Mosala now showing symptoms, perhaps he’d take the risk of the extremists seriously, and reconsider. Coverage of the situation on Stateless stank, uniformly—but SeeNet would soon scoop everyone by announcing the real reasons for the occupation. And even with Mosala alive, the truth might come out badly for the pro-boycott alliance.

The air was humid, but cold. I stared up at the satellites which bridged the planet, and tried to make sense of the fact that I was standing on an artificial South Pacific island, on the eve of a war.

Was my whole life encoded in this moment—the memories I possessed, the circumstances I found myself in? Taking this much and no more as given… could I have reconstructed all the rest?

It didn’t feel that way. My childhood in Sydney was unimaginable, as remote and hypothetical as the Big Bang—and even the time I’d spent in the hold on the fishing boat, and the encounter with the robot at the airport, had receded like fragments of a dream.

I’d never had cholera. I possessed no internal organs.

The stars glinted icily.

At one in the morning, the streets were still crowded, shops and restaurants still trading. Nobody seemed as somber as they should have been; maybe they still believed that they were facing nothing more than the kind of harassment they’d survived before.

There was a group of young men standing around a fountain in the square, joking and laughing. I asked them if they thought the militia would attack the airport soon. I couldn’t imagine why else they’d be in such high spirits; maybe they’d be taking part, and were psyching themselves up for it.

They stared at me in disbelief. “Attack the airport? And get slaughtered?”

“It might be your only chance.”

They exchanged amused glances. One of them put a hand on my shoulder and said solicitously, “Everything’s going to be fine. Just keep an ear to the ground, and hang on tight.”

I wondered what kind of drugs they were on-When I returned to the hospital, De Groot said, “Violet’s awake. She wants to talk to you.”

I went in alone. The room was dimly lit; a monitor near the head of the bed glowed with green and orange data. Mosala’s voice was weak, but she was lucid.

“Will you ride in the ambulance with me?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I want you to record everything. Just make good use of it, if you have to.”

“I will.” I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant—framing EnGeneUity for her death, if it came to that? I didn’t press her for details; I was weary of the politics of martyrdom.

“Karin said you went to the airport and petitioned the mercenaries on my behalf.” She searched my face. “Why?”

“I was returning a favor.”

She laughed softly. “What did I ever do to deserve that?”

“It’s a long story.” And I was no longer sure, myself, whether I’d been trying to repay Adelle Vunibobo, doing it all for technoliberation, acting out of respect and admiration for Mosala, or hoping to impress Akili by “saving the Keystone"—even if the role was beginning to sound less like a revered creator than a kind of information-theoretic Typhoid Mary.

De Groot came in with news of the flight; everything was on schedule, and it was time to leave. Two medics joined us. I stood back, filming with the shoulder camera as Mosala was moved to a trolley, monitor and drug pumps still attached.

In the garage, on the way to the ambulance, I saw half a dozen balloon-tired vehicles being loaded with medical equipment, bandages, and drugs. Maybe they were moving supplies to other sites around the city, in case the hospital was captured. It was heartening to see that not everyone was taking the invasion lightly.

We rode through the city slowly, without the siren wailing. More people were on the streets than I’d ever seen by daylight. Mosala asked De Groot for a notepad, then put it on the mattress beside her, and turned onto her side so she could type. Whatever she was doing seemed to demand intense concentration, but she spoke to me, without looking away from the screen.

“You suggested that I appoint a successor, Andrew. Someone to make sure that the work was finished. Well, I'm arranging that now.”

I couldn’t see the point anymore, but I didn’t argue. A high-resolution scan in Cape Town would yield structures for all the viral proteins almost immediately, and precision drugs to block their actions could be designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Proving the moderates wrong and then begging them for the cure was no longer any kind of shortcut.

Mosala glanced up at me, and spoke for the camera. “The software is working on ten canonical experiments. A full analysis of all of them, combined, will yield what used to be thought of as the ten parameters of total space—the details of the ten-dimensional geometry which underlies all the particles and forces. In modern terms… those ten experiments reveal, between them, exactly how the symmetry of pre-space is broken, for us. Exactly what it is that everything in this universe has in common.”

“I understand.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Let me finish. What’s running on the supercomputer network, right now, is just brute-force calculations. I wanted the software to leave the honors to me. Double-checking, pulling it all together… writing a paper which set out the results in a way which would make sense to anyone. But those things are trivial. I already know exactly what has to be done with the results, once they’re available. And—” She executed a flurry of keystrokes, scrutinized the effects, then put the notepad aside. “All of it has just been automated. My mother gave me a pre-release Kaspar clonelet last week—and it’ll probably write up the results more smoothly than I ever could. So whether I'm alive, dead, or somewhere in between… by six a.m. on Friday, that paper will be written—and posted on the nets with toll-free, universal access. Copies will also be sent to every faculty member and every student of the Physics Departments of every university on the planet.” She flashed a smile of pure defiant glee. “What are the Anthrocosmologists going to do, now? Kill every physicist on the planet?” I glanced up at De Groot, who was tight-lipped and ashen. Mosala groaned. “Don’t look so damn morbid, you two. I'm just covering all contingencies.”

She closed her eyes; her breathing was ragged, but she was still smiling. I turned to the monitor; her temperature was 40.9 degrees.

We’d left the city behind; the windows of the ambulance showed nothing but our reflections. The ride was smooth, the engine all but silent. After a while, I thought I could hear the reef-rock itself, exhaling through a distant borehole—but then I realized that it was the whine of the approaching jet.

Mosala had lost consciousness, and no one tried to rouse her. We reached the rendezvous point, and I climbed out quickly to cover the landing—more because of the promise I’d made than out of any real vestige of professionalism. The plane descended vertically, just forty or fifty meters away from us, gray fuselage lit by nothing but moonlight, the VTOL engines blasting a fine caustic dust of limestone out of the matrix of the rock. I wanted to savor this moment of victory—but the sight of the sleek military craft landing in darkness in the middle of nowhere made my heart sink. I imagined it would be the same with the naval evacuation: the outside world was going to tip-toe in, gather up its own people, and leave. The anarchists could take what was coming to them.

The two men who descended first wore officer’s uniforms and side arms, but they might have been doctors. They took the medics aside and spoke in a huddle, their voices lost beneath the hum of the jets; air was still being forced through the stationary engines to keep them cool. Then a slender young man in rumpled civilian clothes emerged, looking haggard and disoriented. It took me a few seconds to recognize him; it was Mosala’s husband, Makompo.

De Groot met him; they embraced silently. I stayed back as she led him to the ambulance. I turned and looked away across the gray-and-silver reef-rock; threads of scattered trace minerals caught the moonlight, shining like the foam on an impossibly tranquil ocean. When I turned back, the soldiers were carrying Mosala, bound to a stretcher, up into the plane. Makompo and De Groot followed. I suddenly felt very tired.

De Groot came down the steps and approached me, shouting, “Are you coming with us? They say there’s plenty of room.”

I stared back at her. What was there to keep me here? My contract with SeeNet was to make a profile of Mosala, not to record the fall of Stateless. The invisible insect had forbidden me to join the flight—but would the mercenaries have any way of knowing, if I did? Stupid question: outdoors, military satellites could just about fingerprint people and lip-read their conversations, all in infrared. But would they shoot down the plane—undermining the whole PR exercise, and inviting retribution—just to punish one obscure journalist? No.

I said, “I wish I could. But there’s someone here I can’t leave behind.”

De Groot nodded, needing no further explanation, and shook my| hand, smiling. “Good luck to both of you, then. I hope we’ll see you in Cape Town, soon.”

“So do I.”

The two medics were silent as we rode back to the hospital. I felt certain that they wanted to talk about the war—but not in front of a foreigner. I scanned through the footage I’d taken with the shoulder camera, not yet trusting the unfamiliar technology, then dispatched it to my console at home.

The city was more crowded than ever, though there were fewer people on their feet now. Most were camping out on the streets, with sleeping bags, folding chairs, portable stoves, and even some small tents. I didn’t know whether to feel encouraged by this, or depressed at the pathetic optimism it implied. Maybe the anarchists were prepared to make the best of it, if the city’s infrastructure was seized. And I’d still seen no evidence of panic, riots, or looting—so maybe Munroe was right, and their education in the origins and dynamics of these revered human cultural activities was enough to empower them with the ability to think through the consequences, and decline to take part.

But in the face of a billion dollars’ worth of military hardware, they were going to need a lot more than stoves, tents, and sociobiology to avoid being slaughtered.

27

I was woken by the shelling. The rumbling sounded distant but the bed was shaking. I dressed in seconds then stood in the middle of the room, paralyzed by indecision. There were no basements here, no bomb shelters, so where was the safest place to be? Down on the ground floor? Or out on the street? I balked at the prospect of exposure, but would four or five storeys over my head offer any real protection, or just a heavier pile of rubble?

It was just after six, barely light. I moved to the window cautiously, fighting down an absurd fear of snipers—as if anyone from either side would bother. Five columns of white smoke hung in the middle distance, tunneling out from hidden apexes like languid tornadoes. I asked Sisyphus to scan the local nets for close-up vision; dozens of people had posted footage. Reef-rock was resilient and non-flammable, but the shells must have been spiked with some chemical agent tailored to inflict damage beyond the reach of mere heat and percussion, because the results looked less like shattered buildings than mine tailings dumped on empty lots. I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving inside—but the adjacent streets hadn’t fared much better, buried meters deep in chalk dust.

The people camped outside the hotel showed no sign that they’d been taken by surprise; half of them were already packed and moving, the rest were taking down their tents, rolling up blankets and sleeping bags, disassembling stoves. I could hear young children crying, and the mood of the crowd was visibly tense—but no one was being trampled underfoot. Yet. Looking further along the street, I could make out a slow, steady flow of people north, away from the heart of the city.

I’d been half expecting something deadly and silent—EnGeneUity were bioengineers, after all—but I should have known better. A rain of explosions, buildings reduced to dust, and a stream of refugees made far better pictures for Anarchy Comes to Stateless. The mercenaries weren’t here to take control of the island with clinical efficiency; they were here to prove that all renegade societies were doomed to collapse into telegenic mayhem.

A shell went off somewhere east of the hotel, the closest yet. White powder rained down from the ceiling; one corner of the polymer window popped loose from its frame, and curled up like a dead leaf. I squatted on the floor, covering my head, cursing myself for not leaving with De Groot and Mosala—and cursing Akili for ignoring my messages. Why couldn’t I accept the fact that I meant nothing to ver? I’d been of some use in the struggle to protect Mosala from the heretic ACs and I’d brought ver the news which supposedly revealed the truth behind Distress… but now that the great information plague was coming, I was irrelevant.

The door swung open. An elderly Fijian woman stepped into the room; the hotel staff wore no uniforms, but I thought I’d seen her before, working in the building. She announced curtly, “We’re evacuating the city. Take what you can carry.” The floor had stopped moving, but I rose to my feet unsteadily, unsure if I’d heard her correctly.

I’d already packed my clothes. I grabbed my suitcase, and followed her out into the corridor. My room was just past the stairs, and she was heading for the next door along. I gestured at the other half of the corridor, some twenty rooms. “Have you checked—?”

“No.” For a moment, she seemed reluctant to entrust me with the task, but then she relented. She held up her pass key and let my notepad clone its IR signature.

I left my suitcase by the stairs. The first four rooms were empty. More shells were exploding all the time now, most of them mercifully distant. I kept one eye on the screen as I waved my notepad at the locks; someone was collating all the damage reports and posting an annotated map of the city. So far, twenty-one buildings had been demolished—mainly apartment blocks. There was no question that if strategic targets had been chosen, they would have been hit; maybe the most valuable infrastructure was being spared—saved for the use of a puppet government to be installed by a second wave of invaders, who’d “rescue” the island from “anarchy"? Or maybe the aim was simply to level as many residential buildings as possible, in order to drive the greatest number of people out into the desert.

I found Lowell Parker—the Atlantica journalist I’d seen at Mosala’s media conference—crouched on the floor, shaking… much as the woman from the hotel had found me. He recovered quickly, and seemed to accept the news of the evacuation gratefully—as if all he’d been waiting for was word of a definite plan, even if it came from someone else who didn’t have a clue.

In the next ten or twelve rooms, I came across four more people— journalists or academics, probably, but no one I recognized—most of them already packed, just waiting to be told what to do. No one stopped to question the wisdom of the message I was passing on—and I badly wanted to get away from the bombing, myself—but the prospect of a million people pouring out of the city was beginning to fill me with dread. The greatest disasters of the last fifty years had all been among refugees fleeing war zones. Maybe it would be smarter to take my chances playing Russian roulette with the shells.

I knew the last room was a suite, the mirror image of Mosala and De Groot’s; the architectural symmetry of the building demanded it. The cloned pass key signature unlocked the door—but there was a chain keeping it from opening more than a crack.

I called out, loudly. No one answered. I tried using my shoulder—and bruised myself badly, to no effect. Swearing, I kicked the door near the chain—which was twice as painful, almost splitting my stitches, but it worked.

Henry Buzzo was sprawled on the floor beneath the window, flat on his back. I approached, dismayed, doubting that there’d be much chance of getting help amid all the chaos. He was wearing a red velvet bathrobe, and his hair was wet, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. A bioweapon from the extremists, finally taking hold? Or just a heart attack from the shock of the explosions?

Neither. The bathrobe was soaked with blood. A hole had been blasted in his chest. Not by a sniper; the window was intact. I squatted down and pressed two fingers against his carotid artery. He was dead, but still warm.

I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying not to scream with frustration. After all it had taken to get Mosala off the island, Buzzo could have saved himself so easily. A few words admitting the flaw in his work, and he’d still be alive.

It wasn’t pride that had killed him, though—screw that. He’d had a right to his stubbornness, a right to defend his theory, flawed or not. He was dead for precisely one reason: some psychotic AC had sacrificed him to the mirage of transcendence.

I found two umale security guards in the second bedroom—one fully dressed; one had probably been sleeping. Both looked like they’d been shot in the face. I was in shock now—more dazed than sickened—but I finally had enough presence of mind to start filming. Maybe there’d be a trial, eventually, and if the hotel was about to be reduced to rubble, there’d be no other evidence. I surveyed the bodies in close-up, then walked from room to room, sweeping the camera around indiscriminately, hoping to capture enough detail for a complete reconstruction.

The bathroom door was locked. I felt an idiotic surge of hope; maybe a fourth person had witnessed the crime, but had managed to hide here in safety. I rattled the handle, and I was on the verge of yelling out words of reassurance, when the meaning of the chained front door finally penetrated my stupor.

I stood frozen for several seconds, at first not quite believing it—and then afraid to move.

Because I could hear someone breathing. Soft and shallow—but not soft enough. Struggling for control. Centimeters away.

I couldn’t let go of the handle; my fingers were clenched tight. I placed my left hand flat against the cool surface of the door, at the height where the killer’s face would be—as if hoping to sense the contours, to gauge the distance from skin to skin by the resonant pitch of every screaming nerve end.

Who was it? Who was the extremists’ assassin? Who had had the opportunity to infect me with the engineered cholera? Some stranger I’d passed in the Phnom Penh transit lounge, or the crowded bazaar of Dili airport? The Polynesian businessman who’d sat beside me, on the last leg of the flight? Indrani Lee!

I was shaking with horror, certain that a bullet would pierce my skull in a matter of seconds—but part of me still wanted, badly, to break open the door and see.

I could have broadcast the moment live on the net—and gone out in a blaze of revelation.

Another shell exploded nearby, the shock wave resonating through the building so powerfully that the frame almost flexed itself free of the lock.

I turned and fled.

The procession out of the city was an ordeal—but perhaps never more than it had to be. From my snail’s-eye view of the crowd, everyone looked as terrified, as claustrophobic, as desperate for momentum as I was—but they remained stubbornly, defiantly patient, inching forward like novice tightrope walkers, calculating every movement, sweating from the tension between fear and restraint. Children wailed in the distance, but the adults around me spoke in guarded whispers between the ground-shaking detonations. I kept waiting for an apartment block to collapse in front of us, burying a hundred people and crushing a hundred more in the panic of retreat—but it failed to happen, again and again, and after twenty excruciating minutes we’d left the shelling behind.

The procession kept moving. For a long time, we remained jammed in a herd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with no choice but to keep step—but once we were out of the built-up suburbs and into the industrial areas, where the factories and warehouses were set in wide expanses of bare rock, there was suddenly space to move freely. As the opaque scrum around me melted into near transparency, I could see half a dozen quad-cycles ahead in the distance, and even an electric truck keeping pace.

By then we’d been walking for almost two hours, but the sun was still low, and as the crowd spread out a welcome cool breeze moved in between us. My spirits were lifting, slightly. Despite the scale of the exodus, I’d witnessed no real violence; the worst I’d seen so far was an enraged couple screaming accusations of infidelity at each other as they trudged along, side by side, each holding up one end of a bundle of possessions wrapped in orange tent fabric.

It was clear that the whole evacuation had been rehearsed—or at least widely discussed, in great detail—long before the invasion. Civil defense plan D: head for the coast. And a planned evacuation, with tents, with blankets, with solar-rechargeable stoves, didn’t have to be the disaster, here, that it might have been almost anywhere else. We were moving closer to the reefs and the ocean farms—the source of all the island’s food. The freshwater arteries in the rock could be tapped with relative ease, as could the sewage treatment conduits. If exposure, starvation, dehydration and disease were the greatest killers of modern warfare, the people of Stateless seemed to be uniquely equipped to resist them all. The only thing that worried me was the certainty that the mercenaries understood all of this, perfectly. If their aim with the shelling had been to drive us out of the city, they must have known how relatively little misery it would cause. Maybe they believed that selective footage of the exodus would still be enough to confirm the political failure of Stateless in most people’s eyes—and with or without scenes of dysentery and starvation, there was no doubt that the position of the anti-boycott nations had already been weakened. I had a queasy suspicion, though, that merely evicting a million people into tent villages wouldn’t be enough for EnGeneUity.

I’d transmitted the footage from Buzzo’s suite, along with a brief deposition putting it in context, to the FBI and to the security firm’s head office in Suva. It had seemed the proper way to let the families of the three men hear of their deaths, and to set in motion as much of an investigation as was possible under the circumstances. I hadn’t sent a copy to SeeNet—less out of respect for the bereaved relatives, than out of a reluctance to choose between admitting to Lydia that I’d concealed the facts about Mosala and the ACs… and compounding the crime, by pretending that I had no idea why Buzzo had been assassinated. Whatever I did, I was probably screwed in the long run, but I wanted to delay the inevitable for a few more days, if possible.

Some three hours’ slow march from the city, I caught sight of a multi-colored blur in the distance, which soon resolved itself into a vast patchwork of vivid green and orange squares, scattered across the rock a few kilometers ahead. We’d just left the central plateau behind, and the ground now sloped gently down all the way to the coast; whether it was that modest gradient, or the end of the march coming into view, the going seemed suddenly easier. Thirty minutes later, the people around me stopped and began to pitch their own tents.

I sat on my suitcase and rested for a while, then dutifully commenced recording. Whether the evacuation had been rehearsed or not, the island itself collaborated with the refugees so fully as they set up camp that the process looked more like the smooth slotting into place of missing components in an elaborate machine—the logical completion of a function the bare rock had always implied—than any kind of desperate attempt to improvise in an emergency. One tear-sized droplet of signaling peptide was enough to start the cascade which instructed the lithophiles to open a shaft to a buried freshwater artery—and by the time I’d seen the third pump installed, I’d learned to recognize the characteristic swirl of green-and-blue trace minerals which marked the sites where wells could be formed. Sewerage took a little longer—the shafts were wider and deeper, and the access points rarer.

This was the flipside of Ned Landers’ mad, tire-eating survivalist nightmare: autonomy-through-biotech, but without the extremism and paranoia. I only hoped that the founders and designers of Stateless— the Californian anarchists who’d worked for EnGeneUity all those decades ago—were still alive to see how well their invention was serving its purpose.

By noon, with royal blue marquees providing shade for the water pumps, bright red tents erected over the latrines, and even a rudimentary first-aid center, I believed I understood what the medic had meant when she’d warned me not to think that I knew better than the locals. I checked the damage map of the city; it was no longer being updated, but at the last recorded count, over two hundred buildings—including the hotel—had been leveled.

Maybe technoliberation could never transform the unforgiving rock of the continents into anything as hospitable as Stateless—but in a world accustomed to images of squalid refugee camps, choking on dust or drowning in mud… maybe the contrasting vision of the renegades’ village could still symbolize the benefits of an end to the gene patent laws, more persuasively than the island at peace ever had.

I recorded everything, and dispatched the footage to SeeNet’s news room with narration which I hoped would limit the perverse downside: the less dramatic the anarchists’ plight, the less chance there was of any grass roots political backlash against the invasion. I didn’t want to see Stateless discredited, with commentators tutting wisely that it had always been destined to slide into the abyss—but when it took a thousand corpses a day to raise a flicker of interest from the average viewer, if I painted too sanguine a picture the exodus would be a non-story.

The first truck from the coast which I sighted ran out of food long before it came near us. By three p.m., though, with the sixth delivery, two market tents had been set up near one of the water pumps and an ad hoc “restaurant” was under construction. Forty minutes later, I sat on a folding chair in the shade of a photovoltaic awning, with a bowl of steaming sea urchin stew on my lap. There were a dozen other people eating out, forced to flee without their own cooking equipment; they eyed my camera suspiciously, but admitted that, of course, there’d been plans for leaving the city—first drafted long ago, but discussed and refined every year.

I felt more optimistic than ever—and more out of synch with the mood of the locals. They seemed to be taking the success of the exodus (a small miracle, in my eyes) for granted—but now that they’d come through it unscathed, as they’d always expected, and were waiting for the mercenaries to make the next move, everything had become less certain.

“What do you think will happen in the next twenty-four hours?” I asked one woman with a small boy on her lap. She wrapped her arms around the child protectively, and said nothing.

Outside, someone roared with pain. The restaurant emptied in seconds. I managed to penetrate the crowd which had formed in the narrow square between the markets and the restaurant—and then found myself forced back as they drew away in panic.

A young Fijian man had been lofted meters above the ground by invisible machinery; he was wide-eyed with terror, crying out for help. He was struggling pitifully—but his arms hung at his sides, bloody and ruined, white bone protruding through the flesh of one elbow. The thing which had taken him was too strong to be fought.

People were wailing and shouting—and trying to force their way out of the crowd. I resisted too long, transfixed with horror, and I was shoved to my knees. I covered my head and crouched down, but I was still an obstacle to the stampede. Someone heavy tripped on me, jabbing me with knees and elbows, then leaning on me to regain his balance, almost crushing my spine. I cowered on the ground as the buffeting continued, wishing I could rise to my feet, but certain that any attempt would only see me knocked flat on my back and trampled in the face. The man’s desperate pleading was like a second rain of blows; I tucked my head deeper into my arms, trying to blot out the sound. Somewhere nearby, a tent wall collapsed gently to the ground.

Long seconds passed, and no one else collided with me. I raised my head; the square was deserted. The man was still alive, but his eyes were rolling up into his skull intermittently, his jaw working feebly. Both his legs had been shattered now. Blood trickled down onto his invisible torturer—each droplet halting in mid fall and spreading out for a moment, hinting at a tangible surface before vanishing into the hidden carapace. I searched the ground for my camera, emitting soft angry choking noises. My throat was knotted, my chest constricted; every breath, every movement felt like a punishment. I found the camera and attached it, then rose shakily to my feet and began recording.

The man stared at me in disbelief. He looked me in the eye and said, “Help me.”

I stretched a hand in his direction, impotently. The insect ignored me—and I knew I was in no danger, it wanted this to be seen—but I was giddy with rage and frustration, sweating cold stinking rivulets down my face and chest.

A delicate sheen of interference fringes raced over the robot’s form as it raised the man higher. The camera followed my gaze upward, until I knew it was framing only the broken body and the uncaring sky.

I heard myself bellowing, “Where’s the fucking militia now? Where are your weapons? Where are your bombs? Do something!”

The man’s head lolled; I hoped he’d lost consciousness. Invisible pincers snapped his spine, then flung him aside. I heard the corpse thud against the marquee above the water pumps, then slide to the ground.

The whole camp of ten thousand seemed to be wailing in my skull, and I was screaming incoherently, but I kept my eyes locked on the place where the robot had to be.

There was a loud scrabbling sound from the space in front of me. A sickening hush descended in the alleys around the square. The insect played with the light, sketching its own outline for us, in reef-rock gray against the heavens, in sky blue against the rock. The body hanging from its six upturned-V legs was long and segmented; a blunt restless head at each end swiveled curiously, sniffing the air. Four lithe tentacles slithered in and out of sheaths in the carapace, tipped with sharp claws.

I stood swaying in the silence, waiting for something to happen—for someone with a jacket full of plastic explosives to burst out of an alley and run straight at the machine in the hope of a kamikaze embrace… though ve would not have come within ten meters before being blasted back into the crowd to incinerate a dozen friends, instead.

The thing arched its body and raised a pair of limbs, spreading them wide in a gesture of triumph.

Then it lurched toward a gap between the tents, sending people tripping into the walls and frantically clawing at the fabric, trying to tear a way out of its path.

It raced down the alley and disappeared, heading south, back toward the city.

Huddled on the ground behind the latrines, not ready to face the demoralized people of the camp, I dispatched the footage of the murder to SeeNet. I tried to compose some narration to go with it, but I was still in shock, I couldn’t concentrate. I thought: War correspondents see much worse, day after day. How long will it be, before I'm inured to this?

I scanned the international coverage. Everyone was still talking about “rival anarchists"—including SeeNet, who’d broadcast nothing I’d sent them.

I spent five minutes trying to calm myself, then called Lydia. It took me half an hour to get through to her in person. All I could hear around me was people sobbing with grief. What would it be like, after the tenth attack? The hundredth? I closed my eyes and fantasized about Cape Town, Sydney, Manchester. Anywhere.

When Lydia answered, I said, “I'm here, I'm covering this—so what’s happening to my footage?” She was not in charge of news, but she was the only person likely to give me a straight answer.

But Lydia was stony-faced, cold with anger. “Your ‘obituary’ of Violet Mosala had a whole scene cooked up out of thin air. And it said nothing about the cult which killed Yasuko Nishide—and now Henry Buzzo. I’ve seen your deposition to the security firm, about the cholera, about the fishing boat. So what are you playing at?”

I clutched at excuses, trying to find the right ones, knowing that Mosala would have died if I hadn’t used you was not good enough. I said, “Everything I faked, she really said. Off the record. Ask her.”

Lydia was unmoved. “It’s still unacceptable, it still violates all the guidelines. And we can’t ask her anything. She’s comatose.”

I didn’t want to hear that; if Mosala was brain-damaged, it had all been for nothing. I said, “I couldn’t tell you the rest… because I couldn’t tip off the Anthrocosmologists by broadcasting everything.” I was ranting; the ACs had already known exactly how much I would have told the authorities.

Lydia’s expression softened—as if I was clearly so far gone, now, that I deserved to be pitied, not rebuked. “Look, I hope you find a way to get home safely. But the documentary’s canceled—you’ve broken the terms of the contract and News isn’t interested in your coverage of the political problems on the island.”

“Political problems? I'm in the middle of a war being funded by the biggest biotech company on the planet. I'm the only journalist on the island who seems to have a clue what’s going on. And I'm SeeNet’s only journalist, period. So how can they not be interested?”

“We’re negotiating coverage from someone else.”

“Yeah? Who? Janet Walsh?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I don’t believe you! EnGeneUity are slaughtering people, and—”

Lydia held up a hand to silence me. “I don’t want to hear any more of your… propaganda. Okay? I'm sorry you’ve been through so much unpleasantness. I'm sorry the anarchists are killing each other.” She spoke with genuine sadness, I think. “But if you’ve taken sides, and you want to churn out… polemics against the boycott and the patent laws, full of forged material… then that’s your problem. I can’t help you. Be careful, Andrew. Goodbye.”

As dusk fell, I wandered through the camp, filming, transmitting the signal in real-time to my console at home—guaranteeing a record of everything, for what it was worth.

The model refugee village was still intact, the pumps still working, the sanitation impeccable. Lights shone everywhere, haloed with orange and green through the fabric, and the aroma of cooking wafted out of every second doorway. The tents’ stored photovoltaic electricity would last for hours, yet. No great damage had been done—no source of physical comfort had been lost.

But the people I passed were tense, fearful, silent. The robot could return at any time, night or day, and kill one more person—or a thousand.

By sending the robots out of the city to strike at random, the mercenaries could rapidly undermine morale and drive people even further away, closer to the coast. Greenhouse refugees forced to cling to the shoreline, waiting for the next big storm—the fate they’d come to Stateless to avoid—might be ready to abandon the island altogether.

I couldn’t imagine what had happened to the so-called militia—maybe they’d all been slaughtered already, in some brave idiotic stand back in the city. I scanned the local nets; there were bleak reports of dozens of attacks like the one I’d witnessed, but little else. I didn’t expect the anarchists to broadcast all their military secrets on the nets, but I found the absence of blustering propaganda, of morale-boosting claims of imminent victory, strangely chilling. Maybe the silence meant something, but if it did, I couldn’t decipher it.

It was growing cold. I was reluctant to ask for shelter in a stranger’s tent—I wasn’t afraid of being turned away, but I still felt too much like an outsider, despite all my feeble gestures of solidarity. These people were under siege, and they had no reason to trust me.

So I sat in the restaurant, drinking hot thin soup. The other customers talked among themselves, keeping their voices low, glancing at me more with measured caution than open hostility, but excluding me nonetheless.

I’d destroyed my career—for Mosala, for technoliberation—but I’d achieved nothing. Mosala was in a coma. Stateless was on the verge of a long and bloody decline.

I felt numb, and paranoid, and useless.

Then a message arrived from Akili. Ve’d escaped the city unharmed, and was in another camp, less than a kilometer away.

28

“Sit down. Anywhere that looks comfortable.”

The tent contained nothing but a backpack and an unrolled sleeping bag; the transparent floor looked dry, despite the hint of dew outside, but almost thin enough for the grit beneath it to be felt through the plastic. A black patch on the wall radiated gentle heat, powered by the solar energy stored in the charge-displacement polymers which were woven into every strand of the tent’s fabric.

I sat on one end of the sleeping bag. Akili sat cross-legged beside me. I looked around appreciatively; however humble, it was a vast improvement on bare rock. “Where did you find this? I don’t know if they shoot looters on Stateless… but I’d say it was worth the risk.”

Akili snorted. “I didn’t have to steal it. Where do you think I’ve been living for the past two weeks? We can’t all afford the Ritz.”

We exchanged updates. Akili had heard most of my news already, from other sources: Buzzo’s death; Mosala’s evacuation, and uncertain condition. But not her joke on the ACs: the automatic dissemination of her TOE around the world.

Akili frowned intensely, silent for a long time. Something had changed in vis face since I’d seen ver in the hospital; the deep shock of recognition at the news of the supposed mixing plague had given way to a kind of expectant gaze—as if ve was prepared, now, to be taken by Distress at any moment and was almost eager to embrace the experience, despite the anguish and horror all its victims had displayed. Even the few who’d been briefly calm and lucid in their own strange way had swiftly relapsed; if I’d believed that the syndrome was everyone’s fate, I would not have wished to go on living.

Akili confessed, “We still can’t fit our models to the data. No one I’ve been in contact with can work out what’s going on.” Ve seemed resigned to the fact that the plague would elude precise analysis, in the short term—but still confident that vis basic explanation was correct. “The new cases are appearing too rapidly, much faster than exponential growth.”

“Then maybe you’re wrong about the mixing. You made a prediction of exponential growth and now it’s failed. So maybe you’ve been reading too much Anthrocosmology into four sick people’s ranting.”

Ve shook vis head, calmly dismissing the possibility. “Seventeen people, now. Your SeeNet colleague isn’t the only one who’s seen it; other journalists have begun to report the same phenomenon. And there’s a way to explain the discrepancy in the case numbers.”

“How?”

“Multiple Keystones.”

I laughed wearily. “What’s the collective noun for that? Not an arch of Keystones, surely. A pantheon? One person, with one theory, explaining the universe into existence—isn’t that the whole premise of Anthrocosmology?”

“One theory, yes. And one person always seemed the most likely scenario. We always knew that the TOE would be broadcast to the world— but we always assumed that every last detail would be worked out in full by its discoverer, first. But if the discoverer is lying in a coma when the complete TOE is dispatched to tens of thousands of people, simultaneously… that’s like nothing we ever contemplated. And nothing we can hope to model: the mathematics becomes intractable.” Ve spread vis hands in a gesture of acceptance. “No matter. We’ll all learn the truth, soon enough.”

My skin crawled. In Akili’s presence, I didn’t know what I believed. I said, “Learn it how? Mosala’s TOE doesn’t predict telepathy with the Keystone—or Keystones—any more than it predicts the universe unraveling. If she’s right, you must be wrong.”

“It depends what she’s right about.”

“Everything? As in Theory of?”

“Everything could unravel tonight—and most TOEs would have nothing to say about it, one way or another. The rules of chess can’t tell you whether or not the board is strong enough to hold up every legal configuration of the pieces.”

“But every TOE has plenty to say about the human brain, doesn’t it? It’s a lump of ordinary matter, subject to all the ordinary laws of physics. It doesn’t start ‘mixing with information’ just because someone completes a Theory of Everything on the other side of the planet.”

Akili said, “Two days ago, I would have agreed with you. But TOEs which fail to deal with their own basis in information are as incomplete General Relativity—which required the Big Bang to take place, but then broke down completely at that point. It took the unification of all four forces to smooth away the singularity. And it looks like it’s going to take one more unification to understand the explanatory Big Bang.”

“But two days ago—?”

“I was wrong. The mainstream always assumed that an incomplete TOE was just the way things had to be. The Keystone would explain everything—except how a TOE could actually come into force. Anthrocosmology would answer that question—but that side of the equation would never be visible.” Akili held out both hands, palms pressed together horizontally. “Physics and metaphysics: we believed they’d remain separate forever. They always had, in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable premise. Like the single Keystone.” Ve interlocked vis fingers and tipped vis hands to a forty-five-degree angle. “It just happens to be wrong. Maybe because a TOE which unifies physics and information— which mixes the levels, and describes its own authority—is the very opposite of unraveling. It’s more stable than any other possibility; it affirms itself, it tightens the knot.”

I suddenly recalled the night I’d visited Amanda Conroy, when I’d concluded, tongue-in-cheek, that the separation of powers between Mosala and the Anthrocosmologists was a good thing. And later, Henry Buzzo had jokingly postulated a theory which supported itself, defended itself, ruled out all competitors, refused to be swallowed.

I said, “But whose theory is going to unify physics and information? Mosala’s TOE makes no attempt to ’describe its own authority.'”

Akili saw no obstacle. “She never intended it to. But either she failed to understand all the implications of her own work—or someone out on the net is going to get hold of her purely physical TOE, and extend it to embrace information theory. In a matter of days. Or hours.”

I stared at the ground, suddenly angry, all the mundane horrors of the day closing in on me. “How can you sit here wrapped up in this bullshit? Whatever happened to technoliberation?. Solidarity with the renegades? Smashing the boycott?” My own meager skills and connections had already come to nothing in the face of the invasion but somehow I’d imagined Akili proving to be a thousand times more resourceful: taking a vital role at the hub of the resistance, orchestrating some brilliant counter-attack.

Ve said quietly, “What do you expect me to do? I'm not a soldier; I don’t know how to win the war for Stateless. And there’ll soon be more people with Distress than there are on this whole island—and if ACs don’t try to analyze the mixing plague, no one else is going to do it.”

I laughed bitterly. “And now you’re ready to believe that understanding everything drives us insane? The Ignorance Cults were right? The TOE sends us screaming and kicking into the abyss? Just when I’d made up my mind that there was no such thing.”

Akili shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know why people are taking it so hard.” For the first time there was a hint of fear in vis voice, breaking through the determined acceptance. “But… mixing before the Aleph moment must be imperfect, distorted—because if it wasn’t flawed in some way, the first victim of Distress would have explained everything, and become the Keystone. I don’t know what the flaw is—what’s missing, what makes the partial understanding so traumatic—but once the TOE is completed…” Ve trailed off. If the Aleph moment didn’t put an end to Distress, the misery of a war on Stateless would be nothing. If the TOE could not be faced, all that lay ahead was universal madness.

We both fell silent. The camp was quiet, except for a few young children crying in the distance, and the faint clatter of cooking utensils in some of the nearby tents.

Akili said, “Andrew?”

“Yes?”

“Look at me.”

I turned and faced ver squarely, for the first time since I’d arrived. Vis dark eyes appeared more luminous than ever: intelligent, searching, compassionate. The unselfconscious beauty of vis face evoked a deep, astonished resonance inside me, a thrill of recognition which reverberated from the darkness in my skull to the base of my spine. My whole body ached at the sight of ver, every muscle fiber, every tendon. But it was welcome pain, as if I’d been beaten and left to die—and now found myself, impossibly, waking.

That was what Akili was: my last hope, my resurrection.

Ve said, “What is it you want?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on. I'm not blind.” Ve searched my face, frowning slightly, puzzled but unaccusing. “Have I done something? To lead you on? To give you the wrong idea?”

“No.” I wanted the ground to swallow me. And I wanted to touch ver more than I wanted to live.

“Neural asex can make people lose track of the messages they’re sending. I thought I’d made everything clear, but if I’ve confused you—”

I cut ver off. “You did. Make everything.” I heard my voice disintegrating; I waited a few seconds, forcing myself to breathe calmly, willing my throat to unknot, then said evenly, “It’s not your fault. I'm sorry I’ve offended you. I’ll go.” I began to stand.

“No.” Akili placed a hand my shoulder, gently restraining me. “You’re my friend, and you’re in pain, and we’re going to work this out.”

Ve rose to vis feet—but then squatted down and began to unlace vis shoes.

“What are you doing?”

“Sometimes you think you know something, you think you’ve taken it in. But it’s not real, until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.” Ve pulled vis loose T-shirt over vis head; vis torso was slender, lightly muscled, vis chest perfectly smooth—no breasts, no nipples, nothing. I looked away, and then climbed to my feet, determined to walk out—at that moment, prepared to abandon ver for no better reason than to preserve a desire which I’d always known led nowhere—but then I stood there paralyzed, light-headed, vertiginous.

I said numbly, “You don’t have to do this.”

Akili walked up to me, stood beside me. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. Ve took my right hand and placed it against vis stomach, which was flat and soft and hairless, then forced my sweating fingers down between vis legs. There was nothing but smooth skin, cool and dry all the way—and then a tiny urethral opening.

I pulled free, burning with humiliation—swallowing a venomous barb about African traditions just in time. I retreated as far as the tent allowed, still refusing to face ver, and a wave of grief and anger swept over me.

“Why? How could you hate your body so much?”

“I never hated it. But I never worshipped it, either.” Ve spoke softly, striving for patience—but weary of the need to justify verself. “I didn’t pick you for an Edenite. The Ignorance Cults all worship the smallest cages they can find: the accidents of birth, of biology, of history and culture… and then rail against anyone who dares to show them the bars of a cage ten billion times larger. But my body is not a temple—or a dung-heap. Those are the choices of idiot mythology, not the choices of technoliberation. The deepest truth about the body is that all that restrains it, in the end, is physics. We can reshape it into anything the TOE allows.”

This cool logic only made me recoil even more. I agreed with every word of it—but I clung to my instinctive horror like a lifeline. “The deepest truth would still have been true if you hadn’t sacrificed—”

“I’ve sacrificed nothing. Except some ancient hardwired behavioral patterns buried in my limbic system, triggered by certain visual cues and pheromones… and the need to have small explosions of endogenous opiates go off in my brain.”

I turned and let myself look at ver. Ve stared back at me defiantly. The surgery had been well executed; ve did not look unbalanced, deformed. I had no right to grieve for a loss which existed only in my head. Nobody had mutilated ver by force; ve had made vis own decision with vis eyes wide open. I had no right to wish ver healed.

I was still shaken and angry, though. I still wanted to punish ver for what ve’d taken from me.

I asked sardonically, “And where does that get you? Does hacking out your base animal instincts grant you some… great, rarefied insight? Don’t tell me: you can tune in to the lost wisdom of the celibate medieval saints?”

Akili grimaced, amused. “Hardly. But sex grants no insight, either— any more than shooting up heroin does—however much the cultists rant about Tantric mysteries and the communion of souls. Give an MR a magic mushroom or two, and they’ll tell you, sincerely, that they’ve just fucked God. Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilarating—and all, equally, meaningless.”

It was a familiar truth—but at that moment it cut deep. Because I still wanted ver. And the drug I was hooked on did not exist.

Akili half raised vis hands, as if to offer a truce: ve’d had no wish to hurt me, only to defend vis own philosophy. “If most people choose to remain addicted to orgasm, then that’s their right. Not even the most radical asex would dream of forcing anyone to follow us. But I don’t happen to want my own life to revolve around a few cheap biochemical tricks.”

“Not even to be made in the image of your beloved Keystone?”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Ve laughed wearily. “The Keystone is not some… teleological endpoint, some cosmic ideal. In a thousand years’ time, the Keystone’s body will be the same obsolete joke as yours and mine.”

I’d run out of anger. I said simply, “I don’t care. Sex can still be much more than the release of endogenous opiates—”

“Of course it can. It can be a form of communication. But it can also be the very opposite—with all the same biology in play. And all I’ve given up is that which the best and the worst sex have in common. Don’t you see that? All I’ve done is subtracted out the noise.”

These words made no sense to me. I looked away, defeated. And I knew that the pain I’d thought of as an ache of longing had never been more than the bruising I’d received from the crowd as they fled the robot, and the throbbing of the wound in my stomach, and the weight of failure.

I said, without hope, “But don’t you ever want some kind of… physical solace? Some kind of contact? Don’t you ever, still, just want to be touched?"

Akili walked toward me and said gently, “Yes. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

I was speechless. Ve placed one hand on my shoulder, and cupped the other against my face, raising my eyes to meet vis. “If it’s what you want, too—if it won’t just be frustrating for you. And if you understand: this can’t turn into any kind of sex, I don’t—”

I said, “I understand.”

I undressed quickly, before I could change my mind, trembling like a nervous adolescent—willing my erection to vanish, without success. Akili turned up the heating panel, and we lay on our sides on the sleeping bag, eyes locked, not quite touching. I reached over and tentatively stroked vis shoulder, the side of vis neck, vis back.

“Do you like that?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated. “Can I kiss you?”

“Not a good idea, I think. Just relax.” Ve brushed my cheek with vis cool fingers, then ran the back of vis hand down the center of my chest, toward my bandaged abdomen.

I was shivering. “Does your leg still hurt?”

“Sometimes. Relax.” Ve kneaded my shoulders.

“Have you ever done this… with a non-asex before?”

“Yes.”

“Male or female?”

“Female.” Akili laughed softly. “You should see your face. Look—if you come, it’s not the end of the world. She did. So I'm not going to throw you out in disgust.” Ve slid a hand over my hip. “It might be better if you did; you might loosen up.”

I shuddered at vis touch, but my erection was slowly subsiding. I stroked the smooth unmarked skin where a nipple might have been, searching for scar tissue with my fingertips, finding nothing. Akili stretched lazily. I began massaging the side of vis neck, again.

I said, “I'm lost. I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know where we’re heading.”

“Nowhere. We can stop if you want to. We can always just talk. Or we can talk without stopping. It’s called freedom—you’ll get used to it, eventually.”

“This is very strange.” Our eyes remained locked together, and Akili seemed happy enough—but I still felt I should have been hunting for some way to make everything a thousand times more intense.

I said, “I know why this feels wrong. Physical pleasure without sex—” I hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Physical pleasure, without sex, is generally classified as—”

“What?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

Ve thumped me in the ribs. “Spit it out.”

"Infantile."

Akili sighed. “Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A corrupter of language, a destroyer of lives.”

I complied—then I wrapped my arms around ver tightly, and we lay there with our legs entwined, heads on each other’s shoulders, gently stroking each other’s backs. The whole futile sexual charge I’d felt since the fishing boat was finally lifting; all the pleasure came from the warmth of vis body, the unfamiliar contours of vis flesh, the texture of vis skin, the sense of vis presence.

And I still found ver as beautiful as ever. I still cared about ver as much as ever.

Was this what I’d always been looking for? Asexual love. It was a disquieting notion—but I thought it through calmly. Maybe all my life I’d unconsciously swallowed the Edenite lie: that everything in the perfect, harmonious modern emotional relationship somehow flowed magically out of beneficent nature. Monogamy, equality, honesty, respect, tenderness, selflessness—it was all pure instinct, pure sexual biology, taking its unfettered course—despite the fact that all those criteria of perfection had changed radically from century to century, from culture to culture. The Edenites proclaimed that anyone who fell short of the glowing ideal was either wilfully fighting Mother Gaia, or had been corrupted by a traumatic upbringing, media manipulation, or the deeply unnatural power structures of modern society.

In fact, the ancient reproductive drives had been hemmed in by civilizing forces, inhibited by cultural strictures and pressed into service to create social cohesion in countless different ways—but they hadn’t actually changed in tens of thousands of years, and they contradicted current mores, or were silent, just as often as they supported them. Gina’s unfaithfulness had hardly been a crime against biology… and whatever I’d done to drive her away had been a failure of purely conscious effort—a lack of attentiveness that any Stone Age ancestor would have found second nature. Virtually everything which modern humans valued in relationships—over and above the act of sex itself, and some degree of protectiveness toward their partners and offspring—arose by a separate force of will. There was a massive shell of moral and social constructs wrapped around the tiny core of instinctive behavior—and the pearl bore little resemblance to the grit.

I had no wish to abandon either, but if what I’d failed at so badly, again and again, had been reconciling the two…

If the choice came down to biology or civilization… I knew, now, which I valued the most. And asex could still be close. Asex could still touch. After a while, we climbed into the sleeping bag to keep warm. I was still numb with despair at the tragedy of Stateless, Mosala’s senseless half-murder, the ruins of my career. But Akili kissed me on the forehead, and tried vis best to unknot my aching back and shoulders—and I did the same for ver, in the hope that it might make vis fear of the great information plague, which I still did not believe was coming, in some small way easier to bear.

I woke, confused, to the sound of Akili breathing beside me. The tent was bathed in gray and blue light, shadowless as noon; I looked up and saw the disk of the moon overhead, a white spotlight penetrating the weave of the roof, rainbow-fringed by diffraction.

I thought: Akili met me outside the airport. Ve could have infected me with the engineered cholera then, knowing that I’d carry it to Mosala.

And when the weapon misfired, ve’d produced the antidote—to gain my trust, in the hope that ve could use me a second time… but then the moderates had unwittingly kidnapped us both, and there’d been no need to strike at Mosala again.

It was sheer paranoia. I closed my eyes. Why would an extremist pretend to believe in the information plague? And if the belief was genuine, why kill Buzzo when the Aleph moment had been proved inevitable? Either way, with Mosala back in Cape Town—and her work proceeding, with or without her—what use could I be to the extremists?

I disentangled myself, and climbed out of the sleeping bag. Akili woke while I was dressing, and muttered sleepily, “The latrine tent glows red. You can’t miss it.”

“I won’t be long.”

I walked aimlessly, trying to clear my head. It was earlier than I’d imagined, barely after nine, but shockingly cold. Lights still showed from most of the tents, but the alleys between them were deserted.

Akili as an extremist assassin made no sense—why would ve have struggled to get us off the fishing boat?—but the doubt I’d felt on waking still cast a shadow over everything, as if my mistrust itself was as much of a disaster as any possibility that I could be right. How could we have been through so much together—only for me to wake beside ver, wondering if it had all been a lie?

I reached the southern edge of the camp. These people must have been the last wave of refugees to head north, because there was nothing in sight but bare reef-rock, stretching to the horizon.

I hesitated, and almost turned back. But pacing the alleys made me feel like a spy—and I wasn’t ready to return to Akili’s tent, to the warmth of vis body, to the hope ve seemed to offer. Half an hour before, I’d seriously considered migrating to total asex—tearing out my genitals and several vital pieces of gray matter—as the panacea for all my woes. I needed to take a long walk, alone.

I headed out into the moonlit desert.

Whorls of trace minerals glittered everywhere; now that I’d seen a few of these hieroglyphs deciphered, the ground appeared transformed, dense with meaning—although for all I knew, most of the patterns could still have been nothing but random decoration.

The abandoned city was either in darkness, or hidden from view by the slope of the ground; I could see no hint of light on the southern horizon. I pictured a fresh swarm of the invisible insects scurrying out from their nest at the center… but I knew I’d be no safer back in the camp— and the things only killed for the spectacle of it, for the panic they instilled. Alone, I was less of a target than ever.

I thought I felt the ground shudder—a tremor so slight that I doubted it immediately. Was there still shelling going on? I’d imagined everyone leaving the city to the mercenaries—but maybe a few dissenters had ignored the evacuation plan… or maybe the militia had remained, in hiding, and the real confrontation had finally begun. That was a dismal prospect; they didn’t stand a chance.

It happened again. I couldn’t judge the direction of the blast—I’d heard no sound at all, just felt the vibration. I turned a full circle, scanning the horizon for smoke. Maybe they were shelling the camps, now. The white plumes over the city in the morning had been visible for kilometers—but shells meant for tents on bare rock would carry different charges, with different effects.

I kept walking south, hoping that the city would come into view along with some sign that the pyrotechnic action was still confined there. And I tried to imagine myself living through the war, emerging unscathed, but cozily familiar with all the myriad technologies of death… offering—to the nets who didn’t care what I’d faked—footage complete with my own now—expert commentary on “the characteristic sound of a Chinese-made Vigilance missile meeting its target,” or “the unmistakable visual signature of a Peacetech forty-millimeter shell exploding over open ground.”

I felt a wave of resignation sweep over me. I’d swallowed too many dreams in the last three days: technoliberation, an end to the gene patent laws… personal happiness, asexual bliss. It was time to wake up. The ordinary madness of the world had finally reached Stateless—so why not stand back, regain some perspective, and try to scrape some kind of a living out of it? The invasion was no greater tragedy than ten thousand other bloody conquests before it—and it had always been inevitable. War had come, one way or another, to every known human culture.

I whispered aloud, without much conviction, “Screw every known human culture.”

The ground roared, and threw me.

The reef-rock was soft, but I hit it face-down, bloodying my nose, maybe breaking it. Winded and astonished, I raised myself onto my hands and knees, but the ground still hadn’t stopped shaking, I didn’t trust myself to stand. I looked around for some evidence of a nearby impact—but there was no glow, no smoke, no crater, nothing.

Was this the new terror? After invisible robots—invisible bombs?

I knelt, waited, then climbed to my feet unsteadily. The reef-rock was still reverberating; I paced in a drunken circle, searching the horizon, still refusing to believe that there could be no other sign of the blast.

The air had been silent, though. It was the rock which had carried the noise. An underground detonation?

Or undersea, beneath the island?

And no detonation at all—

The ground convulsed again. I landed badly, twisting one arm, but panic washed out everything, dulling the pain into insignificance. I clawed at the ground, trying to find the strength to deny every instinct which screamed at me to stay down, not to risk moving—when I knew that if I didn’t stand—and then sprint faster across the shuddering dead coral than I’d ever moved in my life—I was lost.

The mercenaries had killed off the lithophiles which gave the reef-rock its buoyancy. That was why they’d driven us out of the city: only the center of the island would hold. Beyond the support of the guyot, the overhang was sinking.

I turned to try to see what had happened to the camp. Blue and orange squares gazed back at me blankly; most of the tents were still standing. I could see no one moving out across the desert yet—it was too soon—but there was no question of going back to warn them. Not even Akili. Inland divers would surely understand what was happening, faster than I had. There was nothing I could do now but try to save myself.

I climbed to my feet and broke into a run. I covered about ten meters before the ground shifted, slamming me down. I got up, took three steps, twisted an ankle, fell again. There was a constant tortured cracking sound filling my head now, conducted through my body from reef-rock to bone, resonating from living mineral to living mineral—the underworld reaching up to me, sharing its disintegration.

I started crawling forward on my hands and knees, screaming wordlessly, almost paralyzed by a vision of the ocean rushing over the sinking reefs, sweeping up bodies, propelling them inland, dashing them against the splintering ground. I glanced back and saw nothing but the placid tent village, still uselessly intact—but the whole island was roaring in my skull, the deluge could only be minutes away.

I stood again, ran for whole seconds despite the swaying stars, then landed heavily, splitting my stitches. Warm blood soaked the bandages. I rested, covering my ears, daring to wonder for the first time if it would be better to stop and wait to die. How far was I from the guyot? How far would the ocean reach in, even if I made it to solid ground? I groped at my notepad pocket, as if I could get a GPS fix, check a few maps, come to some kind of decision. I rolled onto my back and started laughing. The stars jittered into time-lapse trails.

I stood up, glanced over my shoulder—and saw someone running across the rock behind me. I dropped to my hands and knees, half voluntarily, but kept my eyes on the figure. Ve was dark-skinned and slender— but it wasn’t Akili, the hair was too long. I strained my eyes. It was a teenage girl. Her face caught the moonlight, her eyes wide with fear, but her mouth set in determination. Then the ground heaved, and we both fell. I heard her cry out in pain.

I waited—but she didn’t get up.

I started crawling back toward her. If she was injured, all I’d be able to do was sit with her until the ocean took us both—but I couldn’t keep going and leave her.

When I reached her, she was lying on her side with her legs jack-knifed, massaging one calf, muttering angrily. I crouched beside her and shouted, “Do you think you can stand?”

She shook her head. “We’d better sit it out here! We’ll be safe here!”

I stared at her. “Don’t you know what’s happening? They’ve killed the lithophiles!”

“No! They’ve been reprogrammed—they’re actively swallowing gas. Just killing them would be too slow—give too much warning!”

This was surreal. I couldn’t focus on her; the ground was juddering too hard. “We can’t stay here! Don’t you understand? We’ll drown!”

She shook her head again. For an instant, contradictory blurs of motion canceled; she was smiling up at me, as if I was a child afraid of a thunderstorm. “Don’t worry! We’ll be fine!”

What did she think would happen, when the ocean came screaming in? We’d just… hold each other up? One million drowning refugees would all link hands and tread water together?

Stateless had driven its children insane.

A fine moist spray rained down on us. I crouched and covered my head, picturing deep water rushing into the depressurized rock, blasting fissures all the way to the surface. And when I looked up, there it was: in the distance, a geyser fountained straight into the sky, a terrible silver thread in the moonlight. It was some hundred meters away—to the south—meaning that the path to the guyot was already undermined, and there was no hope of escape.

I lay down heavily beside the girl. She shouted at me, “Why were you running in the wrong direction? Did you lose your way?”

I reached over and gripped her shoulder, hoping to see her face more clearly. We gazed at each other in mutual incomprehension. She yelled, “I was on scout duty. I should have stopped you at the edge of the camp, but I thought you’d just go a little way, I thought you just wanted a better view for your camera.”

The shoulder camera was still packed in my wallet; I hadn’t even thought of using it, turning it back on the camp as it was flooded, broadcasting the genocide to the world.

The gentle rain grew heavier for a second or two—but then subsided. I looked south, and caught sight of the geyser collapsing.

Then, for the first time, I noticed my hands trembling.

The ground had quietened.

Meaning what? The stretch of rock we lay on had broken free of its surroundings, like an iceberg birthed screaming from a glacial sheet, and was floating in relative tranquility now—before the water rushed in around the edges?

My ears rang, my body was quivering—but I glanced up at the sky, and the stars were rock-steady. Or vice versa.

And then the girl gave me a shaken, queasy, adrenaline-drunk grin, her eyes shining with tears of relief. She believed that the ordeal was over. And I’d been warned not to think I knew better. I stared back at her wonderingly, my heart still pounding with terror, my chest constricted with hope and disbelief. I found myself emitting long, gasping sobs.

When I’d regained my voice, I asked, “Why aren’t we dead? The overhang can’t float without the lithophiles. Why aren’t we drowning?”

She rose and sat cross-legged, massaging her bruised calf, distracted for a moment. Then she looked at me, took the measure of my misunderstanding, shook her head, and patiently explained.

“No one touched the lithophiles in the overhang. The militia sent divers to the edge of the guyot, and pumped in primer to make the lithophiles degass the reef-rock just above the basalt. Water flooded in— and the surface rock at the center is heavier than water.”

She smiled sunnily. “I look at it this way. We’ve lost a city. But we’ve gained a lagoon.”