Distress

by Greg Egan

  “Yeah.”

  I watched the train until it disappeared, thinking: She did help me, after all. I actually forgot about both of us, for a while. And she’ll survive. And I’ll survive. And tomorrow, I’ll be on a South Pacific island … trying to bluff my way through two weeks with Violet Mosala.

  Backed into a different kind of corner.

  What more could I have asked for?

  PART TWO

  Chapter 9

  The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot – a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano – in the middle of the south Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote – but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.

  I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city – which I’d never seen firsthand – but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.

  I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its “destabilizing influence on the region” – but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission … but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.

  It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.

  So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus ’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.

  At least two conflicting generalized measures can be applied to T , the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T , and are equivalent when restricted to M – the space of n-dimensional paracompact Hausdorff manifolds – but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—

  I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off – but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili – picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate – and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years’ time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode … and maybe in the future people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness.

  There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia – but its enthusiastic punishment of the “anarchists” went above and beyond the call of realpolitik . There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though – and from there I could finally reach my destination.

  It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits – the Timor Gap oilfields – with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant – hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk – the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur . Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.

  I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.

  She said, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I’m going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets – and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach.”

  “You mean Stateless?”

  She regarded me sympathetically. “You too?”

  I nodded.

  “You poor man. Where have you come from?”

  “Sydney.”

  Her accent was almost certainly Bombay – but she said, “I’m from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I’m Indrani Lee.”

  “Andrew Worth.”

  We shook hands. She said, “Of course, I’m not giving a paper, myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But … if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?” She smiled conspiratorially. “People grow so desperate to talk off the nets – knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?”

  “I hope so. I’m a journalist – I’m covering the conference for SeeNet.” A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.

  Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us – an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux ) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.

  When the AV was over, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?”

  “I’m not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work.”

  “You’re a journalist?”

  “I’m a sociologist. Or if you want my full job description: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So … if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event.”

  “You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re ‘really just priests and story-tellers’?” I’d meant that as a joke – her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone – but my words came out sounding like an accusation.

  She gave me a reproving glare. “I’m not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I’m afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments, now.” Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. “We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible.”

  I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.

  As lush Vietnamese j
ungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view – and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. “What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean … if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?”

  “Yes – but my job’s very different from yours. Ultimately, I’m just a communications technician.”

  She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later . “The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs – right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?”

  “More or less.”

  “Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this – beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances.” She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. “I’m not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked – as groups like Culture First continue to insist – just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one level: most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.

  “But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of ‘dethroning’ physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science.” She added, in mock reproof, “And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones.”

  I said, “But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?”

  Lee confessed without hesitation: “I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

  “The physicists have it easy – with their subject, if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prizing out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.

  “People are the very opposite. There’s nothing to which we’ll devote more time, and energy, and cunning, than burying the truth.”

  #

  East Timor from the air was a dense patchwork of fields along the coast, and what looked like native jungle and savanna in the highlands. A dozen tiny fires dotted the mountains – but the blackened pinpricks beneath the smoke trails were dwarfed by the scars of old open-cut mines. We spiraled down over the island in a helical U-turn, hundreds of small villages coming into sight and then slipping away.

  The fields displayed no trademark pigments (let alone the logos of fourth-generation biotech); visibly, at least, the farmers were refusing the temptation to go renegade, and were using only old, out-of-patent crops. Agriculture for export was almost dead; even hyper-urbanized Japan could feed its own population. Only the poorest countries, unable to afford the license fees for state-of-the-art produce, struggled for self-sufficiency. East Timor imported food from Indonesia.

  It was just after midday as we touched down in the tiny capital. There was no umbilical; we walked across the sweltering tarmac. The melatonin patch on my shoulder, pre-programmed by my pharm, was nudging me relentlessly toward Stateless time, two hours later than Sydney’s – but Dili was two hours in the other direction. I felt jet-lagged for the first time in my life, physically affronted by the sight of the blazing midday sun – and it struck me just how eerily effective the patch ordinarily was, when I could alight in Frankfurt or Los Angeles without the slightest sense of violated expectations. I wondered how I would have felt if I’d had my hypothalamic clock slavishly synched to the local time zones, all the way along the absurd loop of my flight path. Better, worse … or just disturbingly normal, one part of my perception of time laid bare as the simplest of biochemical phenomena?

  The single-story airport building was crowded – with more people seeing off, or greeting, travelers than I’d ever witnessed in Bombay, Shanghai, or Mexico City, and more uniformed staff than I’d seen in any other airport on the planet. I stood in line behind Indrani Lee to pay the two-hundred-dollar transit tax on the near-monopoly route to Stateless. It was pure extortion … but it was hard to begrudge the opportunism. How else was a country this size supposed to raise the foreign exchange it needed in order to buy food? I hit a few keys on my notepad, and Sisyphus replied: with great difficulty.

  East Timor had none of the few exotic minerals which still needed to be mined to meet net global demand after recycling – and it had been stripped long ago of anything which might have been useful to local industry. Trade in native sandalwood was forbidden by international law – and in any case, engineered plantation species produced a better, cheaper product. A couple of electronics multinationals had built appliance-assembly factories in Dili, during a brief period when the independence movement appeared to have been crushed – but they’d all closed in the twenties, when automation became cheaper than the cheapest sweated labor. That left tourism and culture. But how many hotels could be filled, here? (Two small ones; a total of three hundred beds.) And how many people could make their living on the world nets as writers, musicians, or artists? (Four hundred and seven.)

  In theory, Stateless faced all the same basic problems, and more. But Stateless had been renegade from the start – its very land built with unlicensed biotech. And no one went hungry, there.

  It must have been the jet-lag, but it only dawned on me slowly that most of the people in the airport weren’t there to greet friends, after all. What I’d mistaken for luggage and gifts was merchandise; these people were traders and their customers: tourists, travelers, and locals. There were a couple of stuffy-looking official airport shops in one corner … but the whole building seemed to double as a marketplace.

  Still in the queue, I closed my eyes and invoked Witness ; a sequence of eyeball movements woke the software in my gut, which generated the image of a control panel and fed it down my optic nerve. I stared at the LOCATION slot on the panel, which still read SYDNEY; it obligingly blanked. I mimed vertical one-handed typing, and entered DILI. Then I looked squarely at BEGIN RECORDING, highlighting the words, and opened my eyes.

  Witness confirmed: “Dili, Sunday April 4th, 2055. 4:34:17 GMT.” Beep .

  The Customs Department collected the transit tax – and apparently their hardware was down. Instead of our notepads dealing with everything via a brief exchange of IR, we had to sign papers, show our physical ID cards, and receive a cardboard boarding pass with an official rubber stamp. I’d been half expecting some petty harassment if the opportunity arose, but the Customs officer, a softly-spoken woman with a dense Papuan frizz beneath her cap, gave me the same patient smile as she’d given everyone else, and processed my paperwork just as swiftly.

  I wandered through the airport, not really looking to buy anything, just filming the scene for my scrapbook. People were shouting and haggling in Portuguese, Bahasa and English – and, according to Sisyphus , Tetum and Vaiqueno, local languages undergoing a slow resurrection. The air conditioning was probably working, but the body heat of the crow
d must have almost balanced its effect; after five minutes, I was dripping with sweat.

  Traders were selling rugs, T-shirts, pineapples, oil paintings, statues of saints. I passed by a stall of dried fish, and had to concentrate to keep my stomach from heaving; the smell was no problem, but however many times I confronted it, the sight of dead animals offered for human consumption still left me reeling, more than a human corpse ever did. Engineered crops could match or exceed all the nutritional benefits of meat; a small flesh trade still existed in Australia, but it was discreet and heavily cosmeticized.

  I saw a rack of what looked like Masarini jackets, on sale for a tenth of the price they would have fetched in New York or Sydney. I waved my notepad at them; it found one in my size, interrogated the tag in the collar, and chimed approval – but I had my doubts. I asked the thin teenage boy who was standing by the rack, “Are these real authentication chips, or – ?” He smiled innocently and said nothing. I bought the jacket, then ripped out the tag and handed the chip back to him. “You might as well get some more use out of it.”

  I ran into Indrani Lee beside a software stall. She said, “I think I’ve spotted someone else who’s headed for the conference.”

  “Where?” I felt a mixture of excitement and panic; if it was Violet Mosala herself, I was still unprepared to face her.

  I followed Lee’s gaze to an elderly Caucasian woman, who was arguing heatedly with a trader selling scarves. Her face was vaguely familiar, but in profile I couldn’t put a name to it.

  “Who is that?”

  “Janet Walsh.”

  “No. You’re joking.”

  But it was her.

  Janet Walsh was an award-winning English novelist – and one of the world’s most prominent members of Humble Science! She’d first come to fame in the twenties with Wings of Desire (“a delicious, mischievous, incisive fable”— The Sunday Times ), a story set among an “alien race”, who happened to look exactly like humans … except that their males were born with large butterfly wings growing out of their penises, which were necessarily and bloodily severed when they lost their virginity. The alien females (who lacked hymens), were all callous and brutal. After being raped and abused by everyone in sight for most of the novel, the hero discovers a magical technique for making his lost wings grow back – on his shoulders – and flies off into the sunset. (“Gleefully subverts all gender stereotypes”— Playboy .)