by Greg Egan
“Not really.”
I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn’t eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo’s lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.
The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the grass looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed – but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect’s computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition – a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere – and I’d heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.
Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, “Five hundred dollars.” He had a rural Australian accent.
I said, “If I’m going to get ripped off, I think I’ll wait for a local to do it.”
He gave me a mock-wounded glare. “And ten years doesn’t qualify me? What do you want? Citizenship records? ”
“Ten years? I apologize.” Ten years meant he was practically a pioneer; Stateless had been seeded in 2032, but it had taken almost a decade to become habitable and self-sustaining. I was surprised; the founders, and most of the earliest settlers, had come from the US.
I said, “My name’s Andrew Worth. I’m here for the Einstein Conference.”
“Bill Munroe. Here for the light.” He didn’t offer his hand.
“I can’t afford the picture. But I’ll buy you lunch, if you’re interested.”
He looked at me sourly. “You’re a journalist.”
“I’m covering the conference. Nothing else. But I’m curious about … the island.”
“Then read about it. It’s all on the nets.”
“Yes – and it all contradicts itself. I can’t decide what’s propaganda and what isn’t.”
“So what makes you think anything I might tell you would be any more reliable?”
“Face to face, I’ll know.”
He sighed. “Why me?” He put down his stylus. “All right. Lunch and anarchy. This way.” He started to walk across the square.
I hung back. “You’re not going to leave this – ?” He kept walking, so I caught up with him. “Five hundred dollars – plus the easel and the stylus – and you’re willing to trust people to leave it untouched?”
He glanced at me irritably, then turned and waved his notepad at the easel; it emitted a brief ear-splitting squeal. A few people turned to stare. “Don’t you have alarm tags where you come from?” I felt my face redden.
Munroe chose a cheap-looking open-air café, and ordered a steaming white concoction from the instant-serve display counter. It smelled nauseatingly fishy – although here, that didn’t necessarily imply that it had once been the flesh of any vertebrate. Still, I lost whatever faint hint of an appetite I might have been working up.
As I thumbed approval of the payment for the meal, he said, “Don’t tell me: you’re deeply perplexed by our use of international credit as a means of exchange, the existence of free-enterprise eating establishments, my shameless attachment to private property, and all the other trappings of capitalism which you see around you.”
“You’ve done this before. So what’s the stock answer to the stock question?” Munroe carried his plate out to a table which gave him a clear view of his easel.
He said, “Stateless is a capitalist democracy. And a liberal socialist democracy. And a union of collectives. And several hundred other things for which I have no name.”
“You mean … people here choose to act as they would in those kinds of society?”
“Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Most people join syndicates which effectively are those kinds of society. People want freedom of choice, but they also want a degree of stability. So they enter into agreements which give them a framework in which to organize their lives – agreements which allow for release, of course … but then, most democracies permit emigration. If sixty thousand people in one syndicate agree to pay a portion of their income – subject to audit – into a fund used for health, education, and welfare, disbursed according to policies fleshed out in detail by committees of elected delegates … they may not have a parliament or a head of state, but that still sounds like a socialist democracy to me.”
I said, “So freely chosen ‘government’ isn’t forbidden. But – overall – are you anarchists, or not? Aren’t there universal laws here, which everyone is forced to obey?”
“There are a handful of principles endorsed by a large majority of residents. Basic ideas about freedom from violence and coercion. They’re widely promulgated – and anyone who disagrees with them would be better off not coming here. I won’t split hairs, though; they might as well be laws.
“So are we anarchists, or not?” Munroe mimed indifference. “ Anarchy means ‘no ruler’, not ‘no laws’ … but no one on Stateless loses any sleep contemplating ancient Greek semantics – or the writings of Bakunin, or Proudhon, or Godwin. Sorry, I retract that: about the same percentage of the population as you’d find in Beijing or Paris cares passionately about each of those subjects. But you’ll have to interview one of them, if you want their opinion.
“Personally, I think the word carries too much historical baggage to be salvaged. No great loss. Most of the nineteenth and twentieth century anarchist movements were bogged down, as much as the Marxists, by the question of seizing power from the ruling class. On Stateless that issue was dealt with very simply. In 2025, six employees of a Californian biotech company called EnGeneUity absconded with all the information they needed to make the seed. Much of which was their own work, if not their own property. They also took some engineered cells from various cultures, but too few to be missed. By the time anyone knew that Stateless was growing, there were a few hundred people living here in shifts, and it would have been bad PR to summarily sterilize the place.
“That was our ‘revolution.’ Beats measuring out your life in Molotov cocktails.”
“Except that the theft means you’re saddled with the boycott.”
Munroe shrugged. “The boycott is a great pain. But Stateless under the boycott is still better than the alternative: a company island, every square meter privately owned. It’s bad enough when every decent food crop on the planet is licensed; imagine the ground beneath your feet being the same.”
I said, “Okay. So the technology gave you a short cut to a new society; all the old models were irrelevant. No invasion and genocide, no bloody uprising, no glacial democratic reforms. But getting there’s the easy part. I still don’t understand what holds the place together.”
“Small invertebrate organisms.”
“I meant politically.”
Munroe looked baffled. “Holds the place together against what? The onset of anarchy?”
“Violence. Looting. Mob rule.”
“Why bother traveling to the middle of the Pacific for something you can do in any city in the world? Or do you think we went to all this trouble just for a chance to play Lord of the Flies ?”
“Not intentionally. But when it happens in Sydney, they send in the riot squad. When it happens in Los Angeles, they send in the National Guard.”
“We have a trained militia, who have near-universal consent to use reasonable force to protect people and vital resources in an emergency.” He grinned. “‘Vital resources.’ ‘Emergency powers.’ Sounds just like home,
doesn’t it? Except that the emergency has never arisen.”
“Okay. But why hasn’t it? ”
Munroe massaged his forehead, and regarded me as if I were an over-persistent child. “Good will? Intelligence? Some other bizarre alien force?”
“Be serious.”
“There are some obvious things. People turn up here with a slightly higher than average level of idealism. They want Stateless to work, or they wouldn’t have come – give or take the occasional tedious agent provocateur . They’re prepared to cooperate. I don’t mean living in dormitories, pretending everyone’s your extended family, and going on work parties singing uplifting communal anthems – though there’s some of that about. But they’re willing to be more flexible and tolerant than the average person who chooses to live elsewhere … because that’s the whole point.
“There’s less concentration of wealth, and of power. Maybe that’s only a matter of time – but with so much power so heavily decentralized, it’s very hard to buy . And yes, we have private property, but the island, the reefs, and the waters are a commons. Syndicates which collect and process food trade their products for money, but they have no monopoly; there are plenty of people who feed themselves directly from the sea.”
I looked around the square, frustrated. “Okay. You’re not all slaughtering each other or rioting in the streets, because no one’s starving, and no one’s obscenely rich – yet. But do you honestly think it’s going to last? The next generation won’t be here by choice. What are you going to do – indoctrinate them all with tolerance, and hope for the best? It’s never worked before. Every other experiment like this has ended in violence, been conquered or absorbed … or given up and turned into a nation state.”
Munroe said, “Of course we’re trying to pass on our own values to our children – like everyone else on the planet. And with about as much success. But at least most children here are taught sociobiology from an early age.”
“ Sociobiology? ”
He grinned. “More use than Bakunin, believe me. People will never agree on the details of how society should be organized – and why should they? But unless you’re an Edenite who believes there’s some ‘natural’, Gaia-given Utopian condition to which we should all return, then adopting any form of civilization means choosing some kind of cultural response – other than passive acceptance – to the fact that we are animals with certain innate behavioral drives. And whether that response involves the most subtle compromise, or the most vehement opposition, it helps to know exactly what it is you’re trying to accommodate, or oppose.
“If people understand the biological forces acting on themselves – and everyone around them – then at least they have a chance of adopting intelligent strategies for getting what they want with a minimum of conflict … instead of blundering around with nothing but romantic myths and wishful thinking, courtesy of some dead political philosopher.”
I let that sink in. I’d come across no end of detailed prescriptions for ludicrous “scientific” Utopias, and blueprints for societies organized on allegedly “rational” grounds … but this was the first time I’d heard anyone advocate diversity in the same breath as acknowledging biological forces . Instead of exploiting sociobiology to try to justify some rigid political doctrine to be imposed from above – from Marxism to the nuclear family, from racial purity to gender separatism – “we must live this way, because human nature requires it” … Munroe was suggesting that people could use the self-knowledge of the species to make better decisions for themselves.
Informed anarchy . It was an appealing notion – but I still felt obliged to be skeptical. “Not everyone’s going to let their children learn sociobiology; there must be a few cultural and religious fundamentalists, even here, who’d find it too threatening. And … what about adult migrants? If someone’s twenty years old when they arrive on Stateless, they’ll still be around for another sixty years. Plenty of time to lose their idealism. Do you really think the whole thing can hold together while the first generation grow old and disillusioned?”
Munroe was bemused. “Does it matter what I think? If you really care one way or the other: explore the island, talk to people, make up your own mind.”
“You’re right.” I wasn’t here to explore the island, though, or to form an opinion on its political future. I glanced at my watch; it was after one. I stood up.
Munroe said, “There’s something going on right now which you might like to see. Or even … try. Are you in a hurry?”
I hesitated. “That depends.”
“I suppose you could call this the closest thing we have to a … ceremony for new residents.” I must have looked less than thrilled; Munroe laughed. “No anthems, no oaths, no gilded scrolls, I promise. And no, it’s not compulsory – it just seems to have become the fashion for new arrivals. Mere tourists are welcome, too, though.”
“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?”
“I can tell you that it’s called inland diving. But you really have to see it to know what that means.”
#
Munroe packed up his easel and accompanied me; I suspected he was secretly enjoying playing veteran radical tour guide. We stood in the doorway to catch the breeze, as the tram headed out toward the northern arm of the island. The track ahead was barely visible: two parallel trenches carved in the rock, the gray ribbon of superconductor running down the middle all but hidden beneath a layer of fine chalky dust.
By the time we’d traveled about fifteen kilometers, we were the only passengers left. I said, “Who pays for the maintenance of these things?”
“Fares cover some of it. The syndicates pay the rest.”
“So what happens if a syndicate decides not to pay? To freeload?”
“Then everyone knows.”
“Okay – but what if they genuinely can’t afford to contribute. What if they’re poor?”
“Most syndicate finances are public knowledge. By choice – but it’s viewed as odd if they’re kept secret. Anyone on Stateless can pick up their notepad and find out if the wealth of the island is being concentrated in one syndicate – or being siphoned off-shore, or whatever. And act on that knowledge as they see fit.”
We were clear of the built-up center now. There were buildings which looked like factories and warehouses scattered around the tram line, but more and more of the view was becoming bare reef-rock, flat but slightly uneven. The limestone appeared in all the hues I’d seen in the city, zebra-striping the landscape in distinctly ungeological patterns – governed by the diffusion of different subspecies of lithophilic bacteria. The ground here wouldn’t be amenable to rock farming, though; the inner core of the island was too dry and hard, too devascularized. Further out, the rock was much more porous, and suffused with calcium-rich water and the engineered organisms needed to replenish it. The tram lines didn’t run to the coast because the ground became too soft to bear the weight of the vehicles.
I invoked Witness and started recording; at this rate I’d have more private travelogue footage than material for the documentary, but I couldn’t resist.
I said, “Did you really come here for the light?”
Munroe shook his head. “Hardly. I just had to get away.”
“From what?”
“All the noise. All the cant. All the Professional Australians .”
“Ah.” I’d first heard that term when I was studying film history; it had been coined to describe the mainstream directors of the nineteen seventies and eighties. As one historian had put it: “They possessed no distinguishing features except for their nationality; they had nothing to say, and nothing to do except foist a claustrophobic vocabulary of tired nationalist myths and icons onto their audience, while loudly proclaiming themselves to be ‘defining the national character’, and to represent, in person, ‘a nation finding its voice.’” I’d thought this was probably a harsh judgment – until I’d seen some of the films. Most of them were stultifying horse operas – rural
colonial melodramas – or sentimentalized war stories. The nadir of the period, though, was probably an attempted comedy in which Albert Einstein was portrayed as an Australian apple farmer’s son, who “splits beer atoms” and falls in love with Marie Curie.
I said, “I always thought the visual arts had grown out of that long ago. Especially in your mode.”
Munroe scowled. “I’m not talking about art . I’m talking about the entire dominant culture.”
“Come on! There is no ‘dominant culture’ anymore. The filter is mightier than the broadcaster.” At least, that was the net-swoon line; I still wasn’t sure I’d bought it.
Munroe hadn’t. “Very Zen. Try exporting Australian medical biotech to Stateless, and you’ll soon find out exactly who’s in control.”
I had no answer to that.
He said, “Don’t you ever get tired of living in a society which talks about itself, relentlessly – and usually lies? Which defines everything worthwhile – tolerance, honesty, loyalty, fairness – as ‘uniquely Australian’? Which pretends to encourage diversity – but can’t ever stop babbling about its ‘national identity’? Don’t you ever get sick of the endless parade of buffoons who claim the authority to speak on your behalf: politicians, intellectuals, celebrities, commentators – defining and characterizing you in every detail … from your ‘distinctive Australian sense of humor’ right down to your fucking ‘collective subconscious iconography’ … who are all, simply, liars and thieves?”
I was taken aback for a moment – but on reflection, this was a recognizable description of the mainstream political and academic culture. Or if not the mainstream, at least the loudest. I shrugged. “Every country has some level of parochial bullshit like that going on, somewhere. The US is almost as bad. But I hardly notice it anymore – least of all at home. I suppose I’ve just learned to tune it out, most of the time.”
“I envy you, then. I never could.”
The tram slid on, displaced dust hissing softly. Munroe had a point: nationalists – political and cultural – who claimed to be the voice of their nation could disenfranchise those they “represented” just as effectively as sexists who claimed to be the voice of their sex. A handful of people pretending to speak for forty million – or five billion – would always wield disproportionate power, merely by virtue of making the claim.