Distress

by Greg Egan

  A stronger-than-average surge mixed an updraft of clear water into the milky layer above, parting the curtain for an instant. Beam and camera transfixed the event, exposing lumpy rock sparsely populated with barnacles and pale, frond-mouthed anemones. In the next frame, the image was blurred – not yet obscured by the haze of white particles, but crinkled, distorted by refraction. At first, we’d seen the rock through pure water; now we saw it through water and air.

  There was a thin layer of air constantly trapped against the underside, maintained by the steady stream of oxygen escaping from the foamed rock.

  This air gave the water a surface which could carry waves. Every wave which crashed on the distant reefs would send a twin diving beneath the island.

  No wonder the water was cloudy. The underside of Stateless was being constantly scraped by a vast, wet, jagged file. Waves eroded the shoreline – but at least that stopped at the high-tide mark. This assault was going on beneath dry land, all the way to the rim of the guyot.

  I turned again to the woman beside me, one of Rajendra’s friends. “The limestone detritus – tiny particles like that must lose all their oxygen, all their buoyancy. Why don’t they just … fall?”

  “They do. The white comes from engineered diatoms. They scavenge calcium from the water, mineralize it – then migrate up and paste themselves into the rock when the waves dash them against it. Coral polyps can’t grow in the darkness, so the diatoms are the only repair mechanism.” She smiled, hyperlucid; she’d been there to see for herself. “That’s what holds the island up: just a fine mist of calcium, fading away into the depths, and a few trillion microscopic creatures whose genes tell them what to do with it.”

  The winch started rewinding. No one was near it; there must have been a control button for the diver, which I’d missed – or maybe it was preprogrammed, the whole dive calculated in advance to limit the risk of decompression sickness. Rajendra put his hand in front of his face and waved to us. People laughed and joked as he began his ascent; it was nothing like the mood when I’d arrived.

  I asked the woman, “Do you have a notepad?”

  “In the bus.”

  “Do you want the communications software? You could keep the camera…”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Good idea. Thanks!” She went to fetch the notepad.

  The camera had only cost me ten dollars, but the copy fee for the software turned out to be two hundred; I could hardly retract the offer, though. When she returned, I approved the transaction and the machines conversed in infrared. She’d have to pay for any more duplicates – but the program could be moved and erased for free, passed on to other groups of divers.

  When Rajendra emerged he started whooping with joy. As soon as he was free of the safety line, he sprinted away across the plain, still carrying the scuba tanks, before doubling back and collapsing in a breathless heap. I didn’t know if he was hamming it up or not – he hadn’t seemed the type – but as he took off the diving gear, he was grinning like a madman in love, exhilarated, trembling.

  Adrenaline, yes – but he’d been diving for more than the thrill of it. He was back on solid ground … but it would never be the same, now that he’d seen exactly what lay beneath it: now that he’d swum right through the island’s tenuous foundations.

  This was what the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island itself, but the firsthand knowledge that they stood on rock which the founders had crystallized out of the ocean – and which was, forever, dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair. Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and cooperation, had built Stateless – and even the engineered life which maintained it couldn’t be treated as God-given, infallible; the balance could be disturbed in a thousand ways: mutants could arise, competitors could move in, phages could wipe out bacteria, climate change could shift vital equilibria. All the elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be understood.

  In the long run, discord could literally sink the place. If it was no guarantee of harmony that nobody on Stateless wanted their society to disintegrate … maybe it helped focus the attention to realize that the land beneath their feet might do the same.

  And if it was naïve to think of this understanding as any kind of panacea, it had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived mythology of nationhood .

  It was true.

  I copied everything from the camera’s memory, to give me the scene in high resolution. When Rajendra had calmed down slightly, I asked for his permission to use the footage for broadcast; he agreed. I had no definite plans – but at the very least I could always smuggle it into the interactive version of Violet Mosala .

  Munroe came with me, still shouldering his folded easel and rolled-up canvas, as I headed back for the terminus.

  I said sheepishly, “I might try it for myself once the conference is over. Right now, it looks too … intense. I just don’t want to be distracted. I have a job to do.”

  He faked bewilderment. “It’s entirely your decision. You don’t have to justify anything to anyone, here.”

  “Yeah, sure. And I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

  At the terminus, I hit the call button; the box predicted a ten-minute wait.

  Munroe fell silent for a while. Then he said, “I suppose you have all the inside information about everyone attending the conference?”

  I laughed. “Not exactly. But I’m sure I’m not missing out on much. Soap operas starring physicists are just as dull as any other kind; I really don’t care who’s screwing whom, or who’s stealing whose brilliant ideas.”

  He frowned amiably. “Well, neither do I – but I wouldn’t mind knowing if the rumor about Violet Mosala has any substance.”

  I hesitated. “Which rumor did you have in mind? There are so many.” It sounded pitiful even as I said it; I might as well have come right out and admitted that I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “There’s only one serious question, isn’t there?”

  I shrugged. Munroe looked irritated – as if he believed I was being disingenuous, and not just trying to conceal my ignorance.

  I said candidly, “Violet Mosala and I aren’t exactly swapping intimate secrets. The way things are going, if I make it through to the end of the conference with decent coverage of all her public appearances, I’ll count myself lucky. Even if I have to spend the next six months chasing her between appointments in Cape Town, trying to flesh things out.”

  Munroe nodded with grim satisfaction, like a cynic whose opinions had just been confirmed. “Cape Town? Right. Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  He said, “I never believed it; I just wanted to hear it put to rest by someone in a position to be sure. Violet Mosala – Nobel-prize-winning physicist, inspiration to millions, twenty-first-century Einstein, architect of the TOE most likely to succeed … ‘abandons’ her home country – just when the peace in Natal is starting to look more solid than ever – not for Caltech, not for Bombay, not for CERN, not for Osaka … but to join the rabble on Stateless?

  “Not in a million years.”

  Chapter 14

  Back at the hotel, climbing the stairs to my room, I asked Sisyphus : “Can you name a group of political activists – with the initials AC – who might have taken an interest in Violet Mosala emigrating to Stateless?”

  “No.”

  “Come on! A is for anarchy…?”

  “There are two thousand and seventy-three organizations with ‘anarchy’ or a related word in their title, but they all contain more than two words.”

  “Okay.” Maybe AC itself was shorthand, like US for USA. But then, if Munroe was to be believed, no serious anarchist would ever use the A-word.

  I tried a different angle. “What about A for African, C for culture … with any number of other letters?”

  “There are two hundred and seven matches.”

  I scrolled through the list; AC didn’t seem like a plausi
ble abbreviation for any of them. One name was familiar, though; I replayed a section of the audio log from the morning’s press conference:

  “William Savimbi, Proteus Information. You speak approvingly of a convergence of ideas which has no respect for ancestral cultures – as if your own heritage were of no importance to you at all. Is it true that you received death threats from the Pan-African Cultural Defense Front, after you publicly stated that you didn’t consider yourself to be an African woman?”

  Mosala had put the quote in context – but she hadn’t answered the question. If a comment like that had been enough to result in death threats, what might rumors of “defection” – baseless or not – bring down on her?

  I had no idea; I knew even less about South African cultural politics than I knew about ATMs. Mosala would hardly be the first prominent scientist to leave the country, but she would be one of the most celebrated – and the first to emigrate to Stateless. Chasing money and prestige at a world-class institution was one thing – but it would be hard to read a move to Stateless (which could offer neither) as anything but a deliberate renunciation of her nationality.

  I paused on the landing, and stared at my useless electronic teat. “AC? Mainstream AC?” Sisyphus was silent. Whoever they were, Sarah Knight had managed to find them. I was beginning to feel an ache in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about what I’d done to her. It was clear that she’d prepared for this job meticulously, researching every issue surrounding Mosala – and coming from politics, where nothing on the nets was true, she’d probably gone out and talked to everyone in the flesh. Someone must have told her about the rumors, and put her on the trail which led to Kuwale – all off the record, of course. I’d stolen the project, walked in cold – and now I couldn’t even tell whether I was making a documentary about an emigrant anarcho-physicist in fear of her life … or whether I was jumping at shadows, and the only threat anyone on Stateless faced was being goaded into giving Janet Walsh some long overdue career advice.

  I had Hermes call every hotel on the island, and inquire about a guest called Akili Kuwale.

  No luck.

  In my room, I turned up the windows’ sound insulation, and tried to psych myself into doing some work. The next morning I was scheduled to film a lecture by Helen Wu, chief advocate of the view that Mosala’s methodology verged on circular logic. Before letting Munroe talk me into filming the inland divers, I’d been planning to spend the whole afternoon reading Wu’s previous papers; I had a lot of catching up to do.

  First, though…

  I scanned the relevant databases (eschewing help from Sisyphus , and taking three times as long). The Pan-African Cultural Defense Front turned out to be a loose affiliation of fifty-seven radical traditionalist groups from twenty-three nations, with a council of representatives which met each year to decide strategies and issue proclamations. PACDF itself was twenty years old; it had appeared in the wake of a resurgence of the traditionalist debate in the early thirties, when a number of academics and activists, mostly in central Africa, had begun to speak of the need to “reestablish continuity” with the pre-colonial past. Political and cultural movements of the previous century – from Senghor’s négritude to Mobutu’s “authenticity” to Black Consciousness in all its forms – were dismissed as corrupt, assimilationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism – according to the most vocal of the new traditionalists – was to excise it from history completely: to aim to behave, in its aftermath, as if it had never happened.

  PACDF was the most extreme manifestation of this philosophy, taking an uncompromising – and far from populist – line. They decried Islam as an invader religion, as much as Christianity or Syncretism. They opposed vaccination, bioengineered crops, electronic communications. And if there was more to the group than a catalog of the foreign (or local, but insufficiently ancient) influences they explicitly renounced, they might have found it hard to differentiate themselves without such a hit-list. Many of the policies they advocated – wider official use of local languages, greater support for traditional cultural forms – were already high on the agenda of most governments, or were being lobbied for from other quarters. PACDF’s raison d’être seemed to consist of being greater purists than anyone else. When the most effective anti-malarial vaccine on the planet was manufactured in Nairobi – based on research carried out in that well-known imperialist superpower, Colombia – condemning its use as “a criminal betrayal of traditional healing practices” sounded like sheer fundamentalist perversity to me.

  If Violet Mosala had chosen to emigrate to Stateless, I would have thought they’d be glad to be rid of her. She might have been a hero on half the continent, but to PACDF she could never have been anything but a traitor. And I could find no report of a death threat – so maybe Savimbi’s claim had been pure hype; the reality might have involved nothing more than an anonymous call to his news desk.

  I plowed on, regardless. Maybe Kuwale’s mysterious faction had revealed themselves by taking part in the other side of the debate? There was certainly no shortage of vocal opposition to PACDF – from more moderate traditionalists, from numerous professional bodies, from pluralist organizations, and from self-described technolibérateurs .

  Mismatched initials aside, I couldn’t quite see a member of the African Union for the Advancement of Science collaring journalists in airports and asking them to play unofficial bodyguard to a world-renowned physicist. And while the African Pluralists League organized worldwide student exchange programs, theater and dance tours, physical and net-based art exhibitions, and lobbied aggressively against cultural isolationism and discriminatory treatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities … I doubted they had time on their hands to fret about Violet Mosala.

  The late Muteba Kazadi had coined the term technolibération , to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the “liberation” of the technology itself from restrictive hands. Muteba had been a communications engineer, poet, science writer – and Minister for Development in Zaire in the late thirties. I viewed some of his speeches, impassioned pleas for “the use of knowledge in the service of freedom”; he’d called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public ownership of communications resources, and a universal right of access to scientific information. As well as championing the obvious pragmatism of “liberation biology” (though Zaire had never gone renegade and used unlicensed crops), he’d spoken of the long-term need for African nations to participate in pure research in every area of basic science – an extraordinary stand at a time when such activities were deeply unpopular in the wealthiest countries on the planet, and unthinkable in terms of his own government’s immediate priorities.

  Muteba had had his eccentricities – his three biographers concurred – with a leaning toward Nietzschean metaphysics, fringe cosmology, and dramatic conspiracy theories – including the old one that “El Nido de Ladrones”, the bioengineered haven built by drug runners on the Peruvian-Colombian border, had been H-bombed in 2035 not because the modified forest was out of control and threatening to overrun the whole Amazon basin, but because some kind of “dangerously liberating” neuroactive virus had been invented there. The act had been an obscenity, thousands of people had died – and the public outrage it attracted had quite possibly helped to save Stateless from a similar fate – but I thought the more prosaic explanation was far more likely to be true.

  Learned commentators from every part of the continent stated that Muteba’s legacy lived on, and that proud technolibérateurs were active across the face of Africa, and beyond. I found it difficult to pin down his direct intellectual descendants, though; hundreds of academic and political groups, and tens of thousands of individuals, cited Muteba as a source of inspiration – and many people who’d spoken out against PACDF in net debates had explicitly labeled themselves technolibérateurs – but each seemed to have adapted the philosophy to a slightly
different agenda. I had no doubt that every one of them would have been horrified at the thought of Violet Mosala coming to harm – but I was no wiser as to who might have taken it upon themselves to watch over her.

  #

  Around seven, I headed downstairs. Sarah Knight still hadn’t returned my call – and I could hardly blame her for snubbing me. I thought again about offering to hand back the project, but I told myself that I’d left it too late, and she’d probably committed herself to another assignment. The truth was, the more the complications surrounding Mosala mocked the fantasy I’d held of retreating into the “inconsequential” abstractions of TOEs, the harder it became to imagine walking away. If this was the reality behind the mirage, I had an obligation to face it.

  I was heading toward the main restaurant when I spotted Indrani Lee coming down one of the corridors which led into the lobby. She was with a small group, but they were splitting up – with volleys of rejoinders and afterthoughts, as if they’d just emerged from a long, hectic meeting and couldn’t bear each other’s company any longer, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to end the discussion, either. I approached; she saw me and raised a hand in greeting.

  I said, “I missed you on the connecting flight. How are you settling in?”

  “Fine, fine!” She seemed happy and excited; the conference was obviously living up to her expectations. “But you don’t look at all well.”

  I laughed. “As a student, did you ever find yourself sitting for an exam where all the questions on the paper, and all the questions you’d stayed up until dawn preparing to answer … had so little in common that they might as well have come from two completely different subjects?”