Distress

by Greg Egan

  “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.”

  Chapter 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 naïve 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 wryly, “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 tem
ptation 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 technolibérateurs , 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 marginalising 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 selfconscious – 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 beginnin
g 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.”