shorthand, a too-simple understanding of sex and gender. The proximate cause of death in cases of Amazon Fever was sudden, pervasive tissue rejection-the result of the molecules making up the body acquiring a new virtual history, at the Planck scale and unevenly. It wasn't just men and boys that Amazon Fever killed. What it killed was anyone or anything whose immune system was unable to recognize cells that no longer came-that, all of a sudden, had never come -from an evolutionary line based on sexual reproduction.
The Fever killed male cats, dogs, insects, birds, fish, gingkoes, date palms, malarial gametocytes. Wherever it struck, it destroyed the entire basis of sexual difference. Most observers-who by this point were doing their observing by remote, from twenty light-minutes away-expected animal life on Hippolyta, humanity included, to go extinct in a generation.
But it didn't.
On the real-time maps the Tenacious uses there is a blank place, in the northeast of Aella Continent- Hippolyta's second largest, and the place of oldest settlement. This I can read: the swirl of weather and the slow- moving lights of tracked targets giving way to static survey data, a century old and more.
'How close to here '-on a projected globe, my fingers brush the center of the discontinuity-'can you set me down?'
Lieutenant Addison looks embarrassed.
'Not very, I'm afraid,' he says. 'Our equipment doesn't function well that deep into the causal anomaly.' He gestures at the globe. 'You can see we don't have any current data for that area. No probes, since simultaneity channels don't operate across the probability boundary; and even passive sensors aren't reliable.'
I nod, a little disappointed; but it's no more than I expected, or I wouldn't have brought the mules.
Addison scrutinizes the globe for a moment and selects a point on the southern coast, a few hundred kilometers from the center of the anomaly. In the Ezheler lands.
'What about here, near the coast road?' he asks. 'You can make your way by native transport from there.'
'That will certainly test my disguise.'
Addison looks uncomfortable. He turns back to the globe.
'Well, I-'
'No,' I interrupt. 'The coast road is fine.'
I will have to dance a little faster, that's all.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Hegira, before my ancestors came to Islam, they flirted briefly with Hegel. Perhaps in hoping, by resolving the contradictions of Hippolyta, to resolve the contradictions at the heart of the universe, I have fallen into that old heresy: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If so, so be it. As a natural philosopher, I am expected to face up to the universe's hard truths. As a Russian, I am expected to be a fatalist and a romantic. As a Moslem, I am expected to place my faith in the All-Merciful.
To deny the contradictions-as Musa understood, and as I would never be able to explain to Lieutenant Addison-is not an option that is open to me.
In the little cabin I have stolen from some junior officer, I strip off my borrowed Republic coverall. There is no mirror, but a projector shows me a reversed image, shadowy, as if my double stood in a darkened corridor. I meet my double's eyes.
'Goodbye, Sasha,' we tell each other.
Goodbye to Sasha Rusalev of Odessa, ballet cavalier and natural philosopher.
I am Yazmina Tanzikbayeva now, Ezheler muleteer and coca trader.
Hippolyta was already an old world when the Fever came, old with the kind of impossible age that is common out here, the kind that vigorous and serious young civilizations like the Republic worry about and that most of the rest of us ignore. When Hippolyta was terraformed and settled (if it was terraformed and settled-there are causality violations in Hippolyta's early history, too), a kaleidoscope of nations made it their home: cultures from every part of the Islamic 'umma and outside it as well, landing here and there, merging, fragmenting, trading, stealing, fighting little wars, making peace-millennia of history compressed into a few generations.
The Ezheler are nomadic herders who live in the southern mountains and high plains of Aella Continent. Chronically low fertility-a factor of distance from the center of Hippolyta's causal anomaly-keeps them nomadic, just as it keeps their richer neighbors, such as the Chinese speakers in Tieshan, from expanding into their territory. The Ezheler are Muslims, and speak a Turkic language influenced by Russian and Farsi.
I grew up in Odessa; Russian and Turkish were my native languages. A set of Consilium neural implants and a few months of study have me speaking the language of the Ezheler as well as any off-worlder ever will without living among them.
But the thing that really drew me to the Ezheler, when I was planning this, was their clothes.
I dress in cotton and leather and linen and silk. I have practiced this; it comes back to me now, like the steps of a dance. Cotton underwear, first, unbleached; red cotton trousers, much coarser; soft calf-high boots; white cotton blouse embroidered with red; and finally, the burka, the violet-dyed linen veil/robe that covers everything from hair to eyes to ankles.
Most of the Muslims of Aella follow the customs of hijab, to a degree: they wear the khimar in public, and some wear the abaya. But the Ezheler are among the few who wear the full burka, and only among the Ezheler is it never removed, even among family.
I straighten the burka, trying to find the position that lets me see the most through the lace-bordered veil. My muscles are alive with false memories, a combination of generic feminine movements and simulated Ezheler kinesthetics created from Consilium ethnologists' AV recordings.
There are technologies, readily available, with which I could have rebuilt myself completely, from the chromosomes upward-making part of my disguise impenetrable, no longer deception but the truth. (Undoubtedly there are women on Hippolyta today whose ancestors, in the first days of the Fever, did just that.) I could preserve not only my disguise, but my life.
But in doing so, I would prove nothing. If it were enough to test my hypotheses with equations and proofs, I could have done it from the safety of my rooms in Petersburg. I must test them with myself.
Besides, as my old ballet master used to say, for a swan there is no art in being a swan.
It helps that my audience will not expect me to be anything else.
Four hours later Lieutenant Addison is belting me into the capsule that will take me to Hippolyta. The capsule is made for inserting Marine commandos behind enemy lines, or something similarly exciting and dangerous. It seems to me that for landing on Hippolyta, the capsule is overkill-especially since it will have to be abandoned, and perhaps destroyed. But Addison is feeling guilty that he can't take me exactly where I want to go, and his people have seemed to enjoy themselves so much-programming the capsule's camouflage, plotting a course to minimize the chance that someone will see me entering the atmosphere-that I haven't the heart to object.
There is supposed to be room in the capsule for a half-dozen armored Marines and their equipment, but except for the medical equipment, my gear isn't built to Republic specifications. After it has all been packed in around me, Addison, to shake my hand, has to lean awkwardly over a plastic-wrapped bale that might hold rice or dried apricots or coca leaves.
He looks around the cramped capsule one more time, the trade goods, the medical pods, the two mules in their cocoons, the half-felt presence of the quantum inference engines. Then he looks down at me.
'Well,' he says, with a helpless shrug, 'good luck, then.'
Then he leans back, and the hatch closes, and the capsule swings out on its track, and at last they let me go.
The capsule is three days and fifty kilometers behind me, camouflaged and buried at the bottom of a dry creekbed, when I pick up the road to the coast. The coast road is older, harder than the narrow dirt track I have been following out of the dry hills: concrete laid down before the coming of the Fever and cracked now into broken slabs by a century of summers and winters. The grass of the shoulder is brown, tramped down into a footpath, and I guide the mules along that softer way, to spare their hooves and ankles. I can see the tracks of others before me, in the dirt.
A simultaneity channel links the medical pods, buried with the capsule, to telemetry implants laced through my body, and tells me that so far I am healthy, sore muscles and saddle galls aside. This is Republic technology, simple and reliable, and the pods will probably survive me, whatever happens. The inference engines, more delicate and abstract, I carry with me. They were made in Damascus, and their existence is largely mathematical; it is not likely they will be noticed by anyone who does not know to look for them. For now they are quiet, their transformation of
