'And for you?' I ask.
She shrugs. 'Yueyin, she chose to come here. As for me, I am happy here-but it is where I was born. If I had been born elsewhere, probably I would be happy there.'
She is quiet for a moment, as if debating whether to say more.
'I think you do not know what you are getting into,' she says.
'What do you mean?'
'You are right, the Fever is just a side effect of some kind of causality violation. Whatever its origin, the center is up there, in Erethea.'
'That's why I'm going,' I tell her.
She sighs and looks down, tracing invisible pictures with a finger on the tabletop.
'I have been up there three times,' she says. 'Not all the way.' She looks up. 'How can I explain it? You know the tombs you saw on the way into town, at the south end of the island, the Men's Cemetery?'
I nod.
'You will find Men's Cemeteries, tombs like that, all over the south. But not in Erethea. In Myrine-that is the first big city, up the river-in Myrine all they have is a cenotaph. Nobody knows what happened to the bodies. In Themiscyra they do not even have that; when they talk about men it's like they're talking about a metaphor, or a myth.'
I smile. 'Maybe that's healthier.'
A laugh escapes Liwen's lips, and she shakes her head.
'Maybe it is,' she says. 'Tell me-why are we worth dying for?'
'I don't expect to die.'
'But you know it's a possibility.'
I look away. This is the question everyone danced around-my teachers, my apprentices, the Physics Guild, the Irrationality Office, the Republic's military attachй in London. I distracted them with good manners and mathematics, and let them fill in their own answers, from altruism to neurosis.
'In the early days of Western psychology,' Liwen says, 'for someone to be attracted to one of her own sex was considered a symptom of an inability, on her part, to distinguish between the Self and the Other. Like an infant who does not yet understand the difference between her toys and her own limbs-and puts both of them in her mouth. If that were true… then altruism might be very close to narcissism.'
I look back at her.
'Yueyin was right not to believe me,' I tell her. 'I'm not here because I want to help you. I'm here because I'm the kind of person who can't look at a knot without wanting to untie it.'
'There is a verse from the Tao Te Ching,' Liwen says. 'It is ambiguous, of course, especially in Arabic, but one reading would be: 'The perfect knot leaves no end to be untied.''
'I wouldn't be here if I thought this knot was perfect,' I say. 'If what's happened on Hippolyta can happen once, it's probably happening all the time-it's just that most causal anomalies don't have measurable effects. And when one does, the Phenomenological Service-or someone like them-covers it up, locks it away. If I want to untie that knot-Hippolyta might be my only chance.'
'And for this you are willing to die.'
'If it comes down to it, yes.' I shrug. 'We live in an acausal universe. Isn't that enough justification for anything?'
'Another verse might read: 'Who distinguishes herself from the world may be given the world,'' Liwen says. ''Who regards herself as the world may accept the world.''
She finishes her tea, and stands up.
'You are crazy,' she says, looking down at me. 'I respect that in a scientist. Good night.'
'Thank you,' I say. 'Good night.'
The ferry, the Jing Shi, has a smell that is somehow both sweet and cold, like metal and poison. The exhaust from the two big engines smells like burning plastic.
I hoped to talk more with Mei Yueyin about Hippolyta's geography and demographics, to get more of a sense of the causal anomaly's macroscopic effects, but when I awoke this morning, she was already gone. Probably just as well.
I place my brown hands on the sweating white-painted rail, feeling the engines' vibration, and look out across Haimingdao Channel at the complex of lights and smokestacks and tanks and buildings, the tall gantries that will lift up Liwen's rockets.
Lift them, and launch them to certain death at the hands of Tenacious and its particle-beam satellites. I wonder what Lieutenant Addison and his sober-minded brother officers would see in all this.
They'd admire the mad bravery of it, I expect. The madness whose mirror Liwen saw in me. And then they'd shoot to kill.
North. The Jing Shi advances stubbornly against the stiff current, like a peasant grandmother bent under a bundle of sticks. I'm sick, according to the medical monitors-my temperature's a degree above normal, and my white blood cell count is elevated.
It might be the onset of the Fever. It might just be something I picked up at Yueyin's dinner table.
The inference engines are agitated, murmuring to themselves, but they seem to think my little bubble of reality, pushing back Hippolyta's intrusion, is intact. I speak to the ship's nurse and get a bottle of antipyretics, fat white pills with a sour taste that stays in the mouth a long time after they're swallowed.
At Myrine the rivers come together, the Ortigia from the west emptying into the Otrera. The Jing Shi will continue northeast up the Otrera to Themiscyra, but it will stop overnight here, taking on fuel, exchanging one cargo for another.
I spend the day ashore, taking a rattling electric tram from the port into the oldest part of the city.
In a street cafй I watch the sparrows that hop from ground to table to chair, alert for crumbs. All are female, of course, their heads small, their plumage uniformly brown.
Myrine is cleaner than Haiming, and quieter, though still bustling with prosperity. The streets in this neighborhood, narrow, built for pedestrians, with their quaintly modern pre-Fever buildings, are cheerful and filled with color, crowded with small bright shops and their customers, young women and girls with brown or blonde hair, chattering in a Turkish-German creole that I can almost understand.
The shaded square the cafй looks out onto is an island in the middle of all that, an island of muted colors and quiet. In the center of the square is the Men's Cenotaph. I am not sure what I expected-some phallic obelisk or pillar, perhaps, topped with a muscular and well-endowed statue in classic European style?
What there is, instead, is a circular arrangement of dark slabs and broken walls, very stark, radiating grief. From a distance the stones look as though they might be inscribed with names. But close up, the letters dissolve into abstraction.
I return to the Jing Shi at evening, boarding in the bustle of new passengers coming aboard. Most of them are Tieshanese, immigrants or expatriates; a few are Erithean, those who don't have the money for the trains or the fast hydrofoils, and who don't mind a little adventure.
One of these is a young woman who shares my cabin, an economics student from Antiope-one of the cities beyond Themiscyra, in east Erethea-going home for the holidays. She is thin and muscular and dark. At night she takes off her khimar, revealing hair that is black and tightly curled and very short, like Musa's. In certain lights she looks like a boy.
The bunks have curtains, but I do not close mine-the two small portholes let in little enough fresh air as it is. Neither does my student. She doesn't know what to make of me, hidden behind my burka, with my Ezheler accent and my rough-spun saddlebag that smells of mules and spices. To her I am exotic and dangerous and, I think, a little exciting.
As a European I am the product of a culture-a history, oral and written-which constructs my particular sexuality in a certain way. In the early days of that history the love of women was by many considered an inferior but still marginally acceptable substitute for the love of men.
Perhaps for some it still is, but not for me. And, even if it were-probably there are a few women on Hippolyta, here and there, who lie awake at night dreaming of the men they have never seen. But to expect this boyish student to be one of them-how stupid would I need to be?
At night, by the dim glow of the emergency lights, I look across the cabin at the back of her sleeping head, and
