PART THREE
20
The easiest way to travel beyond the tram lines turned out to be hitching a ride on one of the balloon-tired trucks used to carry produce inland. The trucks were automated, and followed predetermined routes; people seemed to treat them as public transport, although the sea farmers effectively controlled the schedule by the delays they imposed, loading and unloading them. The bed of each truck was divided crosswise by a dozen low barriers, forming spaces into which crates were slotted, and doubling as benches for the passengers.
There was no sign of Kuwale; ve seemed to have found another route, or left for the rendezvous point much earlier. I sat with about twenty other people on the ride northeast from the terminus, resisting the urge to ask the woman beside me what would happen if one of the farmers insisted on loading so many crates that there was no room for anyone to return—or what discouraged passengers from looting the food. The harmony of Stateless still seemed precarious to me, but I was growing increasingly reluctant to give voice to questions which amounted to asking: Why don’t you people all run amok, and make your own lives as miserable as possible?
I didn’t believe for a moment that the rest of the planet could ever function like this—or that anyone on Stateless would particularly want it to—but I was beginning to understand Monroe’s cautious optimism. If I lived here, myself, would I try to tear the place down? No. Would I bring about riots and massacres inadvertently, in pursuit of some short-term gain? Hopefully not. So, what ludicrous vanity allowed me to imagine that I was so much more reasonable or intelligent than the average resident of the island? If I could recognize the precariousness of their society, so could they—and act accordingly. It was an active balance, flying by wire, survival through self- awareness.
A tarpaulin sheltered the bed of the truck, but the sides were open. As we drew nearer to the coast, the terrain began to change: incursions of partly compacted coral appeared, moist and granular, glistening in the sun like rivers choked with powdery gray-and-silver snow. Entropy should have favored the solid reef-rock banks dissolving into this sludge and washing away—but it favored more strongly the flow of energy from the sun into the lithophilic bacteria infesting the coral debris, which labored to stitch the loose aggregate of limestone into the denser polymer-mineral matrix around it. Cool, efficient biological pathways, catalyzed by perfectly shaped enzymes like molecule-sized injection molds, had always mocked the high-temperature-and-pressure industrial chemistry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, they mocked geology itself. The conveyor belt of subduction, feeding ocean sediments deep into the earth to be crushed and metamorphized over eons, was as obsolete on Stateless as the Bessemer process for steel, the Haber process for ammonia.
The truck moved between two broad streams of crushed coral. In the distance, other streams widened and merged, the fingers of reef-rock between them narrowing then vanishing, until the land around us was more than half sludge. The part-digested coral grew coarser, the surface of the channels less even; glistening pools of water began to appear. I noticed occasional streaks of color surviving within the bleached limestone—not the muted trace minerals of the city’s masonry, but vivid, startling reds and oranges, greens and blues. The truck already stank of the ocean, but soon the breeze—which had been carrying the scent away—began to compound it.
Within minutes, the landscape was transformed. Vast banks of living coral, inundated with ocean water, surrounded narrow, winding causeways. The reefs were dazzling, polychromatic; the algal symbionts living within the various species of coral-building polyps employed a rainbow of distinct photosynthetic pigments—and even from a distance I could make out wild variations of morphology between the mineralized skeletons of each colony: pebbled aggregates, riots of thick branched tubing, delicate fernlike structures—no doubt a pragmatic exercise in diversity for the sake of ecological robustness, as well as a deliberately opulent display of bioengineering virtuosity.
The truck stopped, and everyone else clambered off—except for the two people I’d seen shifting crates onto a freight tram back at the terminus.
I hesitated, then followed the crowd; I had further to go, but I didn’t want to attract attention.
The truck moved on. Most of the other passengers were carrying masks, snorkels, flippers; I wasn’t sure if they were tourists or locals, but they all headed straight for the reefs. I wandered along with them, and stood for a while, watching, as they stepped gingerly out onto the half-protruding coral, heading for deeper water. Then I turned and strolled north along the shoreline, away from the divers.
I caught my first glimpse of the open ocean, still hundreds of meters ahead. There were a dozen small boats moored in the harbor—one of the six armpits of the giant starfish. The view from the air came back to me, fragile and exotic.
I caught up with the truck at the harbor; the two workers loading it glanced at me curiously, but didn’t ask what I was doing here. My idleness made me feel like a trespasser; everyone else in sight was shifting crates or sorting seafood. There was machinery, but most of it was very low-tech: electric forklifts, but no giant cranes, no vast conveyor belts feeding processing plants; the reef-rock was probably too soft to support anything heavy. They could have built a floating platform out on the harbor to take the weight of a crane, but apparently no one felt it was worth the investment. Or maybe the farmers simply preferred it this way.
There was still no sign of Kuwale. I moved away from the loading bay and wandered closer to the water’s edge. Biochemical signals diffusing out from the rock kept the harbor free of coral, and plankton transported sediment to the reefs where it was needed; the water here looked bottomless, deep blue-green. Amidst the froth of the gently breaking swell, I thought I could discern an unnatural effervescence; bubbles were rising up everywhere. The outgassing from the pressurized rock, which I’d seen—second hand—on the underside of Stateless, was escaping here to the surface.
Out on the harbor, farmers were winching aboard what might have been a fishing net bursting with produce. Gelatinous tendrils embracing the bounty glistened in the sun. One worker stretched up and touched the top of the “net” with something on the end of a long pole, and the contents abruptly spilled onto the deck, leaving the slack tendrils quivering; within seconds, when the last scraps had fallen, the translucent creature was almost invisible. I had to strain my eyes to follow it, as they lowered it back into the ocean.
Kuwale said, “Do you know what non-renegades pay Ocean Logic for a harvester like that? All its genes were taken straight from existing species—all the company ever did was patent them, and rearrange them.”
I turned. “Spare me the propaganda. I'm on your side—if you’ll give me some straight answers.”
Kuwale looked troubled, but said nothing. I spread my arms in a gesture of frustration. “What do I have to do to convince you to trust me as much as you trusted Sarah Knight? Do I have to die for the cause first?”
“I'm sorry you were infected. The wild type’s bad enough; I know, I’ve had it.” Ve was wearing the same black T-shirt I’d seen ver in at the airport, flickering with random points of brightness. It suddenly struck me again just how young ve was: little more than half my age—and in at the deep end.
I said, begrudgingly, “That wasn’t your fault. And I'm grateful for what you did.” Even if saving my life wasn’t the point.
Kuwale looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if I’d just showered ver with undeserved praise. I hesitated. “It wasn’t your fault, was it?”
“Not directly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? The weapon was yours?”
“No!” Ve looked away, and said bitterly, “But I still have to take some responsibility for everything they do.”
“
Kuwale replied impatiently, “Of course they’re
A man was walking toward us with a crate on his shoulder. As I glanced in his direction, red lines flashed up across my vision. He kept his face half-turned away from us, and a wide-brimmed hat concealed half of the rest,
