Distress

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.”

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 naive 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 wrily, “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 temptation 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 technoliberateurs, 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.