Distress

freedom—you’ll get used to it, eventually.”

“This is very strange.” Our eyes remained locked together, and Akili seemed happy enough—but I still felt I should have been hunting for some way to make everything a thousand times more intense.

I said, “I know why this feels wrong. Physical pleasure without sex—” I hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Physical pleasure, without sex, is generally classified as—”

“What?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

Ve thumped me in the ribs. “Spit it out.”

'Infantile.'

Akili sighed. “Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A corrupter of language, a destroyer of lives.”

I complied—then I wrapped my arms around ver tightly, and we lay there with our legs entwined, heads on each other’s shoulders, gently stroking each other’s backs. The whole futile sexual charge I’d felt since the fishing boat was finally lifting; all the pleasure came from the warmth of vis body, the unfamiliar contours of vis flesh, the texture of vis skin, the sense of vis presence.

And I still found ver as beautiful as ever. I still cared about ver as much as ever.

Was this what I’d always been looking for? Asexual love. It was a disquieting notion—but I thought it through calmly. Maybe all my life I’d unconsciously swallowed the Edenite lie: that everything in the perfect, harmonious modern emotional relationship somehow flowed magically out of beneficent nature. Monogamy, equality, honesty, respect, tenderness, selflessness—it was all pure instinct, pure sexual biology, taking its unfettered course—despite the fact that all those criteria of perfection had changed radically from century to century, from culture to culture. The Edenites proclaimed that anyone who fell short of the glowing ideal was either wilfully fighting Mother Gaia, or had been corrupted by a traumatic upbringing, media manipulation, or the deeply unnatural power structures of modern society.

In fact, the ancient reproductive drives had been hemmed in by civilizing forces, inhibited by cultural strictures and pressed into service to create social cohesion in countless different ways—but they hadn’t actually changed in tens of thousands of years, and they contradicted current mores, or were silent, just as often as they supported them. Gina’s unfaithfulness had hardly been a crime against biology… and whatever I’d done to drive her away had been a failure of purely conscious effort—a lack of attentiveness that any Stone Age ancestor would have found second nature. Virtually everything which modern humans valued in relationships—over and above the act of sex itself, and some degree of protectiveness toward their partners and offspring—arose by a separate force of will. There was a massive shell of moral and social constructs wrapped around the tiny core of instinctive behavior—and the pearl bore little resemblance to the grit.

I had no wish to abandon either, but if what I’d failed at so badly, again and again, had been reconciling the two…

If the choice came down to biology or civilization… I knew, now, which I valued the most. And asex could still be close. Asex could still touch. After a while, we climbed into the sleeping bag to keep warm. I was still numb with despair at the tragedy of Stateless, Mosala’s senseless half-murder, the ruins of my career. But Akili kissed me on the forehead, and tried vis best to unknot my aching back and shoulders—and I did the same for ver, in the hope that it might make vis fear of the great information plague, which I still did not believe was coming, in some small way easier to bear.

* * *

I woke, confused, to the sound of Akili breathing beside me. The tent was bathed in gray and blue light, shadowless as noon; I looked up and saw the disk of the moon overhead, a white spotlight penetrating the weave of the roof, rainbow-fringed by diffraction.

I thought: Akili met me outside the airport. Ve could have infected me with the engineered cholera then, knowing that I’d carry it to Mosala.

And when the weapon misfired, ve’d produced the antidote—to gain my trust, in the hope that ve could use me a second time… but then the moderates had unwittingly kidnapped us both, and there’d been no need to strike at Mosala again.

It was sheer paranoia. I closed my eyes. Why would an extremist pretend to believe in the information plague? And if the belief was genuine, why kill Buzzo when the Aleph moment had been proved inevitable? Either way, with Mosala back in Cape Town—and her work proceeding, with or without her—what use could I be to the extremists?

I disentangled myself, and climbed out of the sleeping bag. Akili woke while I was dressing, and muttered sleepily, “The latrine tent glows red. You can’t miss it.”

“I won’t be long.”

I walked aimlessly, trying to clear my head. It was earlier than I’d imagined, barely after nine, but shockingly cold. Lights still showed from most of the tents, but the alleys between them were deserted.

Akili as an extremist assassin made no sense—why would ve have struggled to get us off the fishing boat? —but the doubt I’d felt on waking still cast a shadow over everything, as if my mistrust itself was as much of a disaster as any possibility that I could be right. How could we have been through so much together—only for me to wake beside ver, wondering if it had all been a lie?

I reached the southern edge of the camp. These people must have been the last wave of refugees to head north, because there was nothing in sight but bare reef-rock, stretching to the horizon.

I hesitated, and almost turned back. But pacing the alleys made me feel like a spy—and I wasn’t ready to return to Akili’s tent, to the warmth of vis body, to the hope ve seemed to offer. Half an hour before, I’d seriously considered migrating to total asex—tearing out my genitals and several vital pieces of gray matter—as the panacea for all my woes. I needed to take a long walk, alone.

I headed out into the moonlit desert.

Whorls of trace minerals glittered everywhere; now that I’d seen a few of these hieroglyphs deciphered, the ground appeared transformed, dense with meaning—although for all I knew, most of the patterns could still have been nothing but random decoration.

The abandoned city was either in darkness, or hidden from view by the slope of the ground; I could see no hint of light on the southern horizon. I pictured a fresh swarm of the invisible insects scurrying out from their nest at the center… but I knew I’d be no safer back in the camp— and the things only killed for the spectacle of it, for the panic they instilled. Alone, I was less of a target than ever.

I thought I felt the ground shudder—a tremor so slight that I doubted it immediately. Was there still shelling going on? I’d imagined everyone leaving the city to the mercenaries—but maybe a few dissenters had ignored the evacuation plan… or maybe the militia had remained, in hiding, and the real confrontation had finally begun. That was a dismal prospect; they didn’t stand a chance.

It happened again. I couldn’t judge the direction of the blast—I’d heard no sound at all, just felt the vibration. I turned a full circle, scanning the horizon for smoke. Maybe they were shelling the camps, now. The white plumes over the city in the morning had been visible for kilometers—but shells meant for tents on bare rock would carry different charges, with different effects.

I kept walking south, hoping that the city would come into view along with some sign that the pyrotechnic action was still confined there. And I tried to imagine myself living through the war, emerging unscathed, but cozily familiar with all the myriad technologies of death… offering—to the nets who didn’t care what I’d faked—footage complete with my own now—expert commentary on “the characteristic sound of a Chinese-made Vigilance missile meeting its target,” or “the unmistakable visual signature of a Peacetech forty-millimeter shell exploding over open ground.”

I felt a wave of resignation sweep over me. I’d swallowed too many dreams in the last three days: technoliberation, an end to the gene patent laws… personal happiness, asexual bliss. It was time to wake up. The ordinary madness of the world had finally reached Stateless—so why not stand back, regain some perspective, and try to scrape some kind of a living out of it? The invasion was no greater tragedy than ten thousand other bloody conquests before it—and it had always been inevitable. War had come, one way or another, to every known human culture.

I whispered aloud, without much conviction, “Screw every known human culture.”