Distress

out into the wind. Ve said, 'If I show you the people you need to recognize, will you let me know if you see them? I'll give you a contact number, and an encryption algorithm, and all you have to do is—'

I said, 'Slow down. Who are these people?'

'They're a danger to Violet Mosala.'

'You mean, you suspect they're a danger.'

'I know it.'

'Okay. So who are they?'

'What difference would it make if I told you their names? It wouldn't mean anything to you.'

'No, but you can tell me who they're working for. Which government, which biotech company…?'

Vis face hardened. 'I told Sarah Knight too much. I'm not repeating that mistake.'

'Too much for what? Did she betray you? To… SeeNet?' 'No!' Kuwale scowled; I was missing the point. 'Sarah told me what happened with SeeNet. You pulled a few strings… and all the work she'd done counted for nothing. She was angry, but she wasn't surprised. She said that's what the networks were like. And she bore you no real grudge; she said she was ready to pass on everything she knew, if you agreed to refund her costs out of your research budget, and maintain confidentiality.'

I said, 'What are you talking about?'

'I gave her the okay to tell you everything she knew about AC. Why do you think I made such a fool of myself, at the airport? If I'd known you were still in the dark, do you think I would have approached you like that?'

'No.' That much, at least, made sense. 'But why would she tell you she was going to brief me, and then change her mind? I haven't heard a word from her. She doesn't answer my calls—'

Kuwale fixed vis eyes on me, sad and ashamed, but suddenly, painfully, honest.

'And she doesn't answer mine.'

We left the tram, at a stop on the outskirts of a small industrial complex, then walked southeast. If we were under professional surveillance, all of this incessant motion would change nothing—but if Kuwale believed it made it safe for us to talk more freely, I was willing to tag along.

I didn't accept for a moment that anything had happened to Sarah; she had every reason to wish both of us out of her life—a wish which a few words to her communications software could have granted. She might have had a brief, magnanimous fantasy about putting me in the picture, in spite of what I'd done to her, out of sheer journalistic solidarity—all of us pulling together for the sake of Mosala's history-making-story-which-must-be-told, ra ra—but then felt differently in the morning, once the chemical solace had worn off.

What's more, I was beginning to have second thoughts about the threat to Mosala herself.

I turned to Kuwale. 'If biotech interests ever did assassinate Violet Mosala, she'd be an instant martyr for technoliberation. And as a corpse, she'd be just as good a mascot, just as good an excuse for the South African government to lead an anti-boycott revolt in the UN.'

'Maybe,' ve conceded. 'If the headlines told the right story.'

'How could the story fail to get out? Mosala's backers would hardly stay silent.'

Kuwale smiled grimly. 'Do you know who owns most of the media?'

'Yes, I do, so don't give me that paranoid bullshit. A hundred different groups, a thousand different people…'

'A hundred different groups—most of which also own large biotech concerns. A thousand different people —most of them on the boards of at least one major player, from AgroGenesis to VivoTech.'

'That's true, but there are other interests, with other agendas. It's not as simple as you make it sound.'

We were alone now, on a large stretch of flat but unpaved reef-rock, prepared but not yet built upon; some small-scale construction machinery was clustered in the distance, but it appeared to be idle. Munroe had told me that no one could own land on Stateless—any more than they could own air—but equally, there was nothing to stop people fencing off and monopolizing vast tracts of it. That they chose not to made me distinctly uneasy; it seemed like an unnatural exercise of restraint—a delicately balanced consensus poised ready to collapse into a spate of land grabs, the creation of de facto titles, and an outraged—probably violent—backlash from those who hadn't got in first.

And yet… Why come all the way out here, just to play Lord of the Flies? No society chooses to destroy itself. And if an ignorant tourist was capable of imagining how disastrous a land rush would be, the residents of Stateless must have thought it through themselves, in a thousand times more detail.

I spread my arms to encompass the whole renegade island. 'If you really think the biotech companies can get away with murder, tell me why they haven't turned Stateless into a fireball?'

'Bombing El Nido made that solution unrepeatable. You need a government to do it for you—and no government, now, would risk the backlash.'

'Sabotaged it, then? If EnGeneUity can't come up with something to dissolve their own creation back into the sea, then the Beach Boys were lying.'

'The Beach Boys?'

''Californian biotechnologists are the best in the world.' Wasn't that one of theirs?'

Kuwale said, 'EnGeneUity are selling versions of Stateless all over the Pacific. Why would they sabotage their best demonstration model— their best advertizement, unauthorized or not? They might not have planned it this way, but the truth is, Stateless has cost them nothing—so long as no one else goes renegade.'

I wasn't convinced, but the argument was going nowhere. 'Do you want to show me your gallery of alleged corporate assassins? And then explain to me, very carefully, exactly what you plan to do if I tell you that I've sighted one of these people? Because if you think I'm entering into a conspiracy to murder—even in defense of the Keystone herself, even on Stateless—'

Kuwale cut me off. 'There's no question of violence. All we want to do is watch these people, gather the necessary intelligence, and tip off conference security as soon as we have something tangible.'

Vis notepad beeped. Ve halted, took it out of vis pocket and gazed at the screen for several seconds, then carefully paced a dozen meters south. I said, 'Do you mind if I ask what you're doing?'

Kuwale beamed proudly. 'My data security is linked to the Global Positioning System. The most crucial files can't be opened, even with the right passwords and voiceprint, unless you're standing on the right spot—which changes, hour by hour. And I'm the only one who knows exactly how it changes.'

I almost asked: Why not memorize a long list of passwords, instead of locations? Stupid question. The GPS was there, so it had to be used—and a more convoluted security scheme was better, not because it was any more secure, but because the complexity of the system was an end in itself. Technophilia was like any other aesthetic; there was no point asking why?

Kuwale was only half a generation younger than me, and we probably shared eighty percent of our world views—but ve'd pushed all the things we both believed much further. Science and technology seemed to have given ver everything ve could ask for: an escape from the poisoned battleground of gender, a political movement worth fighting for, and even a quasi-religion—insane enough in its own way, but unlike most other science-friendly faiths, at least it wasn't a laboriously contrived synthesis of modern physics and some dog-eared historical relic: a mock truce like the fatuities of Quantum Buddhism, or the Church of the Revised Standard Judaeo-Christian Big Bang.

I watched ver tinkering with the software, waiting for some conjunction of satellites and atomic clocks, and wondered: Would I have been happier, if I'd made the same decisions? As an asex—saved from a dozen screwed-up relationships. As a technoliberateur—with ideological zeal to shield me from any doubts about Nagasaki or Ned Landers. As an Anthrocosmologist—with a final explanation for everything which put me one up on even the TOE theorists, and inoculated me against competing religions in my old age.

Would I have been happier?

Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

Kuwale's software chimed success. I walked over and accepted the data ve'd unlocked, tight-beam infrared flowing between our notepads.

I said, 'I don't suppose you want to tell me how you know about these people? Or how I'm meant to verify what you say about them?'