Distress

to start unraveling the whole complicated truth for myself.

Back in my hotel room, I plugged in my umbilical fiber, passed Kuwale's eighteen mug shots to Witness, and flagged them for constant real-time search.

I called Lydia. 'I need five thousand dollars extra for research: database access and hacking fees. More is going on here than I can begin to describe. And if you don't agree that it's worth every cent in a week's time, I'll refund it all.'

We argued for fifteen minutes. I improvised; I dropped misleading hints about PACDF and an impending political storm, but I said nothing about Mosala's planned emigration. In the end, Lydia caved in. I was astonished.

I used the software Kuwale had given me to send ver a deep-encrypted message. 'No, I haven't spotted one of your goons. But if you expect any more help from me—beyond acting as a living culture medium—you're going to have to give me all the details: who these people are, who employed them, your analysis of the weapon… everything. Take it or leave it. Meet me at the same place as last time, in an hour.'

I sat back and took stock of what I knew, what I believed. Biotech weapons, biotech interests! Whether or not that was true, the boycott itself had almost killed me. I'd always seen both sides of the gene patent laws, I'd always been equally suspicious of the corporations and the renegades—but now the symmetry was broken. I had a long history of apathy and ambivalence—and I was ashamed to admit that it had taken so much to politicize me—but now I was ready to embrace technoliberation, I was ready to do everything I could to expose Mosala's enemies and help her cause.

The Beach Boys never lied, though. I couldn't believe that a weapon from EnGeneUity and their allies would have failed because of anything as simple as my distorted melatonin cycle. That sounded more like the work of brilliant, resourceful amateurs making do with limited knowledge, limited tools.

PACDF? The Ignorance Cults? Hardly.

Other technoliberateurs, who'd decided that Mosala's original scheme would benefit greatly from a Nobel-prize-winning martyr? Unaware that they were pitted against people who largely shared their goals—but who weren't merely averse to treating people as expendable, but who had elevated the sacrificial celebrity in question to the status of creator of the universe?

There was an irony there, somewhere: the cool, pragmatic realpolitik faction of technoliberation seemed to be infinitely more fanatical than the quasi-religious Anthrocosmologists.

An irony, or a misunderstanding.

Kuwale's reply arrived while I was in the shower, scouring away the dead skin and the sour odor I'd been unable to remove in the hospital bathroom.

'The data you insist on seeing can't be unlocked at the place you've specified. Meet me at these coordinates.'

I checked a map of the island. There was no point arguing.

I dressed, and set out for the northern reefs.

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. What exactly was I standing on? An artificial island? An ocean-going machine? A