Distress

sheer stubbornness.'

De Groot gave me an odd look, as if she was trying to decide whether I was joking or not.

She said, 'If you really believe that, then you don't know Violet at all.'

26

I told De Groot I'd catch some sleep and be back by 2:30. I wanted to bid Mosala bon voyage.

I went looking for Akili to tell ver the good news, but ve'd been discharged. I sent ver a message, then returned to the hotel, washed my face, changed my laser-singed shirt. My bums were numb, absent; the local anesthetic had magicked them away. I felt battered, but triumphant—and too wired to stand still, let alone sleep. It was almost eleven, but the shops were still open; I went out and bought myself another shoulder camera, then wandered the city, filming everything in sight. The last night of peace on Stateless? The mood on the streets was nothing like the atmosphere of siege among the physicists and journalists inside the hotel, but there was an edge of nervous anticipation, like Los Angeles during a quake risk alert (I'd been through one, a false alarm). When people met my gaze they seemed curious—even suspicious—but they showed no sign of hostility. It was as if they thought I might, conceivably, be a spy for the mercenaries—but if I was, that was merely an exotic trait which they had no intention of holding against me.

I stopped in the middle of a brightly lit square, and checked the news nets. Buzzo had given no press conference admitting his error, but with Mosala now showing symptoms, perhaps he'd take the risk of the extremists seriously, and reconsider. Coverage of the situation on Stateless stank, uniformly—but SeeNet would soon scoop everyone by announcing the real reasons for the occupation. And even with Mosala alive, the truth might come out badly for the pro-boycott alliance.

The air was humid, but cold. I stared up at the satellites which bridged the planet, and tried to make sense of the fact that I was standing on an artificial South Pacific island, on the eve of a war.

Was my whole life encoded in this moment—the memories I possessed, the circumstances I found myself in? Taking this much and no more as given… could I have reconstructed all the rest?

It didn't feel that way. My childhood in Sydney was unimaginable, as remote and hypothetical as the Big Bang—and even the time I'd spent in the hold on the fishing boat, and the encounter with the robot at the airport, had receded like fragments of a dream.

I'd never had cholera. I possessed no internal organs.

The stars glinted icily.

At one in the morning, the streets were still crowded, shops and restaurants still trading. Nobody seemed as somber as they should have been; maybe they still believed that they were facing nothing more than the kind of harassment they'd survived before.

There was a group of young men standing around a fountain in the square, joking and laughing. I asked them if they thought the militia would attack the airport soon. I couldn't imagine why else they'd be in such high spirits; maybe they'd be taking part, and were psyching themselves up for it.

They stared at me in disbelief. 'Attack the airport? And get slaughtered?'

'It might be your only chance.'

They exchanged amused glances. One of them put a hand on my shoulder and said solicitously, 'Everything's going to be fine. Just keep an ear to the ground, and hang on tight.'

I wondered what kind of drugs they were on-When I returned to the hospital, De Groot said, 'Violet's awake. She wants to talk to you.'

I went in alone. The room was dimly lit; a monitor near the head of the bed glowed with green and orange data. Mosala's voice was weak, but she was lucid.

'Will you ride in the ambulance with me?'

'If that's what you want.'

'I want you to record everything. Just make good use of it, if you have to.'

'I will.' I wasn't sure exactly what she meant—framing EnGeneUity for her death, if it came to that? I didn't press her for details; I was weary of the politics of martyrdom.

'Karin said you went to the airport and petitioned the mercenaries on my behalf.' She searched my face. 'Why?'

'I was returning a favor.'

She laughed softly. 'What did I ever do to deserve that?'

'It's a long story.' And I was no longer sure, myself, whether I'd been trying to repay Adelle Vunibobo, doing it all for technoliberation, acting out of respect and admiration for Mosala, or hoping to impress Akili by 'saving the Keystone'—even if the role was beginning to sound less like a revered creator than a kind of information-theoretic Typhoid Mary.

De Groot came in with news of the flight; everything was on schedule, and it was time to leave. Two medics joined us. I stood back, filming with the shoulder camera as Mosala was moved to a trolley, monitor and drug pumps still attached.

In the garage, on the way to the ambulance, I saw half a dozen balloon-tired vehicles being loaded with medical equipment, bandages, and drugs. Maybe they were moving supplies to other sites around the city, in case the hospital was captured. It was heartening to see that not everyone was taking the invasion lightly.

We rode through the city slowly, without the siren wailing. More people were on the streets than I'd ever seen by daylight. Mosala asked De Groot for a notepad, then put it on the mattress beside her, and turned onto her side so she could type. Whatever she was doing seemed to demand intense concentration, but she spoke to me, without looking away from the screen.

'You suggested that I appoint a successor, Andrew. Someone to make sure that the work was finished. Well, I'm arranging that now.'

I couldn't see the point anymore, but I didn't argue. A high-resolution scan in Cape Town would yield structures for all the viral proteins almost immediately, and precision drugs to block their actions could be designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Proving the moderates wrong and then begging them for the cure was no longer any kind of shortcut.

Mosala glanced up at me, and spoke for the camera. 'The software is working on ten canonical experiments. A full analysis of all of them, combined, will yield what used to be thought of as the ten parameters of total space—the details of the ten-dimensional geometry which underlies all the particles and forces. In modern terms… those ten experiments reveal, between them, exactly how the symmetry of pre-space is broken, for us. Exactly what it is that everything in this universe has in common.'

'I understand.'

She shook her head impatiently. 'Let me finish. What's running on the supercomputer network, right now, is just brute-force calculations. I wanted the software to leave the honors to me. Double-checking, pulling it all together… writing a paper which set out the results in a way which would make sense to anyone. But those things are trivial. I already know exactly what has to be done with the results, once they're available. And—' She executed a flurry of keystrokes, scrutinized the effects, then put the notepad aside. 'All of it has just been automated. My mother gave me a pre-release Kaspar clonelet last week—and it'll probably write up the results more smoothly than I ever could. So whether I'm alive, dead, or somewhere in between… by six a.m. on Friday, that paper will be written—and posted on the nets with toll-free, universal access. Copies will also be sent to every faculty member and every student of the Physics Departments of every university on the planet.' She flashed a smile of pure defiant glee. 'What are the Anthrocosmologists going to do, now? Kill every physicist on the planet?' I glanced up at De Groot, who was tight-lipped and ashen. Mosala groaned. 'Don't look so damn morbid, you two. I'm just covering all contingencies.'

She closed her eyes; her breathing was ragged, but she was still smiling. I turned to the monitor; her temperature was 40.9 degrees.

We'd left the city behind; the windows of the ambulance showed nothing but our reflections. The ride was