Distress

Anthrocosmology out of existence—but if I'd failed, would I have had the humility (or the genocidal irresponsibility) to walk away from the implications, to refuse to intervene?

Outside, people were roaring with laughter. In the square, someone turned the music up insanely loud for a second, distorting it into booming bass static, shaking the ground.

Akili held conference with the other mainstream ACs. Someone was hacking into a WHO computer, to get the unofficial latest figures for reported cases of Distress.

'Nine thousand and twenty.' Ve turned to me with a sharp intake of breath; I didn't know if it was panic, or the exhilaration of free fall. 'Tripled in two days. And you still think it's a virus?'

'No.' Even without this inexplicable burst of contagion, I knew my targeted neuroactive mutant bioweapon theory wouldn't stand up to any scrutiny at all. 'But we can still both be wrong, can't we?'

'Maybe.'

I hesitated. 'If it's this fast now, then after the Aleph moment…?'

'I don't know. It could sweep the planet in a week. Or an hour. The faster the better—less suffering for the people who see it coming, but don't yet understand.' Akili closed vis eyes, began to put vis face in vis hands, stopped, clenched vis fists. 'When it comes, it better be good. The truth you can't escape had better be sweet.'

I moved closer and put my arm around ver, and swayed our bodies gently together from side to side.

Sarah arrived, barely a minute later than promised. She sat on my suitcase, and we talked for her camera eyes. Sometimes we had to shout to make ourselves heard—but software would bring the noise of the celebrations down to an atmospheric murmur.

Sarah and I had never been more than casual acquaintances—I'd only spoken to her in person a dozen times before—but for me, she came from the world beyond Stateless, the time before the conference; she was living proof of that era of sanity. And it only took one third party, there in the flesh, to anchor me to normality—to render me certain, again, that Akili was wrong. Distress was a mundane horror, no different from cholera. The universe was oblivious to human explanation. The laws of physics always had been and always would be solid—all the way down to the bedrock of the TOE—whether or not they were understood.

And—though we weren't going out in real-time—she'd brought her audience with her. Under the potential scrutiny of ten million people, what else could I do but think what they expected me to think, give in to their consensus, conform?

Akili, too, seemed to relax—but whether Sarah's presence anchored ver in the same way, or merely served as a welcome distraction, I couldn't tell.

Sarah guided us deftly through our roles in Violet Mosala: Victim of Anthrocosmology. The deposition I'd made for Joe Kepa had stuck to the legally pertinent facts; this interview pretended to probe the moral and philosophical depths of the ACs' conspiracy. But Akili and I both talked of the fishing boat, and the moderates' insane beliefs, as if we had no doubt that their whole world view—as much as their violent methods—deserved only contempt; as if nothing remotely similar could have crossed our own minds in a thousand years.

And it all became news. It all became history. Sarah was doing her job flawlessly—but for the record, the three of us willingly steam-rollered flat every unspoken fear, every qualm, every trace of doubt that the world could ever be different from the nets' pale imitation of it.

We were almost finished—I was on the verge of recounting the events in the ambulance—when my notepad chimed. It was a coded trill for a call to be taken only in private. If I answered, the communications software would shift to deepest encryption, automatically—but if the notepad sensed other people within earshot, it would refuse to maintain the connection.

I excused myself, and left the tent. The sky showed a faint wash of gray over the stars. Music and laughter still flooded out of the square behind the markets, and people were still roaming the camp, but I found a secluded spot nearby.

De Groot said, 'Andrew? Are you all right? Can you talk?' She looked haggard and tense.

'I'm fine. A little bruised by the quake, that's all.' I hesitated; I couldn't bring myself to ask the question.

'Violet died. About twenty minutes ago.' De Groot's voice faltered, but she steeled herself and pushed on wearily. 'No one knows exactly why, yet. Some kind of trap sprung by one of the anti-viral magic bullets—maybe an enzyme in concentrations too weak to detect, which converted it into a toxin.' She shook her head, disbelieving. 'They turned her body into a minefield. What did she ever do to deserve that? She tried to find a few simple truths, a few simple patterns to the world.'

I said, 'They've been caught. They'll stand trial. And Violet will be remembered… for centuries.' It was all hollow comfort, but I didn't know what else to say.

And I'd thought I'd been prepared for this news, ever since I'd heard she was in coma—but it still came like a sudden blow to the head… as if the anarchists' astonishing reversal of fortune, and Sarah's miraculous reappearance, had somehow rewritten the odds. I covered my eyes with my forearm for a moment, and saw her sitting in her hotel room beneath the skylight, raked by the sun, reaching out and taking my hand. Even if I'm wrong… there has to be something down there. Or nobody could even touch.

De Groot said, 'How soon can you get off the island?' She sounded more than a little concerned—which was touching, but strange. We'd hardly been that close.

I laughed dismissively. 'Why? The anarchists have won, the worst is over. I'm sure of that.' De Groot did not look sure at all. 'Have you heard something? From… your political contacts?' There was a sudden chill in my bowels, like the disbelief I'd felt before each new spasm from the cholera: It can't be happening again.

'This isn't about the war. But—you're stuck, aren't you?'

'For now. Are you going to tell me what this—?'

'We had a message. Just after Violet died. A threat from the Anthrocosmologists.' Her face contorted with anger. 'Not the ones on the boat, obviously. So it must have come from the ones who killed Buzzo.'

'Saying what?'

'Shut down all of Violet's calculations. Present them with a verified audit trail for her supercomputer account, proving that all the records of her TOE work have been erased without being copied or read.'

I made a sound of derision. 'Yeah? Where do they think that will get them? All her methods and ideas have been published already. Someone else will duplicate everything… in a year at the most.'

De Groot seemed indifferent to the ACs' motives; she just wanted an end to the violence. 'I've shown the message to the police, here—but they say there's nothing anyone can do, with Stateless the way it is.' She caught herself; she still hadn't spelled it out. 'The threat is, we post the audit trail within an hour—or they kill you.'

'Right.' I could see the logic of it: De Groot, and Mosala's family, would all be too well guarded to threaten directly—but they'd hardly sit back and let the extremists kill me, after I'd helped get Violet off Stateless.

'The calculations were already completed when I logged on—lucky Violet programmed her net broadcast to wait until the hour.' De Groot laughed softly. 'Her idea of making it a formal occasion. We'll do what they've asked, of course. The police advised me not to call you—and I know the news does you no good—but I still thought you had a right to be told.'

I said, 'Don't do anything, don't erase a single file. I'll call you back, very soon.' I broke the connection.

I stood there in the alley for several seconds, listening to the wild music, chilled by the wind, thinking it through.

When I walked into the tent, Sarah and Akili were laughing. I'd meant to invent an excuse to get Sarah out quietly, so we could both just walk away—but it struck me at that moment that it would do me no good. Buzzo had been killed with a gunshot, but their favored methods were biological. If I fled, the chances were that I'd be carrying the weapon inside me.

I reached down and grabbed Akili by the front of vis jacket and sent ver sprawling backward onto the floor. Ve stared up at me, faking shock, anguish, bewilderment. I knelt down over ver and punched ver in the face, clumsily—surprised that I'd even got this far; I was no good at violence, and I'd expected ver to defend verself with