Distress - A Novel Part 9

I don't know what stopped me from walking out of that incomprehensible lecture and away from Mosala's justified distaste. Pride?

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Stubborness? Inertia? Maybe it came down to the presence of the cults. Walsh's tactics could only become uglier-but that only made it seem more of a betrayal to abandon the project. I'd given in to SeeNet's demands for frankenscience in Junk DNA; this was a chance to atone, by showing the world someone who was standing up against the cults. And it wasn't as if the rhetoric was about to give way to violence, Kuwale notwithstanding. This was arcane physics, not biotechnology, and even at the Zambian bioethics conference, where I'd last seen Walsh, it was G.o.d's Image as usual-not Humble Science!-who'd pelted speakers with monkey embryos and doused unsympathetic journalists in human blood. No religious fundamen-talists had bothered with the Einstein Centenary Conference; TOEs were either beyond their comprehension, or beneath their contempt.

Mosala said softly, "That's nonsense."

I glanced at her warily. She was smiling. She turned to me, all hostilities momentarily forgotten, and whispered, "He's wrong! He thinks he's found a way to discard the isolated-point topologies; he's cooked up an isomorphism which maps them all into a set of measure zero. But he's using the wrong measure. In this context, he has to use Perrini's, not Saupe's! How could he have missed that?"

I had only the vaguest idea of what she was talking about. Isolated-point topologies were "s.p.a.ces" where nothing actually touched anything else. A "measure" was a kind of generalization of length, like a higher-dimensional area or volume-only they included much wilder abstractions than that. When you summed something over all the topologies, you multiplied each contribution to the infinite sum by a "measure" of "how big" the topology was ... a bit like weighting the worldwide average of some statistic according to the population of each country or according to its land area, or its Gross Domestic Product, or some other measure of its relative significance.

Buzzo believed he'd found a way of tackling the calculation of any real physical quant.i.ty which made the effective contribution of all the universes of isolated points equal to zero.

Mosala believed he was mistaken.

I said, "So, you'll confront him when he's finished?"

She turned back to the proceedings, smiling to herself. "Let's wait and see. I don't want to embarra.s.s him. And someone else is sure to spot the error."

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Question time arrived. I strained my limited grasp of the subject, trying to decide if any of the issues raised were Mosala's in disguise-but I thought not. When the session ended and she still hadn't spoken, I asked point blank: "Why didn't you tell him?"

She became irritated. "I could be mistaken. I'll have to give it more thought. It's not a trivial question; he may have had a good reason for the choice he made."

I said, "This was a prelude to his paper on Sunday week, wasn't it? Clearing the ground for his masterpiece?" Buzzo, Mosala and Yasuko Nishide were scheduled to present their rival TOEs-in strict alphabetical order-on the last day of the conference.

"That's right."

"So ... if he's wrong about the choice of measure, he could end up falling flat on his face?"

Mosala gave me a long, hard look. I wondered if I'd finally managed to push the decision out of my hands: if she'd withdraw her cooperation entirely, leaving me with no subject to film, no reason to remain.

She said coldly, "I have enough trouble deciding when my own techniques are valid; I don't have time to be an expert on everyone else's work as well." She glanced at her notepad. "I believe that's all the filming we agreed on for today. So if you'll excuse me, I'm meeting someone for lunch."

I saw Mosala heading for one of the hotel restaurants, so I turned the other way and walked out of the building. The midday sky was dazzling; in the shadows of awnings the buildings retained their subtle hues, but in the glare of full sunlight they took on an appearance reminiscent of the oldest quarters of some North African cities, all white stone against blue sky. There was an ocean-scented breeze from the east, warm but not unpleasant.

I walked down side streets at random, until I came to an open square. In the middle there was a small circular park, some twenty meters wide, covered with luxuriant gra.s.s-wild and unmown-and dotted with small palms. It was the first vegetation I'd seen on Stateless, except for potted plants in the hotel. Soil was a luxury here; all the necessary minerals could be found in the ocean, in trace amounts, but trying to provide the island with enough topsoil for agriculture would have meant trawling 112.

several thousand times the area of water required for the algae-and-plankton-based food chain which met all the same needs.

I gazed at this modest patch of greenery, and the longer I stared, the more the sight of it unnerved me. It took me a while longer to understand why.

The whole island was an artifact, as much as any building of metal and gla.s.s. It was maintained by engineered lifeforms-but their wild ancestors were as remote to them as ancient buried ore bodies were to gleaming t.i.tanium alloy. This tiny park, which was really just an overgrown potted plant, should have driven that home mercilessly, puncturing the illusion that I was standing on anything but the deck of a vast machine.

It didn't. "

I'd seen Stateless from the air, spreading its tendrils out into the Pacific, as organically beautiful as any living creature on the planet. I knew that every brick and tile in this city had been grown from the sea, not fired in any kiln. The whole island appeared so "natural," on its own terms, that it was the gra.s.s and the trees which looked artificial. This patch of wild-"authentic"-nature seemed alien and contrived.

I sat on a bench-reef-rock, but softer than the paving beneath it; more polymer, less mineral?-half shaded by one of the (ironic?) palm-tree-shaped sculptures which ringed the edge of the square. None of the locals were walking on the gra.s.s, so I stayed back. I hadn't regained my appet.i.te, so I just sat and let the warm air and the sight of the people wash over me.

Unwillingly, I recalled my ludicrous fantasy of endless carefree Sunday afternoons with Gina. Why had I ever imagined that she'd want to sit by a fountain in Epping with me, for the rest other life? How could I have believed, for so long, that she was happy . . . when all I'd made her feel, in the end, was ignored and invisible, suffocated and trapped?

My notepad beeped. I slid it from my pocket and Sisyphus announced, "WHO epidemiology statistics for March have just been released. Notified cases of Distress now number five hundred and twenty-three. That's a thirty percent increase in a month." A graph appeared on the screen. "There have been more new cases reported in March than in the previous six months combined."

I said numbly, "I don't remember asking to be told this."

"August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m." The hotel room in Manchester. "You said, 'Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.'"

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"Okay. Go on."

"There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last inquired." A list of t.i.tles appeared. "Do you want to hear their abstracts?"

"Not really."

I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn't eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo's lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.

The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the gra.s.s looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed-but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect's computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition-a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere-and I'd heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.

Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, "Five hundred dollars." He had a rural Australian accent.

I said, "If I'm going to get ripped off, I think I'll wait for a local to do it."

He gave me a mock-wounded glare. "And ten years doesn't qualify me? What do you want? Citizenship records7"

"Ten years? I apologize." Ten years meant he was practically a pioneer; Stateless had been seeded in 2032, but it had taken almost a decade to become habitable and self-sustaining. I was surprised; the founders, and most of the earliest settlers, had come from the US.

I said, "My name's Andrew Worth. I'm here for the Einstein Conference.

"Bill Munroe. Here for the light." He didn't offer his hand. "I can't afford the picture. But I'll buy you lunch, if you're interested."

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He looked at me sourly. "You're a journalist."

"I'm covering the conference. Nothing else. But I'm curious about. . . the island."

"Then read about it. It's all on the nets."

"Yes-and it all contradicts itself. I can't decide what's propaganda and what isn't."

"So what makes you think anything I might tell you would be any more reliable?"

"Face to face, I'll know."

He sighed. "Why me?" He put down his stylus. "All right. Lunch and anarchy. This way." He started to walk across the square.

I hung back. "You're not going to leave this-?" He kept walking, so I caught up with him. "Five hundred dollars-plus the easel and the stylus-and you're willing to trust people to leave it untouched?"

He glanced at me irritably, then turned and waved his notepad at the easel; it emitted a brief ear-splitting squeal. A few people turned to stare. "Don't you have alarm tags where you come from?" I felt my face redden.

Munroe chose a cheap-looking open-air cafe, and ordered a steaming white concoction from the instant-serve display counter. It smelled nau-seatingly fishy-although here that didn't necessarily imply that it had once been the flesh of any vertebrate. Still, I lost whatever faint hint of an appet.i.te I might have been working up.

As I thumbed approval of the payment for the meal, he said, "Don't tell me: you're deeply perplexed by our use of international credit as a means of exchange, the existence of free-enterprise eating establishments, my shameless attachment to private property, and all the other trappings of capitalism which you see around you."

"You've done this before. So what's the stock answer to the stock question?" Munroe carried his plate out to a table which gave him a clear view of his easel.

He said, "Stateless is a capitalist democracy. And a liberal socialist democracy. And a union of collectives. And several hundred others things for which I have no name."

"You mean . . . people here choose to act as they would in those kinds of societies?"

"Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Most people join syndicates which effectively are those kinds of societies. People want freedom of choice, but they also want a degree of stability. So they enter into agreements which 115.

give them a framework in which to organize their lives-agreements which allow for release, of course . . . but then, most democracies permit emigration. If sixty thousand people in one syndicate agree to pay a portion of their income-subject to audit-into a fund used for health, education, and welfare, disbursed according to policies fleshed out in detail by committees of elected delegates.. . they may not have a parliament or a head of state, but that still sounds like a socialist democracy to me."

I said, "So freely chosen 'government' isn't forbidden. But-overall- are you anarchists, or not? Aren't there universal laws here, which everyone is forced to obey?"

"There are a handful of principles endorsed by a large majority of residents. Basic ideas about freedom from violence and coercion. They're widely promulgated and anyone who disagrees with them would be better off not coming here. I won't split hairs, though; they might as well be laws.

"So are we anarchists, or not?" Munroe mimed indifference. "Anarchy means 'no ruler,' not 'no laws' . . . but no one on Stateless loses any sleep contemplating ancient Greek semantics-or the writings of Bakunin, or Proudhon, or G.o.dwin. Sorry, I retract that: about the same percentage of the population as you'd find in Beijing or Paris cares pa.s.sionately about each of those subjects. But you'll have to interview one of them, if you want their opinion.

"Personally, I think the word carries too much historical baggage to be salvaged. No great loss. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchist movements were bogged down, as much as the Marxists, by the question of seizing power from the ruling cla.s.s. On Stateless that issue was dealt with very simply. In 2025, six employees of a Californian biotech company called EnGeneUity absconded with all the information they needed to make the seed. Much of which was their own work, if not their own property. They also took some engineered cells from various cultures, but too few to be missed. By the time anyone knew that Stateless was growing, there were a few hundred people living here in shifts, and it would have been bad PR to summarily sterilize the place.

"That was our 'revolution.' Beats measuring out your life in Molotov c.o.c.ktails."

"Except that the theft means you're saddled with the boycott."

Munroe shrugged. "The boycott is a great pain. But Stateless under the boycott is still better than the alternative: a company island, every 116.

square meter privately owned. It's bad enough when every decent food crop on the planet is licensed; imagine the ground beneath your feet being the same."

I said, "Okay. So the technology gave you a shortcut to a new society; all the old models were irrelevant. No invasion and genocide, no b.l.o.o.d.y uprising, no glacial democratic reforms. But getting there's the easy part. I still don't understand what holds the place together."

"Small invertebrate organisms."

"I meant politically."

Munroe looked baffled. "Holds the place together against what? The onset of anarchy?"

"Violence. Looting. Mob rule."

"Why bother traveling to the middle of the Pacific for something you can do in any city in the world? Or do you think we went to all this trouble just for a chance to play Lord of the Flies?"

"Not intentionally. But when it happens in Sydney, they send in the riot squad. When it happens in Los Angeles, they send in the National Guard."

"We have a trained militia, who have near-universal consent to use reasonable force to protect people and vital resources in an emergency." He grinned. '"Vital resources.' 'Emergency powers.' Sounds just like home, doesn't it? Except that the emergency has never arisen."

"Okay. But why hasn't it?"

Munroe ma.s.saged his forehead, and regarded me as if I were an over-persistent child. "Good will? Intelligence? Some other bizarre alien force?"

"Be serious."

"There are some obvious things. People turn up here with a slightly higher than average level of idealism. They want Stateless to work, or they wouldn't have come-give or take the occasional tedious agent provocateur. They're prepared to cooperate. I don't mean living in dormitories, pretending everyone's your extended family, and going on work parties singing uplifting communal anthems-though there's some of that about. But they're willing to be more flexible and tolerant than the average person who chooses to live elsewhere . . . because that's the whole point.

"There's less concentration of wealth, and of power. Maybe that's only a matter of time-but with so much power so heavily decentralized, 117.

it's very hard to buy. And yes, we have private property, but the island, the reefs, and the waters are a commons. Syndicates which collect and process food trade their products for money, but they have no monopoly; there are plenty of people who feed themselves directly from the sea."

I looked around the square, frustrated. "Okay. You're not all slaughtering each other or rioting in the streets, because no one's starving, and no one's obscenely rich-yet. But do you honestly think it's going to last? The next generation won't be here by choice. What are you going to do-indoctrinate them all with tolerance, and hope for the best? It's never worked before. Every other experiment like this has ended in violence, been conquered or absorbed ... or given up and turned into a nation state."

Munroe said, "Of course we're trying to pa.s.s on our own values to our children-like everyone else on the planet. And with about as much success. But at least most children here are taught sociobiology from an early age." "Sociobiology.''"

He grinned. "More use than Bakunin, believe me. People will never agree on the details of how society should be organized-and why should they? But unless you're an Edenite who believes there's some 'natural,' Gala-given Utopian condition to which we should all return, then adopting any form of civilization means choosing some kind of cultural response-other than pa.s.sive acceptance-to the fact that we are animals with certain innate behavioral drives. And whether that response involves the most subtle compromise, or the most vehement opposition, it helps to know exactly what it is you're trying to accommodate, or oppose.

"If people understand the biological forces acting on themselves and everyone around them then at least they have a chance of adopting intelligent strategies for getting what they want with a minimum of conflict . . . instead of blundering around with nothing but romantic myths and wishful thinking, courtesy of some dead political philosopher."

I let that sink in. I'd come across no end of detailed prescriptions for ludicrous "scientific" Utopias, and blueprints for societies organized on allegedly "rational" grounds . . . but this was the first time I'd heard anyone advocate diversity in the same breath as acknowledging biological forces. Instead of exploiting sociobiology to try to justify some rigid political doctrine to be imposed from above-from Marxism to the nuclear 118.

family, from racial purity to gender separatism-"we must live this way, because human nature requires it" . . . Munroe was suggesting that people could use the self-knowledge of the species to make better decisions for themselves.

Informed anarchy. It was an appealing notion-but I still felt obliged to be skeptical. "Not everyone's going to let their children learn sociobiology; there must be a few cultural and religious fundamentalists, even here, who'd find it too threatening. And . . . what about adult migrants? If someone's twenty years old when they arrive on Stateless, they'll still be around for another sixty years. Plenty of time to lose their idealism. Do you really think the whole thing can hold together while the first generation grow old and disillusioned?"

Munroe was bemused. "Does it matter what I think? If you really care one way or the other: explore the island, talk to people, make up your own mind."

"You're right." I wasn't here to explore the island, though, or to form an opinion on its political future. I glanced at my watch; it was after one. I stood up.

Munroe said, "There's something going on right now which you might like to see. Or even . . . try. Are you in a hurry?"

I hesitated. "That depends."

"I suppose you could call this the closest thing we have to a ... ceremony for new residents." I must have looked less than thrilled; Munroe laughed. "No anthems, no oaths, no gilded scrolls, I promise. And no, it's not compulsory-it just seems to have become the fashion for new arrivals. Mere tourists are welcome, too, though."

"Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?"

"I can tell you that it's called inland diving. But you really have to see it to know what that means."

Munroe packed up his easel and accompanied me; I suspected he was secretly enjoying playing veteran radical tour guide. We stood in the doorway to catch the breeze, as the tram headed out toward the northern arm of the island. The track ahead was barely visible: two parallel trenches carved in the rock, the gray ribbon of superconductor running down the middle all but hidden beneath a layer of fine chalky dust.

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By the time we'd traveled about fifteen kilometers, we were the only pa.s.sengers left. I said, "Who pays for the maintenance of these things?"

"Fares cover some of it. The syndicates pay the rest."

"So what happens if a syndicate decides not to pay? To freeload?"