Distress - A Novel Part 10

"Then everyone knows."

"Okay, but what if they genuinely can't afford to contribute. What if they're poor?"

"Most syndicate finances are public knowledge. By choice, but it's viewed as odd if they're kept secret. Anyone on Stateless can pick up their notepad and find out if the wealth of the island is being concentrated in one syndicate or being siphoned off-sh.o.r.e, or whatever. And act on that knowledge as they see fit."

We were clear of the built-up center now. There were buildings which looked like factories and warehouses scattered around the tram line, but more and more of the view was becoming bare reef-rock, flat but slightly uneven. The limestone appeared in all the hues I'd seen in the city, zebra-striping the landscape in distinctly ungeological patterns, governed by the diffusion of different subspecies of lithophilic bacteria. The ground here wouldn't be amenable to rock farming, though; the inner core of the island was too dry and hard, too devascularized. Further out, the rock was much more porous, and suffused with calcium-rich water and the engineered organisms needed to replenish it. The tram lines didn't run to the coast because the ground became too soft to bear the weight of the vehicles.

I invoked Witness and started recording; at this rate I'd have more private travelogue footage than material for the doc.u.mentary, but I couldn't resist.

I said, "Did you really come here for the light?"

Munroe shook his head. "Hardly. I just had to get away."

"From what?"

"All the noise. All the cant. All the Professional Australians."

"Ah." I'd first heard that term when I was studying film history; it had been coined to describe the mainstream directors of the nineteen seventies and eighties. As one historian had put it: "They possessed no distinguis.h.i.+ng features except for their nationality; they had nothing to say, and nothing to do except foist a claustrophobic vocabulary of tired nationalist myths and icons onto their audience, while loudly proclaiming themselves to be 'defining the national character,' and to represent, 120.

in person, 'a nation finding its voice.'" I'd thought this was probably a harsh judgment-until I'd seen some of the films. Most of them were stultifying horse operas-rural colonial melodramas-or sentimentalized war stories. The nadir of the period, though, was probably an attempted comedy in which Albert Einstein was portrayed as an Australian apple farmer's son, who "splits beer atoms" and falls in love with Marie Curie.

I said, "I always thought the visual arts had grown out of that long ago. Especially in your mode."

Munroe scowled. "I'm not talking about art. I'm talking about the entire dominant culture."

"Come on! There is no 'dominant culture' anymore. The filter is mightier than the broadcaster." At least, that was the net-swoon line; I still wasn't sure I'd bought it.

Munroe hadn't. "Very Zen. Try exporting Australian medical biotech to Stateless, and you'll soon find out exactly who's in control."

I had no answer to that.

He said, "Don't you ever get tired of living in a society which talks about itself, relentlessly-and usually lies? Which defines everything worthwhile-tolerance, honesty, loyalty, fairness-as 'uniquely Australian'? Which pretends to encourage diversity-but can't ever stop babbling about its 'national ident.i.ty'? Don't you ever get sick of the endless parade of buffoons who claim the authority to speak on your behalf: politicians, intellectuals, celebrities, commentators-defining and characterizing you in every detail . . . from your 'distinctive Australian sense of humor' right down to your f.u.c.king 'collective subconscious iconography' . . , who are all, simply, liars and thieves?"

I was taken aback for a moment, but on reflection, this was a recognizable description of the mainstream political and academic culture. Or if not the mainstream, at least the loudest. I shrugged. "Every country has some level of parochial bulls.h.i.+t like that going on, somewhere. The US is almost as bad. But I hardly notice it anymore-least of all at home. I suppose I've just learned to tune it out, most of the time."

"I envy you, then. I never could."

The tram slid on, displaced dust hissing softly. Munroe had a point: nationalists-political and cultural-who claimed to be the voice of their nation could disenfranchise those they "represented" just as effectively as s.e.xists who claimed to be the voice of their s.e.x. A handful of people pretending to speak for forty million-or five billion-would 121.

always wield disproportionate power, merely by virtue of making the claim.

So what was the solution? Move to Stateless? Become as.e.x! Or just stick your head in a Balkanized corner of the net, and try to believe that none of it mattered?

Munroe said, "I would have thought that the flight from Sydney was enough to make anyone want to leave for good. Physical proof of the absurdity of nations."

I laughed drily. "Almost. Being petty and vindictive with the East Timorese is understandable; imagine dirtying the bayonets of our business partners for all those years, and then having the temerity to turn around and take us to court. What the problem is with Stateless, though, I have no idea. None of the EnGeneUity patents were Australian-owned, were they?"

"No."

"So what's the big deal? Even Was.h.i.+ngton doesn't go out of its way to punish Stateless quite so ... comprehensively."

Munroe said, "I do have one theory."

"Yeah?"

"Think about it. What's the biggest lie the political and cultural ruling cla.s.s tells itself? Where's the greatest disparity between image and truth? What are the attributes which any self-respecting Professional Australian boasts about the most-and possesses the least?"

"If this is a cheap Freudian joke, I'm going to be very disappointed."

"Suspicion of authority. Independence of spirit. Nonconformity. So what could they possibly find more threatening than an island full of anarchists?"

122.

13.We walked north from the terminus, across a plane of marbled gray-green, in places still imprinted with faint hints of stubby branched tubing: coral from the sh.o.r.es of a decade ago, incompletely digested. Knowing the time scale made the sight curiously shocking; it was a bit like stumbling across fossils of distinctive forties artifacts- clunky old-model notepads, quaint shoes which had been alpha fas.h.i.+on in living memory-converted into nothing but mineralized outlines. I thought I could feel the rock yielding beneath my feet more than the dense, cured paving of the city, but we left no visible imprints behind us. I paused and crouched to touch the ground, wondering if it would be palpably moist; it wasn't, but there was probably a plasticized skin beneath the surface to limit evaporation.

In the distance, a group of twenty or so people were gathered around a gantry several meters high, with a large motorized winch beside it. Nearby was a small green bus with big, balloon-tired wheels. The gantry sprouted half a dozen bright orange awnings, and I could hear them snapping in the breeze. Orange cable stretched from the winch to a pulley suspended from the gantry, then dropped straight down- presumably into a hole in the ground, concealed by the circle of spectators.

I said, "They're being lowered into some kind of maintenance shaft?"

"That's right."

"What a charming custom. Welcome to Stateless, tired and hungry traveler . . . now check out our sewers."

Munroe snorted. "Wrong."

As we drew nearer, I could see that everyone in the group was gazing intently at the hole beneath the gantry. A couple of people glanced our way briefly, and one woman raised a hand in a tentative greeting. I 123.

returned the gesture, and she smiled nervously, then turned back to the hidden entrance.

I whispered (though we were barely within earshot), "They look like they're at a mine disaster. Waiting to identify the bodies as they're raised to the surface."

"It's always tense. But... be patient."

From a distance, I'd thought people were just randomly, casually dressed, but close-up it was clear that they were mostly in swimming costumes, though some wore T-s.h.i.+rts as well. A few were in short-limbed wetsuits. Some peoples' hair looked distinctively disheveled; one man's was visibly still wet.

"So what are they diving into? The water supply?" Ocean water was desalinated in specialized pools out on the reefs, and the fresh water pumped inland to supplement recycled waste.

Munroe said, "That'd be a challenge. None of the water arteries are thicker than a human arm."

I stopped a respectful distance from the group, feeling very much an intruder. Munroe went ahead and gently squeezed his way into the outer circle; no one seemed to mind, or to pay either of us much attention. It finally struck me that the awnings overhead were flapping and shuddering out of all proportion to the gentle wind from the east. I moved closer and caught the edge of a strong, cool breeze emerging from the tunnel itself, carrying a stale damp mineral odor.

Peering over people's shoulders, I could see that the mouth of the tunnel was capped with a knee-high structure like a small well, built of dark reef-rock or heavy-duty biopolymer, with an iris seal which had been wrenched open. The winch, a few meters away, seemed monstrous now-far too large and industrial-looking to be involved in any light-hearted sport. The cable was thicker than I'd expected; I thought of trying to estimate its total length, but the sides of the drum concealed the number of layers wrapped around it. The motor itself was silent except for the hiss of air across magnetic bearings, but the cable squeaked against itself as it spooled onto the drum, and the gantry creaked as the cable slid over the pulley.

No one spoke. It didn't seem like the time to start asking questions.

Suddenly I heard a gasping sound, almost a sobbing. There was a buzz of excitement, and everyone craned forward expectantly. A woman emerged from the tunnel, clinging tightly to the cable, scuba tanks 124.

strapped to her back, face mask pulled up onto her forehead. She was wet, but not dripping-so the water had to be some way down.

The winch stopped. The woman unhooked a safety line linking the scuba harness to the cable; people reached out to help her onto the lip of the well, and then the ground. I stepped forward, and saw a small circular platform-a coa.r.s.e grid of plastic tubes-on which she'd been standing. There was also a twin-beam lantern fixed to the cable, about a meter and a half above the platform.

The woman seemed dazed. She walked some distance away from the group, almost staggering, then sat down on the rock and stared up at the sky, still breathless. Then she removed the tanks and mask, slowly and methodically, and lay down on her back. She closed her eyes and stretched out her arms, palms down, spreading her fingers on the ground.

A man and two teenage girls had separated from the others; they stood nearby, watching the woman anxiously. I was beginning to wonder if she needed medical attention-and I was on the verge of discreetly asking Sisyphus to refresh my memory on heart attack symptoms and emergency first aid-when she sprung to her feet, smiling radiantly. She began to speak excitedly to her family, in what I took to be a Polynesian language; I didn't understand a word she said, but she sounded elated.

The tension vanished, and everyone began laughing and talking. Munroe turned to me. "There are eight people in the queue ahead of you but it's worth waiting for, I promise."

"I don't know. Whatever's down there, my insurance doesn't cover it."

"I doubt your insurance covers a tram ride, on Stateless."

A thin young man in bright floral shorts was putting on the scuba gear the woman had discarded. I introduced myself; he seemed nervous, but he didn't mind talking. His name was k.u.mar Rajendra, an Indian-Fijian civil engineering student; he'd been on Stateless less than a week. I took a b.u.t.ton camera from my wallet and explained what I wanted. He glanced over at the people gathered around the hole-as if wondering if he needed to ask permission of someone-but then he agreed to take it down. Fixing the camera to the top of the scuba mask, where it sat like a third eye, I noticed a faint chalky residue on the faceplate's transparent plastic.

An elderly woman in a wetsuit came over and checked that the scuba gear was fitted properly, then went through emergency procedures with 125.

Rajendra. He listened solemnly; I backed away and checked the reception on my notepad. The camera transmitted in ultrasound, radio and IR-and if all those signals failed to get through, it had a forty-minute memory.

Munroe approached me, exasperated. "You're crazy, you know. It won't be the same. Why record someone else's dive, when you could do it yourself?"

Just my luck; even on Stateless, I'd found someone who wanted me to shut up and do what 1 was told. I said, "Maybe I will; this way I get to see exactly what I'd be letting myself in for. Then again . . . I'm just a tourist, aren't I ? So my experience of a ceremony for new residents would hardly be authentic."

Munroe rolled his eyes. "Authentic7 Make up your mind: are you covering the Einstein Conference, or making Coming of Age on Stateless7."

"That remains to be seen. If I end up with two programs for the price of one ... all the better."

Rajendra climbed onto the edge of the well, took hold of the cable, then stepped onto the platform; it tilted precariously until he managed to center himself. The breeze ballooned his shorts and sent his hair streaming comically upward, but the sight was more vertiginous than amusing; it made him look like a skydiver sans parachute, or some lunatic balanced on the wing of a plane. He finally attached the safety line-but the impression of free-fall remained.

I was surprised that Munroe was so enthusiastic about what looked to me like just one more bonding-through-bravery ritual, one more initiation-by-ordeal. Even if there was no real pressure to take part, and even if the dangers were minimal ... so much for the island of radical nonconformists.

Someone started the winch unwinding. Rajendra's friends, standing-and then kneeling-on the lip of the well, reached out and patted his shoulders as he descended, cheering him on; he grinned nervously as he disappeared from sight. I squeezed forward myself, and leaned over with the notepad to maintain line-of-sight communication. The b.u.t.ton camera's memory would probably be more than enough, but it was impossible to resist the lure of real-time. I wasn't alone; people jostled to , get a view of the screen.

Munroe called out from behind the crush, "So much for authenticity. You realize you're changing the experience for everyone?" "Not for the diver."

126.

"Oh, right, that's all that matters. Capture the last glimpse of the real thing-before destroying it forever. You ethnovandal." He added, half seriously, "Anyway, you're wrong. It changes things for the diver, too."

The tunnel was about two meters wide, the walls about as cylindrical as the surface rock was flat-too good to be the product of any geological process, but too rough to have been machined. The morphogenesis of Stateless was a complex process which I'd never investigated in detail, but I did know that explicit human intervention had been required for many of the fine points. Still, whether this tunnel had formed unbidden at the intersection of certain levels of marker-chemical gradients, because lithophilic bacteria had noticed the cue and switched on all the right genes-or whether they'd had to be told more forcefully, by a person tipping a bucketload of primer onto the surface-it beat attacking the rock for a month or two with a diamond-coated drill.

I watched the twin reflections of the lantern beams slowly shrinking into the darkness, and the point-of-view image of pebbled gray-green rock sliding by. There were more hints of ancestral coral, and fleeting glimpses of the bones of fish trapped in the compacting of the reefs-and again, I felt an eerie sense of the compressed time scale of the island. The idea that subterranean depths belonged to inconceivably remote eons was so ingrained that it required a constant effort to remain prepared for soft drink bottles or car tires-predating Stateless, but perfectly likely to have drifted into the mix when this rock was being formed.

The decorative trace minerals began to fade, not to be wasted at a depth where they'd rarely be seen. Rajendra's breathing accelerated, and he glanced up toward the surface; some of the people watching the screen called down to him and waved, their arms skinny silhouettes half eaten by the glare from the dazzling circle of sky. He looked away, and then directly down; the grid of the platform was no real obstruction, but neither lantern beams nor sunlight penetrated far. He seemed to grow calm again. I'd considered asking him to provide a running commentary, but I was glad now that I hadn't; it would have been an unfair burden.

The wall of the tunnel grew visibly moist; Rajendra reached out and trailed his fingers through the chalky fluid. Water and nutrients penetrated every part of the island (even the center, although the dry, hard surface layer was thickest there). It didn't matter that the rock here would never be mined-and the fact that the tunnel remained unhealed" showed that this region had been explicitly programmed 127.

against regrowth. The lithophiles were still indispensable; the heartrock could never be allowed to die.

I began to make out tiny bubbles forming in the fluid clinging to the wall-and then, deeper still, visible effervescence. Beyond the edges of the guyot, Stateless was unsupported from below-and a solid limestone overhang forty kilometers long, strengthened by biopolymers or not, would have snapped in an instant. The guyot was a useful anchor, and it bore some of the load, but most of the island simply had to float. Stateless was three-quarters air; the heartrock was a fine, mineralized foam, lighter than water.

The air in the foam was under pressure, though: from the rock above, and-below sea level-from the surrounding water trying to force its way in. Air was constantly being lost to diffusion through the rock; the wind blasting out of this tunnel was the acc.u.mulated leakage from hundreds of square meters, but the same thing was happening, less dramatically, everywhere.

The lithophiles prevented Stateless from collapsing like a punctured lung, and sinking like a drowned sponge. Plenty of natural organisms were proficient at making gas, but they tended to excrete products you wouldn't want wafting out of the ground in vast amounts, like methane or hydrogen sulphide. The lithophiles consumed water and carbon dioxide (mostly dissolved) to make carbohydrates and oxygen (mostly undis-solved)-and because they manufactured "oxygen-deficient" carbohydrates (like deoxyribose), they released more oxygen than they took in carbon dioxide, adding to the net increase in pressure.

All of this required energy as well as raw materials; the lithophiles, living in darkness, needed to be fed. The nutrients they consumed and the products they excreted were part of a cycle which stretched out to the reefs and beyond; ultimately, sunlight on distant water powered everything they did.

Soon the surface was frothing and boiling, spraying calcareous droplets toward the camera like spittle. And it finally dawned on me that I'd been utterly mistaken: the dive had nothing to do with Edenite notions of "modern tribalism." Whatever courage it required was incidental; that wasn't being valued for its own sake. The point was to descend through the palpable exhalation of the rock, and to see with your own eyes what Stateless was: to understand the hidden machinery which kept the island afloat.

128.

Rajendra's hand appeared at the border of the image as he fitted the mouthpiece and switched on the air supply. Of course: all this seeping liquid would build up at the bottom of the tunnel. He glanced down once, at what looked like a dark, sulphurous pool, boiling with volcanic heat; in fact, it was probably chilly and almost odorless. Munroe had been right about one thing: you really had to be there. What's more ... the tunnel wind would be weaker at this depth than at the surface, because much of the leaking rock contributing to the total airflow was now overhead. Rajen-dra would have no trouble noticing the difference-but the view, alone, of gas escaping at ever greater pressure, suggested exactly the opposite.

As the camera plunged beneath the surface, the image flickered and then switched to lower resolution. Even through the turbulent, cloudy water, I could still catch occasional glimpses of the tunnel wall-or at least the wall of bubbles streaming out of the rock. It was a weird, disorienting sight-it almost looked as if the water was so acidic that it was dissolving the limestone right before my eyes . . . but once again, that impression would have been instantly untenable if I'd been down there in person, swimming in the stuff.

The resolution dropped again, and then the frame rate fell; the picture became a series of stills in rapid succession as the camera struggled to maintain contact. Sound came through clearly enough, though I probably wouldn't have recognized distortion in the noise of bubbles breaking against a scuba mask. Rajendra glanced down; the view showed ten thousand pearls of oxygen streaming up through opalescent water- and nothing more distant than his knees. I thought I heard him inhaling sharply, tensing himself in preparation for touching the bottom-and then I almost sent the notepad tumbling down after him.

One still showed a*startled, bright red fish staring straight into the camera. In the next image, it was gone.

I turned to the woman beside me. "Did you see-?" She had, but she didn't seem at all surprised. The skin tingled all over my body. How thick was the rock we were standing on? How long was the cable?

When Rajendra emerged from the underside of the island, he made a noise which might have expressed anything from exuberance to terror; with a plastic tube in his mouth, and all the other acoustic complications, all I could discern was a m.u.f.fled choking sound. As he descended through the subterranean ocean, the water around him gradually became clearer. I saw a whole school of tiny, pale fish cross the lantern beam in 129.

the distance, followed by a gray manta ray at least a meter wide, mouth stretched open in a permanent, plankton-straining grin. I glanced up from the screen, shaken. This couldn't be happening beneath my feet.

The winch halted. Rajendra looked up, back toward Stateless, tilting the lantern on its pivot, swinging it back and forth.

Milky water roiled in a layer that clung to the underside. Fine particles of limestone? I was confused; why didn't they simply fall? Even from strobed stills, I could see that this haze was in constant motion, surging rhythmically toward the hidden rock. I could also make out bubbles of gas, dragged down a few meters in some kind of undertow, before finally escaping back into the haze. Rajendra played the beam back and forth, improving his control; the lantern was obviously difficult to manipulate accurately, and I could sense his frustration-but after a few minutes his persistence paid off, A stronger-than-average surge mixed an updraft of clear water into the milky layer above, parting the curtain for an instant. Beam and camera transfixed the event, exposing lumpy rock spa.r.s.ely populated with barnacles and pale, frond-mouthed anemones. In the next frame, the image was blurred-not yet obscured by the haze of white particles, but crinkled, distorted by refraction. At first, we'd seen the rock through pure water; now we saw it through water and air.

There was a thin layer of air constantly trapped against the underside, maintained by the steady stream of oxygen escaping from the foamed rock.

This air gave the water a surface which could carry waves. Every wave which crashed on the distant reefs would send a twin diving beneath the island.

No wonder the water was cloudy. The underside of Stateless was being constantly sc.r.a.ped by a vast, wet, jagged file. Waves eroded the sh.o.r.eline, but at least that stopped at the high-tide mark. This a.s.sault was going on beneath dry land, all the way to the rim of the guyot.

I turned again to the woman beside me, one of Rajendra's friends. "The limestone detritus . . . tiny particles like that, must lose all their oxygen, all their buoyancy. Why don't they just. . . fall?"

"They do. The white comes from engineered diatoms. They scavenge calcium from the water, mineralize it-then migrate up and paste themselves into the rock when the waves dash them against it. Coral polyps can't grow in the darkness, so the diatoms are the only repair mechanism." She smiled, hyperlucid; she'd been there to see for herself. "That's 130.

what holds the island up: just a fine mist of calcium, fading away into the depths, and a few trillion microscopic creatures whose genes tell them what to do with it."

The winch started rewinding. No one was near it; there must have been a control b.u.t.ton for the diver, which I'd missed, or maybe it was preprogrammed, the whole dive calculated in advance to limit the risk of decompression sickness. Rajendra put his hand in front of his face and waved to us. People laughed and joked as he began his ascent; it was nothing like the mood when I'd arrived.

I asked the woman, "Do you have a notepad?"

"In the bus."

"Do you want the communications software? You could keep the camera..."

She nodded enthusiastically. "Good idea. Thanks!" She went to fetch the notepad.