Distress

by Greg Egan

  I watched a schematic of the worst-case scenario. “If antibiotic-resistant, Mexico City V. cholerae succeed in crossing the blood-brain barrier, immunosuppressants can limit the fever – but bacterial toxins themselves are likely to cause irreversible damage.”

  Mutant choleragen molecules fused with neural membranes. The cells collapsed like punctured balloons.

  I still feared death as much as ever – but the truth had lost its sting. If the TOE had taken me in its fist and squeezed … at least it had proved that there was solid ground beneath me: the final law, the simplest pattern, holding up the world in all its strangeness.

  I’d hit bottom. Once you’d touched the bedrock of the underworld, the foundations of the universe, there was nowhere else to fall.

  I said, “That’s enough. Now find something to cheer me up.”

  “How about the Beat poets?”

  I smiled. “Perfect.”

  Sisyphus ransacked the libraries, and played them reading their own works. Ginsberg howling “Moloch! Moloch!” Burroughs rasping “A Junkie’s Christmas” – all severed limbs in suitcases, and scoring the immaculate fix.

  And best of all, Kerouac himself, wild and melodic, stoned and innocent: “What If The Three Stooges Were Real?”

  Afternoon sunlight slanted across the ward and brushed the side of my face, bridging distance, energy, scale, complexity. This was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe. It was the most ordinary thing imaginable.

  I was as ready as I’d ever be. I closed my eyes.

  #

  Someone prodded my shoulder, and said for the fourth or fifth time, “Wake up, please.”

  I’d lost all choice in the matter. I opened my eyes.

  A young woman stood beside me, no one I’d seen before. She had serious, dark brown eyes. Olive skin, long black hair. She spoke with a German accent.

  “Drink this.” She held out a small vial of clear liquid.

  “I can’t keep anything down. Didn’t they tell you?”

  “This, you will.”

  I was past caring; vomiting was as natural to me as breathing. I took the vial and tipped the contents down my throat. My esophagus spasmed, and acid hit the roof of my mouth – but nothing more.

  I coughed. “Why didn’t someone offer me that sooner?”

  “It only just arrived.”

  “From where?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I blinked at her. My head cleared slightly. “Arrived? What kind of drug wouldn’t be in stock already?”

  “What do you think?”

  The flesh at the base of my spine went cold. “Am I dreaming? Or am I dead?”

  “Akili had samples of your blood smuggled out to … a certain country, and analyzed by friends. You just swallowed a set of magic bullets for every stage of the weapon. You’ll be on your feet in a matter of hours.”

  My head throbbed. The weapon. My worst fear had just been confirmed and banished in the same sentence; it was disorienting. “Every stage? What would have come next? What have I missed out on?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I think you’re right.” I still wasn’t convinced that any of this was happening. “Why? Why did Akili go to all that trouble just to save me?”

  “We had to find out exactly what you were carrying. Violet Mosala might still be at risk, even though she’s showing no symptoms. We had to have a cure for her, ready, here on the island.”

  I absorbed that. At least she hadn’t said: We don’t care who is or isn’t the Keystone. We’re all prepared to risk our lives to protect just about anyone.

  “So what was I carrying? And why did it detonate prematurely?”

  The young AC frowned solemnly. “We still haven’t worked out all the details – but the timing fell apart. It looks like the bacteria generated confused internal signals, due to a disparity between intracellular molecular clocks and the host’s biochemical cues. The melatonin receptors were choked, saturated—” She stopped, alarmed. “I don’t understand. Why are you laughing?”

  #

  By the time I left the hospital, on Tuesday morning, I had my strength back – and I was enraged. The conference was half over, but TOEs were no longer the story – and if Sarah Knight, for whatever unfathomable reasons, had abandoned the war over Mosala to sit by Yasuko Nishide’s bedside, incommunicado … I’d finally have 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 technolibération , 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 technolibérateurs , 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 technolibération 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

  Chapter 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 tw
enty other people on the ride north-east 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 metamorphosed 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 bioengineered sea monster? The distinctions blurred into meaninglessness.

  I caught up with the truck at the harbor; the two workers loading it glanced at me curiously, but didn’t ask what I was doing here. My idleness made me feel like a trespasser; everyone else in sight was shifting crates or sorting seafood. There was machinery, but most of it was very low-tech: electric forklifts, but no giant cranes, no vast conveyor belts feeding processing plants; the reef-rock was probably too soft to support anything heavy. They could have built a floating platform out on the harbor to take the weight of a crane, but apparently no one felt it was worth the investment. Or maybe the farmers simply preferred it this way.

  There was still no sign of Kuwale. I moved away from the loading bay and wandered closer to the water’s edge. Biochemical signals diffusing out from the rock kept the harbor free of coral, and plankton transported sediment to the reefs where it was needed; the water here looked bottomless, deep blue-green. Amidst the froth of the gently breaking swell, I thought I could discern an unnatural effervescence; bubbles were rising up, everywhere. The outgassing from the pressurized rock, which I’d seen – second hand – on the underside of Stateless, was escaping here to the surface.

  Out on the harbor, farmers were winching aboard what might have been a fishing net bursting with produce. Gelatinous tendrils embracing the bounty glistened in the sun. One worker stretched up and touched the top of the “net” with something on the end of a long pole, and the contents abruptly spilt onto the deck, leaving the slack tendrils quivering; within seconds, when the last scraps had fallen, the translucent creature was almost invisible. I had to strain my eyes to follow it, as they lowered it back into the ocean.

  Kuwale said, “Do you know what non-renegades pay Ocean Logic for a harvester like that? All its genes were taken straight from existing species – all the company ever did was patent them, and rearrange them.”

  I turned. “Spare me the propaganda. I’m on your side – if you’ll give me some straight answers.”

  Kuwale looked troubled, but said nothing. I spread my arms in a gesture of frustration. “What do I have to do to convince you to trust me – as much as you trusted Sarah Knight? Do I have to die for the cause first?”

  “I’m sorry you were infected. The wild type’s bad enough; I know, I’ve had it.” Ve was wearing the same black T-shirt I’d seen ver in at the airport, flickering with random points of brightness. It suddenly struck me again just how young ve was: little more than half my age – and in at the deep end.

  I said, begrudgingly, “That wasn’t your fault. And I’m grateful for what you did.” Even if saving my life wasn’t the point.

  Kuwale looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if I’d just showered ver with undeserved praise. I hesitated. “It wasn’t your fault, was it?”

  “Not directly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? The weapon was yours?”

  “No!” Ve looked away, and said bitterly, “But I still have to take some responsibility for everything they do.”

  “ Why? Because they’re not working for the biotech companies? Because they’re technolibérateurs , like you?” Ve wouldn’t meet my eyes; I felt a small surge of triumph. I’d finally got something right.

  Kuwale replied impatiently, “Of course they’re technolibérateurs .” As if to say: isn’t everyone? “But that’s not why they’re trying to kill Mosala.”

  A man was walking toward us with a crate on his shoulder. As I glanced in his direction, red lines flashed up across my vision. He kept his face half-turned away from us, and a wide-brimmed hat concealed half of the rest, but Witness – reconstructing the hidden parts by symmetry and anatomical extrapolation rules – saw enough to be convinced.

  I fell silent. Kuwale waite
d until the man was out of earshot, then said urgently, “Who was it?”

  “Don’t ask me. You wouldn’t give me any names to go with the faces – remember?” But I relented, and checked with the software. “Number seven in your list, if that means anything to you.”

  “What kind of swimmer are you?”

  “Very mediocre. Why?”

  Kuwale turned and dived into the harbor. I crouched by the edge of the water, and waited for ver to surface.

  I called out, “What are you doing, you lunatic? He’s gone.”

  “Don’t follow me in yet.”

  “I have no intention—”

  Kuwale swam toward me. “Wait until it’s clear which one of us is doing better.” Ve held up vis right hand; I reached down and took it, and began to haul ver up; ve shook vis head impatiently. “Leave me in, unless I start to falter.” Ve trod water. “Immediate irrigation is the best way to remove some transdermal toxins – but for others, it’s the worst thing you can do: it can drive the hydrophobic spearheads into the skin much faster.” Ve submerged completely, dragging me in up to the elbow, almost dislocating my shoulder.

  When ve surfaced again, I said, “What if it’s a mixture of both.”

  “Then we’re fucked.”

  I glanced toward the loading bay. “I could go and get help.” In spite of everything I’d just been through – no doubt thanks to a passing stranger with an aerosol – part of me still flatly refused to believe in invisible weapons . Or maybe I just imagined that some principle of double jeopardy meant that the molecular world had no more power over me, no right to a second attempt to claim me. Our presumed assailant was walking calmly off into the distance; it was impossible to feel threatened.

  Kuwale watched me anxiously. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Except you’re breaking my arm. This is insane.” My skin began to tingle. Kuwale groaned, a worst-expectations-come-true sound. “You’re turning blue. Get in.”