by Greg Egan
I stood slumped against the wall beside the panel. It occurred to me that if I buried the ACs’ confession, EnGeneUity might still get the blame. If Helen Wu and friends, in hiding, tried claiming responsibility after the fact, they were more than likely to be written off as obscure cranks. No one had ever heard of Anthrocosmologists. Mosala’s martyrdom could, still, break the boycott wide open.
I could already hear myself reciting the comforting rationalization over and over in my head: It would have been what she wanted .
I took off my belt and forced the prong of the buckle into the flesh around my metal navel. There was a thin layer of bioengineered connective tissue around the surgical steel, sealing the permanent wound against infection; the sound of tearing collagen set my teeth on edge, but there were no nerve endings to register the damage. A couple of centimeters down, though, I hit the metal flange which anchored the port in place. I levered the flesh away from the tube, and managed to force the prong past the edge of the flange.
It had seemed like a small enough piece of DIY surgery: enlarging the existing hole in the abdominal wall by seven or eight millimeters. My body disagreed. I persisted, digging around under the flange and trying to twist it free, while conflicting waves of chemical messengers flooded out from the site, delivering razor-sharp rebukes and analgesic comfort in turn. Kuwale came over and helped me, pulling the aperture open. As vis warm fingers brushed the scars where I’d slashed myself in front of Gina, I found I had an erection; it was the wrong response for so many reasons that I almost burst out laughing. Sweat ran into my eyes, blood trickled down toward my groin – and my body kept on blindly signaling desire. And the truth was, if ve’d been willing, I would have happily lain down on the floor and made love in any way possible. Just to feel more of vis skin against my skin. Just to believe that we’d made some kind of connection.
The buried steel tube emerged, trailing a short length of blood-slick optical fiber. I turned away and spat out a mouthful of acid. Mercifully, nothing followed.
I waited for my fingers to stop shaking, then wiped everything clean on my shirt, and unscrewed the whole end assembly – leaving the windowed port naked, unencumbered. More like circumcision than phalloplasty – and a lot of trouble to go through for a millimeter of penetration. I pocketed the metal foreskin, then found the wall socket and tried again.
Large, cheerful, blue-on-white letters appeared in front of me – unable to dazzle, but no less of a shock.
Mitsubishi Shanghai Marine
Model Number LMHDV-12-5600
Emergency Options:
F – launch Flares
B – activate radio Beacon
I hit all the possible escape codes, in the hope of finding some wider menu – but this was it, the complete list of choices. All the glorious fantasies I hadn’t dared entertain had involved reaching the ship’s main computer, gaining instant access to the net, and archiving the ACs’ pre-recorded confession in twenty safe places, while simultaneously sending copies to everyone at the Einstein Conference. This was nothing but a vestigial emergency system – probably built into the design as a minimum statutory requirement, and then ignored when the ship was fitted out by a third party with proper communications and navigation equipment.
Ignored – or disconnected?
I mimed typing B.
The text of a simple mayday broadcast flowed across the virtual screen. It gave the ship’s model number, serial number, latitude and longitude – if I remembered the map of Stateless correctly, we were closer to the island than I’d thought – and stated that “survivors” were located in the “main cargo hold.” I suddenly had a strong suspicion that if we’d bothered to search the rest of the hold, we might have found another panel, hiding two fist-sized red buttons labeled BEACON and FLARES – but I didn’t want to think about that.
Somewhere up on deck, a siren started screaming.
Kuwale was dismayed. “What did you do? Trigger a fire alarm?”
“I broadcast a mayday. I thought flares might get us into trouble.” I closed the panel and started rebuttoning my bloody shirt, as if hiding the evidence might help.
I heard someone heavy running across the deck. A few seconds later, the siren shut off. Then the hatch was wound halfway open, and Three peered down at us. He was holding a gun, almost absentmindedly. “What good do you think that’s going to do you? We’re sending out the false-alarm code already; no one’s going to take any notice.” He seemed more bemused than angry. “All you have to do is sit tight and stop fucking about, and you’ll be free soon enough. So how about some cooperation?”
He unfurled the ladder and came down, alone. I stared up at the strip of pale dawn sky behind him; I could see a fading satellite, but I had no way to reach it. Three picked up two pieces of discarded rope and tossed them at us. “Sit down and tie your feet together. Do it properly and you might get breakfast.” He yawned widely, then turned and yelled, “Giorgio! Anna! Give me a hand!”
Kuwale rushed him, faster than I’d seen anyone move in my life. Three raised the gun and shot ver in the thigh. Kuwale staggered, pirouetting, still moving forward. Three kept the gun aimed squarely on ver, as vis knees buckled and vis head sagged. As the shot’s reverb faded from my skull, I could hear ver gasping for breath.
I stood and shouted abuse at him, barely conscious of what I was saying. I’d lost it: I wanted to take the hold, the ship, the ocean, and wipe them all away like cobwebs. I stepped forward, waving my arms wildly, screaming obscenities. Three glanced at me, perplexed, as if he couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. I took another step, and he aimed the gun at me.
Kuwale sprang forward and knocked him off his feet. Before he could rise, ve leaped on him and pinned his arms, slamming his right hand against the floor. I was paralyzed for a second, convinced that the struggle was futile, but then I ran to help.
Three must have looked like an indulgent father playing with two belligerent five-year-olds. I tugged at the gun barrel protruding from his huge fist; the weapon might as well have been set in stone. He seemed ready to climb to his feet as soon as he caught his breath, with or without Kuwale’s slender frame attached.
I kicked him in the head. He protested, outraged. I attacked the same spot repeatedly, fighting down my revulsion. The skin above his eye split open; I ground my heel hard into the wound, crouching down and pulling on the gun. He cried out in pain and let it slip free – and then half sat up, throwing Kuwale to one side. I fired the gun into the floor behind me, hoping to discourage him from making me use it. Another shot rang out, above. I looked up. Nineteen – Anna? – was lying on her stomach at the edge of the hold.
I aimed the gun at Three, stepping back a few paces. He stared at me, bloodied and angry – but still curious, trying to fathom my senseless actions.
“You want it, don’t you? The unraveling. You want Mosala to take the world apart.” He laughed and shook his head. “You’re too late.”
Anna called out, “There’s no need for any of this. Please. Put the gun down, and you’ll be back on Stateless in an hour. No one wants to harm you.”
I shouted back, “Bring me a working notepad. Fast. You have two minutes before I blow his brains out.” I meant it – if only for as long as it took to get the words out.
Anna crawled back from the edge; I heard a murmur of angry low voices as she consulted with the others.
Kuwale limped over to me. Vis wound was bleeding steadily; the bullet had clearly missed the femoral artery, but vis breathing was ragged, ve needed help. Ve said, “They’re not going to do it. They’ll just keep stalling. Put yourself in their place—”
Three said calmly, “Ve’s right. Whatever value anyone puts on my life … if Mosala becomes the Keystone, we all die anyway. If you’re trying to save her, you’ve got nothing to trade – because whatever you threaten, it’s forfeit either way.”
I glanced up toward the deck; I could still hear them arguing. But if they had enough faith in the
ir cosmology to kill Mosala – and to trash their own lives and become self-righteous fugitives, hiding out in rural Mongolia or Turkistan without so much as a share of the media rights … the threat of one more death was not going to dent their conviction.
I said, “I think your work is in urgent need of peer review.”
I handed Kuwale the gun, then took off my shirt and tied it around the top of vis leg. I’d stopped bleeding, myself; the ruptured sealant tissue was oozing a colorless balm of antibiotics and coagulants.
I returned to the utilities panel and plugged myself in again. Independent of the main computer, the emergency system couldn’t be shut down; I repeated the mayday, then fired the flares. I heard three loud hisses of expanding gas – and then a merciless actinic glare began to spread down the far wall, displacing the soft dawn light. The brown patina of algal stains had never been clearer – but it lost its camouflage value completely: the edges of another recessed compartment appeared, the gap around the protective cover starkly etched in black. I looked inside; there were two large buttons, just as I’d suspected – and an emergency air supply as well. On close inspection, the faintest hint of a cryptic logo – incomprehensible across all languages and cultures – showed through the stains on the compartment’s door.
The conversation above had fallen silent. I was just hoping they wouldn’t panic, and rush us.
Three seemed tempted to say something disparaging, but he kept his mouth shut. He eyed Kuwale nervously; maybe he’d decided that ve was the real fanatic who wanted the unraveling , and I’d merely been duped into helping ver.
The flare rose toward the zenith, its light filling the hold. I said, “I don’t understand. How do you get to the point where you’re ready to kill an innocent woman – just because some computer tells you she can bring on Armageddon?” Three mimed indifference in the presence of fools. I said, “So you found a theory that could swallow any TOE. A system that could out-explain any kind of physics. But don’t kid yourself: it’s not science. You might as well have stumbled on some way to add up the gematria numbers of ‘Mosala’ to get 666.”
Three said mildly, “Ask Kuwale if it’s all cabalistic gibberish. Ask ver about Kinshasa in ’43.”
“What?”
“That’s just … apocryphal bullshit.” Kuwale was drenched in sweat, and showing signs of going into shock. I took the gun, and ve went to sit against the wall.
Three persisted, “Ask ver how Muteba Kazadi died.”
I said, “He was seventy-eight years old.” I struggled to recall what his biographers had said about his death; given his age, I hadn’t paid much attention. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘cerebral hemorrhage.’”
Three laughed, disbelieving, and a chill ran through me. Of course they had more than pure information theory behind their beliefs: they also had at least one mythical death by forbidden knowledge – to validate everything, to convince them that the abstractions had teeth.
I said, “Okay. But if Muteba didn’t bring down the universe when he went … why should Mosala?”
“Muteba wasn’t a TOE theorist; he can’t have become the Keystone. No one knows exactly what he was doing; all his notes have been lost. But some of us think he found a way to mix with information – and when it happened, the shock was too much for him.”
Kuwale snorted derisively.
I said, “What’s ‘mix with information’ supposed to mean?”
Three said, “Every physical structure encodes information – but normally it’s the laws of physics, alone, which control how the structure behaves.” He grinned. “Drop a Bible and a copy of the Principia together, and they’ll fall side-by-side all the way. The fact that the laws of physics are themselves information is invisible, irrelevant. They’re as absolute as Newtonian space-time – a fixed backdrop, not a player.
“But nothing’s pure, nothing’s independent. Time and space mix at high velocities. Macroscopic possibilities mix at the quantum level. The four forces mix at high temperatures. And physics and information mix … by an unknown process. The symmetry group isn’t clear, let alone the detailed dynamics. But it could just as easily be triggered by pure knowledge – knowledge of information cosmology itself, encoded in a human brain – as by any physical extreme.”
“To what effect?”
“Hard to predict.” The blood on his face resembled a black caul in the flare’s light. “Maybe … exposing the deepest unification: revealing precisely how physics is created by explanation – and vice versa. Spinning the vector, rotating all the hidden machinery into view.”
“Yeah? If Muteba had such a great cosmic revelation … how do you know it didn’t turn him into the Keystone? The instant before he died?” I knew I was probably wasting my breath, but I couldn’t stop trying to get Mosala off the hook.
Three smirked at my ignorance. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen models of an information cosmos with a Keystone who mixed . And I know we don’t live in that universe.”
“Why?”
“Because after the Aleph moment, everyone else would get dragged along. Exponential growth: one person mixing, then two, four, eight … if that had happened in ’43, we’d all have followed Muteba Kazadi by now. We’d all know, firsthand, exactly what killed him.”
The flare descended out of sight, plunging the hold into grayness again. I invoked Witness , adapting my eyes to the ambient light again instantly.
Kuwale said, “Andrew! Listen!”
There was a deep rhythmic pulsing sound coming through the hull, growing steadily louder. I’d finally learned to recognize an MHD engine – and this one wasn’t ours.
I waited, sick with uncertainty. My hands were beginning to shake as badly as Kuwale’s. After a few minutes, there was shouting in the distance. I couldn’t make out the words – but there were new voices, with Polynesian accents.
Three said quietly, “You keep your mouth shut, or they’ll all have to die. Or is Violet Mosala worth a dozen farmers to you?”
I stared at him, light-headed. Would the rest of the ACs think like that? How many real deaths would they have to confront, before they admitted that they might be mistaken? Or had they surrendered completely to a moral calculus where even the smallest chance of the unraveling outweighed any crime, any atrocity?
The voices grew nearer, then the engine stopped; it sounded as if the fishing boat had pulled up right beside us. But I could already hear another one in the distance.
I caught snatches of a conversation: “But I leased you this boat, so it’s my responsibility. The emergency system should not have malfunctioned.” It was a deep voice, a woman’s, puzzled, reasonable, persistent. I glanced at Kuwale; vis eyes were shut, vis teeth clenched tight. The sight of ver in pain cut me up badly; I didn’t trust what I was beginning to feel for ver, but that wasn’t the point. Ve needed treatment, we had to get away.
But if I called out … how many people would I endanger?
I heard a third ship approaching. Mayday … false-alarm code … mayday … flares. The whole local fleet seemed to think that was strange enough to be worth looking into. Even if all these people were unarmed, the ACs were now completely outnumbered.
I raised my head and bellowed, “In here!”
Three tensed, as if preparing to move. I fired the gun into the floor near his head, and he froze. A wave of vertigo swept over me – and I waited for a barrage of automatic fire. I was insane – what had I done?
There were heavy footfalls on the deck, more shouting.
Twenty – and a tall Polynesian woman in blue coveralls – approached the edge of the hold.
The farmer glanced down at us, frowning. She said, “If they’ve threatened violence, gather your evidence and take it to an adjudicator back on the island. But whatever’s gone on here – don’t you think both sides would be better off separated?”
Twenty faked outrage. “They hide on board, they intimidate us with firearms, they take a man hostage! And you expect
us to hand them over to you, so you can let them go free!”
The farmer looked straight at me. I couldn’t speak, but I met her gaze, and I let my right hand drop to my side. She addressed Twenty again, deadpan. “I’m happy to testify for you, about what I’ve seen here. So if they’re willing to give up their hostage and come with us – you have my word, justice won’t be compromised.”
Four other farmers appeared at the edge of the hold. Kuwale, still sitting by the wall, raised a hand in greeting, and called out something in a Polynesian language. One of the farmers laughed raucously, and replied. I felt a surge of hope. The ship was swarming with people – and when it came down to the prospect of a massacre, face-to-face, the ACs had buckled.
I put the gun in my back pocket. I shouted up, “He’s free to go!”
Three rose to his feet, looking surly. I said quietly, “She’s dead anyway. You said so, yourself. You’re already savior of the universe.” I tapped my stomach. “Think of your place in history. Don’t tarnish your image, now.” He exchanged glances with Twenty, then started climbing the rope ladder.
I threw the gun into a corner of the hold, then went to help Kuwale. Ve took the ladder slowly; I followed close behind, hoping I’d be able to catch ver if ve lost vis grip.
There must have been thirty farmers on deck – and eight ACs, most of them with guns, who seemed far more tense than the unarmed anarchists. I felt a reprise of horror at the thought of what might have happened. I looked around for Helen Wu, but she was nowhere in sight. Had she returned to the island during the night, to oversee Mosala’s death? I’d heard no boat … but she might have donned scuba gear, and ridden the harvester.
As we started making our way toward the edge of the deck, where a concertina bridge linked the two ships, Twenty called out, “Don’t think you’re going to walk away with stolen property.”
The farmer was losing patience; she turned to me. “Do you want to empty out your pockets, and save us all some time? Your friend needs a doctor.”
