It was the old anthropic principle, the fudge which had saved a thousand cosmologies. And I had no real argument with it even if all the other universes were destined to be forever hypothetical.
But Violet Mosala’s methods seemed neither more nor less circular. Her opponents had to “fine tune” a few parameters in their equations, to take account of the particular universe “our” Big Bang had created. Mosala and her supporters merely described real experiments in the real world so thoroughly that they “showed the equations” the very same thing.
It seemed to me that both groups of physicists were confessing, however reluctantly, that they couldn’t quite explain how the universe was built… without mentioning the fact that they were there inside it, looking for the explanation.
Silence filled the cabin as we flew into darkness. Display screens blinked out, one by one, as passengers dozed off; everyone had had a long journey, wherever they’d started from. I watched the cloud banks behind us darken—a swift, violent sunset, metallic and bruised—then I switched to a route map as we headed northeast, just beyond sight of New Zealand. I thought of space probes on slingshot orbits to Venus via Jupiter. It was as if we’d had to take the long way round to build up enough velocity—as if Stateless was moving too fast to be approached any other way.
An hour later, the island finally appeared ahead of us, like a pale stranded starfish. Six arms sloped gently down from a central plateau; along their sides, gray rock gave way to banks of coral, which thinned from a mass of solid outcrops to a lacelike presence barely breaking the surface of the water. A faint blue bioluminescent glow outlined the convoluted borders of the reefs, enclosed by a succession of other hues—the color-coded depth lines of a living navigation chart. A small cloud of flashing orange fireflies was clustered in the nearest of the starfish’s armpits; whether they were boats anchored in the harbor, or something more exotic, I couldn’t tell.
Inland, a sprinkling of lights hinted at a city’s orderly grid. I felt a sudden rush of unease. Stateless was as beautiful as any atoll, as spectacular as any ocean liner… with none of the reassuring qualities of either. How could I trust this bizarre artifact not to crumble into the sea? I was accustomed to standing on solid rock a billion years old, or riding machines of a suitably modest human scale. In my own lifetime, this whole island had been nothing but a cloud of minerals adrift over half the Pacific—and from this vantage, it didn’t seem beyond belief that the ocean might surge in through a thousand invisible pores and channels to dissolve it all, reclaim it all, at any moment.
As we descended, though, the land spread out around us, streets and buildings came into view, and my insecurity faded. One million people had made this their home, staking their lives on its solidity. If it was humanly possible to keep this mirage afloat, then I had nothing to fear.
10
The plane emptied slowly. Passengers pressed forward, sleepy and irritable; many were clutching cushions and small blankets, looking like children up past their bedtime. It was only about nine p.m. here—and most people’s body clocks would have agreed—but we were all still dazed and cramped and weary. I looked around for Indrani Lee, but I couldn’t spot her in the crowd.
There was a security gate at the end of the umbilical, but no airport staff in sight, and no obvious device for interrogating my passport. Stateless placed no restrictions on immigration, let alone the entry of temporary visitors—but they did prohibit certain imports. Beside the gate was a multilingual sign which read:
FEEL FREE TO TRY TO BRING THROUGH WEAPONS. WE'LL FEEL FREE TO TRY TO DESTROY THEM.
STATELESS AIRPORT SYNDICATE
I hesitated. If my passport wasn’t read, and the seal of approval for my implants taken into account… what would this machine do to me? Incinerate a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of hardware—and fry a large part of my digestive tract in the process?
I knew that was paranoid: I could hardly have been the first journalist to set foot on the island. And the message was probably aimed at visitors from certain privately owned South American islands—"libertarian havens” established by self-styled “political refugees” from the US gun law reforms of the twenties—some of whom had tried to bring Stateless around to their special way of thinking on a number of occasions.
Nevertheless, I stood back for several minutes, hoping that someone in uniform would appear to put my mind at ease. My insurance company had declined to offer me any kind of cover once I was on Stateless—and when my bank found out I’d been here, they wouldn’t be pleased; they still owned most of the chips in my gut. Legally, the risk wasn’t mine to take.
No one turned up. I walked through. The frame of the scanner was loose, and it shuddered slightly—my body pinning a tiny portion of the magnetic flux, dragging it forward, then releasing it to rebound like elastic—but no microwave pulses seared my abdomen, and no alarms went off.
The gate led into a modern airport, not much different from many I’d seen in small European cities, with clean-lined architecture, and movable seating which groups of people had arranged in inward-facing rings. There were only three airline counters, and they all displayed much smaller versions of their logos than usual, as if not wishing to attract too much attention. Booking passage here, I’d found no flights advertised openly on the net; I’d had to post a specific query in order to obtain any information. The European Federation, India, and several African and Latin American countries only enforced the minimal boycott of selected high technology which the UN demanded; these airlines were operating entirely within the laws of their home nations. Still, irritating the Japanese, Korean, Chinese and US governments— not to mention the biotech multinationals—would always carry a risk. Committing the offense discreetly wouldn’t conceal anything, but no doubt it acted as a gesture of obeisance, and lessened the perceived need for examples to be made of the collaborators.
I collected my suitcase and stood by the baggage roundabout, trying to get my bearings. I watched my fellow passengers drift away, some greeted by friends, some going on alone. Most spoke in English or French; there was no official language here, but almost two-thirds of the population had migrated from other Pacific islands. Choosing to live on Stateless might always be a political decision in the end—and some Greenhouse refugees apparently preferred to spend years in Chinese detention camps instead, in the hope of eventually being accepted into that entrepreneurial dreamland—but after seeing your home washed into the ocean, I could imagine that a self-repairing (and currently increasing) landmass might hold a special attraction. Stateless represented a reversal of fortune: sunlight and biotechnology playing the whole disaster movie backward. Better than raging at the storm. Fiji and Samoa were finally growing new islands of their own, but they weren’t yet habitable—and both governments were paying several billion dollars for the privilege, in license fees and consultants’ charges. They’d carry the debt into the twenty-second century.
In theory, a patent lasted only seventeen years—but biotech companies had perfected the strategy of re-applying for the same coverage from a different angle when the expiration date loomed: first for the DNA sequence of a gene, and all its applications… then for the corresponding amino acid sequence… then for the shape and functionality (irrespective of precise chemical makeup) of the fully assembled protein. I couldn’t bring myself to simply shrug off the theft of knowledge as a victimless crime—I’d always been swayed by the argument that no one would waste money on R&D if engineered lifeforms couldn’t be patented—but there was something insane about the fact that the most powerful tools against famine, the most powerful tools against environmental damage, the most powerful tools against poverty… were all priced beyond the reach of everyone who needed them the most.