After about fifteen minutes, the same enzyme factories finally began degrading the opiates in my blood, and I clawed my way down from marshmallow heaven. I begged for a notepad; Jwala obliged, then left to help out on deck.
I managed to get through to Karin De Groot immediately. I stuck to the essentials. De Groot heard me out in silence; my appearance must have given the story a degree of credibility. “You have to talk Violet into heading back to civilization. Even if she’s not convinced of the danger… what has she got to lose? She can always deliver her final paper from Cape Town.”
De Groot said, “Believe me, she’ll take every word of this seriously. Yasuko Nishide died last night. It was pneumonia—and he was very frail —but Violet’s still badly shaken. And she’s seen the cholera genome analysis, which was done by a reputable Bombay lab. But—”
“So you’ll fly out with her?” Nishide’s death saddened me, but Mosala’s loss of complacency was pure good news. “I know, it’s a risk, she might get sick on the plane, but—”
De Groot cut me off. “Listen. There’ve been some problems here, while you were away. No one’s flying anywhere.”
“Why? What kind of problems?”
“A boatload of… mercenaries, I don’t know… arrived on the island overnight. They’ve occupied the airport.”
Jwala had come back to check on Kuwale; he caught the last part of the conversation, and interjected derisively, “Agents provocateurs. Every few years a different pack of apes in designer camouflage show up, try to make trouble… fail, and go away.” He sounded about as concerned as someone from an ordinary democracy, complaining about the periodic irritation of election campaigns. “I saw them last night, landing in the harbor. They were heavily armed, we had to let them pass.” He grinned. “But they’re in for some surprises. I’ll give them six months, at the most.”
“Six months?”
He shrugged. “It’s never been longer.”
A boatload of mercenaries, trying to make trouble—the boat which had rammed the ACs? In any case, Twenty and her colleagues must have known by morning that the airport had been seized—and that my testimony would make little difference to Mosala’s chances.
The timing could not have been worse, but it was hardly surprising. The Einstein Conference was already lending Stateless too much respectability, and Mosala’s planned migration would be an even greater embarrassment. But EnGeneUity and their allies wouldn’t try to assassinate her, creating an instant martyr. Nor would they dissolve the island back into the ocean, and risk scaring off legitimate customers worth billions of dollars. All they could do was try, one last time, to bring the social order of Stateless crashing down—proving to the world that the whole naive experiment had been doomed from the start.
I said, “Where’s Violet now?”
“Talking to Henry Buzzo. She’s trying to convince him to go with her to the hospital.”
“Good idea.” Immersed in the schemes of the “moderates,” I’d almost forgotten that Buzzo was also in danger—and Mosala was at risk on two fronts. The extremists had already triumphed in Kyoto—and whoever had infected me with the cholera, en route from Sydney, was probably on Stateless right now, looking for a chance to make up for the botched first attempt.
De Groot said, “I’ll show them this conversation immediately.”
“And give a copy to security.”
“Right. For what that’s worth.” She seemed to be holding up under the pressure far better than I was; she added wrily, “No sign of Helen Wu in flippers, so far. But I’ll keep you posted.”
We arranged to meet at the hospital. I signed off, and closed my eyes, fighting the temptation to sink back into the lingering opiate fog.
It had taken the mainstream ACs five days to smuggle in a cure for me even with the airport open. After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t ready to swallow the fact that Mosala was now a walking corpse—but short of a counter-invasion by African technoliberateurs, over a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers, in the next day or two, at the latest… I could see no hope of her surviving.
As the boat approached the northern harbor, I sat watching over Akili. I badly wanted to take vis hand, but I was afraid it would only make things worse. How could I have fallen for someone who’d surgically excised even the possibility of desire?
Easily enough, apparently: a shared trauma, an intense experience, the confusing absence of gender cues… it was no great mystery. People became infatuated with asex all the time. And no doubt it would pass, soon enough—once I accepted the simple fact that nothing I felt could ever be reciprocated.
After a while, I found I could no longer bear to look at vis face; it hurt too much. So I watched the glowing traces on the bedside monitor, and listened for each shallow exhalation, and tried to understand why the ache I felt would not go away.
The trams were reportedly still running, but one of the farmers offered to drive us all the way to the city. “Quicker than waiting for an ambulance,” she explained. “There are only ten on the island.” She was a young Fijian named Adelle Vunibobo; I remembered seeing her looking down into the hold on the ACs’ boat.
Kuwale sat between us in the cab of the truck, half awake but still stupefied. I watched the vivid coral inlets shrinking around us, like a fast-motion view of the reefs’ slow compaction.
I said, “You risked your life back there.”
“Maydays at sea are taken very seriously.” Her tone was gently mocking, as if she was trying to puncture my deferential manner.
“Lucky we weren’t on land.” I persisted, “But you could see that the boat wasn’t in danger. The crew told you to clear off and mind your own business. Underlining the suggestion with guns.”
She glanced at me curiously. “So you think it was reckless? Foolish? There’s no police force here. Who else would have helped you?”
“No one,” I admitted.
She fixed her eyes on the uneven terrain ahead. “I was in a fishing boat that capsized, five years ago. We were caught in a storm. My parents, and my sister. My parents were knocked unconscious, they drowned straight away. My sister and I spent ten hours in the ocean, treading water, taking turns holding each other up.”
“I'm sorry. The Greenhouse Storms have claimed so many people—”
She groaned. “I don’t want your sympathy. I'm just trying to explain.”
I waited in silence. After a while, she said, “Ten hours. I still dream about it. I grew up on a fishing boat—and I’d seen storms sweep away whole villages. I thought I already knew exactly how I felt about the ocean. But that time in the water with my sister changed everything.”