Distress

There was more, with some of my footage of Mosala at the conference, and this journalist's own coverage of the shelling, the dignified exodus from the city, the establishment of the camps, and an attack by one of the mercenaries' robots.

It was all immaculately shot and edited. It was powerful, but never exploitative. And from start to finish, it was unashamed—but absolutely honest—propaganda for the renegades.

I could not have done it half as well.

The best was yet to come, though.

As the view returned to the dark waters of the lagoon, the journalist signed off.

"This is Sarah Knight, for SeeNet News, on Stateless."

As far as the personal com nets were concerned, Sarah Knight was still incommunicado in Kyoto. Lydia wouldn't take my call—but I found a SeeNet production assistant willing to pass on a message to Sarah. She called me half an hour later, and Akili and I dragged the story out of her.

"When Nishide became ill in Kyoto, I told the Japanese authorities exactly what I thought was happening—but his pneumococcus sequenced as an unengineered strain, and they refused to believe that it had been introduced by a trojan." Trojans were bacteria which could reproduce themselves and their hidden pathogenic cargo—without symptoms or an immune response—for dozens of generations… and then self-destruct without a trace, leaving behind a massive but apparently natural infection to swamp the body's defenses. "After making so much of a stink—and no one believing me, not even Nishide's family—I thought it would be wise to keep a low profile."

We weren't able to talk for long, Sarah had to get to an interview with one of the militia's divers, but just as she was about to break the connection, I said haltingly, "The Mosala documentary. You deserved the commission. You should have got it."

She made as if to laughingly dismiss the whole question as ancient history—but then she stopped herself, and said calmly: "That's true. I spent six months making sure I was better prepared than anyone else— and you still came along and stole it in a day. Because you were Lydia's blue-eyed boy, and she wanted to keep you happy."

I couldn't believe how hard it was to get the words out. The injustice was blindingly obvious—and I'd admitted it to myself a thousand times—but some splinter of pride and self-righteousness resisted every step of the way.

I said, "I abused my power. I'm sorry."

Sarah nodded slowly, lips pursed. "Okay. Apology accepted, Andrew. On one condition: you and Akili agree to be interviewed. The invasion is only half the story here—and I don't want the fuckers who put Violet in a coma to get away with anything. I want to hear exactly what happened on that boat."

I turned to Akili. Ve said, "Sure."

We exchanged coordinates. Sarah was on the other side of the island, but she was working her way around to all of the camps, hitching rides with the militia.

"At five a.m.?" she suggested.

Akili laughed, flashing a conspiratorial glance at me. "Why not? No one's sleeping tonight, on Stateless."

The camp was full of the sounds of celebration. People streamed past the tent, laughing and shouting, shrunken silhouettes against the moonlight. Music from the satellites—from Tonga, from Berlin, from Kinshasa—blasted out of the main square—and someone, somehow, had found or made firecrackers. I was still intoxicated with adrenaline, but ragged with fatigue—I wasn't sure if I wanted to join the party, or curl up and hibernate for a fortnight. I'd promised to do neither.

Akili and I sat on the sleeping bag—warmly dressed, with the tent flap closed; the electricity was fading. We passed the hours talking, scanning the nets, lapsing into awkward silences. I longed to bring ver, somehow, inside the aura of invulnerability I felt, having survived my own imagined apocalypse. I wanted to comfort ver in any way I could. My judgment was paralyzed, though; vis body language had become opaque to me, and I had no sense of how or when to touch ver. We'd lain together naked, but I couldn't keep that memory, that image, from signifying more to me than it could ever mean to ver. So we sat apart.

I asked why ve hadn't mentioned the mixing plague to Sarah.

"Because she might have taken it seriously enough to spread word, start a panic."

"Don't you think people might panic less if they knew the cause?"

Akili snorted. "You don't believe what I've told you about the cause. Do you think people would react to the news with anything but incomprehension or hysteria? Anyway, after the Aleph moment, the 'victims' will know far more than anyone who hasn't mixed could ever tell them. And there'll be no question of panic, then: Distress itself will have vanished." Most of this was said with absolute conviction; it was only with the last pronouncement that ve seemed to waver.

I asked tentatively, "So why did the moderates get it so wrong? They had their own supercomputers. They seemed to know as much about Anthrocosmology as anyone. If they could be mistaken about the unraveling…"