PART TWO

9

The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot—a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano—in the middle of the South Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote—but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.

I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air-conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city—which I’d never seen firsthand—but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.

I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its "destabilizing influence on the region"—but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission… but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.

It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.

So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.

At least two conflicting generalised measures can be applied to T, the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T, and are equivalent when restricted to M—the space of n-dimensional para-compact Hausdorff manifolds—but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—

I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off—but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili—picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate—and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years' time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode… and maybe people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness in future.

There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia—but its enthusiastic punishment of the "anarchists" went above and beyond the call of realpolitik. There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though, and from there I could finally reach my destination.

It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits—the Timor Gap oilfields—with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant—hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk—the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur. Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.

I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.

She said, "You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I’m going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets—and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach."

"You mean Stateless?"

She regarded me sympathetically. "You too?"

I nodded.

"You poor man. Where have you come from?"

"Sydney."

Her accent was almost certainly Bombay but she said, "I’m from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I’m Indrani Lee."

"Andrew Worth."

We shook hands. She said, "Of course, I’m not giving a paper myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But… if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?" She smiled conspiratorially. "People grow so desperate to talk off the nets knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?"

"I hope so. I’m a journalist—I’m covering the conference for SeeNet." A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.

Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us—an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.

When the AV was over, I said, "Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?"

"I’m not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work."

"You’re a journalist?"

"I’m a sociologist. Or if you want my full title: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So… if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event."

"You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re really just priests and story-tellers?" I’d meant that as a joke—her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone—but my words came out sounding like an accusation.

She gave me a reproving glare. "I’m not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I’m afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments now." Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. "We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible."

I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.

As lush Vietnamese jungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view—and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. "What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean… if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them."

She shook her head in disbelief. "Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?"

"Yes—but my jobs very different from yours. Ultimately, I’m just a communications technician."

She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later. "The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs, right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?"

"More or less."

"Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances." She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. "I’m not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked—as groups like Culture First continue to insist—just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of extreme violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one level: most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.

"But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of dethroning physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science." She added, in mock reproof, "And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones."

I said, "But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?"

Lee confessed without hesitation: "I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

"The physicists have it easy—with their subject, if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about prising out nature’s secrets. The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.

"People are the very opposite. There’s nothing to which we’ll devote more time, and energy, and cunning, than burying the truth."

East Timor from the air was a dense patchwork of fields along the coast, and what looked like native jungle and savanna in the highlands. A dozen tiny fires dotted the mountains, but the blackened pinpricks beneath the smoke trails were dwarfed by the scars of old open-cut mines. We spiraled down over the island in a helical U-turn, hundreds of small villages coming into sight and then slipping away.

The fields displayed no trademark pigments (let alone the logos of fourth-generation biotech); visibly, at least, the farmers were refusing the temptation to go renegade, and were using only old, out-of-patent crops. Agriculture for export was almost dead; even hyper-urbanized Japan could feed its own population. Only the poorest countries, unable to afford the license fees for state-of-the-art produce, struggled for self-sufficiency. East Timor imported food from Indonesia.

It was just after midday as we touched down in the tiny capital. There was no umbilical; we walked across the sweltering tarmac. The melatonin patch on my shoulder, pre-programmed by my pharm, was nudging me relentlessly toward Stateless time, two hours later than Sydney’s— but Dili was two hours in the other direction. I felt jet-lagged for the first time in my life, physically affronted by the sight of the blazing midday sun—and it struck me just how eerily effective the patch ordinarily was, when I could alight in Frankfurt or Los Angeles without the slightest sense of violated expectations. I wondered how I would have felt if I’d had my hypothalamic clock slavishly synched to the local time zones, all the way along the absurd loop of my flight path. Better, worse… or just disturbingly normal, one part of my perception of time laid bare as the simplest of biochemical phenomena?

The single-story airport building was crowded—with more people seeing off, or greeting, travelers than I’d ever witnessed in Bombay, Shanghai, or Mexico City, and more uniformed staff than I’d seen in any other airport on the planet. I stood in line behind Indrani Lee to pay the two-hundred-dollar transit tax on the near-monopoly route to Stateless. It was pure extortion… but it was hard to begrudge the opportunism. How else was a country this size supposed to raise the foreign exchange it needed in order to buy food? I hit a few keys on my notepad, and Sisyphus replied: with great difficulty.

East Timor had none of the few exotic minerals which still needed to be mined to meet net global demand after recycling and it had been stripped long ago of anything which might have been useful to local industry. Trade in native sandalwood was forbidden by international law, and in any case engineered plantation species produced a better, cheaper product. A couple of electronics multinationals had built appliance-assembly factories in Dili, during a brief period when the independence movement appeared to have been crushed, but they’d all closed in the twenties, when automation became cheaper than the cheapest sweated labor. That left tourism and culture. But how many hotels could be filled, here? (Two small ones; a total of three hundred beds.) And how many people could make their living on the world nets as writers, musicians, or artists? (Four hundred and seven.)

In theory, Stateless faced all the same basic problems, and more. But Stateless had been renegade from the start—its very land built with unlicensed biotech. And no one went hungry there.

It must have been the jet-lag, but it only dawned on me slowly that most of the people in the airport weren’t there to greet friends, after all. What I’d mistaken for luggage and gifts was merchandise; these people were traders and their customers: tourists, travelers, and locals. There were a couple of stuffy-looking official airport shops in one corner… but the whole building seemed to double as a marketplace.

Still in the queue, I closed my eyes and invoked Witness; a sequence of eyeball movements woke the software in my gut, which generated the image of a control panel and fed it down my optic nerve. I stared at the LOCATION slot on the panel, which still read SYDNEY; it obligingly blanked. I mimed vertical one-handed typing, and entered DILI. Then I looked squarely at BEGIN RECORDING, highlighting the words, and opened my eyes.

Witness confirmed: "Dili, Sunday, April 4th, 2055. 4:34:17 GMT." Beep.

The Customs Department collected the transit tax—and apparently their hardware was down. Instead of our notepads dealing with everything via a brief exchange of IR, we had to sign papers, show our physical ID cards, and receive a cardboard boarding pass with an official rubber stamp. I’d been half expecting some petty harassment if the opportunity arose, but the Customs officer, a softly spoken woman with a dense Papuan frizz beneath her cap, gave me the same patient smile as she’d given everyone else, and processed my paperwork just as swiftly.

I wandered through the airport, not really looking to buy anything, just filming the scene for my scrapbook. People were shouting and haggling in Portuguese, Bahasa and English—and, according to Sisyphus, Tetum and Vaiqueno, local languages undergoing a slow resurrection. The air conditioning was probably working, but the body heat of the crowd must have almost balanced its effect; after five minutes, I was dripping with sweat.

Traders were selling rugs, T-shirts, pineapples, oil paintings, statues of saints. I passed by a stall of dried fish, and had to concentrate to keep my stomach from heaving; the smell was no problem, but however many times I confronted it, the sight of dead animals offered for human consumption still left me reeling, more than a human corpse ever did.

Engineered crops could match or exceed all the nutritional benefits of meat; a small flesh trade still existed in Australia, but it was discreet and heavily cosmeticized.

I saw a rack of what looked like Masarini jackets, on sale for a tenth of the price they would have fetched in New York or Sydney. I waved my notepad at them; it found one in my size, interrogated the tag in the collar, and chimed approval—but I had my doubts. I asked the thin teenage boy who was standing by the rack, "Are these real authentication chips, or…?" He smiled innocently and said nothing. I bought the jacket, then ripped out the tag and handed the chip back to him. "You might as well get some more use out of it."

I ran into Indrani Lee beside a software stall. She said, "I think I’ve spotted someone else who’s headed for the conference."

"Where?" I felt a mixture of excitement and panic; if it was Violet Mosala herself, I was still unprepared to face her.

I followed Lee’s gaze to an elderly Caucasian woman, who was arguing heatedly with a trader selling scarves. Her face was vaguely familiar, but in profile I couldn’t put a name to it.

"Who is that?"

"Janet Walsh."

"No. You’re joking."

But it was her.

Janet Walsh was an award-winning English novelist—and one of the world’s most prominent members of Humble Science! She’d first come to fame in the twenties with Wings of Desire ("a delicious, mischievous, incisive fable"—The Sunday Times), a story set among an "alien race," who happened to look exactly like humans… except that their males were born with large butterfly wings growing out of their penises, which were necessarily and bloodily severed when they lost their virginity. The alien females (who lacked hymens), were all callous and brutal. After being raped and abused by everyone in sight for most of the novel, the hero discovers a magical technique for making his lost wings grow back—on his shoulders—and flies off into the sunset. ("Gleefully subverts all gender stereotypes"—Playboy.)

Since then, Walsh had specialized in morality tales concerning the evils of "male science" (sic), an ill-defined but invariably calamitous activity—which even women could perform if they were led sufficiently astray, although apparently that was no excuse to change the label. I’d quoted her pithiest comment on the subject in Gender Scrutiny Overload: "If it’s arrogant, hubristic, dominating, reductionist, exploitative, spiritually impoverished, and dehumanizing—what else should we call it but male?"

I said, "Why! Why is she here?"

"Hadn’t you heard? But you were probably traveling; I saw it on the net just before I left. One of the murdochs hired her as a special correspondent to cover the Einstein Conference. Planet News, I think."

"Janet Walsh is going to report on progress in Theories of Everything?" Even for Planet Noise, that was surreal. Sending members of the British royal family to cover famines, and soap opera stars to cover summit meetings, didn’t come close.

Lee said drily, "Report may not be quite the word for it."

I hesitated. "Can I ask you something? I… never really had a chance before I left to look into the cults' response to the conference." Sisyphus would have picked up any relevant stories—but I’d requested a briefing pared down to the essentials. "I don’t suppose you’ve heard whether or not they’re… taking much interest?"

Lee regarded me with amazement. "They’ve been chartering direct flights from all over the planet for the past week. If Walsh is coming the long way, at the last minute, it’s only to keep up appearances for her employer’s sake—to maintain a veneer of non-partisanship. Stateless will be swarming with her supporters." She added gleefully, "Janet Walsh! Now that makes the trip worthwhile!"

I felt a stab of betrayal. "You said you weren’t—"

She scowled. "Not because I’m a follower! Janet Walsh is a hobby of mine. By day I study the rationalists. By night I study their opposites."

"How very… Manichean." Walsh bought the scarf and started walking away from the stall, not quite toward us. I turned so my face was hidden from her. We’d met once, at a bioethics conference in Zambia; it hadn’t been pleasant. I laughed numbly. "So this is going to be your ideal working holiday?"

Lee was puzzled. "And yours, too, surely? You must have been hoping desperately for something more than a few sleepy seminars to film. Now you’ll have Violet Mosala versus Janet Walsh. Physics versus the Ignorance Cults. Maybe even riots in the streets: anarchy comes to Stateless, at last. What more could you possibly ask for?"

Denied access to Australian, Indonesian and Papua-New-Guinean airspace, the (Portuguese-registered) plane headed southwest across the Indian Ocean. The waters looked wind-swept, gray-blue and threatening, though the sky above was clear. We’d curve right around the continent of Australia, and we wouldn’t sight land again until we arrived.

I was seated beside two middle-aged Polynesian men in business suits, who conversed loudly and incessantly in French. Mercifully, their dialect was so unfamiliar to me that I could almost tune them out; there was nothing on the plane’s headset worth listening to, and without a signal the device made a poor substitute for earplugs.

Sisyphus could reach the net via IR and the plane’s satellite link, and I considered downloading the reports I’d missed about the cult presence on Stateless—but I’d be there soon enough; anticipation seemed masochistic. I forced my attention back to the subject of All-Topology Models.

The concept of ATMs was simple enough to state: the universe was considered to possess, at the deepest level, a mixture of every single mathematically possible topology.

Even in the oldest quantum theories of gravity, the "vacuum" of empty space-time had been viewed as a seething mass of virtual worm-holes, and other more exotic topological distortions, popping in and out of existence. The smooth appearance at macroscopic lengths and human timescales was just the visible average of a hidden riot of complexity. In a way, it was like ordinary matter: a sheet of flexible plastic betrayed nothing to the naked eye of its microstructure—molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks—but knowledge of those constituents allowed the bulk substance’s physical properties to be computed: its modulus of elasticity, for example. Space-time wasn’t made of atoms, but its properties could be understood by viewing it as being "built" from a hierarchy of ever more convoluted deviations from its apparent state of continuity and mild curvature. Quantum gravity had explained why observable space-time, underpinned by an infinite number of invisible knots and detours, behaved as it did in the presence of mass (or energy): curving in exactly the fashion required to produce the gravitational force.

ATM theorists were striving to generalize this result: to explain the (relatively) smooth ten-dimensional "total space" of the Standard Unified Field Theory—whose properties accounted for all four forces: strong, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic—as the net result of an infinite number of elaborate geometrical structures.

Nine spatial dimensions (six rolled up tight), and one time, was only what total space appeared to be if it wasn’t examined too closely. Whenever two subatomic particles interacted, there was always a chance that the total space they occupied would behave, instead, like part of a twelve-dimensional hypersphere, or a thirteen-dimensional doughnut, or a fourteen-dimensional figure eight, or just about anything else. In fact—just as a single photon could travel along two different paths at once—any number of these possibilities could take effect simultaneously, and "interfere with each other" to produce the final outcome. Nine space, one time, was nothing but an average.

There were two main questions still in dispute among ATM theorists:

What, exactly, was meant by "all" topologies? Just how bizarre could the possibilities contributing to the average total space become? Did they have to be, merely, those which could be formed with a twisted, knotted sheet of higher-dimensional plastic—or could they include states more like a (possibly infinite) handful of scattered grains of sand— where notions like "number of dimensions" and "space-time curvature" ceased to exist altogether?

And how, exactly, should the average effect of all these different structures be computed? How should the sum over the infinite number of possibilities be written down and added up when the time came to test the theory: to make a prediction, and calculate some tangible, physical quantity which an experiment could actually measure?

On one level, the obvious response to both questions was: "Use whatever gives the right answers"—but choices which did that were hard to find… and some of them smacked of contrivance. Infinite sums were notorious for being either intractable, or too pliable by far. I jotted down an example—remote from the actual tensor equations of ATMs, but good enough to illustrate the point:

Let S = 1-1+1-1+1-1+1- …

Then S = (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) + … = 0 + 0 + 0 … = 0

But S = 1 + (-1+1) + (-1+1) + (-1+1) … = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 … = 1

It was a mathematically naive "paradox"; the correct answer was, simply, that this particular infinite sequence didn’t add up to any definite sum at all. Mathematicians would always be perfectly happy with such a verdict, and would know all the rules for avoiding the pitfalls—and software could assess even the most difficult cases. When a physicist’s hard-won theory starred generating similarly ambiguous equations, though, and the choice came down to strict mathematical rigor and a theory with no predictive power at all… or, a bit of pragmatic side-stepping of the rules, and a theory which churned out beautiful results in perfect agreement with every experiment… it was no surprise that people were tempted. After all, most of what Newton had done to calculate planetary orbits had left contemporary mathematicians apoplectic with rage.

Violet Mosala’s approach was controversial for a very different reason. She’d been awarded the Nobel prize for rigorously proving a dozen key theorems in general topology—theorems which had rapidly come to comprise a standard mathematical toolbox for ATM physicists, obliterating stumbling blocks and resolving ambiguities. She’d done more than anyone else to provide the field with solid foundations, and the means of making careful, measured progress. Even her fiercest critics agreed that her mathematics was meticulous, beyond reproach.

The trouble was, she told her equations too much about the world.

The ultimate test of a TOE was to answer questions like: "What is the probability of a ten-gigaelectronvolt neutrino fired at a stationary proton scattering off a down quark and emerging at a certain angle?"… or even just: "What is the mass of an electron?" Essentially, Mosala prefixed all such questions with the condition: "Given that we know that space-time is roughly four-dimensional, and total space is roughly ten-dimensional, and the apparatus used to perform the experiment consists, approximately, of the following…"

Her supporters said she was merely setting everything in context. No experiment happened in isolation; quantum mechanics had been hammering that point home for the last hundred and twenty years. Asking a Theory of Everything to predict the chance of observing some microscopic event—without adding the proviso that "there is a universe, and it contains, among other things, equipment for detecting the event in question"—would be as nonsensical as asking: "If you pick a marble out of a bag, what are the odds that it will be green?"

Her critics said she used circular reasoning, assuming from the very beginning all the results she was trying to prove. The details she fed into her computations included so much about the known physics of the experimental apparatus that—indirectly, but inevitably—they gave the whole game away.

I was hardly qualified to come down on either side… but it seemed to me that Mosala’s opponents were being hypocritical, because they were pulling the same trick under a different guise: the alternatives they offered all invoked a cosmological fix. They declared that "before" the Big Bang and the creation of time (or "adjoining" the event, to avoid the oxymoron), there had been nothing but a perfectly symmetrical "pre-space," in which all topologies carried equal weight… and the "average result" of most familiar physical quantities would have been infinite. Pre-space was sometimes called "infinitely hot"; it could be thought of as the kind of perfectly balanced chaos which space-time would become if so much energy was poured into it that literally everything became equally possible. Everything and its opposite; the net result was that nothing happened at all.

But some local fluctuation had disturbed the balance in such a way as to give rise to the Big Bang. From that tiny accident, our universe had burst into existence. Once that had happened, the original "infinitely hot," infinitely even-handed mixture of topologies had been forced to become ever more biased, because "temperature" and "energy" now had a meaning—and in an expanding, cooling universe, most of the "hot" old symmetries would have been as unstable as molten metal thrown into a lake. And when they’d cooled, the shapes into which they’d frozen had just happened to favor topologies close to a certain ten-dimensional total space—one which gave rise to particles like quarks and electrons, and forces like gravity and electromagnetism.

By this logic, the only correct way to sum over all the topologies was to incorporate the fact that our universe had—by chance—emerged from pre-space in a certain way. Details of the broken symmetry had to be fed into the equations "by hand"—because there was no reason why they couldn’t have been utterly different. And if the physics resulting from this accident seemed improbably conducive to the formation of stars, planets, and life… then this universe was just one of a vast number which had frozen out of pre-space, each with a different set of particles and forces. If every possible set had been tried, it was hardly surprising that at least one of them had turned out to be favorable to life.

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.