Distress полностью

"No. We parted company. Five years ago. When I migrated."

To asex. "Five years ago? How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

"Isn't that too young for surgery?" I was, still, only guessing, but it would take more than superficial androgyny to split up most families.

"Not in Brazil."

"And they took it badly?"

Ve said bitterly, "They didn't understand. Technoliberation, asex—everything that mattered to me—none of it made sense to them. Once I had a mind of my own, they started treating me like some kind of… alien foundling. They were highly educated, highly paid, sophisticated, cosmopolitan… traditionalists. They were still tied to Malawi—and to one social stratum, and all its values and prejudices—wherever they went. I had no homeland. I was free." Ve laughed. "Travel shows up the invariants: the same hypocrisies repeating themselves, over and over. By the time I was fourteen, I'd lived in thirty different cultures—and I'd figured out that sex was for dumb conformists."

That almost shut me up. I asked tentatively, "You mean gender or intercourse?"

"Both."

I said, "Some people need both. Not just biologically—I know, you can switch that off. But… for identity. For self-esteem."

Kuwale snorted, highly amused. "Self-esteem is a commodity invented by twentieth-century personal growth cults. If you want self-esteem—or an emotional center—go to Los Angeles and buy it." Ve added, more sympathetically, "What is it with you Westerners? Sometimes it sounds to me like all the pre-scientific psychology of Freud and Jung—and all its market-driven US regurgitations—has hijacked your language and culture so completely that you can't even think about yourselves anymore, except in cult-speak. And it's so ingrained now, you don't even know when you're doing it."

"Maybe you're right." I was beginning to feel unspeakably old and traditionalist myself. If Kuwale was the future, the generation after ver was going to be entirely beyond my comprehension. Which was probably no bad thing, but it was still a painful realization. "But what do you put in place of Western psychobabble? Asex and technoliberation I can almost understand—but what's the great attraction of Anthrocosmology? If you want a dose of cosmic reassurance, why not at least choose a religion with an afterlife?"

"You should join the murderers up on deck, if you think you can choose what's true and what isn't."

I stared out across the dark hold. The faint strip of light was fading rapidly; it looked like we were going to spend a freezing night here. My bladder felt close to bursting but I was having trouble forcing myself to let go. Every time I thought I'd finally accepted my body and all it could do to me, the underworld tugged the leash again. I'd accepted nothing. I'd had one brief glimpse beneath the surface, and now I wanted to bury everything I'd learned, to carry on as if nothing had changed.

I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."

"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."

I was woken by torchlight in my face, and someone jagging an enzyme-coated knife through the polymer net which bound me to Kuwale. It was so cold it had to be early morning. I blinked and shivered, blinded by the glare. I couldn't see how many people there were, let alone what weapons they carried, but I sat perfectly still while they cut me free, working on the assumption that anything less could earn me a bullet through the brain.

I was winched up in a crude sling, then left suspended in midair while three people clambered out of the hold on a rope ladder, leaving Kuwale behind. I looked around at the moonlit deck and—so far as I could see— open ocean. The thought of leaving Stateless behind chilled my blood; if there was any chance of help, it was surely back on the island.

They slammed the hatch closed, lowered me and untied my feet, then started hustling me toward a cabin at the far end of the boat. After some pleading, I was allowed to stop and piss over the side; for several seconds afterward, I was so overcome with gratitude that I would have been willing to despatch Violet Mosala personally with my bare hands, if anyone had asked.

The cabin was packed with display screens and electronic equipment. I'd never been on a fishing boat before in my life, but this looked distinctly like overkill, when the average fleet could probably be run by a single microchip.

I was tied to a chair in the middle of the cabin. There were four people present; Witness had already matched two of them—numbered three and five in Kuwale's gallery—but it came up blank on the others, two women about my age. I captured and filed their faces: nineteen and twenty.

I said, to no one in particular, "What was all the noise, before? I thought we'd run aground."

Three said, "We were rammed. You missed all the excitement." He was a Caucasian umale, heavily muscled, with Chinese characters tattooed on both forearms.