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."
"In what way? Do you have more respect, more fear?"
Vunibobo shook her head impatiently. "More lifejackets, actually, but that's not what I'm talking about." She grimaced, frustrated, but then she said, "Would you do something for me? Close your eyes, and try to picture the world. All ten billion people at once. I know it's impossible— but try."
I was baffled, but I obliged. "Okay."
"Now describe what you see."
"A view of the Earth from space. It's more like a sketch than a photograph, though. North is up. The Indian Ocean is in the center—but the view stretches from West Africa to New Zealand, from Ireland to Japan. There are crowds of people—not to scale—standing on all the continents and islands. Don't ask me to count them, but I'd guess there are about a hundred, in all."
I opened my eyes. I'd left her old and new homes right off the map, but I had a feeling this wasn't a consciousness-raising exercise in the marginalizing force of geographical representations.
She said, "I used to see something like that, myself. But since the accident, it's changed. When I close my eyes and imagine the world, now… I see the same map, the same continents… but the land isn't land at all. What looks like solid ground is really a solid mass of people; there is no dry land, there is nowhere to stand. We're all in the ocean, treading water, holding each other up. That's how we're born, that's how we die. Struggling to keep each other's heads above the waves." She laughed, suddenly self-conscious, but then she said defiantly, "Well, you asked for an explanation."
"I did."
The dazzling coral inlets had turned to rivers of bleached limestone sludge, but the reef-rock around us now shimmered with delicate greens and silver-grays. I wondered what the other farmers would have told me, if I'd asked them the same question. A dozen different answers, probably;
Stateless seemed to run on the principle of people agreeing to do the same thing for entirely different reasons. It was a sum over mutually contradictory topologies which left the calculus of pre-space for dead; no imposed politics, philosophy, religion, no idiot cheer-squad worship of flags or symbols—but order emerged nonetheless.
And I still couldn't decide if that was miraculous, or utterly unmysterious. Order only arose and survived, anywhere, because enough people desired it. Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonored. The ultimate safety nets were inertia, apathy and obfuscation. On Stateless, they'd had the— possibly insane—courage to unravel the whole political knot into its simplest form, to gaze at the undecorated structures of power and responsibility, tolerance and consensus.
I said, "You kept me from drowning. So how do I repay you?" Vunibobo glanced at me, measuring my seriousness. "Swim harder. Help us all to stay afloat."
"I'll try. If I ever have the chance."
She smiled at this crudely hedged half-promise, and reminded me, "We're heading straight into a storm, right now. I think you'll get your chance."
