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.
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.
10
The plane emptied slowly. Passengers pressed forward, sleepy and irritable; many were clutching cushions and small blankets, looking like children up past their bedtime. It was only about nine p.m. here—and most people's body clocks would have agreed—but we were all still dazed and cramped and weary. I looked around for Indrani Lee, but I couldn't spot her in the crowd.
There was a security gate at the end of the umbilical, but no airport staff in sight, and no obvious device for interrogating my passport. Stateless placed no restrictions on immigration, let alone the entry of temporary visitors—but they did prohibit certain imports. Beside the gate was a multilingual sign which read:
FEEL FREE TO TRY TO BRING THROUGH WEAPONS. WE'LL FEEL FREE TO TRY TO DESTROY THEM.
STATELESS AIRPORT SYNDICATE
I hesitated. If my passport wasn't read, and the seal of approval for my implants taken into account… what would this machine do to me? Incinerate a hundred thousand dollars' worth of hardware—and fry a large part of my digestive tract in the process?
I knew that was paranoid: I could hardly have been the first journalist to set foot on the island. And the message was probably aimed at visitors from certain privately owned South American islands—"libertarian havens" established by self-styled "political refugees" from the US gun law reforms of the twenties—some of whom had tried to bring Stateless around to their special way of thinking on a number of occasions.
Nevertheless, I stood back for several minutes, hoping that someone in uniform would appear to put my mind at ease. My insurance company had declined to offer me any kind of cover once I was on Stateless—and when my bank found out I'd been here, they wouldn't be pleased; they still owned most of the chips in my gut. Legally, the risk wasn't mine to take.
No one turned up. I walked through. The frame of the scanner was loose, and it shuddered slightly—my body pinning a tiny portion of the magnetic flux, dragging it forward, then releasing it to rebound like elastic—but no microwave pulses seared my abdomen, and no alarms went off.
