Distress полностью

Informed anarchy. It was an appealing notion—but I still felt obliged to be skeptical. "Not everyone's going to let their children learn sociobiology; there must be a few cultural and religious fundamentalists, even here, who'd find it too threatening. And… what about adult migrants? If someone's twenty years old when they arrive on Stateless, they'll still be around for another sixty years. Plenty of time to lose their idealism. Do you really think the whole thing can hold together while the first generation grow old and disillusioned?"

Munroe was bemused. "Does it matter what I think? If you really care one way or the other: explore the island, talk to people, make up your own mind."

"You're right." I wasn't here to explore the island, though, or to form an opinion on its political future. I glanced at my watch; it was after one. I stood up.

Munroe said, "There's something going on right now which you might like to see. Or even… try. Are you in a hurry?"

I hesitated. "That depends."

"I suppose you could call this the closest thing we have to a… ceremony for new residents." I must have looked less than thrilled; Munroe laughed. "No anthems, no oaths, no gilded scrolls, I promise. And no, it's not compulsory—it just seems to have become the fashion for new arrivals. Mere tourists are welcome, too, though."

"Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?"

"I can tell you that it's called inland diving. But you really have to see it to know what that means."

Munroe packed up his easel and accompanied me; I suspected he was secretly enjoying playing veteran radical tour guide. We stood in the doorway to catch the breeze, as the tram headed out toward the northern arm of the island. The track ahead was barely visible: two parallel trenches carved in the rock, the gray ribbon of superconductor running down the middle all but hidden beneath a layer of fine chalky dust.

By the time we'd traveled about fifteen kilometers, we were the only passengers left. I said, "Who pays for the maintenance of these things?"

"Fares cover some of it. The syndicates pay the rest."

"So what happens if a syndicate decides not to pay? To freeload?"

"Then everyone knows."

"Okay, but what if they genuinely can't afford to contribute. What if they're poor?"

"Most syndicate finances are public knowledge. By choice, but it's viewed as odd if they're kept secret. Anyone on Stateless can pick up their notepad and find out if the wealth of the island is being concentrated in one syndicate or being siphoned off-shore, or whatever. And act on that knowledge as they see fit."

We were clear of the built-up center now. There were buildings which looked like factories and warehouses scattered around the tram line, but more and more of the view was becoming bare reef-rock, flat but slightly uneven. The limestone appeared in all the hues I'd seen in the city, zebra-striping the landscape in distinctly ungeological patterns, governed by the diffusion of different subspecies of lithophilic bacteria. The ground here wouldn't be amenable to rock farming, though; the inner core of the island was too dry and hard, too devascularized. Further out, the rock was much more porous, and suffused with calcium-rich water and the engineered organisms needed to replenish it. The tram lines didn't run to the coast because the ground became too soft to bear the weight of the vehicles.

I invoked Witness and started recording; at this rate I'd have more private travelogue footage than material for the documentary, but I couldn't resist.

I said, "Did you really come here for the light?"

Munroe shook his head. "Hardly. I just had to get away."

"From what?"

"All the noise. All the cant. All the Professional Australians."

"Ah." I'd first heard that term when I was studying film history; it had been coined to describe the mainstream directors of the nineteen seventies and eighties. As one historian had put it: "They possessed no distinguishing features except for their nationality; they had nothing to say, and nothing to do except foist a claustrophobic vocabulary of tired nationalist myths and icons onto their audience, while loudly proclaiming themselves to be 'defining the national character,' and to represent, in person, 'a nation finding its voice.'" I'd thought this was probably a harsh judgment—until I'd seen some of the films. Most of them were stultifying horse operas—rural colonial melodramas—or sentimentalized war stories. The nadir of the period, though, was probably an attempted comedy in which Albert Einstein was portrayed as an Australian apple farmer's son, who "splits beer atoms" and falls in love with Marie Curie.

I said, "I always thought the visual arts had grown out of that long ago. Especially in your mode."

Munroe scowled. "I'm not talking about art. I'm talking about the entire dominant culture."