An elderly woman in a wetsuit came over and checked that the scuba gear was fitted properly, then went through emergency procedures with Rajendra. He listened solemnly; I backed away and checked the reception on my notepad. The camera transmitted in ultrasound, radio and IR—and if all those signals failed to get through, it had a forty-minute memory.
Munroe approached me, exasperated. "You're crazy, you know. It won't be the same. Why record someone else's dive, when you could do it yourself?"
Just my luck; even on Stateless, I'd found someone who wanted me to
Munroe rolled his eyes. "
"That remains to be seen. If I end up with two programs for the price of one… all the better."
Rajendra climbed onto the edge of the well, took hold of the cable, then stepped onto the platform; it tilted precariously until he managed to center himself. The breeze ballooned his shorts and sent his hair streaming comically upward, but the sight was more vertiginous than amusing; it made him look like a skydiver sans parachute, or some lunatic balanced on the wing of a plane. He finally attached the safety line—but the impression of free-fall remained.
I was surprised that Munroe was so enthusiastic about what looked to me like just one more bonding-through-bravery ritual, one more initiation-by-ordeal. Even if there was no real pressure to take part, and even if the dangers were minimal… so much for the island of radical nonconformists.
Someone started the winch unwinding. Rajendra's friends, standing—and then kneeling—on the lip of the well, reached out and patted his shoulders as he descended, cheering him on; he grinned nervously as he disappeared from sight. I squeezed forward myself, and leaned over with the notepad to maintain line-of-sight communication. The button camera's memory would probably be more than enough, but it was impossible to resist the lure of real-time. I wasn't alone; people jostled to get a view of the screen.
Munroe called out from behind the crush, "So much for
"Not for the diver."
"Oh, right, that's all that matters. Capture the last glimpse of the real thing—before destroying it forever. You ethnovandal." He added, half seriously, "Anyway, you're wrong. It changes things for the diver, too."
The tunnel was about two meters wide, the walls about as cylindrical as the surface rock was flat—too good to be the product of any geological process, but too rough to have been machined. The morphogenesis of Stateless was a complex process which I'd never investigated in detail, but I did know that explicit human intervention had been required for many of the fine points. Still, whether this tunnel had formed unbidden at the intersection of certain levels of marker-chemical gradients, because lithophilic bacteria had noticed the cue and switched on all the right genes—or whether they'd had to be told more forcefully, by a person tipping a bucketload of primer onto the surface—it beat attacking the rock for a month or two with a diamond-coated drill.
I watched the twin reflections of the lantern beams slowly shrinking into the darkness, and the point-of-view image of pebbled gray-green rock sliding by. There were more hints of ancestral coral, and fleeting glimpses of the bones of fish trapped in the compacting of the reefs—and again, I felt an eerie sense of the compressed time scale of the island. The idea that subterranean depths belonged to inconceivably remote eons was so ingrained that it required a constant effort to remain prepared for soft drink bottles or car tires—predating Stateless, but perfectly likely to have drifted into the mix when this rock was being formed.
The decorative trace minerals began to fade, not to be wasted at a depth where they'd rarely be seen. Rajendra's breathing accelerated, and he glanced up toward the surface; some of the people watching the screen called down to him and waved, their arms skinny silhouettes half eaten by the glare from the dazzling circle of sky. He looked away, and then directly down; the grid of the platform was no real obstruction, but neither lantern beams nor sunlight penetrated far. He seemed to grow calm again. I'd considered asking him to provide a running commentary, but I was glad now that I hadn't; it would have been an unfair burden.
