Грег Иган - Distress

"So what are they diving into? The water supply?" Ocean water was desalinated in specialized pools out on the reefs, and the fresh water pumped inland to supplement recycled waste.

Munroe said, "That’d be a challenge. None of the water arteries are thicker than a human arm."

I stopped a respectful distance from the group, feeling very much an intruder. Munroe went ahead and gently squeezed his way into the outer circle; no one seemed to mind, or to pay either of us much attention. It finally struck me that the awnings overhead were flapping and shuddering out of all proportion to the gentle wind from the east. I moved closer and caught the edge of a strong, cool breeze emerging from the tunnel itself, carrying a stale damp mineral odor.

Peering over people’s shoulders, I could see that the mouth of the tunnel was capped with a knee-high structure like a small well, built of dark reef-rock or heavy-duty biopolymer, with an iris seal which had been wrenched open. The winch, a few meters away, seemed monstrous now—far too large and industrial-looking to be involved in any light-hearted sport. The cable was thicker than I’d expected; I thought of trying to estimate its total length, but the sides of the drum concealed the number of layers wrapped around it. The motor itself was silent except for the hiss of air across magnetic bearings, but the cable squeaked against itself as it spooled onto the drum, and the gantry creaked as the cable slid over the pulley.

No one spoke. It didn’t seem like the time to start asking questions.

Suddenly I heard a gasping sound, almost a sobbing. There was a buzz of excitement, and everyone craned forward expectantly. A woman emerged from the tunnel, clinging tightly to the cable, scuba tanks strapped to her back, face mask pulled up onto her forehead. She was wet, but not dripping—so the water had to be some way down.

The winch stopped. The woman unhooked a safety line linking the scuba harness to the cable; people reached out to help her onto the lip of the well, and then the ground. I stepped forward, and saw a small circular platform—a coarse grid of plastic tubes—on which she’d been standing. There was also a twin-beam lantern fixed to the cable, about a meter and a half above the platform.

The woman seemed dazed. She walked some distance away from the group, almost staggering, then sat down on the rock and stared up at the sky, still breathless. Then she removed the tanks and mask, slowly and methodically, and lay down on her back. She closed her eyes and stretched out her arms, palms down, spreading her fingers on the ground.

A man and two teenage girls had separated from the others; they stood nearby, watching the woman anxiously. I was beginning to wonder if she needed medical attention—and I was on the verge of discreetly asking Sisyphusto refresh my memory on heart attack symptoms and emergency first aid—when she sprung to her feet, smiling radiantly. She began to speak excitedly to her family, in what I took to be a Polynesian language; I didn’t understand a word she said, but she sounded elated.

The tension vanished, and everyone began laughing and talking. Munroe turned to me. "There are eight people in the queue ahead of you but it’s worth waiting for, I promise."

"I don’t know. Whatever’s down there, my insurance doesn’t cover it."

"I doubt your insurance covers a tram ride, on Stateless."

A thin young man in bright floral shorts was putting on the scuba gear the woman had discarded. I introduced myself; he seemed nervous, but he didn’t mind talking. His name was Kumar Rajendra, an Indian-Fijian civil engineering student; he’d been on Stateless less than a week. I took a button camera from my wallet and explained what I wanted. He glanced over at the people gathered around the hole—as if wondering if he needed to ask permission of someone—but then he agreed to take it down. Fixing the camera to the top of the scuba mask, where it sat like a third eye, I noticed a faint chalky residue on the faceplate’s transparent plastic.

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 shut up and do what I was told. I said, "Maybe I will; this way I get to see exactly what I’d be letting myself in for. Then again… I’m just a tourist, aren’t I ? So my experience of a ceremony for new residents would hardly be authentic."

Munroe rolled his eyes. " Authentic? Make up your mind: are you covering the Einstein Conference, or making Coming of Age on Stateless? "

"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 authenticity. You realize you’re changing the experience for everyone?"

"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.