The easiest way to travel beyond the tram lines turned out to be hitching a ride on one of the balloon-tired trucks used to carry produce inland. The trucks were automated, and followed predetermined routes; people seemed to treat them as public transport, although the sea farmers effectively controlled the schedule by the delays they imposed, loading and unloading them. The bed of each truck was divided crosswise by a dozen low barriers, forming spaces into which crates were slotted, and doubling as benches for the passengers.

There was no sign of Kuwale; ve seemed to have found another route, or left for the rendezvous point much earlier. I sat with about twenty other people on the ride north-east from the terminus, resisting the urge to ask the woman beside me what would happen if one of the farmers insisted on loading so many crates that there was no room for anyone to return – or what discouraged passengers from looting the food. The harmony of Stateless still seemed precarious to me, but I was growing increasingly reluctant to give voice to questions which amounted to asking: Why don’t you people all run amok, and make your own lives as miserable as possible?

I didn’t believe for a moment that the rest of the planet could ever function like this – or that anyone on Stateless would particularly want it to – but I was beginning to understand Monroe’s cautious optimism. If I lived here, myself, would I try to tear the place down? No. Would I bring about riots and massacres inadvertently, in pursuit of some short-term gain? Hopefully not. So, what ludicrous vanity allowed me to imagine that I was so much more reasonable or intelligent than the average resident of the island? If I could recognize the precariousness of their society, so could they – and act accordingly. It was an active balance, flying by wire, survival through self-awareness.

A tarpaulin sheltered the bed of the truck, but the sides were open. As we drew nearer to the coast, the terrain began to change: incursions of partly compacted coral appeared, moist and granular, glistening in the sun like rivers choked with powdery gray-and-silver snow. Entropy should have favored the solid reef-rock banks dissolving into this sludge and washing away – but it favored more strongly the flow of energy from the sun into the lithophilic bacteria infesting the coral debris, which labored to stitch the loose aggregate of limestone into the denser polymer-mineral matrix around it. Cool, efficient biological pathways, catalyzed by perfectly shaped enzymes like molecule-sized injection molds, had always mocked the high-temperature-and-pressure industrial chemistry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, they mocked geology itself. The conveyor belt of subduction, feeding ocean sediments deep into the earth to be crushed and metamorphosed over eons, was as obsolete on Stateless as the Bessemer process for steel, the Haber process for ammonia.