I waited in silence. After a while, she said, “Ten hours. I still dream about it. I grew up on a fishing boat – and I’d seen storms sweep away whole villages. I thought I already knew exactly how I felt about the ocean. But that time in the water with my sister changed everything.”

“In what way? Do you have more respect, more fear—?”

Vunibobo shook her head impatiently. “More lifejackets, actually, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” She grimaced, frustrated – but then she said, “Would you do something for me? Close your eyes, and try to picture the world. All ten billion people at once. I know it’s impossible – but try.”

I was baffled, but I obliged. “Okay.”

“Now describe what you see.”

“A view of the Earth from space. It’s more like a sketch than a photograph, though. North is up. The Indian Ocean is in the center – but the view stretches from West Africa to New Zealand, from Ireland to Japan. There are crowds of people – not to scale – standing on all the continents and islands. Don’t ask me to count them, but I’d guess there are about a hundred, in all.”

I opened my eyes. I’d left her old and new homes right off the map – but I had a feeling this wasn’t a consciousness-raising exercise in the marginalising force of geographical representations.

She said, “I used to see something like that, myself. But since the accident, it’s changed. When I close my eyes and imagine the world, now … I see the same map, the same continents … but the land isn’t land at all. What looks like solid ground is really a solid mass of people; there is no dry land, there is nowhere to stand. We’re all in the ocean, treading water, holding each other up. That’s how we’re born, that’s how we die. Struggling to keep each other’s heads above the waves.” She laughed, suddenly selfconscious – but then she said defiantly, “Well, you asked for an explanation.”

“I did.”

The dazzling coral inlets had turned to rivers of bleached limestone sludge, but the reef-rock around us now shimmered with delicate greens and silver-grays. I wondered what the other farmers would have told me, if I’d asked them the same question. A dozen different answers, probably; Stateless seemed to run on the principle of people agreeing to do the same thing for entirely different reasons. It was a sum over mutually contradictory topologies which left the calculus of pre-space for dead; no imposed politics, philosophy, religion, no idiot cheer-squad worship of flags or symbols – but order emerged nonetheless.