Akili laughed, flashing a conspiratorial glance at me. “Why not? No one’s sleeping tonight, on Stateless.”

#

The camp was full of the sounds of celebration. People streamed past the tent, laughing and shouting, shrunken silhouettes against the moonlight. Music from the satellites – from Tonga, from Berlin, from Kinshasa – blasted out of the main square – and someone, somehow, had found or made firecrackers. I was still intoxicated with adrenaline, but ragged with fatigue – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to join the party, or curl up and hibernate for a fortnight – but I’d promised to do neither.

Akili and I sat on the sleeping bag – warmly dressed, with the tent flap closed; the electricity was fading. We passed the hours talking, scanning the nets, lapsing into awkward silences. I longed to bring ver, somehow, inside the aura of invulnerability I felt, having survived my own imagined apocalypse. I wanted to comfort ver in any way I could. My judgment was paralyzed, though; vis body language had become opaque to me, and I had no sense of how or when to touch ver. We’d lain together naked – but I couldn’t keep that memory, that image, from signifying more to me than it could ever mean to ver. So we sat apart.

I asked why ve hadn’t mentioned the mixing plague to Sarah.

“Because she might have taken it seriously enough to spread word, start a panic.”

“Don’t you think people might panic less if they knew the cause?”

Akili snorted. “ You don’t believe what I’ve told you about the cause. Do you think people would react to the news with anything but incomprehension, or hysteria? Anyway – after the Aleph moment, the ‘victims’ will know far more than anyone who hasn’t mixed could ever tell them. And there’ll be no question of panic, then: Distress itself will have vanished.” Most of this was said with absolute conviction; it was only with the last pronouncement that ve seemed to waver.

I asked tentatively, “So why did the moderates get it so wrong? They had their own supercomputers. They seemed to know as much about Anthrocosmology as anyone. If they could be mistaken about the unraveling…”

Akili gave me a long, hard look – still trying to judge how far ve could trust me. “I don’t know that they’re mistaken about the unraveling. I hope they are – but I don’t know it for sure.”

I thought that over. “You mean the distortion in the mixing before the Aleph moment could be enough to have prevented the unraveling, so far – but once the TOE is completed…?”

“That’s right.”

I felt a chill, more of incomprehension than fear. “And you still tried to protect Mosala? Believing there was a chance that she could end everything?”