“The physicists have it easy – with their subject, if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prizing out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.

“People are the very opposite. There’s nothing to which we’ll devote more time, and energy, and cunning, than burying the truth.”

#

East Timor from the air was a dense patchwork of fields along the coast, and what looked like native jungle and savanna in the highlands. A dozen tiny fires dotted the mountains – but the blackened pinpricks beneath the smoke trails were dwarfed by the scars of old open-cut mines. We spiraled down over the island in a helical U-turn, hundreds of small villages coming into sight and then slipping away.

The fields displayed no trademark pigments (let alone the logos of fourth-generation biotech); visibly, at least, the farmers were refusing the temptation to go renegade, and were using only old, out-of-patent crops. Agriculture for export was almost dead; even hyper-urbanized Japan could feed its own population. Only the poorest countries, unable to afford the license fees for state-of-the-art produce, struggled for self-sufficiency. East Timor imported food from Indonesia.

It was just after midday as we touched down in the tiny capital. There was no umbilical; we walked across the sweltering tarmac. The melatonin patch on my shoulder, pre-programmed by my pharm, was nudging me relentlessly toward Stateless time, two hours later than Sydney’s – but Dili was two hours in the other direction. I felt jet-lagged for the first time in my life, physically affronted by the sight of the blazing midday sun – and it struck me just how eerily effective the patch ordinarily was, when I could alight in Frankfurt or Los Angeles without the slightest sense of violated expectations. I wondered how I would have felt if I’d had my hypothalamic clock slavishly synched to the local time zones, all the way along the absurd loop of my flight path. Better, worse … or just disturbingly normal, one part of my perception of time laid bare as the simplest of biochemical phenomena?

The single-story airport building was crowded – with more people seeing off, or greeting, travelers than I’d ever witnessed in Bombay, Shanghai, or Mexico City, and more uniformed staff than I’d seen in any other airport on the planet. I stood in line behind Indrani Lee to pay the two-hundred-dollar transit tax on the near-monopoly route to Stateless. It was pure extortion … but it was hard to begrudge the opportunism. How else was a country this size supposed to raise the foreign exchange it needed in order to buy food? I hit a few keys on my notepad, and Sisyphus replied: with great difficulty.