Nevertheless, I stood back for several minutes, hoping that someone in uniform would appear to put my mind at ease. My insurance company had declined to offer me any kind of cover once I was on Stateless – and when my bank found out I’d been here, they wouldn’t be pleased; they still owned most of the chips in my gut. Legally, the risk wasn’t mine to take.

No one turned up. I walked through. The frame of the scanner was loose, and it shuddered slightly – my body pinning a tiny portion of the magnetic flux, dragging it forward, then releasing it to rebound like elastic – but no microwave pulses seared my abdomen, and no alarms went off.

The gate led into a modern airport, not much different from many I’d seen in small European cities, with clean-lined architecture, and movable seating – which groups of people had arranged in inward-facing rings. There were only three airline counters – and they all displayed much smaller versions of their logos than usual, as if not wishing to attract too much attention. Booking passage here, I’d found no flights advertised openly on the net; I’d had to post a specific query in order to obtain any information. The European Federation, India, and several African and Latin American countries only enforced the minimal boycott of selected high technology which the UN demanded; these airlines were operating entirely within the laws of their home nations. Still, irritating the Japanese, Korean, Chinese and US governments – not to mention the biotech multinationals – would always carry a risk. Committing the offense discreetly wouldn’t conceal anything – but no doubt it acted as a gesture of obeisance, and lessened the perceived need for examples to be made of the collaborators.

I collected my suitcase and stood by the baggage roundabout, trying to get my bearings. I watched my fellow passengers drift away, some greeted by friends, some going on alone. Most spoke in English or French; there was no official language here, but almost two-thirds of the population had migrated from other Pacific islands. Choosing to live on Stateless might always be a political decision in the end – and some Greenhouse refugees apparently preferred to spend years in Chinese detention camps instead, in the hope of eventually being accepted into that entrepreneurial dreamland – but after seeing your home washed into the ocean, I could imagine that a self-repairing (and currently increasing) landmass might hold a special attraction. Stateless represented a reversal of fortune: sunlight and biotechnology playing the whole disaster movie backward. Better than raging at the storm. Fiji and Samoa were finally growing new islands of their own, but they weren’t yet habitable – and both governments were paying several billion dollars for the privilege, in license fees and consultants’ charges. They’d carry the debt into the twenty-second century.