Distress

9

The living, artificial island of Stateless was anchored to an unnamed guyot—a submerged, flat-topped, extinct volcano—in the middle of the South Pacific. At thirty-two degrees latitude, it lay outside the ocean resource zones of the Polynesian nations to the north, in uncontested international waters. (Laughable ambit claims by Antarctic squatters aside.) It sounded remote—but it was only four thousand kilometers from Sydney; a direct flight would have taken less than two hours.

I sat in the transit lounge in Phnom Penh, trying to unknot the muscles in the back of my neck. The air-conditioning was icy, but the humidity seemed to penetrate the building unchecked. I thought about wandering out into the city—which I’d never seen firsthand—but I only had forty minutes between flights, and it would probably have taken half that time to obtain the necessary visa.

I’d never understood why the Australian government was such a vehement supporter of the boycott against Stateless. For twenty-three years, successive Ministers of Foreign Affairs had ranted about its “destabilizing influence on the region"—but in fact it had acted to relieve tensions considerably, by accepting more Greenhouse refugees than any nation on the planet. And it was true that the creators of Stateless had broken countless international laws, and used thousands of patented DNA sequences without permission… but a nation founded by invasion and mass-murder (acts demurely regretted in a treaty signed two hundred and fifty years later) could hardly claim to be on higher moral ground.

It was clear that Stateless was being ostracized for purely political reasons. But no one in power seemed to feel obliged to make those reasons explicit.

So I sat in the transit lounge, stiff from a four-hour flight in the wrong direction, and tried to read the sections of Sisyphus’s physics lesson which I’d skimmed over the first time. They were highlighted in accusing blue, eyeball-track analysis gallingly right on every count.

At least two conflicting generalised measures can be applied to T, the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T, and are equivalent when restricted to M—the space of n-dimensional para-compact Hausdorff manifolds—but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces. However, the physical significance (if any) of this discrepancy remains obscure—

I couldn’t concentrate. I gave up, closed my eyes and attempted to doze off—but a siesta appeared to be biochemically impossible. I blanked my mind and tried to relax. Eventually, my notepad chimed and announced my connection to Dili—picking up the news from the room’s IR broadcast a few seconds before the multilingual audio began. I headed for the security gate—and, stepping through, recalled the scanner in Manchester, extracting poetry from a student’s brain. No doubt in twenty years’ time, weaponless hijackers would have their intentions exposed as easily as any explosive or knife. My passport file carried details of my suspicious internal anomalies, to reassure nervous security officials that I wasn’t wired to explode… and maybe people who were plagued by unwanted dreams of running amok at twenty thousand meters would need analogous certificates of innocuousness in future.

There were no flights to Stateless from Cambodia. China, Japan and Korea were all pro-boycott, so Cambodia fell into line with its major trading partners to avoid causing offense. As did Australia—but its enthusiastic punishment of the “anarchists” went above and beyond the call of realpolitik. There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though, and from there I could finally reach my destination.

It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits—the Timor Gap oilfields—with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant—hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk—the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur. Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.

I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.

She said, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I'm going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets—and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach.”

“You mean Stateless?”

She regarded me sympathetically. “You too?”

I nodded.

“You poor man. Where have you come from?”

“Sydney.”

Her accent was almost certainly Bombay but she said, “I'm from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I'm Indrani Lee.”

“Andrew Worth.”

We shook hands. She said, “Of course, I'm not giving a paper myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But… if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?” She smiled conspiratorially. “People grow so desperate to talk off the nets knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?”

“I hope so. I'm a journalist—I'm covering the conference for SeeNet.” A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.

Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us—an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.

When the AV was over, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?”

“I'm not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“I'm a sociologist. Or if you want my full title: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So… if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event.”

“You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re ’really just priests and story-tellers'?” I’d meant that as a joke—her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone—but my words came out sounding like an accusation.

She gave me a reproving glare. “I'm not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I'm afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments now.” Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. “We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible.”

I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.

As lush Vietnamese jungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view—and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. “What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean… if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?”

“Yes—but my jobs very different from yours. Ultimately, I'm just a communications technician.”

She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later. “The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs, right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?”

“More or less.”

“Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances.” She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. “I'm not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked—as groups like Culture First continue to insist—just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of extreme violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one level: most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.

“But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of ‘dethroning’ physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science.” She added, in mock reproof, “And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones.”

I said, “But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?”

Lee confessed without hesitation: “I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

“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 ‘prising 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.

East Timor had none of the few exotic minerals which still needed to be mined to meet net global demand after recycling and it had been stripped long ago of anything which might have been useful to local industry. Trade in native sandalwood was forbidden by international law, and in any case engineered plantation species produced a better, cheaper product. A couple of electronics multinationals had built appliance-assembly factories in Dili, during a brief period when the independence movement appeared to have been crushed, but they’d all closed in the twenties, when automation became cheaper than the cheapest sweated labor. That left tourism and culture. But how many hotels could be filled, here? (Two small ones; a total of three hundred beds.) And how many people could make their living on the world nets as writers, musicians, or artists? (Four hundred and seven.)

In theory, Stateless faced all the same basic problems, and more. But Stateless had been renegade from the start—its very land built with unlicensed biotech. And no one went hungry there.

It must have been the jet-lag, but it only dawned on me slowly that most of the people in the airport weren’t there to greet friends, after all. What I’d mistaken for luggage and gifts was merchandise; these people were traders and their customers: tourists, travelers, and locals. There were a couple of stuffy-looking official airport shops in one corner… but the whole building seemed to double as a marketplace.

Still in the queue, I closed my eyes and invoked Witness; a sequence of eyeball movements woke the software in my gut, which generated the image of a control panel and fed it down my optic nerve. I stared at the LOCATION slot on the panel, which still read SYDNEY; it obligingly blanked. I mimed vertical one-handed typing, and entered DILI. Then I looked squarely at BEGIN RECORDING, highlighting the words, and opened my eyes.

Witness confirmed: “Dili, Sunday, April 4th, 2055. 4:34:17 GMT.” Beep.

The Customs Department collected the transit tax—and apparently their hardware was down. Instead of our notepads dealing with everything via a brief exchange of IR, we had to sign papers, show our physical ID cards, and receive a cardboard boarding pass with an official rubber stamp. I’d been half expecting some petty harassment if the opportunity arose, but the Customs officer, a softly spoken woman with a dense Papuan frizz beneath her cap, gave me the same patient smile as she’d given everyone else, and processed my paperwork just as swiftly.

I wandered through the airport, not really looking to buy anything, just filming the scene for my scrapbook. People were shouting and haggling in Portuguese, Bahasa and English—and, according to Sisyphus, Tetum and Vaiqueno, local languages undergoing a slow resurrection. The air conditioning was probably working, but the body heat of the crowd must have almost balanced its effect; after five minutes, I was dripping with sweat.

Traders were selling rugs, T-shirts, pineapples, oil paintings, statues of saints. I passed by a stall of dried fish, and had to concentrate to keep my stomach from heaving; the smell was no problem, but however many times I confronted it, the sight of dead animals offered for human consumption still left me reeling, more than a human corpse ever did.

Engineered crops could match or exceed all the nutritional benefits of meat; a small flesh trade still existed in Australia, but it was discreet and heavily cosmeticized.

I saw a rack of what looked like Masarini jackets, on sale for a tenth of the price they would have fetched in New York or Sydney. I waved my notepad at them; it found one in my size, interrogated the tag in the collar, and chimed approval—but I had my doubts. I asked the thin teenage boy who was standing by the rack, “Are these real authentication chips, or…?” He smiled innocently and said nothing. I bought the jacket, then ripped out the tag and handed the chip back to him. “You might as well get some more use out of it.”

I ran into Indrani Lee beside a software stall. She said, “I think I’ve spotted someone else who’s headed for the conference.”

“Where?” I felt a mixture of excitement and panic; if it was Violet Mosala herself, I was still unprepared to face her.

I followed Lee’s gaze to an elderly Caucasian woman, who was arguing heatedly with a trader selling scarves. Her face was vaguely familiar, but in profile I couldn’t put a name to it.

“Who is that?”

“Janet Walsh.”

“No. You’re joking.”

But it was her.

Janet Walsh was an award-winning English novelist—and one of the world’s most prominent members of Humble Science! She’d first come to fame in the twenties with Wings of Desire ("a delicious, mischievous, incisive fable"—The Sunday Times), a story set among an “alien race,” who happened to look exactly like humans… except that their males were born with large butterfly wings growing out of their penises, which were necessarily and bloodily severed when they lost their virginity. The alien females (who lacked hymens), were all callous and brutal. After being raped and abused by everyone in sight for most of the novel, the hero discovers a magical technique for making his lost wings grow back—on his shoulders—and flies off into the sunset. ("Gleefully subverts all gender stereotypes"—Playboy.)

Since then, Walsh had specialized in morality tales concerning the evils of “male science” (sic), an ill-defined but invariably calamitous activity—which even women could perform if they were led sufficiently astray, although apparently that was no excuse to change the label. I’d quoted her pithiest comment on the subject in Gender Scrutiny Overload: “If it’s arrogant, hubristic, dominating, reductionist, exploitative, spiritually impoverished, and dehumanizing—what else should we call it but male?”

I said, “Why! Why is she here?”

“Hadn’t you heard? But you were probably traveling; I saw it on the net just before I left. One of the murdochs hired her as a special correspondent to cover the Einstein Conference. Planet News, I think.”

“Janet Walsh is going to report on progress in Theories of Everything?” Even for Planet Noise, that was surreal. Sending members of the British royal family to cover famines, and soap opera stars to cover summit meetings, didn’t come close.

Lee said drily, “'Report’ may not be quite the word for it.”

I hesitated. “Can I ask you something? I… never really had a chance before I left to look into the cults’ response to the conference.” Sisyphus would have picked up any relevant stories—but I’d requested a briefing pared down to the essentials. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard whether or not they’re… taking much interest?”

Lee regarded me with amazement. “They’ve been chartering direct flights from all over the planet for the past week. If Walsh is coming the long way, at the last minute, it’s only to keep up appearances for her employer’s sake—to maintain a veneer of non-partisanship. Stateless will be swarming with her supporters.” She added gleefully, “Janet Walsh! Now that makes the trip worthwhile!”

I felt a stab of betrayal. “You said you weren’t—”

She scowled. “Not because I'm a follower! Janet Walsh is a hobby of mine. By day I study the rationalists. By night I study their opposites.”

“How very… Manichean.” Walsh bought the scarf and started walking away from the stall, not quite toward us. I turned so my face was hidden from her. We’d met once, at a bioethics conference in Zambia; it hadn’t been pleasant. I laughed numbly. “So this is going to be your ideal working holiday?”

Lee was puzzled. “And yours, too, surely? You must have been hoping desperately for something more than a few sleepy seminars to film. Now you’ll have Violet Mosala versus Janet Walsh. Physics versus the Ignorance Cults. Maybe even riots in the streets: anarchy comes to Stateless, at last. What more could you possibly ask for?”

Denied access to Australian, Indonesian and Papua-New-Guinean airspace, the (Portuguese-registered) plane headed southwest across the Indian Ocean. The waters looked wind-swept, gray-blue and threatening, though the sky above was clear. We’d curve right around the continent of Australia, and we wouldn’t sight land again until we arrived.

I was seated beside two middle-aged Polynesian men in business suits, who conversed loudly and incessantly in French. Mercifully, their dialect was so unfamiliar to me that I could almost tune them out; there was nothing on the plane’s headset worth listening to, and without a signal the device made a poor substitute for earplugs.

Sisyphus could reach the net via IR and the plane’s satellite link, and I considered downloading the reports I’d missed about the cult presence on Stateless—but I’d be there soon enough; anticipation seemed masochistic. I forced my attention back to the subject of All-Topology Models.

The concept of ATMs was simple enough to state: the universe was considered to possess, at the deepest level, a mixture of every single mathematically possible topology.

Even in the oldest quantum theories of gravity, the “vacuum” of empty space-time had been viewed as a seething mass of virtual worm-holes, and other more exotic topological distortions, popping in and out of existence. The smooth appearance at macroscopic lengths and human timescales was just the visible average of a hidden riot of complexity. In a way, it was like ordinary matter: a sheet of flexible plastic betrayed nothing to the naked eye of its microstructure—molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks—but knowledge of those constituents allowed the bulk substance’s physical properties to be computed: its modulus of elasticity, for example. Space-time wasn’t made of atoms, but its properties could be understood by viewing it as being “built” from a hierarchy of ever more convoluted deviations from its apparent state of continuity and mild curvature. Quantum gravity had explained why observable space-time, underpinned by an infinite number of invisible knots and detours, behaved as it did in the presence of mass (or energy): curving in exactly the fashion required to produce the gravitational force.

ATM theorists were striving to generalize this result: to explain the (relatively) smooth ten-dimensional “total space” of the Standard Unified Field Theory—whose properties accounted for all four forces: strong, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic—as the net result of an infinite number of elaborate geometrical structures.

Nine spatial dimensions (six rolled up tight), and one time, was only what total space appeared to be if it wasn’t examined too closely. Whenever two subatomic particles interacted, there was always a chance that the total space they occupied would behave, instead, like part of a twelve-dimensional hypersphere, or a thirteen-dimensional doughnut, or a fourteen-dimensional figure eight, or just about anything else. In fact—just as a single photon could travel along two different paths at once—any number of these possibilities could take effect simultaneously, and “interfere with each other” to produce the final outcome. Nine space, one time, was nothing but an average.

There were two main questions still in dispute among ATM theorists:

What, exactly, was meant by “all” topologies? Just how bizarre could the possibilities contributing to the average total space become? Did they have to be, merely, those which could be formed with a twisted, knotted sheet of higher-dimensional plastic—or could they include states more like a (possibly infinite) handful of scattered grains of sand— where notions like “number of dimensions” and “space-time curvature” ceased to exist altogether?

And: how, exactly, should the average effect of all these different structures be computed? How should the sum over the infinite number of possibilities be written down and added up when the time came to test the theory: to make a prediction, and calculate some tangible, physical quantity which an experiment could actually measure?

On one level, the obvious response to both questions was: “Use whatever gives the right answers"—but choices which did that were hard to find… and some of them smacked of contrivance. Infinite sums were notorious for being either intractable, or too pliable by far. I jotted down an example—remote from the actual tensor equations of ATMs, but good enough to illustrate the point:

Let S = 1-1+1-1+1-1+1- …

Then S = (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) + … = 0 + 0 + 0 … = 0

But S = 1 + (-1+1) + (-1+1) + (-1+1) … = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 … = 1

It was a mathematically naive “paradox"; the correct answer was, simply, that this particular infinite sequence didn’t add up to any definite sum at all. Mathematicians would always be perfectly happy with such a verdict, and would know all the rules for avoiding the pitfalls—and software could assess even the most difficult cases. When a physicist’s hard-won theory starred generating similarly ambiguous equations, though, and the choice came down to strict mathematical rigor and a theory with no predictive power at all… or, a bit of pragmatic side-stepping of the rules, and a theory which churned out beautiful results in perfect agreement with every experiment… it was no surprise that people were tempted. After all, most of what Newton had done to calculate planetary orbits had left contemporary mathematicians apoplectic with rage.

Violet Mosala’s approach was controversial for a very different reason. She’d been awarded the Nobel prize for rigorously proving a dozen key theorems in general topology—theorems which had rapidly come to comprise a standard mathematical toolbox for ATM physicists, obliterating stumbling blocks and resolving ambiguities. She’d done more than anyone else to provide the field with solid foundations, and the means of making careful, measured progress. Even her fiercest critics agreed that her mathematics was meticulous, beyond reproach.

The trouble was, she told her equations too much about the world.

The ultimate test of a TOE was to answer questions like: “What is the probability of a ten-gigaelectronvolt neutrino fired at a stationary proton scattering off a down quark and emerging at a certain angle?"… or even just: “What is the mass of an electron?” Essentially, Mosala prefixed all such questions with the condition: “Given that we know that space-time is roughly four-dimensional, and total space is roughly ten-dimensional, and the apparatus used to perform the experiment consists, approximately, of the following…”

Her supporters said she was merely setting everything in context. No experiment happened in isolation; quantum mechanics had been hammering that point home for the last hundred and twenty years. Asking a Theory of Everything to predict the chance of observing some microscopic event—without adding the proviso that “there is a universe, and it contains, among other things, equipment for detecting the event in question"—would be as nonsensical as asking: “If you pick a marble out of a bag, what are the odds that it will be green?”

Her critics said she used circular reasoning, assuming from the very beginning all the results she was trying to prove. The details she fed into her computations included so much about the known physics of the experimental apparatus that—indirectly, but inevitably—they gave the whole game away.

I was hardly qualified to come down on either side… but it seemed to me that Mosala’s opponents were being hypocritical, because they were pulling the same trick under a different guise: the alternatives they offered all invoked a cosmological fix. They declared that “before” the Big Bang and the creation of time (or “adjoining” the event, to avoid the oxymoron), there had been nothing but a perfectly symmetrical “pre-space,” in which all topologies carried equal weight… and the “average result” of most familiar physical quantities would have been infinite. Pre-space was sometimes called “infinitely hot"; it could be thought of as the kind of perfectly balanced chaos which space-time would become if so much energy was poured into it that literally everything became equally possible. Everything and its opposite; the net result was that nothing happened at all.

But some local fluctuation had disturbed the balance in such a way as to give rise to the Big Bang. From that tiny accident, our universe had burst into existence. Once that had happened, the original “infinitely hot,” infinitely even-handed mixture of topologies had been forced to become ever more biased, because “temperature” and “energy” now had a meaning—and in an expanding, cooling universe, most of the “hot” old symmetries would have been as unstable as molten metal thrown into a lake. And when they’d cooled, the shapes into which they’d frozen had just happened to favor topologies close to a certain ten-dimensional total space—one which gave rise to particles like quarks and electrons, and forces like gravity and electromagnetism.

By this logic, the only correct way to sum over all the topologies was to incorporate the fact that our universe had—by chance—emerged from pre-space in a certain way. Details of the broken symmetry had to be fed into the equations “by hand"—because there was no reason why they couldn’t have been utterly different. And if the physics resulting from this accident seemed improbably conducive to the formation of stars, planets, and life… then this universe was just one of a vast number which had frozen out of pre-space, each with a different set of particles and forces. If every possible set had been tried, it was hardly surprising that at least one of them had turned out to be favorable to life.

It was the old anthropic principle, the fudge which had saved a thousand cosmologies. And I had no real argument with it even if all the other universes were destined to be forever hypothetical.

But Violet Mosala’s methods seemed neither more nor less circular. Her opponents had to “fine tune” a few parameters in their equations, to take account of the particular universe “our” Big Bang had created. Mosala and her supporters merely described real experiments in the real world so thoroughly that they “showed the equations” the very same thing.

It seemed to me that both groups of physicists were confessing, however reluctantly, that they couldn’t quite explain how the universe was built… without mentioning the fact that they were there inside it, looking for the explanation.

Silence filled the cabin as we flew into darkness. Display screens blinked out, one by one, as passengers dozed off; everyone had had a long journey, wherever they’d started from. I watched the cloud banks behind us darken—a swift, violent sunset, metallic and bruised—then I switched to a route map as we headed northeast, just beyond sight of New Zealand. I thought of space probes on slingshot orbits to Venus via Jupiter. It was as if we’d had to take the long way round to build up enough velocity—as if Stateless was moving too fast to be approached any other way.

An hour later, the island finally appeared ahead of us, like a pale stranded starfish. Six arms sloped gently down from a central plateau; along their sides, gray rock gave way to banks of coral, which thinned from a mass of solid outcrops to a lacelike presence barely breaking the surface of the water. A faint blue bioluminescent glow outlined the convoluted borders of the reefs, enclosed by a succession of other hues—the color-coded depth lines of a living navigation chart. A small cloud of flashing orange fireflies was clustered in the nearest of the starfish’s armpits; whether they were boats anchored in the harbor, or something more exotic, I couldn’t tell.

Inland, a sprinkling of lights hinted at a city’s orderly grid. I felt a sudden rush of unease. Stateless was as beautiful as any atoll, as spectacular as any ocean liner… with none of the reassuring qualities of either. How could I trust this bizarre artifact not to crumble into the sea? I was accustomed to standing on solid rock a billion years old, or riding machines of a suitably modest human scale. In my own lifetime, this whole island had been nothing but a cloud of minerals adrift over half the Pacific—and from this vantage, it didn’t seem beyond belief that the ocean might surge in through a thousand invisible pores and channels to dissolve it all, reclaim it all, at any moment.

As we descended, though, the land spread out around us, streets and buildings came into view, and my insecurity faded. One million people had made this their home, staking their lives on its solidity. If it was humanly possible to keep this mirage afloat, then I had nothing to fear.

10

The plane emptied slowly. Passengers pressed forward, sleepy and irritable; many were clutching cushions and small blankets, looking like children up past their bedtime. It was only about nine p.m. here—and most people’s body clocks would have agreed—but we were all still dazed and cramped and weary. I looked around for Indrani Lee, but I couldn’t spot her in the crowd.

There was a security gate at the end of the umbilical, but no airport staff in sight, and no obvious device for interrogating my passport. Stateless placed no restrictions on immigration, let alone the entry of temporary visitors—but they did prohibit certain imports. Beside the gate was a multilingual sign which read:

I hesitated. If my passport wasn’t read, and the seal of approval for my implants taken into account… what would this machine do to me? Incinerate a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of hardware—and fry a large part of my digestive tract in the process?

I knew that was paranoid: I could hardly have been the first journalist to set foot on the island. And the message was probably aimed at visitors from certain privately owned South American islands—"libertarian havens” established by self-styled “political refugees” from the US gun law reforms of the twenties—some of whom had tried to bring Stateless around to their special way of thinking on a number of occasions.

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.

In theory, a patent lasted only seventeen years—but biotech companies had perfected the strategy of re-applying for the same coverage from a different angle when the expiration date loomed: first for the DNA sequence of a gene, and all its applications… then for the corresponding amino acid sequence… then for the shape and functionality (irrespective of precise chemical makeup) of the fully assembled protein. I couldn’t bring myself to simply shrug off the theft of knowledge as a victimless crime—I’d always been swayed by the argument that no one would waste money on R&D if engineered lifeforms couldn’t be patented—but there was something insane about the fact that the most powerful tools against famine, the most powerful tools against environmental damage, the most powerful tools against poverty… were all priced beyond the reach of everyone who needed them the most.

As I began to cross toward the exit, I saw Janet Walsh heading in the same direction, and I hung back. She was walking with a group of half a dozen men and women—but one man walked a few meters outside the entourage, with a practiced smooth gait and a steady gaze directed straight at Walsh. I recognized the technique at once, and the practitioner a moment later: David Connolly, a photographer with Planet Noise. Walsh needed a second pair of eyes, of course—she would hardly have let them put all that nasty dehumanizing technology inside her own body… and, worse, her own POV would have left her out of every shot. Not much point employing a celebrity journalist if she wasn’t onscreen.

I followed at a discreet distance. A group of forty or fifty supporters were standing outside in the warm night air, holding up luminescent banners—more telegenic in the relative darkness than they would have been inside—which switched in synch between HUMBLE SCIENCE!, WELCOME JANET! and SAY NO TO TOE! They cheered in unison as Walsh came through the doors. She broke away from her halo of companions to shake hands and receive kisses; Connolly stood back to capture it all.

Walsh made a short speech, wisps of gray hair blowing in the breeze. I couldn’t fault her skills with camera or crowd: she had the knack of appearing dignified and authoritative, without seeming stern or aloof. And I had to admire her stamina: she displayed more energy after the long flight than I could have summoned if my life had been in danger.

“I want to thank all of you for coming here to greet me; I really am touched by your generosity. And I want to thank you for undertaking the long, arduous journey to this island, to lend your voices to our small song of protest against the forces of scientific arrogance. There are people gathering here who believe they can crush every last source of human dignity, every last wellspring of spiritual nourishment, every last precious, sustaining mystery, under the weight of their ‘intellectual progress'—grind us all down into one equation, and write it on a T-shirt like a cheap slogan. People who believe they can take all the wonders of nature and the secrets of the heart and say: ‘This is it. This is all there is.’ Well, we’re here to tell them—”

The small crowd roared, “NO!”

Beside me, someone laughed quietly. “But if they can’t take away your precious dignity, Janet, why make such a fuss?”

I turned. The speaker was a… twentyish? asex? Ve tipped vis head and smiled, teeth flashing white against deep black skin, eyes as dark as Gina’s, high cheekbones which had to be a woman’s—except, of course, they didn’t. Ve was dressed in black jeans and a loose black T-shirt; points of light appeared on the fabric sparsely, at random, as if it was meant to be displaying some kind of image, but the data feed had been cut.

Ve said, “What a windbag. You know she used to work for D-R-D? You’d think she’d have snappier rhetoric, with credentials like that.” Cre-den-tials was pronounced with an ironic (Jamaican?) drawl; D-R-D was Dayton-Rice-Daley, the Anglophone world’s largest advertising firm. “You’re Andrew Worth.”

“Yes. How—?”

“Come to film Violet Mosala.”

“That’s right. Do you… work with her?” Ve looked almost too young even to be a doctoral student—but then, Mosala had completed her own PhD at twenty.

Ve shook vis head. “I’ve never met her.”

I still couldn’t pin down vis accent, unless the word I was looking for was mid-Atlantic: halfway between Kingston and Luanda. I put down my suitcase and held out a hand. Ve shook it firmly. “I'm Akili Kuwale.”

“Here for the Einstein Conference?”

“Why else?”

I shrugged. “There must be other things happening on Stateless.” Ve didn’t reply.

Walsh had moved on, and her cheer squad were dispersing. I glanced down at my notepad and said, “Transport map.”

Kuwale said, “The hotel’s only two kilometers away. Unless that suitcase is heavier than it looks… it would be just as easy to walk, wouldn’t it?”

Ve had no luggage, no backpack, nothing; ve must have arrived earlier, and returned to the airport… to meet me? I had a serious need to be horizontal, and I couldn’t imagine what ve wanted to tell me that couldn’t wait until morning—and couldn’t be said on a tram—but that was probably all the more reason to hear it.

I said, “Good idea. I could use some fresh air.”

Kuwale seemed to know where ve was going, so I put my notepad away and followed along. It was a warm, humid night, but there was a steady breeze which took the edge off the oppressiveness. Stateless was no closer to the tropics than Sydney; overall, it was probably cooler.

The layout of the center of the island reminded me of Sturt, an inland South Australian neopolis built at about the time Stateless was seeded. There were broad, paved streets and low buildings, most of them small blocks of apartments above shopfronts, six storeys high at the most. Everything in sight was made from reef-rock: a form of limestone, strengthened and sealed by organic polymers, which was “farmed” from the self-replenishing quarries of the inner reefs. None of the buildings was bleached-coral white, though; trace minerals produced all the colors of marble: rich grays, greens and browns, and more rarely dark crimson, shading to black.

The people around us seemed relaxed and unhurried, as if they were all out for leisurely strolls with no particular destination in mind. I saw no cycles at all, but there’d have to be a few on the island; tram lines stretched less than halfway to the points of the star, fifty kilometers from the center.

Kuwale said, “Sarah Knight was a great admirer of Violet Mosala. I think she would have done a good job. Careful. Thorough.” That threw me. “You know Sarah?” “We’ve been in touch.” I laughed wearily. “What is this? Sarah Knight is a big fan of Mosala… and I'm not. So what? I'm not some Ignorance Cult member here to do a hatchet job; I’ll still treat her fairly.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“It’s the only issue I'm willing to discuss with you. Why do you imagine it’s any of your business how this documentary’s made?”

Kuwale said calmly, “I don’t. The documentary’s not important.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“No offense. But it’s not what I'm talking about.”

We walked on a few meters, in silence. I waited to see if keeping my mouth shut and feigning indifference would prompt a sudden revelatory outburst. It didn’t.

I said, “So… what exactly are you doing here? Are you a journalist, a physicist… or what? A sociologist?” I’d almost said: A cultist—but even a member of a rival group like Mystical Renaissance or Culture First would never have mocked the deep wisdom of Janet Walsh.

“I'm an interested observer.”

“Yeah? That explains everything.”

Ve grinned appreciatively, as if I’d made a joke. I could see the curved facade of the hotel in the distance, straight ahead now; I recognized it from the conference organizers’ AV.

Kuwale became serious. “You’ll be with Violet Mosala… a lot, over the next two weeks. Maybe more than any other person. We’ve tried to get messages through to her, but you know she doesn’t take us seriously. So… would you at least be willing to keep your eyes open?”

“For what?”

Ve frowned, then looked around nervously. “Do I have to spell it out? I'm AC. Mainstream AC. We don’t want to see her hurt. And I don’t know how sympathetic you are, or how far you’re prepared to go to help us, but all you’d have to do is—”

I held up a hand to stop ver. “What are you talking about? You don’t want to see her hurt?”

Kuwale looked dismayed, then suddenly wary. I said, “‘Mainstream AC'? Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Ve didn’t reply. “And if Violet Mosala doesn’t take you seriously, why should anyone else?”

Kuwale was clearly having grave second thoughts about me. I still wanted to know what the first ones had been. Ve said derisively, “Sarah Knight never agreed to anything—not in so many words—but at least she understood what was going on. What kind of journalist are you? Do you ever go looking for information? Or do you just grab an electronic teat and see what comes out when you suck?”

Ve broke away, and headed down a side street. I called out, “I'm not a mind-reader! Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

I stood and watched ver disappear into the crowd. I could have followed, demanding answers, but I was already beginning to suspect that I could guess the truth. Kuwale was a fan of Mosala’s, affronted by the planeloads of cultists who’d come to mock vis idol. And though it wasn’t, literally, impossible that an even more disturbed member of Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance meant Violet Mosala harm… most likely it was all just Kuwale’s elaborate fantasy.

I’d call Sarah Knight in the morning; she’d probably had a dozen weird messages from Kuwale, and finally fobbed ver off by replying: Its not even my job anymore. Go pick on the arsehole who stole it from me, Andrew Worth. Here’s a recent picture. I could hardly blame her; it was a small enough act of revenge.

I continued on toward the hotel. I was dead on my feet, sleepwalking.

I asked Sisyphus, “So what does AC stand for?”

“In what context?”

“Any context. Besides alternating current."

There was a long pause. I glanced up at the sky, and spotted the faint row of evenly spaced dots, drifting slowly eastward against the stars, which still bound me to the world I knew.

“There are five thousand and seventeen other meanings, including specialist jargon, subcultural slang, and registered businesses, charities, and political organizations.”

“Then… anything which might fit the way it was used by Akili Kuwale a few minutes ago.” My notepad kept twenty-four hours of audio in memory. I added, “Kuwale is probably asex.”

Sisyphus digested the conversation, rescanned its list, and said, “The thirty most plausible meanings are: Absolute Control, a Fijian security consultancy who work throughout the South Pacific; Asex Catholique, a Paris-based group which advocates reform of the policies of the Roman Catholic Church toward asex gender migrants; Advanced Cartography, a South African satellite data reduction firm…” I listened to all thirty, then thirty more, but the connections were all so ludicrous as to amount to nothing but noise.

“So what’s the meaning which makes perfect sense—but isn’t listed in any respectable database? What’s the one answer I can’t get out of my favorite electronic teat?”

Sisyphus didn’t dignify that with a reply.

I nearly apologized, but I caught myself in time.

11

I woke at six-thirty, a few seconds before my alarm sounded. I caught fragments of a retreating dream: images of waves crashing against disintegrating coral and limestone—but if the mood had been threatening, it was rapidly dispelled. Sunlight filled the room, shining off the smooth silver-gray walls of polished reef-rock. There were people talking on the street below; I couldn’t make out any words, but the tone sounded relaxed, amiable, civilized. If this was anarchy, it beat waking up to police sirens in Shanghai or New York. I felt more refreshed and optimistic than I had for a very long time.

And I was finally going to meet my subject.

I’d received a message the night before, from Mosala’s assistant, Karin De Groot. Mosala was giving a media conference at eight; after that, she’d be busy for most of the day—starting at nine, when Henry Buzzo from Caltech was delivering a paper which he claimed would cast doubt on a whole class of ATMs. Between the media conference and Buzzo’s paper, though, I’d have a chance to discuss the documentary with her, at last. Although nothing had to be concluded on Stateless—I’d be able to interview her at length back in Cape Town, if necessary—I’d been beginning to wonder if I’d be forced to cover her time here as just another journalist in the pack.

I thought about breakfast, but after forcing myself to eat on the flight from Dili, my appetite still hadn’t returned. So I lay on the bed, reading through Mosala’s biographical notes one more time, and rechecking my tentative shooting schedule for the fortnight ahead. The room was functional, almost ascetic compared to most hotels… but it was clean, modern, bright, and inexpensive, I’d slept in less comfortable beds, in rooms with plusher but gloomier decor, at twice the cost.

It was all too good, by far. Peaceful surroundings and an untraumatic subject—what had I done to deserve this? I’d never even found out who Lydia had sent into the breach to make Distress. Who’d be spending the day in a psychiatric hospital in Miami or Berne, while tranquilizers were withdrawn from one strait-jacketed victim after another, to test the effects of some non-sedative drug on the syndrome, or to obtain scans of the neuropathology unsullied by pharmacological effects?

I brushed the image away, angrily. Distress wasn’t my responsibility; I hadn’t created the disease. And I hadn’t forced anyone to take my place.

Before leaving for the media conference, I reluctantly called Sarah Knight. My curiosity about Kuwale had all but faded—it was sure to be a sad story, with no surprises—and the prospect of facing Sarah for the first time since I’d robbed her of Violet Mosala wasn’t appealing.

I didn’t have to. It was only ten to six in Sydney, and a generic answering system took my call. Relieved, I left a brief message, then headed downstairs.

The main auditorium was packed, buzzing with expectant chatter. I’d had visions of hundreds of protesters from Humble Science! picketing the hotel entrance, or brawling with security guards and physicists in the corridors, but there wasn’t a demonstrator in sight. Standing in the entrance, it took me a while to pick out Janet Walsh in the audience, but once I’d spotted her it was easy to triangulate to Connolly in a forward row—perfectly placed to turn from Walsh to Mosala with a minimum of neck strain.

I took a seat near the back of the room, and invoked Witness. Electronic cameras on the stage would capture the audience, and I could buy the footage from the conference organizers if there was anything worth using.

Marian Fox, president of the International Union of Theoretical Physicists, took the stage and introduced Mosala. She uttered all the words of praise that anyone would have used in her place: respected, inspirational, dedicated, exceptional. I had no doubt that she was perfectly sincere… but the language of achievement always seemed to me to crumble into self-parody. How many people on the planet could be exceptional? How many could be unique? I had no wish to see Violet Mosala portrayed as no different from the most mediocre of her colleagues… but all the laudatory clichés conveyed nothing. They just rendered themselves meaningless.

Mosala walked to the podium, trying to look graceful under hyperbole; a section of the audience applauded wildly, and several people rose to their feet. I made a mental note to ask Indrani Lee for her thoughts as to when and why these strange adulatory rituals—observed almost universally with actors and musicians—had begun to be followed for a handful of celebrity scientists. I suspected it was all down to the Ignorance Cults; they’d struggled so hard to raise popular interest in their cause that it would have been surprising if they hadn’t ended up generating some equally vehement opposing passions. And there were plenty of social strata where the cults were pure establishment, and there could be no greater act of rebellion than idolizing a physicist.

Mosala waited for the noise to die down. “Thank you, Marian. And thank you all for attending this session. I should just briefly explain what I'm doing here. I’ll be on a number of panels taking questions on technical matters, throughout the conference. And, of course, I’ll be happy to discuss the issues raised by the paper I'm giving on the eighteenth, after I’ve presented it. But time is always short on those occasions, and we like to keep the questions tightly focused—which, I know, often frustrates journalists who’d like to cover a broader range of topics.

“So, the organizing committee have persuaded a number of speakers to hold media sessions where those restrictions won’t apply. This morning it’s my turn. So if you have anything you’d like to ask me which you’re afraid might be ruled out as irrelevant at later sessions… this is your chance.”

Mosala came across as relaxed and unassuming; she’d been visibly nervous in the footage I’d seen of earlier appearances—the Nobel ceremony, especially—but if she wasn’t yet a seasoned veteran, she was definitely more at ease. She had a deep, vibrant voice—which might have been electrifying if she ever took to making speeches—but her tone was conversational, not oratorial. All of which boded well for Violet Mosala. The awkward truth was, some people just didn’t belong on a living room screen for most of fifty minutes. They didn’t fit—and they emerged distorted, like a sound too loud or too soft to record. Mosala, I was sure now, would survive the limitations of the medium. So long as I didn’t screw up completely, myself.

The first few questions came from the science correspondents of the non-specialist news services… who diligently resurrected all the old non sequiturs: Will a Theory of Everything mean an end to science? Will a TOE render the future totally predictable? Will a TOE unlock all the unsolved problems of physics and chemistry, biology and medicine… ethics and religion?

Mosala dealt with all of this patiently and concisely. “A Theory of Everything is just the simplest mathematical formulation we can find which encapsulates all the underlying order in the universe. Over time, if a candidate TOE survives sustained theoretical scrutiny and experimental testing, we should gradually become confident that it represents a kind of kernel of understanding… from which—in principle, in the most idealized sense—everything around us could be explained.

“But that won’t make anything ’totally predictable.’ The universe is full of systems which we understand completely—systems as simple as two planets orbiting a star—where the mathematics is chaotic, or intractable, and long term predictions will always be impossible to compute.

“And it doesn’t mean ‘an end to science.’ Science is much more than the search for a TOE; it’s the elucidation of the relationships between order in the universe at every level. Reaching the foundations doesn’t mean hitting the ceiling. There are dozens of problems in fluid dynamics—let alone neurobiology—which need new approaches, or better approximations, not the ultimate, precise description of matter on a subatomic scale.”

I pictured Gina at her workstation. And I pictured her in her new home, recounting all her problems and small triumphs to her new lover. I felt unsteady for a moment, but it passed.

“Lowell Parker, Atlantica. Professor Mosala, you say a TOE is the ’simplest mathematical formulation of the underlying order in the universe.’ But aren’t all these concepts culturally determined? ‘Simplicity'? ‘Order'? Even the range of formulations available to contemporary mathematics?” Parker was an earnest young man with a Boston accent; Atlantica was a highculture netzine, produced mainly by part-time academics from east coast universities.

Mosala replied, “Certainly. And the equations we choose to call a TOE won’t be unique. They’ll be like… say, Maxwell’s Equations for electromagnetism. There are half a dozen equally valid ways Maxwell’s Equations can be written—constants can be shuffled around, different variables used… they can even be expressed in either three or four dimensions. Physicists and engineers still can’t agree as to which formulation is the simplest—because that really depends on what you want to use them for: designing a radar antenna, calculating the behavior of the solar wind, or describing the history of the unification of electrostatics and magnetism. But they all give identical results in any particular calculation—because they all describe the same thing: electromagnetism itself.”

Parker said, “That’s often been said about the world’s religions, hasn’t it? They all express the same basic, universal truths—merely in a different manner, to suit different times and places. Would you concede that what you’re doing is essentially just a part of the same tradition?”

“No. I don’t believe that’s true.”

“But you’ve admitted that cultural factors will determine the TOE we accept. So how can you claim that what you’re doing is any more ‘objective’ than religion?”

Mosala hesitated, then said carefully, “Suppose every human being was wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, and we waited a few million years for the next species with a set of religious and scientific cultures to arise. What do you think the new religions would have in common with the old ones—the ones from our time? I suspect the only common ground would be certain ethical principles which could be traced to shared biological influences: sexual reproduction, child rearing, the advantages of altruism, the awareness of death. And if the biology was very different, there might be no overlap at all.

“But if we waited for the new scientific culture to come up with their idea of a TOE, then I believe that—however different it looked ‘on paper'—it would be something which either culture would be able to show was mathematically equivalent in every respect to our TOE… just as any physics undergraduate can prove that all the forms of Maxwell’s Equations describe exactly the same thing.

“That’s the difference. Scientists may start off disagreeing wildly—but they converge on a consensus, regardless of their culture. There are physicists at this conference from over a hundred different countries. Their ancestors three thousand years ago might have had twenty or thirty mutually contradictory explanations between them for any phenomenon you care to think of in the natural world. And yet there are only three conflicting candidate TOEs being presented here. And in twenty years’ time, if not sooner, I’d bet there’ll only be one.”

Parker appeared dissatisfied with this reply, but he took his seat.

“Lisbeth Weller, GninWeisheit. It seems to me that your whole approach to these issues reflects a male, Western, reductionist, left-brained mode of thought.” Weller was a tall, sober-looking woman, who sounded genuinely saddened and perplexed. “How can you possibly reconcile this with your struggle as an African woman against cultural imperialism?”

Mosala said evenly, “I have no interest in surrendering the most powerful intellectual tools I possess, because of some quaint misconception that they’re the property of any particular group of people: male, Western, or otherwise. As I said, the history of science is one of convergence toward a shared understanding of the universe—and I'm not willing to be excluded from that convergence for any reason. And as for ‘left-brained modes of thought,’ I'm afraid that’s a rather dated—and reductionist—concept. Personally, I use the whole organ.”

There was loud applause from the fans, but it sounded plaintive as it died out. The atmosphere in the room was changing: becoming strained, polarized. Weller, I knew, was a proud member of Mystical Renaissance—and although most journalists here would have no cult affiliation, the minority with strong anti-science sentiments could still make their presence felt.

“William Savimbi, Proteus Information. You speak approvingly of a convergence of ideas which has no respect for ancestral cultures—as if your own heritage were of no importance to you at all. Is it true that you received death threats from the Pan-African Cultural Defense Front, after you publicly stated that you didn’t consider yourself to be an African woman?” Proteus was the South African branch of a large Canadian family company; Savimbi was a solid, gray-haired man, who spoke with casual familiarity, as if he’d been covering Mosala for some time.

Mosala struggled visibly to contain her anger. She reached into a pocket and took out her notepad, and began typing on the keyboard.

Without pausing, she said, “Mr. Savimbi, if you find the technology of your profession too daunting, perhaps you should look for something less challenging. This is the quote, from the original Reuters story, filed in Stockholm on December 10th, 2053. And it’s only taken me fifteen seconds to find it,”

She held up the notepad, and her recorded voice said: “I don’t wake up every morning and say to myself: ‘I’m an African woman, how should this be reflected in my work?’ I don’t think that way at all. I wonder if anyone asked Dr. Wozniak how being European influenced his approach to polymer synthesis.”

There was more applause—from more of the audience, this time—but I sensed a growing predatory undercurrent. Mosala was becoming visibly agitated, and however sympathetic the pack were—in principle—I had no doubt that they’d be overjoyed if she was provoked into losing control.

“Janet Walsh, Planet News. Ms. Mosala, perhaps you could clarify something for me. This Theory of Everything you keep talking about, which is going to sum up the final truth about the universe… it sounds absolutely wonderful to me, but I would like to hear exactly what it’s based on.”

Mosala must have known who Walsh was, but she betrayed no sign of hostility. She said, “Every TOE is an attempt to find a deeper explanation for what’s called the Standard Unified Field Theory. That was completed in the late twenties—and it’s survived all experimental tests, so far. Strictly speaking, the SUFT is already a ‘Theory of Everything': it does give a unified account of all the forces of nature. But its a very messy, arbitrary theory—based on a ten-dimensional universe with a lot of strange quirks which are difficult to take at face value. Most of us believe that there’s a simpler explanation underlying it, just waiting to be found.”

Walsh said, “But this SUFT you’re trying to supplant—what was that based on?”

“A number of earlier theories which each, separately, accounted for one or two of the four basic forces. But if you want to know where those earlier theories came from, I’d have to recount five thousand years of scientific history. The short answer is, ultimately, a TOE will be based on observations of every aspect of the world, and the search for patterns in those observations.”

"That’s it?” Walsh mimed happy disbelief. “Then we’re all scientists, aren’t we? We all use our senses, we all make observations. And we all see patterns. I see patterns in the clouds above my home, every time I walk out into the garden.” She smiled a modest, self-deprecating smile.

Mosala said, “That’s a start. But there are two powerful steps beyond that kind of observation, which have made all the difference. Carrying out deliberate, controlled experiments, instead of only watching nature as it unfolds. And carrying out quantitative observations: making measurements, and trying to find patterns in the numbers.”

“Eike numerology?”

Mosala shook her head, and said patiently, “Not any pattern, for the sake of it. You have to have a clear hypothesis to start with, and you have to know how to test it.”

“You mean… use all the right statistical methods, and so on?”

“Exactly.”

“But given the right statistical methods… you think the whole truth about the universe is spelled out in the patterns you can find by peering at an endless list of numbers?”

Mosala hesitated, probably wondering if the tortuous process of explaining anything more subtle would be worse than accepting that characterization other life’s work.

“More or less.”

“Everything’s in the numbers? The numbers never lie?”

Mosala lost all patience. “No, they don’t.”

Walsh said, “That’s very interesting. Because a few months ago, I came across a preposterous—very offensive!—idea that was being spread on some of the far-right-wing European networks. I thought it deserved to be properly—scientifically!—refuted. So I bought a little statistical package, and I asked it to test the hypothesis that a certain portion—a certain quota—of the Nobel Prizes since the year 2010 have been explicitly reserved on political grounds for the citizens of African nations.” There was a moment of stunned silence, then a wave of outraged exclamations spread across the room. Walsh held up her notepad and continued, raising her voice over the outcry, “And the answer was, there was a ninety-five percent chance—” Half a dozen people in the fan club rows sprang to their feet and started shouting at her; the two men on either side of me began hissing. Walsh pressed on, with an expression of bemusement, as if she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “The answer was, there was a ninety-five percent chance that it was true."

A dozen more people stood up to abuse her. Four journalists stormed out of the auditorium. Walsh remained on her feet, waiting for a response, smiling innocently. I saw Marian Fox move tentatively toward the podium; Mosala gestured to her to stay back.

Mosala began typing on her notepad. The shouting and hissing gradually subsided, and then everyone but Walsh took their seats again.

The silence can’t have lasted more than ten seconds, but it was long enough for me to realize that my heart was pounding. I wanted to punch someone. Walsh was no racist, but she was an expert manipulator. She’d slipped a barb under everyone’s skin; if she’d had two hundred screaming, placard-waving followers at the back of the auditorium, she couldn’t have raised stronger passions.

Mosala looked up and smiled sweetly.

She said, “The African scientific renaissance has been examined in detail, in over thirty papers in the last ten years. I’d be happy to give you the references, if you can’t track them down yourself. You’ll find there are several more sophisticated hypotheses for explaining the sharp rise in the number of articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the rates of citation of those articles, the number of patents awarded—and the number of Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry.

“When it comes to your own field, though, I'm afraid you’re on your own. I can’t find a single study which offers any alternative explanation to the ninety-nine percent likelihood that, since its inception, a quota of Booker Prizes have been set aside for a clearly delineated, intellectually challenged minority: hacks who should have stayed in advertizing.”

The auditorium exploded with laughter. Walsh remained standing for a few seconds, then took her seat with remarkable dignity: unrepentant, unashamed, unfazed. I wondered if all she’d wanted was for Mosala to hit back on the same level. There was no question that Planet Noise would find a way to twist the exchange into a victory for Walsh: SCIENCE PRODIGY, CONFRONTED WITH THE FACTS, INSULTS RESPECTED AUTHOR. But most of the media would report that Mosala had responded with great restraint to deliberate provocation.

There were a few more questions—all of them innocuous and mildly technical—then the session was declared at an end. I walked around to the back of the stage, where Karin De Groot was waiting for me.

De Groot was unmistakably ifem—a look which was not at all “halfway toward” androgynous; it was far more distinctive than that. While ufems and umales exaggerated well-established facial gender cues, and asexes eliminated them, the first ifems and imales had modeled the human visual system and found completely new clusters of parameters which would set them apart at a glance—without rendering them all homogeneous.

She shook my hand then led me toward one of the hotel’s small meeting rooms. She said quietly, “Go easy on her, will you? That wasn’t pleasant back there.”

“I can’t imagine anyone handling it better.”

“Violet’s not someone I’d want as an enemy; she never hits back without thinking it through. But that doesn’t mean she’s made of stone.”

The room had a table and seating for twelve, but only Mosala was waiting there. I’d been half expecting a private security guard—but then, the fan club notwithstanding, she wasn’t quite in the rock star league. And Kuwale’s dire intimations notwithstanding, there was probably no need.

Mosala greeted me warmly. “I'm sorry we couldn’t do this earlier, but I'm afraid I hadn’t set aside any time for it. After all those meetings with Sarah Knight, I’d assumed the whole planning stage was over.”

All those meetings with Sarah Knight? Pre-production should never have gone that far without SeeNet’s approval.

I said, “I'm sorry to put you through it again. There’s always some unavoidable duplication when a new director takes over a project.”

Mosala nodded, distracted. We sat and went through the whole conference timetable together, comparing notes. Mosala asked not to be filmed at more than fifty percent of the sessions she attended. “I’d go mad if you were watching me all the time, catching me out whenever I pulled a face at something I disagreed with.” I agreed, but then we haggled over the particular fifty percent—I definitely wanted reaction shots for all the talks where her work would be explicitly discussed.

We decided on three interview sessions, two hours each, the first on Wednesday afternoon.

Mosala said, “I still have some trouble understanding what your aim is with this program. If the subject is TOEs… why not just cover the whole conference, instead of putting the spotlight on me?”

“Audiences find the theories more accessible if they come packaged as something which a particular person has done.” I shrugged. “Or so the network executives have convinced themselves—and probably convinced the audiences as well, by now.” SeeNet stood for Science, Education and Entertainment Network, but the S-word was often treated as a source of embarrassment incapable of being intrinsically interesting, and requiring the maximum possible sugar-coating. “With a profile we can touch on some broader issues, though, in terms of the way they affect your day-to-day life. The Ignorance Cults, for example.”

Mosala said drily, “You don’t think they get enough publicity already?”

“Yes—but most of it’s on their own terms. The profile could be a chance for people to see them through your eyes.”

She laughed. “You want me to tell your audience what I think of the cults? You won’t have time for anything else, if I get started.”

“You could stick to the big three.”

Mosala hesitated. De Groot flashed me a warning look, but I ignored it. I said, “Culture First?”

“Culture First is the most pathetic. It’s the last refuge for people desperate to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals'—while remaining complete scientific illiterates. Most of them are just nostalgic for the era when a third of the planet was controlled by people whose definition of a civilized education was Latin, European military history, and the selected doggerel of a few overgrown British schoolboys.”

I grinned. “Mystical Renaissance?”

Mosala smiled ironically. “They start from such good intentions, don’t they? They say most people are blind to the world around them: sleepwalkers in a zombie’s routine of mundane work and mind-numbing entertainment. I couldn’t agree more. They say they want everyone on the planet to become ‘attuned’ to the universe we’re living in, and to share the awe they feel when they confront the deep strangeness of it all: the dizzying length and time scales of cosmology, the endlessly rich complexities of the biosphere, the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

“Well… all of those things inspire awe in me, too—some of the time—but Mystical Renaissance treats that response as an end in itself. And they want science to pull back from investigating anything which gives them a high in its pristine, unexplained state—in case they don’t get the same rush from it, once it’s better understood. Ultimately, they’re not interested in the universe at all—any more than people who romanticize the life of animals into a cartoon world where no blood is spilled… or people who deny the existence of ecological damage, because they don’t want to change the way they live. Followers of Mystical Renaissance only want the truth if it suits them, if it induces the right emotions. If they were honest, they’d just stick a hot wire in their brain at whatever location made them believe they were undergoing a constant mystical epiphany—because in the end, that’s all they’re after.”

This was priceless; no one of Mosala’s stature had ever really let fly against the cults like this. Not on the public record. “Humble Science!?”

Mosala’s eyes flashed with anger. “They’re the worst, by far. The most patronizing, the most cynical. Janet Walsh is just a tactician and a figurehead; most of the real leaders are far better educated. And in their collective wisdom, they’ve decided that the fragile blossom of human culture just can’t survive any more revelations about what human beings really are, or how the universe actually functions.

“If they spoke out against the abuse of biotechnology, I’d back them all the way. If they spoke out against weapons research, I’d do the same. If they stood for some coherent system of values which made the most pitiless scientific truths less alienating to ordinary people… without denying those truths… I’d have no quarrel with them at all.

“But when they decide that all knowledge—beyond a border which is theirs to define—is anathema to civilization and sanity, and that it’s up to some self-appointed cultural elite to generate a set of hand-made ‘life-affirming’ myths to take its place… to imbue human existence with some suitably uplifting—and politically expedient—meaning… they become nothing but the worst kind of censors and social engineers.”

I suddenly noticed that Mosala’s slender arms, spread out on the table in front of her, were trembling; she was far angrier than I’d realized. I said, “It’s almost nine, but we could take this up again after Buzzo’s lecture, if you have time?”

De Groot touched her elbow. They leaned toward each other, and conversed sotto voce, at length.

Mosala said, “We have an interview scheduled for Wednesday, don’t we? I'm sorry, but I can’t spare any time before then,”

“Of course, that’s fine.”

“And those comments I just made are all off the record. They’re not to be used.”

My heart sank. “Are you serious?”

“This was supposed to be a meeting to discuss your filming schedule. Nothing I said here was intended to be made public.”

I pleaded, “I’ll put it all in context: Janet Walsh went out of her way to insult you—and at the media conference you kept your cool, you were restrained—but afterward, you expressed your opinions in detail. What’s wrong with that? Or do you want Humble Science! to start censoring you!"

Mosala closed her eyes for a moment then said carefully, “Those are my opinions, yes, and I'm entitled to them. I'm also entitled to decide who hears them and who doesn’t. I don’t want to inflame this whole ugly mess any further. So would you please respect my wishes and tell me that you won’t use any of it?”

“We don’t have to sort this out immediately. I can send you a rough cut—”

Mosala gestured dismissively. “I signed an agreement with Sarah Knight, saying I could veto anything, on the spot, with no questions asked.”

“If you did, that was with her, personally, not with SeeNet. All SeeNet have from you is a standard clearance.”

Mosala did not look happy. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you? Sarah said you’d explain why you had to take over the project at such short notice. After all the work she put into it, all she left was a ten-second message saying: ‘I'm off the profile, Andrew Worth is the new director, he’ll tell you the reason why.'”

I said carefully, “Sarah may have given you the wrong impression. SeeNet had never officially chosen her to make the documentary. And it was SeeNet who approached you and set things up initially—not Sarah. It was never a freelance project she was developing independently, to offer to them. It was a SeeNet project which she wanted to direct, so she sank a lot of her own time into trying to make that happen.”

De Groot said, “But why didn’t it happen? All that research, all that preparation, all that enthusiasm… why didn’t it pay off?”

What could I say? That I’d stolen the project from the one person who truly deserved it… so I could have a fully paid South Pacific holiday, away from the stresses of serious frankenscience?

I said, “Network executives are in a world of their own. If I could understand how they made their decisions, I’d probably be up there with them myself.”

De Groot and Mosala regarded me with silent disbelief.

12

TechnoLalia, SeeNet’s major rival, insisted on labeling Henry Buzzo “the revered guru of trans-millennial physics"—and frequently implied that he should retire as soon as possible, leaving the field open to younger colleagues who rated more dynamic clichés: wunderkinder und enfants terrible “surfing pre-space’s infinite-dimensional nouvelle vague.” (Lydia dismissed TL as a guccione, “all hip and no brain.” I couldn’t argue with that, but I often feared that SeeNet was heading for a similar fate.) Buzzo had shared the Nobel back in 2036, with the seven other architects of the Standard Unified Field Theory—but he, too, was now trying to demolish, or at least supersede, it. I was reminded of two early-twentieth-century physicists: J. J. Thomson, who’d established the existence of electrons as distinct particles, and George Thomson, his son, who’d shown that they could also behave like waves. It was an enlargement of vision, not a contradiction—and no doubt Buzzo was hoping to perform a similar feat in a single generation.

Buzzo was a tall, bald, heavily wrinkled man, eighty-three years old but showing no signs of frailty. He was a lively speaker, and he seemed to strike sparks off the audience of ATM specialists… but even his arcane jokes, which left them in stitches, went over my head. His introduction contained plenty of familiar phrases, and plenty of equations which I’d seen before—but once he started doing things with those equations, I was completely out of my depth. Every now and then he’d display graphics: knotted gray-white tubes, with green-gridded surfaces and bright red geodesic lines snaking across them. Triplets of mutually perpendicular arrowed vectors would blossom from a point, then move around a loop or a knot, tipping and twisting along the way. No sooner would I start to feel that I was making sense of these diagrams, though, than Buzzo would wave a hand at the screen dismissively and say something like: “I can’t show you the most crucial aspect—what’s happening in the bundle of linear frames—but I'm sure you can all picture it: just imagine embedding this surface in twelve dimensions…”

I sat two (empty) seats to the left of Violet Mosala, but I hardly dared glance her way. When I did, she kept her eyes on Buzzo, but her expression became stony. I couldn’t imagine what means she suspected I’d employed to win the contract for the documentary. (Bribery? Extortion? Sex? If only SeeNet could have been so divertingly Byzantine.) It didn’t really matter how I’d done it, though; the injustice of the end result was self-evident, regardless.

“So this path integral,” said Buzzo, “gives us an invariant!” His latest crisp diagram of knotted tubes suddenly blurred into an amorphous gray-green haze—symbolizing the shift from a particular space-time to its generalization in pre-space—but the three vectors he’d sent to circumnavigate the simulated universe remained fixed. “Invariants” in an All-Topologies Model were physical quantities which could be shown to be independent of such things as the curvature of space-time in the region of interest, and even how many dimensions it possessed; finding invariants was the only way to make any kind of coherent physics emerge from the daunting indeterminacy of pre-space. I fixed my gaze on Buzzo’s steady vectors; I wasn’t entirely lost yet, after all.

“But that’s obvious. Now comes the tricky part: imagine extending the same operator to spaces where the Ricci curvature is nowhere-defined—”

Now I was lost.

I gave serious thought to calling Sarah again, and asking if she’d be willing to take back Violet Mosala. I could have handed her the footage I’d shot so far, smoothed out the administrative glitches with Lydia, and then crawled away somewhere to recover—from Gina’s departure, from Junk DNA—without having to pretend that I was doing anything but convalescing. I’d told myself that I couldn’t afford to stop working, even for a month… but that was a question of what I was used to, not a question of starvation—and without someone to share the rent, I was going to have to move house anyway. Distress would have kept me in leafy, tranquil Eastwood for a year or more—but whatever I did now, I was headed back to the outer sprawl.

I don’t know what stopped me from walking out of that incomprehensible lecture and away from Mosala’s justified distaste. Pride? Stubbornness? Inertia? Maybe it came down to the presence of the cults. Walsh’s tactics could only become uglier—but that only made it seem more of a betrayal to abandon the project. I’d given in to SeeNet’s demands for frankenscience in Junk DNA; this was a chance to atone, by showing the world someone who was standing up against the cults. And it wasn’t as if the rhetoric was about to give way to violence, Kuwale notwithstanding. This was arcane physics, not biotechnology, and even at the Zambian bioethics conference, where I’d last seen Walsh, it was God’s Image as usual—not Humble Science!—who’d pelted speakers with monkey embryos and doused unsympathetic journalists in human blood. No religious fundamentalists had bothered with the Einstein Centenary Conference; TOEs were either beyond their comprehension, or beneath their contempt.

Mosala said softly, “That’s nonsense.”

I glanced at her warily. She was smiling. She turned to me, all hostilities momentarily forgotten, and whispered, “He’s wrong! He thinks he’s found a way to discard the isolated-point topologies; he’s cooked up an isomorphism which maps them all into a set of measure zero. But he’s using the wrong measure. In this context, he has to use Perrini’s, not Saupe’s! How could he have missed that?”

I had only the vaguest idea of what she was talking about. Isolated-point topologies were “spaces” where nothing actually touched anything else. A “measure” was a kind of generalization of length, like a higher-dimensional area or volume—only they included much wilder abstractions than that. When you summed something over all the topologies, you multiplied each contribution to the infinite sum by a “measure” of “how big” the topology was… a bit like weighting the worldwide average of some statistic according to the population of each country or according to its land area, or its Gross Domestic Product, or some other measure of its relative significance.

Buzzo believed he’d found a way of tackling the calculation of any real physical quantity which made the effective contribution of all the universes of isolated points equal to zero.

Mosala believed he was mistaken.

I said, “So, you’ll confront him when he’s finished?”

She turned back to the proceedings, smiling to herself. “Let’s wait and see. I don’t want to embarrass him. And someone else is sure to spot the error.”

Question time arrived. I strained my limited grasp of the subject, trying to decide if any of the issues raised were Mosala’s in disguise—but I thought not. When the session ended and she still hadn’t spoken, I asked point blank: “Why didn’t you tell him?”

She became irritated. “I could be mistaken. I’ll have to give it more thought. It’s not a trivial question; he may have had a good reason for the choice he made.”

I said, “This was a prelude to his paper on Sunday week, wasn’t it? Clearing the ground for his masterpiece?” Buzzo, Mosala and Yasuko Nishide were scheduled to present their rival TOEs—in strict alphabetical order—on the last day of the conference.

“That’s right.”

“So… if he’s wrong about the choice of measure, he could end up falling flat on his face?”

Mosala gave me a long, hard look. I wondered if I’d finally managed to push the decision out of my hands: if she’d withdraw her cooperation entirely, leaving me with no subject to film, no reason to remain.

She said coldly, “I have enough trouble deciding when my own techniques are valid; I don’t have time to be an expert on everyone else’s work as well.” She glanced at her notepad. “I believe that’s all the filming we agreed on for today. So if you’ll excuse me, I'm meeting someone for lunch.”

I saw Mosala heading for one of the hotel restaurants, so I turned the other way and walked out of the building. The midday sky was dazzling; in the shadows of awnings the buildings retained their subtle hues, but in the glare of full sunlight they took on an appearance reminiscent of the oldest quarters of some North African cities, all white stone against blue sky. There was an ocean-scented breeze from the east, warm but not unpleasant.

I walked down side streets at random, until I came to an open square. In the middle there was a small circular park, some twenty meters wide, covered with luxuriant grass—wild and unmown—and dotted with small palms. It was the first vegetation I’d seen on Stateless, except for potted plants in the hotel. Soil was a luxury here; all the necessary minerals could be found in the ocean, in trace amounts, but trying to provide the island with enough topsoil for agriculture would have meant trawling several thousand times the area of water required for the algae-and-plankton-based food chain which met all the same needs.

I gazed at this modest patch of greenery, and the longer I stared, the more the sight of it unnerved me. It took me a while longer to understand why.

The whole island was an artifact, as much as any building of metal and glass. It was maintained by engineered lifeforms—but their wild ancestors were as remote to them as ancient buried ore bodies were to gleaming titanium alloy. This tiny park, which was really just an overgrown potted plant, should have driven that home mercilessly, puncturing the illusion that I was standing on anything but the deck of a vast machine.

It didn’t.

I’d seen Stateless from the air, spreading its tendrils out into the Pacific, as organically beautiful as any living creature on the planet. I knew that every brick and tile in this city had been grown from the sea, not fired in any kiln. The whole island appeared so “natural,” on its own terms, that it was the grass and the trees which looked artificial. This patch of wild—"authentic"—nature seemed alien and contrived.

I sat on a bench—reef-rock, but softer than the paving beneath it; more polymer, less mineral?—half shaded by one of the (ironic?) palm-tree-shaped sculptures which ringed the edge of the square. None of the locals were walking on the grass, so I stayed back. I hadn’t regained my appetite, so I just sat and let the warm air and the sight of the people wash over me.

Unwillingly, I recalled my ludicrous fantasy of endless carefree Sunday afternoons with Gina. Why had I ever imagined that she’d want to sit by a fountain in Epping with me, for the rest other life? How could I have believed, for so long, that she was happy… when all I’d made her feel, in the end, was ignored and invisible, suffocated and trapped?

My notepad beeped. I slid it from my pocket and Sisyphus announced, “WHO epidemiology statistics for March have just been released. Notified cases of Distress now number five hundred and twenty-three. That’s a thirty percent increase in a month.” A graph appeared on the screen. “There have been more new cases reported in March than in the previous six months combined.”

I said numbly, “I don’t remember asking to be told this.”

“August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m.” The hotel room in Manchester. “You said, ‘Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.'”

“Okay. Go on.”

“There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last inquired.” A list of titles appeared. “Do you want to hear their abstracts?”

“Not really.”

I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn’t eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo’s lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.

The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the grass looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed—but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect’s computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition—a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere—and I’d heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.

Without pausing to glance at me, the artist said, “Five hundred dollars.” He had a rural Australian accent.

I said, “If I'm going to get ripped off, I think I’ll wait for a local to do it.”

He gave me a mock-wounded glare. “And ten years doesn’t qualify me? What do you want? Citizenship records?”

“Ten years? I apologize.” Ten years meant he was practically a pioneer;

Stateless had been seeded in 2032, but it had taken almost a decade to become habitable and self-sustaining. I was surprised; the founders, and most of the earliest settlers, had come from the US.

I said, “My name’s Andrew Worth. I'm here for the Einstein Conference.

“Bill Munroe. Here for the light.” He didn’t offer his hand.

“I can’t afford the picture. But I’ll buy you lunch, if you’re interested.”

He looked at me sourly. “You’re a journalist.”

“I'm covering the conference. Nothing else. But I'm curious about… the island.”

“Then read about it. It’s all on the nets.”

“Yes—and it all contradicts itself. I can’t decide what’s propaganda and what isn’t.”

“So what makes you think anything I might tell you would be any more reliable?”

“Face to face, I’ll know.”

He sighed. “Why me?” He put down his stylus. “All right. Lunch and anarchy. This way.” He started to walk across the square.

I hung back. “You’re not going to leave this—?” He kept walking, so I caught up with him. “Five hundred dollars—plus the easel and the stylus—and you’re willing to trust people to leave it untouched?”

He glanced at me irritably, then turned and waved his notepad at the easel; it emitted a brief ear-splitting squeal. A few people turned to stare. “Don’t you have alarm tags where you come from?” I felt my face redden.

Munroe chose a cheap-looking open-air cafe, and ordered a steaming white concoction from the instant-serve display counter. It smelled nauseatingly fishy—although here that didn’t necessarily imply that it had once been the flesh of any vertebrate. Still, I lost whatever faint hint of an appetite I might have been working up.

As I thumbed approval of the payment for the meal, he said, “Don’t tell me: you’re deeply perplexed by our use of international credit as a means of exchange, the existence of free-enterprise eating establishments, my shameless attachment to private property, and all the other trappings of capitalism which you see around you.”

“You’ve done this before. So what’s the stock answer to the stock question?” Munroe carried his plate out to a table which gave him a clear view of his easel.

He said, “Stateless is a capitalist democracy. And a liberal socialist democracy. And a union of collectives. And several hundred others things for which I have no name.”

“You mean… people here choose to act as they would in those kinds of societies?”

“Yes, but it goes deeper than that. Most people join syndicates which effectively are those kinds of societies. People want freedom of choice, but they also want a degree of stability. So they enter into agreements which give them a framework in which to organize their lives—agreements which allow for release, of course… but then, most democracies permit emigration. If sixty thousand people in one syndicate agree to pay a portion of their income—subject to audit—into a fund used for health, education, and welfare, disbursed according to policies fleshed out in detail by committees of elected delegates… they may not have a parliament or a head of state, but that still sounds like a socialist democracy to me.”

I said, “So freely chosen ‘government’ isn’t forbidden. But—overall—are you anarchists, or not? Aren’t there universal laws here, which everyone is forced to obey?”

“There are a handful of principles endorsed by a large majority of residents. Basic ideas about freedom from violence and coercion. They’re widely promulgated and anyone who disagrees with them would be better off not coming here. I won’t split hairs, though; they might as well be laws.

“So are we anarchists, or not?” Munroe mimed indifference. “Anarchy means ‘no ruler,’ not ‘no laws'… but no one on Stateless loses any sleep contemplating ancient Greek semantics—or the writings of Bakunin, or Proudhon, or Godwin. Sorry, I retract that: about the same percentage of the population as you’d find in Beijing or Paris cares passionately about each of those subjects. But you’ll have to interview one of them, if you want their opinion.

“Personally, I think the word carries too much historical baggage to be salvaged. No great loss. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchist movements were bogged down, as much as the Marxists, by the question of seizing power from the ruling class. On Stateless that issue was dealt with very simply. In 2025, six employees of a Californian biotech company called EnGeneUity absconded with all the information they needed to make the seed. Much of which was their own work, if not their own property. They also took some engineered cells from various cultures, but too few to be missed. By the time anyone knew that Stateless was growing, there were a few hundred people living here in shifts, and it would have been bad PR to summarily sterilize the place.

“That was our ’revolution.’ Beats measuring out your life in Molotov cocktails.”

“Except that the theft means you’re saddled with the boycott.”

Munroe shrugged. “The boycott is a great pain. But Stateless under the boycott is still better than the alternative: a company island, every square meter privately owned. It’s bad enough when every decent food crop on the planet is licensed; imagine the ground beneath your feet being the same.”

I said, “Okay. So the technology gave you a shortcut to a new society; all the old models were irrelevant. No invasion and genocide, no bloody uprising, no glacial democratic reforms. But getting there’s the easy part. I still don’t understand what holds the place together.”

“Small invertebrate organisms.”

“I meant politically.”

Munroe looked baffled. “Holds the place together against what? The onset of anarchy?”

“Violence. Looting. Mob rule.”

“Why bother traveling to the middle of the Pacific for something you can do in any city in the world? Or do you think we went to all this trouble just for a chance to play Lord of the Flies?"

“Not intentionally. But when it happens in Sydney, they send in the riot squad. When it happens in Los Angeles, they send in the National Guard.”

“We have a trained militia, who have near-universal consent to use reasonable force to protect people and vital resources in an emergency.” He grinned. “‘Vital resources.’ ‘Emergency powers.’ Sounds just like home, doesn’t it? Except that the emergency has never arisen.”

“Okay. But why hasn’t it?”

Munroe massaged his forehead, and regarded me as if I were an over-persistent child. “Good will? Intelligence? Some other bizarre alien force?”

“Be serious.”

“There are some obvious things. People turn up here with a slightly higher than average level of idealism. They want Stateless to work, or they wouldn’t have come—give or take the occasional tedious agent provocateur. They’re prepared to cooperate. I don’t mean living in dormitories, pretending everyone’s your extended family, and going on work parties singing uplifting communal anthems—though there’s some of that about. But they’re willing to be more flexible and tolerant than the average person who chooses to live elsewhere… because that’s the whole point.

“There’s less concentration of wealth, and of power. Maybe that’s only a matter of time—but with so much power so heavily decentralized, it’s very hard to buy. And yes, we have private property, but the island, the reefs, and the waters are a commons. Syndicates which collect and process food trade their products for money, but they have no monopoly; there are plenty of people who feed themselves directly from the sea.”

I looked around the square, frustrated. “Okay. You’re not all slaughtering each other or rioting in the streets, because no one’s starving, and no one’s obscenely rich—yet. But do you honestly think it’s going to last? The next generation won’t be here by choice. What are you going to do—indoctrinate them all with tolerance, and hope for the best? It’s never worked before. Every other experiment like this has ended in violence, been conquered or absorbed… or given up and turned into a nation state.”

Munroe said, “Of course we’re trying to pass on our own values to our children—like everyone else on the planet. And with about as much success. But at least most children here are taught sociobiology from an early age.”

“Sociobiology?”

He grinned. “More use than Bakunin, believe me. People will never agree on the details of how society should be organized—and why should they? But unless you’re an Edenite who believes there’s some ‘natural,’ Gala-given Utopian condition to which we should all return, then adopting any form of civilization means choosing some kind of cultural response—other than passive acceptance—to the fact that we are animals with certain innate behavioral drives. And whether that response involves the most subtle compromise, or the most vehement opposition, it helps to know exactly what it is you’re trying to accommodate, or oppose.

“If people understand the biological forces acting on themselves and everyone around them then at least they have a chance of adopting intelligent strategies for getting what they want with a minimum of conflict… instead of blundering around with nothing but romantic myths and wishful thinking, courtesy of some dead political philosopher.”

I let that sink in. I’d come across no end of detailed prescriptions for ludicrous “scientific” Utopias, and blueprints for societies organized on allegedly “rational” grounds… but this was the first time I’d heard anyone advocate diversity in the same breath as acknowledging biological forces. Instead of exploiting sociobiology to try to justify some rigid political doctrine to be imposed from above—from Marxism to the nuclear family, from racial purity to gender separatism—"we must live this way, because human nature requires it"—Munroe was suggesting that people could use the self-knowledge of the species to make better decisions for themselves.

Informed anarchy. It was an appealing notion—but I still felt obliged to be skeptical. “Not everyone’s going to let their children learn sociobiology; there must be a few cultural and religious fundamentalists, even here, who’d find it too threatening. And… what about adult migrants? If someone’s twenty years old when they arrive on Stateless, they’ll still be around for another sixty years. Plenty of time to lose their idealism. Do you really think the whole thing can hold together while the first generation grow old and disillusioned?”

Munroe was bemused. “Does it matter what I think? If you really care one way or the other: explore the island, talk to people, make up your own mind.”

“You’re right.” I wasn’t here to explore the island, though, or to form an opinion on its political future. I glanced at my watch; it was after one. I stood up.

Munroe said, “There’s something going on right now which you might like to see. Or even… try. Are you in a hurry?”

I hesitated. “That depends.”

“I suppose you could call this the closest thing we have to a… ceremony for new residents.” I must have looked less than thrilled; Munroe laughed. “No anthems, no oaths, no gilded scrolls, I promise. And no, it’s not compulsory—it just seems to have become the fashion for new arrivals. Mere tourists are welcome, too, though.”

“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?”

“I can tell you that it’s called inland diving. But you really have to see it to know what that means.”

Munroe packed up his easel and accompanied me; I suspected he was secretly enjoying playing veteran radical tour guide. We stood in the doorway to catch the breeze, as the tram headed out toward the northern arm of the island. The track ahead was barely visible: two parallel trenches carved in the rock, the gray ribbon of superconductor running down the middle all but hidden beneath a layer of fine chalky dust.

By the time we’d traveled about fifteen kilometers, we were the only passengers left. I said, “Who pays for the maintenance of these things?”

“Fares cover some of it. The syndicates pay the rest.”

“So what happens if a syndicate decides not to pay? To freeload?”

“Then everyone knows.”

“Okay, but what if they genuinely can’t afford to contribute. What if they’re poor?”

“Most syndicate finances are public knowledge. By choice, but it’s viewed as odd if they’re kept secret. Anyone on Stateless can pick up their notepad and find out if the wealth of the island is being concentrated in one syndicate or being siphoned off-shore, or whatever. And act on that knowledge as they see fit.”

We were clear of the built-up center now. There were buildings which looked like factories and warehouses scattered around the tram line, but more and more of the view was becoming bare reef-rock, flat but slightly uneven. The limestone appeared in all the hues I’d seen in the city, zebra-striping the landscape in distinctly ungeological patterns, governed by the diffusion of different subspecies of lithophilic bacteria. The ground here wouldn’t be amenable to rock farming, though; the inner core of the island was too dry and hard, too devascularized. Further out, the rock was much more porous, and suffused with calcium-rich water and the engineered organisms needed to replenish it. The tram lines didn’t run to the coast because the ground became too soft to bear the weight of the vehicles.

I invoked Witness and started recording; at this rate I’d have more private travelogue footage than material for the documentary, but I couldn’t resist.

I said, “Did you really come here for the light?”

Munroe shook his head. “Hardly. I just had to get away.”

“From what?”

“All the noise. All the cant. All the Professional Australians.”

“Ah.” I’d first heard that term when I was studying film history; it had been coined to describe the mainstream directors of the nineteen seventies and eighties. As one historian had put it: “They possessed no distinguishing features except for their nationality; they had nothing to say, and nothing to do except foist a claustrophobic vocabulary of tired nationalist myths and icons onto their audience, while loudly proclaiming themselves to be ‘defining the national character,’ and to represent, in person, ‘a nation finding its voice.'” I’d thought this was probably a harsh judgment—until I’d seen some of the films. Most of them were stultifying horse operas—rural colonial melodramas—or sentimentalized war stories. The nadir of the period, though, was probably an attempted comedy in which Albert Einstein was portrayed as an Australian apple farmer’s son, who “splits beer atoms” and falls in love with Marie Curie.

I said, “I always thought the visual arts had grown out of that long ago. Especially in your mode.”

Munroe scowled. “I'm not talking about art. I'm talking about the entire dominant culture.”

“Come on! There is no ‘dominant culture’ anymore. The filter is mightier than the broadcaster.” At least, that was the net-swoon line; I still wasn’t sure I’d bought it.

Munroe hadn’t. “Very Zen. Try exporting Australian medical biotech to Stateless, and you’ll soon find out exactly who’s in control.”

I had no answer to that.

He said, “Don’t you ever get tired of living in a society which talks about itself, relentlessly—and usually lies? Which defines everything worthwhile—tolerance, honesty, loyalty, fairness—as ‘uniquely Australian'? Which pretends to encourage diversity—but can’t ever stop babbling about its ‘national identity'? Don’t you ever get sick of the endless parade of buffoons who claim the authority to speak on your behalf: politicians, intellectuals, celebrities, commentators—defining and characterizing you in every detail… from your ’distinctive Australian sense of humor’ right down to your fucking ‘collective subconscious iconography'… who are all, simply, liars and thieves?”

I was taken aback for a moment, but on reflection, this was a recognizable description of the mainstream political and academic culture. Or if not the mainstream, at least the loudest. I shrugged. “Every country has some level of parochial bullshit like that going on, somewhere. The US is almost as bad. But I hardly notice it anymore—least of all at home. I suppose I’ve just learned to tune it out, most of the time.”

“I envy you, then. I never could.”

The tram slid on, displaced dust hissing softly. Munroe had a point: nationalists—political and cultural—who claimed to be the voice of their nation could disenfranchise those they “represented” just as effectively as sexists who claimed to be the voice of their sex. A handful of people pretending to speak for forty million—or five billion—would always wield disproportionate power, merely by virtue of making the claim.

So what was the solution? Move to Stateless? Become asex? Or just stick your head in a Balkanized corner of the net, and try to believe that none of it mattered?

Munroe said, “I would have thought that the flight from Sydney was enough to make anyone want to leave for good. Physical proof of the absurdity of nations.”

I laughed drily. “Almost. Being petty and vindictive with the East Timorese is understandable; imagine dirtying the bayonets of our business partners for all those years, and then having the temerity to turn around and take us to court. What the problem is with Stateless, though, I have no idea. None of the EnGeneUity patents were Australian-owned, were they?”

“No.”

“So what’s the big deal? Even Washington doesn’t go out of its way to punish Stateless quite so… comprehensively.”

Munroe said, “I do have one theory.”

“Yeah?”

“Think about it. What’s the biggest lie the political and cultural ruling class tells itself? Where’s the greatest disparity between image and truth? What are the attributes which any self-respecting Professional Australian boasts about the most—and possesses the least?”

“If this is a cheap Freudian joke, I'm going to be very disappointed.”

“Suspicion of authority. Independence of spirit. Nonconformity. So what could they possibly find more threatening than an island full of anarchists?”

13

We walked north from the terminus, across a plane of marbled gray-green, in places still imprinted with faint hints of stubby branched tubing: coral from the shores of a decade ago, incompletely digested. Knowing the time scale made the sight curiously shocking; it was a bit like stumbling across fossils of distinctive forties artifacts—clunky old-model notepads, quaint shoes which had been alpha fashion in living memory—converted into nothing but mineralized outlines. I thought I could feel the rock yielding beneath my feet more than the dense, cured paving of the city, but we left no visible imprints behind us. I paused and crouched to touch the ground, wondering if it would be palpably moist; it wasn’t, but there was probably a plasticized skin beneath the surface to limit evaporation.

In the distance, a group of twenty or so people were gathered around a gantry several meters high, with a large motorized winch beside it. Nearby was a small green bus with big, balloon-tired wheels. The gantry sprouted half a dozen bright orange awnings, and I could hear them snapping in the breeze. Orange cable stretched from the winch to a pulley suspended from the gantry, then dropped straight down— presumably into a hole in the ground, concealed by the circle of spectators.

I said, “They’re being lowered into some kind of maintenance shaft?”

“That’s right.”

“What a charming custom. Welcome to Stateless, tired and hungry traveler… now check out our sewers.”

Munroe snorted. “Wrong.”

As we drew nearer, I could see that everyone in the group was gazing intently at the hole beneath the gantry. A couple of people glanced our way briefly, and one woman raised a hand in a tentative greeting. I returned the gesture, and she smiled nervously, then turned back to the hidden entrance.

I whispered (though we were barely within earshot), “They look like they’re at a mine disaster. Waiting to identify the bodies as they’re raised to the surface.”

“It’s always tense. But… be patient.”

From a distance, I’d thought people were just randomly, casually dressed, but close-up it was clear that they were mostly in swimming costumes, though some wore T-shirts as well. A few were in short-limbed wetsuits. Some peoples’ hair looked distinctively disheveled; one man’s was visibly still wet.

“So what are they diving into? The water supply?” Ocean water was desalinated in specialized pools out on the reefs, and the fresh water pumped inland to supplement recycled waste.

Munroe said, “That’d be a challenge. None of the water arteries are thicker than a human arm.”

I stopped a respectful distance from the group, feeling very much an intruder. Munroe went ahead and gently squeezed his way into the outer circle; no one seemed to mind, or to pay either of us much attention. It finally struck me that the awnings overhead were flapping and shuddering out of all proportion to the gentle wind from the east. I moved closer and caught the edge of a strong, cool breeze emerging from the tunnel itself, carrying a stale damp mineral odor.

Peering over people’s shoulders, I could see that the mouth of the tunnel was capped with a knee-high structure like a small well, built of dark reef-rock or heavy-duty biopolymer, with an iris seal which had been wrenched open. The winch, a few meters away, seemed monstrous now—far too large and industrial-looking to be involved in any light-hearted sport. The cable was thicker than I’d expected; I thought of trying to estimate its total length, but the sides of the drum concealed the number of layers wrapped around it. The motor itself was silent except for the hiss of air across magnetic bearings, but the cable squeaked against itself as it spooled onto the drum, and the gantry creaked as the cable slid over the pulley.

No one spoke. It didn’t seem like the time to start asking questions.

Suddenly I heard a gasping sound, almost a sobbing. There was a buzz of excitement, and everyone craned forward expectantly. A woman emerged from the tunnel, clinging tightly to the cable, scuba tanks strapped to her back, face mask pulled up onto her forehead. She was wet, but not dripping—so the water had to be some way down.

The winch stopped. The woman unhooked a safety line linking the scuba harness to the cable; people reached out to help her onto the lip of the well, and then the ground. I stepped forward, and saw a small circular platform—a coarse grid of plastic tubes—on which she’d been standing. There was also a twin-beam lantern fixed to the cable, about a meter and a half above the platform.

The woman seemed dazed. She walked some distance away from the group, almost staggering, then sat down on the rock and stared up at the sky, still breathless. Then she removed the tanks and mask, slowly and methodically, and lay down on her back. She closed her eyes and stretched out her arms, palms down, spreading her fingers on the ground.

A man and two teenage girls had separated from the others; they stood nearby, watching the woman anxiously. I was beginning to wonder if she needed medical attention—and I was on the verge of discreetly asking Sisyphus to refresh my memory on heart attack symptoms and emergency first aid—when she sprung to her feet, smiling radiantly. She began to speak excitedly to her family, in what I took to be a Polynesian language; I didn’t understand a word she said, but she sounded elated.

The tension vanished, and everyone began laughing and talking. Munroe turned to me. “There are eight people in the queue ahead of you but it’s worth waiting for, I promise.”

“I don’t know. Whatever’s down there, my insurance doesn’t cover it.”

“I doubt your insurance covers a tram ride, on Stateless.”

A thin young man in bright floral shorts was putting on the scuba gear the woman had discarded. I introduced myself; he seemed nervous, but he didn’t mind talking. His name was Kumar Rajendra, an Indian-Fijian civil engineering student; he’d been on Stateless less than a week. I took a button camera from my wallet and explained what I wanted. He glanced over at the people gathered around the hole—as if wondering if he needed to ask permission of someone—but then he agreed to take it down. Fixing the camera to the top of the scuba mask, where it sat like a third eye, I noticed a faint chalky residue on the faceplate’s transparent plastic.

An elderly woman in a wetsuit came over and checked that the scuba gear was fitted properly, then went through emergency procedures with Rajendra. He listened solemnly; I backed away and checked the reception on my notepad. The camera transmitted in ultrasound, radio and IR—and if all those signals failed to get through, it had a forty-minute memory.

Munroe approached me, exasperated. “You’re crazy, you know. It won’t be the same. Why record someone else’s dive, when you could do it yourself?”

Just my luck; even on Stateless, I’d found someone who wanted me to shut up and do what I was told. I said, “Maybe I will; this way I get to see exactly what I’d be letting myself in for. Then again… I'm just a tourist, aren’t I ? So my experience of a ceremony for new residents would hardly be authentic.”

Munroe rolled his eyes. “Authentic? Make up your mind: are you covering the Einstein Conference, or making Coming of Age on Stateless?”

“That remains to be seen. If I end up with two programs for the price of one… all the better.”

Rajendra climbed onto the edge of the well, took hold of the cable, then stepped onto the platform; it tilted precariously until he managed to center himself. The breeze ballooned his shorts and sent his hair streaming comically upward, but the sight was more vertiginous than amusing; it made him look like a skydiver sans parachute, or some lunatic balanced on the wing of a plane. He finally attached the safety line—but the impression of free-fall remained.

I was surprised that Munroe was so enthusiastic about what looked to me like just one more bonding-through-bravery ritual, one more initiation-by-ordeal. Even if there was no real pressure to take part, and even if the dangers were minimal… so much for the island of radical nonconformists.

Someone started the winch unwinding. Rajendra’s friends, standing—and then kneeling—on the lip of the well, reached out and patted his shoulders as he descended, cheering him on; he grinned nervously as he disappeared from sight. I squeezed forward myself, and leaned over with the notepad to maintain line-of-sight communication. The button camera’s memory would probably be more than enough, but it was impossible to resist the lure of real-time. I wasn’t alone; people jostled to get a view of the screen.

Munroe called out from behind the crush, “So much for authenticity. You realize you’re changing the experience for everyone?”

“Not for the diver.”

“Oh, right, that’s all that matters. Capture the last glimpse of the real thing—before destroying it forever. You ethnovandal.” He added, half seriously, “Anyway, you’re wrong. It changes things for the diver, too.”

The tunnel was about two meters wide, the walls about as cylindrical as the surface rock was flat—too good to be the product of any geological process, but too rough to have been machined. The morphogenesis of Stateless was a complex process which I’d never investigated in detail, but I did know that explicit human intervention had been required for many of the fine points. Still, whether this tunnel had formed unbidden at the intersection of certain levels of marker-chemical gradients, because lithophilic bacteria had noticed the cue and switched on all the right genes—or whether they’d had to be told more forcefully, by a person tipping a bucketload of primer onto the surface—it beat attacking the rock for a month or two with a diamond-coated drill.

I watched the twin reflections of the lantern beams slowly shrinking into the darkness, and the point-of-view image of pebbled gray-green rock sliding by. There were more hints of ancestral coral, and fleeting glimpses of the bones of fish trapped in the compacting of the reefs—and again, I felt an eerie sense of the compressed time scale of the island. The idea that subterranean depths belonged to inconceivably remote eons was so ingrained that it required a constant effort to remain prepared for soft drink bottles or car tires—predating Stateless, but perfectly likely to have drifted into the mix when this rock was being formed.

The decorative trace minerals began to fade, not to be wasted at a depth where they’d rarely be seen. Rajendra’s breathing accelerated, and he glanced up toward the surface; some of the people watching the screen called down to him and waved, their arms skinny silhouettes half eaten by the glare from the dazzling circle of sky. He looked away, and then directly down; the grid of the platform was no real obstruction, but neither lantern beams nor sunlight penetrated far. He seemed to grow calm again. I’d considered asking him to provide a running commentary, but I was glad now that I hadn’t; it would have been an unfair burden.

The wall of the tunnel grew visibly moist; Rajendra reached out and trailed his fingers through the chalky fluid. Water and nutrients penetrated every part of the island (even the center, although the dry, hard surface layer was thickest there). It didn’t matter that the rock here would never be mined—and the fact that the tunnel remained unhealed showed that this region had been explicitly programmed against regrowth. The lithophiles were still indispensable; the heartrock could never be allowed to die.

I began to make out tiny bubbles forming in the fluid clinging to the wall—and then, deeper still, visible effervescence. Beyond the edges of the guyot, Stateless was unsupported from below—and a solid limestone overhang forty kilometers long, strengthened by biopolymers or not, would have snapped in an instant. The guyot was a useful anchor, and it bore some of the load, but most of the island simply had to float. Stateless was three-quarters air; the heartrock was a fine, mineralized foam, lighter than water.

The air in the foam was under pressure, though: from the rock above, and—below sea level—from the surrounding water trying to force its way in. Air was constantly being lost to diffusion through the rock; the wind blasting out of this tunnel was the accumulated leakage from hundreds of square meters, but the same thing was happening, less dramatically, everywhere.

The lithophiles prevented Stateless from collapsing like a punctured lung, and sinking like a drowned sponge. Plenty of natural organisms were proficient at making gas, but they tended to excrete products you wouldn’t want wafting out of the ground in vast amounts, like methane or hydrogen sulphide. The lithophiles consumed water and carbon dioxide (mostly dissolved) to make carbohydrates and oxygen (mostly undissolved)—and because they manufactured “oxygen-deficient” carbohydrates (like deoxyribose), they released more oxygen than they took in carbon dioxide, adding to the net increase in pressure.

All of this required energy as well as raw materials; the lithophiles, living in darkness, needed to be fed. The nutrients they consumed and the products they excreted were part of a cycle which stretched out to the reefs and beyond; ultimately, sunlight on distant water powered everything they did.

Soon the surface was frothing and boiling, spraying calcareous droplets toward the camera like spittle. And it finally dawned on me that I’d been utterly mistaken: the dive had nothing to do with Edenite notions of “modern tribalism.” Whatever courage it required was incidental; that wasn’t being valued for its own sake. The point was to descend through the palpable exhalation of the rock, and to see with your own eyes what Stateless was: to understand the hidden machinery which kept the island afloat.

Rajendra’s hand appeared at the border of the image as he fitted the mouthpiece and switched on the air supply. Of course: all this seeping liquid would build up at the bottom of the tunnel. He glanced down once, at what looked like a dark, sulphurous pool, boiling with volcanic heat; in fact, it was probably chilly and almost odorless. Munroe had been right about one thing: you really had to be there. What’s more… the tunnel wind would be weaker at this depth than at the surface, because much of the leaking rock contributing to the total airflow was now overhead. Rajendra would have no trouble noticing the difference—but the view, alone, of gas escaping at ever greater pressure, suggested exactly the opposite.

As the camera plunged beneath the surface, the image flickered and then switched to lower resolution. Even through the turbulent, cloudy water, I could still catch occasional glimpses of the tunnel wall—or at least the wall of bubbles streaming out of the rock. It was a weird, disorienting sight—it almost looked as if the water was so acidic that it was dissolving the limestone right before my eyes… but once again, that impression would have been instantly untenable if I’d been down there in person, swimming in the stuff.

The resolution dropped again, and then the frame rate fell; the picture became a series of stills in rapid succession as the camera struggled to maintain contact. Sound came through clearly enough, though I probably wouldn’t have recognized distortion in the noise of bubbles breaking against a scuba mask. Rajendra glanced down; the view showed ten thousand pearls of oxygen streaming up through opalescent water— and nothing more distant than his knees. I thought I heard him inhaling sharply, tensing himself in preparation for touching the bottom—and then I almost sent the notepad tumbling down after him.

One still showed a startled, bright red fish staring straight into the camera. In the next image, it was gone.

I turned to the woman beside me. “Did you see—?” She had, but she didn’t seem at all surprised. The skin tingled all over my body. How thick was the rock we were standing on? How long was the cable?

When Rajendra emerged from the underside of the island, he made a noise which might have expressed anything from exuberance to terror; with a plastic tube in his mouth, and all the other acoustic complications, all I could discern was a muffled choking sound. As he descended through the subterranean ocean, the water around him gradually became clearer. I saw a whole school of tiny, pale fish cross the lantern beam in the distance, followed by a gray manta ray at least a meter wide, mouth stretched open in a permanent, plankton-straining grin. I glanced up from the screen, shaken. This couldn’t be happening beneath my feet.

The winch halted. Rajendra looked up, back toward Stateless, tilting the lantern on its pivot, swinging it back and forth.

Milky water roiled in a layer that clung to the underside. Fine particles of limestone? I was confused; why didn’t they simply fall? Even from strobed stills, I could see that this haze was in constant motion, surging rhythmically toward the hidden rock. I could also make out bubbles of gas, dragged down a few meters in some kind of undertow, before finally escaping back into the haze. Rajendra played the beam back and forth, improving his control; the lantern was obviously difficult to manipulate accurately, and I could sense his frustration—but after a few minutes his persistence paid off,

A stronger-than-average surge mixed an updraft of clear water into the milky layer above, parting the curtain for an instant. Beam and camera transfixed the event, exposing lumpy rock sparsely populated with barnacles and pale, frond-mouthed anemones. In the next frame, the image was blurred—not yet obscured by the haze of white particles, but crinkled, distorted by refraction. At first, we’d seen the rock through pure water; now we saw it through water and air.

There was a thin layer of air constantly trapped against the underside, maintained by the steady stream of oxygen escaping from the foamed rock.

This air gave the water a surface which could carry waves. Every wave which crashed on the distant reefs would send a twin diving beneath the island.

No wonder the water was cloudy. The underside of Stateless was being constantly scraped by a vast, wet, jagged file. Waves eroded the shoreline, but at least that stopped at the high-tide mark. This assault was going on beneath dry land, all the way to the rim of the guyot.

I turned again to the woman beside me, one of Rajendra’s friends. “The limestone detritus… tiny particles like that, must lose all their oxygen, all their buoyancy. Why don’t they just… fall?”

“They do. The white comes from engineered diatoms. They scavenge calcium from the water, mineralize it—then migrate up and paste themselves into the rock when the waves dash them against it. Coral polyps can’t grow in the darkness, so the diatoms are the only repair mechanism.” She smiled, hyperlucid; she’d been there to see for herself. “That’s what holds the island up: just a fine mist of calcium, fading away into the depths, and a few trillion microscopic creatures whose genes tell them what to do with it.”

The winch started rewinding. No one was near it; there must have been a control button for the diver, which I’d missed, or maybe it was preprogrammed, the whole dive calculated in advance to limit the risk of decompression sickness. Rajendra put his hand in front of his face and waved to us. People laughed and joked as he began his ascent; it was nothing like the mood when I’d arrived.

I asked the woman, “Do you have a notepad?”

“In the bus.”

“Do you want the communications software? You could keep the camera…”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Good idea. Thanks!” She went to fetch the notepad.

The camera had only cost me ten dollars, but the copy fee for the software turned out to be two hundred; I could hardly retract the offer, though. When she returned, I approved the transaction and the machines conversed in infrared. She’d have to pay for any more duplicates, but the program could be moved and erased for free, passed on to other groups of divers.

When Rajendra emerged he started whooping with joy. As soon as he was free of the safety line, he sprinted away across the plain, still carrying the scuba tanks, before doubling back and collapsing in a breathless heap. I didn’t know if he was hamming it up or not—he hadn’t seemed the type—but as he took off the diving gear, he was grinning like a madman in love, exhilarated, trembling.

Adrenaline, yes but he’d been diving for more than the thrill of it. He was back on solid ground… but it would never be the same, now that he’d seen exactly what lay beneath it: now that he’d swum right through the island’s tenuous foundations.

This was what the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island itself, but the firsthand knowledge that they stood on rock which the founders had crystallized out of the ocean—and which was, forever, dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair. Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and cooperation, had built Stateless—and even the engineered life which maintained it couldn’t be treated as God-given, infallible; the balance could be disturbed in a thousand ways: mutants could arise, competitors could move in, phages could wipe out bacteria, climate change could shift vital equilibria. All the elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be understood.

In the long run, discord could literally sink the place. If it was no guarantee of harmony that nobody on Stateless wanted their society to disintegrate… maybe it helped focus the attention to realize that the land beneath their feet might do the same.

And if it was naive to think of this understanding as any kind of panacea, it had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived mythology of nationhood.

It was true.

I copied everything from the camera’s memory, to give me the scene in high resolution. When Rajendra had calmed down slightly, I asked for his permission to use the footage for broadcast; he agreed. I had no definite plans, but at the very least I could always smuggle it into the interactive version of Violet Mosala.

Munroe came with me, still shouldering his folded easel and rolled-up canvas, as I headed back for the terminus.

I said sheepishly, “I might try it for myself once the conference is over. Right now, it looks too… intense. I just don’t want to be distracted. I have a job to do.”

He faked bewilderment. “It’s entirely your decision. You don’t have to justify anything to anyone, here.”

“Yeah, sure. And I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

At the terminus, I hit the call button; the box predicted a ten-minute wait.

Munroe fell silent for a while. Then he said, “I suppose you have all the inside information about everyone attending the conference?”

I laughed. “Not exactly. But I'm sure I'm not missing out on much. Soap operas staring physicists are just as dull as any other kind; I really don’t care who’s screwing whom, or who’s stealing whose brilliant ideas.”

He frowned amiably. “Well, neither do I—but I wouldn’t mind knowing if the rumor about Violet Mosala has any substance.”

I hesitated. “Which rumor did you have in mind? There are so many.” It sounded pitiful even as I said it; I might as well have come right out and admitted that I had no idea what he was talking about.

“There’s only one serious question, isn’t there?”

I shrugged. Munroe looked irritated, as if he believed I was being disingenuous, and not just trying to conceal my ignorance.

I said candidly, “Violet Mosala and I aren’t exactly swapping intimate secrets. The way things are going, if I make it through to the end of the conference with decent coverage of all her public appearances, I’ll count myself lucky. Even if I have to spend the next six months chasing her between appointments in Cape Town, trying to flesh things out.”

Munroe nodded with grim satisfaction, like a cynic whose opinions had just been confirmed. “Cape Town? Right. Thanks.”

“For what?”

He said, “I never believed it; I just wanted to hear it put to rest by someone in a position to be sure. Violet Mosala—Nobel-prize-winning physicist, inspiration to millions, twenty-first-century Einstein, architect of the TOE most likely to succeed… ‘abandons’ her home country— just when the peace in Natal is starting to look more solid than ever— not for Caltech, not for Bombay, not for CERN, not for Osaka… but to join the rabble on Stateless?

“Not in a million years.”

14

Back at the hotel, climbing the stairs to my room, I asked Sisyphus:

“Can you name a group of political activists—with the initials AC—who might have taken an interest in Violet Mosala emigrating to Stateless?”

“No.”

“Come on! A is for anarchy… ?”

“There are two thousand and seventy-three organizations with ‘anarchy’ or a related word in their title, but they all contain more than two words.”

“Okay.” Maybe AC itself was shorthand, like US for USA. But then, if Munroe was to be believed, no serious anarchist would ever use the A-word.

I tried a different angle. “What about A for African, С for culture… with any number of other letters?”

“There are two hundred and seven matches.”

I scrolled through the list; AC didn’t seem like a plausible abbreviation for any of them. One name was familiar, though; I replayed a section of the audio log from the morning’s press conference:

“William Savimbi, Proteus Information. You speak approvingly of a convergence of ideas which has no respect for ancestral cultures—as if your own heritage were of no importance to you at all. Is it true that you received death threats from the Pan-African Cultural Defense Front, after you publicly stated that you didn’t consider yourself to be an African woman?”

Mosala had put the quote in context—but she hadn’t answered the question. If a comment like that had been enough to result in death threats, what might rumors of “defection"—baseless or not—bring down on her?

I had no idea; I knew even less about South African cultural politics than I knew about ATMs. Mosala would hardly be the first prominent scientist to leave the country, but she would be one of the most celebrated—and the first to emigrate to Stateless. Chasing money and prestige at a world-class institution was one thing, but it would be hard to read a move to Stateless (which could offer neither) as anything but a deliberate renunciation of her nationality.

I paused on the landing, and stared at my useless electronic teat. AC? Mainstream AC? Sisyphus was silent. Whoever they were, Sarah Knight had managed to find them. I was beginning to feel an ache in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about what I’d done to her. It was clear that she’d prepared for this job meticulously, researching every issue surrounding Mosala—and coming from politics, where nothing on the nets was true, she’d probably gone out and talked to everyone in the flesh. Someone must have told her about the rumors, and put her on the trail which led to Kuwale—all off the record, of course. I’d stolen the project, walked in cold, and now I couldn’t even tell whether I was making a documentary about an emigrant anarcho-physicist in fear of her life… or whether I was jumping at shadows, and the only threat anyone on Stateless faced was being goaded into giving Janet Walsh some long overdue career advice.

I had Hermes call every hotel on the island, and inquire about a guest called Akili Kuwale.

No luck.

In my room, I turned up the windows’ sound insulation, and tried to psych myself into doing some work. The next morning I was scheduled to film a lecture by Helen Wu, chief advocate of the view that Mosalas methodology verged on circular logic. Before letting Munroe talk me into filming the inland divers, I’d been planning to spend the whole afternoon reading Wu’s previous papers; I had a lot of catching up to do.

First, though…

I scanned the relevant databases (eschewing help from Sisyphus, and taking three times as long). The Pan-African Cultural Defense Front turned out to be a loose affiliation of fifty-seven radical traditionalist groups from twenty-three nations, with a council of representatives which met each year to decide strategies and issue proclamations. PACDF itself was twenty years old; it had appeared in the wake of a resurgence of the traditionalist debate in the early thirties, when a num ber of academics and activists, mostly in central Africa, had begun to speak of the need to “re-establish continuity” with the pre-colonial past. Political and cultural movements of the previous century—from Senghor’s negritude to Mobutu’s “authenticity” to Black Consciousness in all its forms—were dismissed as corrupt, assimilationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism—according to the most vocal of the new traditionalists—was to excise it from history completely: to aim to behave, in its aftermath, as if it had never happened.

PACDF was the most extreme manifestation of this philosophy, taking an uncompromising and far from populist line. They decried Islam as an invader religion, as much as Christianity or Syncretism. They opposed vaccination, bioengineered crops, electronic communications. And if there was more to the group than a catalog of the foreign (or local, but insufficiently ancient) influences they explicitly renounced, they might have found it hard to differentiate themselves without such a hit-list. Many of the policies they advocated—wider official use of local languages, greater support for traditional cultural forms—were already high on the agenda of most governments, or were being lobbied for from other quarters. PACDF’s raison d'être seemed to consist of being greater purists than anyone else. When the most effective anti-malarial vaccine on the planet was manufactured in Nairobi—based on research carried out in that well-known imperialist superpower, Colombia—condemning its use as “a criminal betrayal of traditional healing practices” sounded like sheer fundamentalist perversity to me.

If Violet Mosala had chosen to emigrate to Stateless, I would have thought they’d be glad to be rid of her. She might have been a hero on half the continent, but to PACDF she could never have been anything but a traitor. And I could find no report of a death threat, so maybe Savimbi’s claim had been pure hype; the reality might have involved nothing more than an anonymous call to his news desk.

I plowed on, regardless. Maybe Kuwale’s mysterious faction had revealed themselves by taking part in the other side of the debate? There was certainly no shortage of vocal opposition to PACDF—from more moderate traditionalists, from numerous professional bodies, from pluralist organizations, and from self-described technoliberateurs.

Mismatched initials aside, I couldn’t quite see a member of the African Union for the Advancement of Science collaring journalists in airports and asking them to play unofficial bodyguard to a world-renowned physicist. And while the African Pluralists League organized worldwide student exchange programs, theatre and dance tours, physical and net-based art exhibitions, and lobbied aggressively against cultural isolationism and discriminatory treatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities… I doubted they had time on their hands to fret about Violet Mosala.

The late Muteba Kazadi had coined the term technoliberation, to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the “liberation” of the technology itself from restrictive hands. Muteba had been a communications engineer, poet, science writer—and Minister for Development in Zaire in the late thirties. I viewed some of his speeches, impassioned pleas for “the use of knowledge in the service of freedom"; he’d called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public ownership of communications resources, and a universal right of access to scientific information. As well as championing the obvious pragmatism of “liberation biology” (though Zaire had never gone renegade and used unlicensed crops), he’d spoken of the long-term need for African nations to participate in pure research in every area of basic science—an extraordinary stand at a time when such activities were deeply unpopular in the wealthiest countries on the planet, and unthinkable in terms of his own government’s immediate priorities.

Muteba had had his eccentricities, his three biographers concurred, with a leaning toward Nietzschean metaphysics, fringe cosmology, and dramatic conspiracy theories—including the old one that “El Nido de Ladrones,” the bioengineered haven built by drug runners on the Peruvian-Colombian border, had been H-bombed in 2035 not because the modified forest was out of control and threatening to overrun the whole Amazon basin, but because some kind of “dangerously liberating” neuroactive virus had been invented there. The act had been an obscenity, thousands of people had died—and the public outrage it attracted had quite possibly helped to save Stateless from a similar fate—but I thought the more prosaic explanation was far more likely to be true.

Learned commentators from every part of the continent stated that Muteba’s legacy lived on, and that proud technoliberateurs were active across the face of Africa, and beyond. I found it difficult to pin down his direct intellectual descendants, though; hundreds of academic and political groups, and tens of thousands of individuals, cited Muteba as a source of inspiration—and many people who’d spoken out against PACDF in net debates had explicitly labeled themselves technoliberateurs—but each seemed to have adapted the philosophy to a slightly different agenda. I had no doubt that every one of them would have been horrified at the thought of Violet Mosala coming to harm—but I was no wiser as to who might have taken it upon themselves to watch over her.

Around seven, I headed downstairs. Sarah Knight still hadn’t returned my call—and I could hardly blame her for snubbing me. I thought again about offering to hand back the project, but I told myself that I’d left it too late, and she’d probably committed herself to another assignment. The truth was, the more the complications surrounding Mosala mocked the fantasy I’d held of retreating into the “inconsequential” abstractions of TOEs, the harder it became to imagine walking away. If this was the reality behind the mirage, I had an obligation to face it.

I was heading toward the main restaurant when I spotted Indrani Lee coming down one of the corridors which led into the lobby. She was with a small group, but they were splitting up—with volleys of rejoinders and afterthoughts, as if they’d just emerged from a long, hectic meeting and couldn’t bear each other’s company any longer, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to end the discussion, either. I approached; she saw me and raised a hand in greeting.

I said, “I missed you on the connecting flight. How are you settling in?”

“Fine, fine!” She seemed happy and excited; the conference was obviously living up to her expectations. “But you don’t look at all well.”

I laughed. “As a student, did you ever find yourself sitting for an exam where all the questions on the paper, and all the questions you’d stayed up until dawn preparing to answer… had so little in common that they might as well have come from two completely different subjects?”

“Several times. But what’s brought on the déjà vu? Is all the mathematics going over your head?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not the problem.” I glanced around the lobby; no one was likely to overhear us, but I didn’t want to add to the rumors about Mosala if I could help it. I said, “You looked like you were in a hurry. Maybe I’ll bore you with all my tribulations on the flight back to Phnom Penh.”

“In a hurry? No, I was just going out for some air. If you’re not busy yourself, you’re welcome to join me.”

I accepted gratefully. I’d been planning to eat, but I still had no real appetite—and it occurred to me that Lee might have some professional insights into technoliberation which she’d be willing to share.

As we stepped through the doors, though, I could see what she’d really meant by “going out for some air": Mystical Renaissance had decided to show themselves, crowding the street outside the hotel. Banners read: TO EXPLAIN IS TO DESTROY! REVERE THE NUMEN! SAY NO TO TOE! T-shirts displayed Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Joseph Campbell, Fritjof Capra, the cult’s late founder Gunter Kleiner, event artist Sky Alchemy—and even Einstein, poking his tongue out.

No one was chanting slogans; after Janet Walsh’s confrontationist salvo, Mystical Renaissance had opted for a carnival atmosphere, all mime artists and fire-jugglers, palmists and tarot card readers. Tumbling firesticks cast oscillating deep-blue shadows everywhere, giving the street an oceanic cast. Bemused locals threaded their way through this obstacle course with expressions of weary resignation; they hadn’t asked to have a circus shoved down their throats. So far as I could see, it was only a few badge-wearing conference members who were availing themselves of the free entertainment, or giving money to the buskers and fortune-tellers.

One of the cultists who’d stolen Albert was singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” accompanying himself on a keyboard—a common brand, like his T-shirt; both had IR programming ports. I paused in front of him, smiling appreciatively, while I invoked some notepad software I’d written several years before, and quietly typed instructions. As we walked away, his keyboard fell silent—every volume level set to zero—and Einstein sprouted a thought balloon which read: “Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”

Lee gave me an admonishing look. I said, “Come on! He was begging for it.”

Further down the street, a small theatre group were in the middle of a compressed version of The Iceman Cometh, rewritten in contemporary MR vernacular. A woman in a clown costume tore at her hair and declaimed: “I’ve failed to be psychically attuned! Everyone in my net-clan would have remained closer to the healing numen, if only I’d respected their need to continue to be nourished by their imagination-driven self-narratives!” Images of tears flowed down her cheeks.

I turned to Lee. “Well, I'm convinced. I'm joining up tomorrow. And to think: I used to take the fragile beauty of the sunset and reduce it to ugly technical jargon.”

“If you think this is painful, you should hear their five-minute Mahab’harata-as-Jungian-psychobabble.” She shuddered. “But the original remains intact, doesn’t it? And they have a right to their own… interpretation… as much as anyone.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced.

I said wearily, “I don’t know what these people hoped to gain by coming here. Even if they disrupted the conference, all the research has already taken place; it’s all going to be posted on the nets, regardless. And if the whole idea of a TOE offends them so deeply… they can just close their eyes to it, can’t they? They’ve closed their eyes to every other scientific discovery which has failed to meet their stringent spiritual requirements.”

Lee shook her head. “It’s a matter of territorial defense. You must see that. A TOE effectively claims sovereignty over… the universe, and everyone in it. If a conference of lawyers in New York set themselves up as rulers of the cosmos, wouldn’t you be tempted to go and thumb your nose at them, at the very least?”

I groaned. “Physics doesn’t claim sovereignty. Least of all here, where the whole aim is to find the one thing about the universe which physicists and technologists will never have the power to change. Using crude political metaphors like ‘sovereignty’ or ‘imperialism’ is just empty rhetoric; no one at this conference is sending troops to annex the weak force to the strong force. Unification isn’t being legislated or enforced. It’s being mapped.”

Lee said portentously, “Ah, the power of maps."

“Oh, stop it, you know exactly what I mean! As in a map of the sky, not a map of… Kurdistan. And with no constellations drawn in… or stars named.” Lee smirked, as if she had a much, much longer list of culturally charged attributes in mind, and wasn’t going to let me off the hook until I’d ruled out every one of them. I said, “All right, forget the whole metaphor! But the fact is: exactly the same TOE underlies the universe—and keeps these cultists alive, juggling, and spouting gibberish—whether the evil reductionist physicists are allowed to discover it, or not.”

“Not according to the Anthrocosmologists, it doesn’t.” Lee offered a conciliatory smile. “But of course, yes, the laws of physics are whatever they are—and half of Mystical Renaissance would concede as much, in suitably evasive and conditional jargon. Most of them accept that the universe rules itself in some… systematic fashion. But they still feel deeply affronted by an explicit, mathematical formulation of that system.

“You say they should be satisfied with personal ignorance, rather than trying to keep the TOE out of human hands entirely. And of course, they’ll go on believing whatever they like, even if a successful TOE is announced; they’ve never let scientific orthodoxy stand in their way before. But the very beliefs they’ve chosen to hold dictate that they can’t ignore the fact that physicists—and geneticists, and neurobiologists—are tunneling ever deeper beneath everybody’s feet, and dragging to the surface whatever they find there… and what they find will influence every culture on Earth, in the long run.”

“And that’s reason enough to come here and intimidate innocent people with the mutilated corpse of Eugene O'Neill?”

“Be fair: if you’re conceding them the right to believe what they like, that has to include the right to feel threatened.”

The play was coming to a close; one of the actors was delivering a monologue on the need to show only compassion to poor scientists who’d lost touch with the soul of Gaia.

I said, “So what do you call claiming to know the divine will of the Earth itself—if not an equally global land grab, couched in warmer and fuzzier terms?”

Lee gave me a puzzled frown. “But of course. MR are like everyone else; they want to define the world on their own terms. They want to set the parameters, they want to make all the rules. Naturally, they’ve evolved an elaborate strategy to try to mask that fact—such as describing themselves with words like ‘generous,’ ‘open’ and ‘inclusive'—but I'm certainly not suggesting that they’re any more humble, virtuous or tolerant than the most fanatical rationalist. I'm just trying to explain their beliefs to you as an outsider, as best I can.”

“With your own universal explanatory scheme?”

“Exactly. That’s my arduous duty: expert guide and interpreter to every subculture on Earth. The sociologist’s burden. But then, who else could shoulder it?” She smiled solemnly. “I am, after all, the only objective person on the planet.”

We walked on through the warm night, passing right out of the carnival. After a minute or two, I turned and looked back. From a distance, it was an odd sight, compacted by perspective and framed by the surrounding buildings: a flamboyant sideshow embedded in the middle of a city—going about its ordinary life—which had built itself out of the ocean, molecule by molecule, and knew it. The adjacent streets certainly looked mundane and colorless in comparison—full of ordinary pedestrians: no one dressed as harlequins, no one juggling fire or swallowing swords—but the memory of the afternoon’s dive, and what it had revealed about the island, was enough to make all of the cult’s self-conscious exotica and desperately cheerful busyness fade into insignificance.

I suddenly recalled what Angelo had said, the night before I left Sydney. We sanctify what we’re stuck with. Maybe that was the heart of it, for Mystical Renaissance. Most of the universe had been inexplicable, for most of human history—and MR had inherited the strand of the culture which had doggedly made a virtue out of that necessity. They’d stripped away—or fed through a cultural blender, in a kind of mock-pluralism—the historical baggage of most of the specific religions and other belief systems which had done the same, in their day… and then inflated what remained into the essence of Big-H itself. To sanctify mystery is to be “fully human.” Fail to do so, and you’re something less: “soulless,” “left-brained,” “reductionist"… and in need of being “healed."

James Rourke should have been here. The Battle for the H-words was in full swing.

As we started back toward the hotel, I realized I’d meant to ask Lee a question which had almost slipped my mind.

I said, “Who are the Anthrocosmologists?” The term sounded as if it should have meant something to me, but—vague etymological inferences aside—it didn’t.

Lee was hesitant. “I doubt you really want to know. If Mystical Renaissance raise your ire…”

“They’re an Ignorance Cult? I’ve never heard of them.”

“They’re not an Ignorance Cult. And the word ‘cult,’ of course, is terribly value-laden and pejorative; although I use it in the vernacular sense like everyone else, I really shouldn’t.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what these people believe, and then I’ll make up my own mind exactly how intolerant and condescending to be toward them?”

She smiled, but she looked genuinely pained, as if I was asking her to betray a confidence. “The ACs are extremely sensitive about… the way they’re represented. It was hard enough persuading them to talk to me at all, and they still won’t let me publish anything about them.”

The ACs! I feigned indignation, trying to mask my jubilation. “What do you mean, ‘let'?”

Lee said, “I agreed in advance to certain conditions, and I have to keep my word if I want their cooperation to continue. They’ve promised there’ll be a time when I can put everything on the nets—but until then, I'm on indefinite probation. Disclosing information to a journalist would destroy the whole relationship in an instant.”

“I don’t want to publicize anything about them. This is purely off the record, I swear. I'm just curious.”

“Then it won’t do you any harm to wait a few years, will it?”

A few years? I said, “All right, I'm more than curious.”

“Why?”

I thought it over: I could tell her about Kuwale—and ask her to swear to keep it to herself, to avoid embroiling Mosala in any more unwelcome speculation. Except that… how could I ask her to betray one confidence while begging her to respect another? It would be pure hypocrisy—and if she was willing to swap secrets with me, what would her promise be worth?

I said, “What have they got against journalists, anyway? Most cults are dying to recruit new members. What sort of ethos—?”

Lee eyed me suspiciously. “I'm not going to be tricked into any more indiscretions. It’s my fault entirely that the name slipped out, but the topic is now closed. The Anthrocosmologists are a non-subject.”

I laughed. “Oh, come on! This is absurd! You’re one of them, aren’t you? No secret handshakes; your notepad is sending out coded infrared: I am Indrani Lee, High Priestess of the Revered and Sacred Order."

She took a swat at me with the back other hand; I pulled back just in time. She said, “They certainly don’t have priestesses.”

“You mean they’re sexist? All male?”

She scowled. “Or priests. And I'm not saying anything more.”

We walked on in silence. I took out my notepad and gave Sisyphus several meaningful glances. The full word had unlocked no Aladdin’s cave of data, though: every search on “Anthrocosmologists” came up blank.

I said, “I apologize. No more questions, no more provocation. What if I really do need to get in touch with them, though, but I just can’t tell you why?”

Lee was unmoved. “That sounds unlikely.”

I hesitated. “Someone called Kuwale has been trying to contact me. Ve’s been sending me cryptic messages for days. But ve failed to turn up at an arranged meeting last night, so I just want to find out what’s going on.” Almost none of this was true, but I wasn’t going to admit that I’d screwed up a perfect opportunity to discover for myself what AC was about. In any case, Lee remained impassive; if she’d heard the name before, she showed no sign of it.

I said, “Can’t you pass on the message that I want to speak to them? Give them the right to choose for themselves whether or not to turn me down?”

She stopped walking, A cultist on stilts reached down and thrust a stack of edible pamphlets in her face, MR’s own Einstein Conference Newsletter in the non-electronic edition. Lee waved the woman away irritably. “You’re asking a lot. If they take offense, and I lose five years’ work…”

I thought: You wouldn’t lose five years’ work; you’d finally be free to publish. But it didn’t seem diplomatic to put it that way.

I said, “I first heard the term Anthrocosmotogists from Kuwale, not you. So you don’t even have to tell them that you admitted knowing anything. Just say I asked you more or less at random—that I’ve been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you.”

She hesitated. I said, “Kuwale was dropping hints about… violence. So what am I supposed to do? Just forget about ver? Or start trying to navigate my way through whatever bizarre apparatus Stateless employs for dealing with suspicious disappearances ?”

Lee gave me a look which seemed to imply that she hadn’t been taken in by any of this—but then she said begrudgingly, “If I tell them you’ve been blundering around shooting your mouth off, I suppose they can’t hold that against me.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t look happy. “Violence? Against whom?”

I shook my head. “Ve didn’t say. I mean, it may all come to nothing, but I still have to follow it up.”

“I want to hear everything, when you do.”

“You will, I promise.”

We’d arrived back at the theatre group, who were now acting out a laborious fable about a child with cancer… whose life could only be saved if he was kept from hearing the—stressful, immunosuppressant—truth. Look, Ma, real science! Except that the effects of stress on the immune system had been amenable to pharmacological control for the last thirty years.

I stood and watched for a while, playing devil’s advocate against my own first impressions, trying to convince myself that there might be some real insight hidden in the story: some eternal verity which transcended the outdated medical contingencies.

If there was, I honestly couldn’t find it. The earnest clowns might as well have been envoys from another planet, for all that they conveyed to me about the world we supposedly shared.

And if I was wrong, and they were right? If everything I saw as specious contrivance was, in fact, luminous with wisdom? If this clumsy, sentimental fairy tale spoke the deepest truth about the world?

Then I was more than wrong. I was utterly deluded. I was lost beyond redemption—a foundling from another cosmology, another logic entirely, with no place in this one at all.

There was no possibility of compromise, no question of building bridges. We couldn’t both be “half-right.” Mystical Renaissance endlessly proclaimed that they’d found “the perfect balance” between mysticism and rationality—as if the universe had been waiting for this cozy detente before deciding how to conduct itself, and was, frankly, relieved that the conflicting parties had been able to reach an amicable settlement which would respect everyone’s delicate cultural sensibilities and give due weight to everyone’s views. Except, of course, the view that the human ideals of balance and compromise, however laudable in political and social spheres, had absolutely nothing to do with the way the universe itself behaved.

Humble Science! could denounce as “tyrants of scientism” anyone who expressed this opinion, Mystical Renaissance could call them “victims of psychic numbing” who needed to be “healed"… but even if the cults were right, the principle itself could not be diluted, reconciled with its opposites, brought into the fold. It was either true or false—or truth and falsehood were meaningless, and the universe was an incomprehensible blur.

I thought: Empathy at last. If any of this was mutual—if MR felt half as alienated and dispossessed by the prospect of a TOE, as I did at the thought of their lunatic ideas shaping the ground beneath my feet—then I finally understood why they’d come here.

The actors bowed. A few people, mainly other cultists in fancy dress, applauded. I suspected there’d been a happy ending; I’d stopped paying attention. I took out my notepad and transferred twenty dollars to the one they’d placed before them on the ground. Even Jungians in clown costumes had to eat: First Law of Thermodynamics.

I turned to Indrani Lee. “Tell me, honestly: Are you really the one person who can step outside every culture, every belief system, every source of bias and confusion, and see the truth?”

She nodded unassumingly. “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

Back in my room, I stared blankly at the first page of Helen Wu’s most controversial Physical Review article—and tried to piece together how Sarah Knight could have stumbled on the Anthrocosmologists in the course of her research for Violet Mosala. Maybe Kuwale had heard about the project and approached her, just as ve’d approached me.

Heard about it how?

Sarah had come out of politics, but she’d already completed one science documentary for SeeNet. I checked the schedules. The title was Holding Up the Sky… and the subject was fringe cosmology. It wasn’t due to be broadcast until June, but it was sitting in SeeNet’s private library—to which I had full access.

I viewed the whole thing. It ranged from near-orthodox (but probably untestable) theories: quantum parallel universes (diverging from a single Big Bang), multiple Big Bangs freezing out of pre-space with different physical constants, universes “reproducing” via black holes and passing on “mutated” physics to their offspring… through to more exotic and fanciful concepts: the cosmos as a cellular automaton, as the coincidental by-product of disembodied Platonic mathematics, as a “cloud” of random numbers which only possessed form by virtue of the fact that one possible form happened to include conscious observers.

There was no mention of the Anthrocosmologists, but maybe Sarah had been saving them for a later project—by which time she hoped to have won their confidence and secured their cooperation? Or maybe she’d been saving them for Violet Mosala, if there was a substantial connection between the two—if it was more than a coincidence that Kuwale was a devotee of both.

I sent Sisyphus exploring the nooks and crannies of the interactive version of Holding Up the Sky, but there were no buried references, no hints of more to come. And no public database on the planet contained a single entry on the ACs. Every cult employed image managers to try to keep the right spin on their media representations… but total invisibility suggested extraordinary discipline, not expensive PR.

The cult of Anthrocosmology. Meaning: Human knowledge of the universe? It was not an instantly transparent label. At least Mystical Renaissance, Humble Science! and Culture First didn’t leave you guessing about their priorities.

It did contain the H-word, though. No wonder they had opposing factions—a mainstream and a fringe.

I closed my eyes. I thought I could hear the island breathing, ceaselessly exhaling—and the subterranean ocean, scouring the rock beneath me.

I opened my eyes. This close to the center, I was still above the guyot. Underneath the reef-rock was solid basalt and granite, all the way down to the ocean floor.

Sleep reached up and took me, regardless.

15

I arrived early for Helen Wu’s lecture. The auditorium was almost empty—but Mosala was there, studying something on her notepad intently. I took a seat one space removed from her. She didn’t look up.

“Good morning.”

She glanced at me, and replied coldly, “Good morning,” then went back to whatever she was viewing. If I kept filming her like this, the audience would conclude that the whole documentary had been made at gunpoint.

Body language could always be edited.

That wasn’t the point, though.

I said, “How does this sound? I promise not to use anything you said about the cults—yesterday, if you agree to give me something more considered later on.”

She thought it over, without lifting her eyes from the screen.

“All right. That’s fair.” She glanced at me again, adding, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I really do have to finish this.” She showed me her notepad; she was half-way through one of Wu’s papers, a Physical Review article about six months old.

I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked momentarily scandalized. Mosala said defensively, “There are only twenty-four hours in a day. Of course I should have read this months ago, but…” She gestured impatiently.

“Can I film you reading it?”

She was horrified. “And let everyone know?”

I said, “'Nobel laureate catches up on homework.’ It would show that you have something in common with us mortals.” I almost added: “It’s what we call humanization.”

Mosala said firmly, “You can start filming when the lecture begins. That’s what it says on the schedule we agreed to. Right?”

“Right.”

She carried on reading—now truly ignoring me; all the self-consciousness and hostility had vanished. I felt a wave of relief wash over me: between us, we’d probably just saved the documentary. Her reaction to the cults had to be dealt with, but she had a right to express it more diplomatically. It was a simple, obvious compromise; I only wished I’d thought of it sooner.

I peeked at Mosala’s notepad while she read (without recording). She invoked some kind of software assistant every time she came to an equation: windows blossomed on the screen, full of algebraic cross-checking and detailed analysis of the links between the steps in Wu’s argument. I wondered if I would have been able to make better sense of Wu’s papers myself, with this kind of help. Probably not: some of the notation in the “explanatory” windows looked even more cryptic to me than that of the original text.

I could follow, in the broadest qualitative terms, most of the issues being discussed at the conference—but Mosala, with a little computerized help, could clearly penetrate right down to the level where the mathematics either survived rigorous scrutiny, or fell apart. No seductive rhetoric, no persuasive metaphors, no appeals to intuition: just a sequence of equations where each one did or did not lead inexorably to the next. Passing this inspection wasn’t proof of anything, of course; an immaculate chain of reasoning led to nothing but an elegant fantasy, if the premises were, physically, wrong. It was crucial to be able to test the connections themselves, though, to check every strand in the web of logic which bound two possibilities together.

The way I saw it, every theory and its logical consequences—every set of general laws, and the specific possibilities they dictated—formed an indivisible whole. Newton’s universal laws of motion and gravity, Kepler’s idealized elliptical orbits, and any number of particular (pre-Einsteinian) models of the solar system, were all part of the same fabric of ideas, the same tightly knit layer of reasoning. None of which had turned out to be entirely correct, so the whole layer of Newtonian cosmology had been peeled away (fingernails slipped under the unraveling corner where velocities approached the speed of light) in search of something deeper… and the same thing had happened half a dozen times since. The trick was to know precisely what constituted each layer, to prise away each interlinked set of falsified ideas and failed predictions, no more and no less… until a layer was reached which was seamless, self-consistent—and which fit every available observation of the real world.

That was what set Violet Mosala apart (from half her colleagues, no doubt, as well as third-rate science journalists—and which no amount of humanization would ever change): If a proposed TOE was inconsistent with experimental data, or unraveled under its own contradictions, she had the ability to follow the logic as far as it went, and peel away the whole beautiful failure, like a perfect sheet of dead skin.

And if it wasn’t a beautiful failure? If the TOE in question turned out to be flawless? Watching her parse Wu’s elaborate mathematical arguments as if they were written in the most transparent prose, I could picture her, when that day came—whether the TOE was her own or not—patiently mapping out the theory’s consequences at every scale, every energy, every level of complexity, doing her best to weave the universe into an indivisible whole.

The auditorium began to fill. Mosala finished the paper just as Wu arrived at the podium. I whispered, “What’s the verdict?”

Mosala was pensive. “I think she’s largely correct. She hasn’t quite proved what she’s set out to prove—not yet. But I'm almost certain that she’s on the right track.”

I was startled. “But doesn’t that worry—?”

She raised a finger to her lips. “Be patient. Let’s hear her out.”

Helen Wu lived in Malaysia, but had worked for the University of Bombay for the last thirty years. She’d co-authored at least a dozen seminal papers—including two with Buzzo and one with Mosala—but somehow she’d never reached the same quasi-celebrity status. She was probably every bit as ingenious and imaginative as Buzzo, and maybe even as rigorous and thorough as Mosala, but she seemed to have been slower to move straight to the frontiers of the field (always really visible only in retrospect), and not as lucky in choosing problems which had yielded spectacular general results.

Much of the lecture was simply beyond me. I covered every word, every graphic, scrupulously, but my thoughts wandered to the question of how I could paraphrase the message without the technicalities. With an interactive dialogue, maybe?

Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don’t tell me what it is.

[Thinks… 575]

Add the digits together.

[17]

Add them again.

[8]

Add 3.

[11]

Subtract this from the original number.

[564]

Add the digits together.

[15]

Find the remainder left when you divide by nine.

[6]

Square it.

[36]

Add 6.

[42]

The number in your head now is… 42?

[Yes!]

Now try it once again…

The end result, of course, was guaranteed to be the same every time; all the elaborate steps of this cheap party trick were just a long-winded way of saying that X minus X would always equal zero.

Wu was suggesting that Mosala’s whole approach to building a TOE amounted to much the same thing: all the mathematics simply canceled itself out. On a grander scale, and in a far less obvious manner—but in the end, a tautology was still a tautology.

Wu spoke quietly as equations flowed across the display screen behind her. To spell out these connections, to short-circuit one part of Mosala’s work with another, Wu had had to prove half a dozen new theorems in pure mathematics—difficult results, all of them, and useful in their own right. (This was not my own uneducated opinion; I’d checked the databases for citations other earlier work, which had prepared the ground for this presentation.) And that was the extraordinary thing, for me: that such a rich and complex restatement of “X minus X equals zero” was even possible. It was as if an elaborately twisted length of rope, weaving in and out of its own detours a few hundred thousand times, had turned out not to be knotted at all, but just a simple loop—ornately arranged, but ultimately able to be completely untangled. Maybe that would make a better metaphor—and in the interactive, viewers with force gloves could reach in and prove for themselves that the “knot” really was just a loop in disguise…

You couldn’t grab hold of a couple of Mosala’s tensor equations and simply tug, though, to find out how they were joined. You had to unpick the false knot in your mind’s eye (with help from software—but it couldn’t do everything). Subtle mistakes were always possible. The details were everything.

Wu finished, and began taking questions. The audience was subdued; there were only a couple of tentative requests for clarification, expressing no hint of acceptance or rejection.

I turned to Mosala. “Do you still think she’s on the right track?”

She hesitated. “Yes, I do.”

The auditorium was emptying around us. In the corner of my eye, I could see people’s gaze lingering on Mosala as they made their way past us. It was all very civilized—no swooning teenagers begging for autographs—but there were unmistakable flashes of infatuation, reverence, adoration. I recognized some members of the fan club whose support had been so evident at the press conference—but I still hadn’t so much as glimpsed Kuwale anywhere in the building. If ve was so concerned about Mosala, why wasn’t ve here?

I said, “What does that mean for your TOE? If Wu is correct?”

Mosala smiled. “Maybe that strengthens my position.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

She glanced at her notepad. “It’s a complicated issue. Maybe we could go into it tomorrow?”

Wednesday afternoon: our first interview session.

“Of course.”

We began to walk out together. Mosala clearly had another appointment; it was now or never. I said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I don’t know if it’s important, but…”

She seemed distracted, but she said, “Go on.”

“When I arrived, I was met at the airport by someone called Akili Kuwale.” She didn’t react to the name, so I continued. “Ve said ve was a ‘mainstream Anthrocosmologist,’ and—”

Mosala groaned softly, closed her eyes, and stopped dead. Then she turned on me. “Let me make this absolutely clear. If you so much as mention the Anthrocosmologists in this documentary, I’ll—”

I broke in hurriedly, “I have no intention of doing that.”

She stared at me angrily, disbelieving.

I added, “Do you think they’d let me, even if I wanted to?”

She wasn’t mollified. “I never know what they might do. What did this person want from you, if it wasn’t coverage for their lunatic views?”

I said carefully, “Ve seemed to feel you might be in some kind of danger.” I contemplated raising the question of emigration to Stateless, but Mosala was already so close to flashpoint that I didn’t think it was worth the risk.

She said acidly, “Well, that’s the Anthrocosmologists for you, and their concern is very touching, but I'm not in any danger, am I?” She gestured at the empty auditorium, as if to point out the absence of lurking assassins. “So they can relax, and you can forget about them, and we can both get on with our jobs. Right?”

I nodded dumbly. She started to walk away; I caught up with her. I said, “Look, I didn’t seek these people out. I was approached straight off the plane by this mysterious person making cryptic remarks about your safety. I thought you had a right to hear about it; it’s as simple as that. I didn’t know ve was a member of your least favorite cult. And if the whole subjects taboo… fine. I’ll never speak their name in your presence again.”

Mosala stopped, her expression softening. She said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to chew your head off. But if you knew the kind of pernicious nonsense—” She broke off. “Never mind. You say the subjects closed? You have no interest in them?” She smiled sweetly. “Then there’s nothing to argue about, is there?” She walked to the doorway, then turned and called back, “So—I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon? We can finally have a talk about some things that matter. I'm looking forward to that."

I watched her walk away, then I retreated back into the empty room and sat down in a front-row seat, wondering how I’d ever talked myself into believing that I could “explain” Violet Mosala to the world. I hadn’t even known what my own lover was thinking, living with her week after week, so what kind of ludicrous misjudgments would I make with this highly strung, mercurial stranger… whose life revolved around mathematics I could barely comprehend?

My notepad beeped urgently. I took it from my pocket; Hermes had deduced that the lecture was over, and audible signaling was now acceptable. There was a message for me from Indrani Lee:

"Andrew, you may not fully appreciate what kind of coup this is, but a representative of the people we discussed last night has agreed to speak with you. Off the record, of course. 27 Chomsky Avenue. Nine o'clock tonight."

I clutched my stomach, and tried not to laugh.

I said, “I'm not going. I'm not risking it. What if Mosala finds out? Of course I'm curious—but it’s just not worth it.”

After a few seconds, Hermes asked, “Is that a reply to the sender?”

I shook my head. “No. And it’s not even the truth, either.”

The address Lee had given me was a short walk from the north-east tram line, through what looked—almost—like a patch of middle-class suburbia back home… except that there was no vegetation, ostentatious or otherwise, just relatively large paved courtyards and occasional kitsch statuary. No obviously electrified fences, either. The air was chilly; autumn was making itself felt here, after all. The dazzling coral of Stateless gave the wrong impression entirely; the natural cousins of its engineered polyps would not have thrived, this far from the tropics.

I thought: Sarah Knight had been in touch with the Anthrocosmologists, and Mosala had never got to hear of it. She would hardly have spoken about Sarah in such glowing terms, if she’d known there’d been some kind of deal between her and Kuwale. That was pure supposition, but it made sense: research for Holding Up the Sky must have led Sarah to the ACs, who were at least part of the reason why she’d worked so hard to get the contract for Violet Mosala. And maybe the Anthrocosmologists had now decided to offer the same deal to me. Help us keep watch over Violet Mosala, and we’ll give you a world exclusive: the first media coverage of the planet’s most secretive cult.

Why did they feel it was their duty to guard Mosala, though? What role did TOE specialists play in the Anthrocosmologists’ scheme of things? Revered gurus? Unworldly holy fools who needed to be protected from their enemies by a secret cadre of devoted followers? Sanctifying physicists would make a change from sanctifying ignorance—but I could imagine Mosala finding it even more galling to be told that she was some kind of precious (but ultimately, naive and helpless) conduit for mystical insights, than to be told she was in need of being humbled, or healed.

Number 27 was a single-storey house of silver-gray granite-like reef-rock. It was large, but no mansion; four or five bedrooms, maybe. It made sense for the reclusive ACs to lease themselves something out in the suburbs; it was certainly more discreet than booking themselves rooms in a hotel swarming with journalists. Warm yellow light showed through windows set to opalescent, a deliberately welcoming configuration. I walked through the unlocked gate, crossed the empty courtyard, steeled myself, and rang the bell. If Mystical Renaissance could don clown costumes and talk about “imagination-driven self-narratives” out on the street for all the world to see, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a cult whose practices had to take place behind closed doors.

My notepad emitted a brief, soft squeal, like a children’s toy impaled on a knife. I took it from my pocket; the screen was blank—the first time ever I’d seen it that way. The door opened, and an elegantly dressed woman smiled at me and extended a hand, saying, “You must be Andrew Worth. I'm Amanda Conroy.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Still clutching my notepad, I shook her hand. She glanced at the dead machine. “It won’t be damaged—but you understand, this is off the record.” She had a West Coast US accent, and unashamedly unnatural milk-white skin, smooth as polished marble. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty.

I followed her into the house, down a plushly carpeted hallway, and into the living room. There were half a dozen wall-hangings: large, abstract and colorful. They looked to me like Brazilian Mock Primitive—the work of a school of fashionable Irish artists—but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were the “genuine” article: self-consciously exploitative “remixes” of twenties Saõ Paulo ghetto art, currently valued at a hundred thousand times the price of the real thing from Brazil. The four-meter wall-screen certainly wasn’t cheap, though, and nor was the hidden device which had turned my notepad into a brick. I didn’t even contemplate trying to invoke Witness; I was just glad I’d transmitted the morning’s footage to my editing console at home, before leaving the hotel.

We seemed to be alone in the house. Conroy said, “Take a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?” She moved toward a small beverage dispenser in a corner of the room. I glanced at the machine, and declined. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar synthesizer model—essentially a scaled-up pharm; it could have served anything from orange juice to a cocktail of neuroactive amines. Its presence on Stateless surprised me—I hadn’t been allowed to bring my own out-of-date pharm here—but not having memorized the schedules to the UN resolution, I wasn’t sure what technology was prohibited universally, and what was banned only from Australian exports.

Conroy sat opposite me, composed, but thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, “Akili Kuwale is a very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful person, but ve’s something of a loose cannon.” She smiled disarmingly. “I can’t imagine what impression you have of us, after ve led you on with all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense.” She glanced at my notepad again, meaningfully. “I suppose our insistence on strict privacy doesn’t help matters, either—but there’s nothing sinister about that, I assure you. You must appreciate the power of the media to take a group of people, and their ideas, and distort the representation of both to suit… any number of agendas.” I started to reply—to concede the point, actually—but she cut me off. “I'm not trying to libel your profession, but we’ve seen it happen so many times, to other groups, that you shouldn’t be surprised if we treat it as an inevitable consequence of going public.

“So we’ve made the difficult choice, for the sake of autonomy, to refuse to be represented by outsiders at all. We don’t wish to be portrayed to the world at large: fairly or unfairly, sympathetically or otherwise. And if we have no public image whatsoever, the problem of distortion vanishes. We are who we are.”

I said, “And yet, you’ve asked me here.”

Conroy nodded, regretfully. “Wasting your time, and risking making things even worse. But what choice did we have? Akili stirred your curiosity, and we could hardly expect you to let the matter drop. So… I'm willing to discuss our ideas with you directly rather than leaving you to track down and piece together a lot of unreliable hearsay from third parties. But it must, all, be off the record.”

I shifted in my seat. “You don’t want me drawing any more attention to you by asking questions of the wrong people—so you’ll answer them yourself, just to shut me up?”

I’d expected this blunt appraisal to be met with wounded denials and a barrage of euphemisms but Conroy replied calmly, “That’s right.”

Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value: Just say I asked you more or less at random—that I’ve been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you. If the ACs thought my hastily improvised story for Lee about the “vanishing informant” Kuwale was in the process of being repeated to every last journalist and physicist on Stateless, no wonder they’d wasted no time in calling me in.

I said, “Why are you willing to trust me? What’s to stop me from using everything you say?”

Conroy spread her hands. “Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I’ve viewed your previous work; it’s clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don’t interest you. You’re here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference—which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture—they’re forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we’re not. And with no images of us—unless you care to fake them—what would you put in your documentary? A five-minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?”

I didn’t know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosalas antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.

What’s more, I couldn’t help but sympathize a little with the ACs’ stand. It seemed that almost everyone I’d encountered in the last few years—from gender migrants fleeing other people’s definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe—was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons, although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.

I said cautiously, “I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I’ll try to respect your wishes.”

This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she’d weighed up everything before we’d even met and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.

She said, “Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won’t waste your time, though, listing what we do and don’t have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth-century France, or eighteenth-century Germany… you can mine all the distant history yourself, if you really care. I’ll start with a man I'm sure you’ve heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler.” I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he’d played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.

Conroy continued, “Wheeler was a great advocate of the idea of a participatory universe: a universe shaped by the inhabitants who observe and explain it. He had a favorite metaphor for this concept… do you know the old game of twenty questions? One person thinks of an object, and the other keeps asking yes-or-no questions, to try to find out what it is.

“There’s another way to play the game, though. You don’t choose any object at all, to start with. You just answer the questions ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ more or less at random—but constrained by the need to be consistent with what you’ve already said. If you’ve said that ‘it’ is blue all over, you can’t change your mind later and say that it’s red… even though you still have no precise idea what ‘it’ really is. But as more and more questions are asked, what ‘it’ might be becomes narrower and narrower.

“Wheeler suggested that the universe itself behaved like that undefined object—only coming into being as something specific through a similar process of interrogation. We make observations, we carry out experiments—we ask questions about ‘it.’ We get back answers—some of them more or less random—but they’re never absolute contradictions. And the more questions we ask… the more precisely the universe takes shape.”

I said, “You mean like… making measurements on microscopic objects? Some properties of subatomic particles don’t exist until they’re measured—and the measurement you get has a random component—but if you measure the same thing a second time, you get the same result.” This was old, old ground, well-established and uncontroversial. “Surely that’s the kind of thing Wheeler would have meant?”

Conroy agreed. “That’s the definitive example. Which dates back to Neils Bohr, of course, whom Wheeler studied under in Copenhagen, in the nineteen-thirties. Quantum measurement was certainly the inspiration for the whole model. Wheeler and his successors took it further, though.

“Quantum measurement is about individual, microscopic events which do or don’t happen—at random, but according to probabilities determined by a set of pre-existing laws. About… individual heads and tails, not the shape of the coin, or the overall odds when it’s thrown repeatedly. It’s easy enough to see that a coin is neither ‘heads’ nor ’tails’ while it’s still up in the air, spinning—but what if it’s not even any particular coin? What if there really are no pre-existing laws governing the system you’re about to measure… any more than there are pre-existing answers to any of those measurements?”

I said warily, “You tell me.” I’d come here expecting a serve of the usual florid cult-speak from the very start: gibberish about archetypal warlocks and witches, or the urgent need to rediscover the lost wisdom of the alchemists. The strategy of taking quantum mechanics and distorting the boundaries of its counter-intuitive weirdness in whatever direction suited the cult philosophy was far harder to track. In the hands of a smooth-talking charlatan, QM could be blurred into just about anything—from a “scientific” basis for telepathy, to a “proof of Zen Buddhism. Still, if I couldn’t gauge the precise moment when Conroy moved from established science to Anthrocosmological fantasy, that hardly mattered; I could map it all out later, when I had my electronic teat back, giving me access to some expert guidance.

Conroy smiled at my edginess—and continued in the language of science. “What happened, historically, was that physics merged with information theory. Or at least, a lot of people explored the union, for a while. They tried to discover whether it made sense to talk about building, not just a space-time of individual microscopic events, but all of the underlying quantum mechanics, and all of the various—then, non-unified—field equations… out of nothing but a stream of yes-and-no answers. Reality from information, from an accumulation of knowledge. As Wheeler put it, ‘an it from a bit.'”

I said, “Sounds like one of those nice ideas that just didn’t pan out. No one at the conference is talking about anything of the kind.”

Conroy conceded, “Information physics pretty much vanished from serious contention when the Standard Unified Field Theory rose from the ashes of superstrings. What did the geometry of ten-dimensional total space have to do with sequences of bits? Very little. Geometry took over. And it’s been the most productive approach ever since.”

“So where do the Anthrocosmologists fit in? Do you have your own rival TOEs from ‘information physics,’ which the establishment won’t take seriously?”

Conroy laughed. “Hardly! We couldn’t begin to compete in that arena, and we have no wish to do so. Buzzo, Mosala and Nishide can fight it out between themselves. One of them will come up with a flawless TOE in the end, I'm certain of that.”

“Then—?”

“Go back to the old Wheeler model of the universe. Laws of physics emerge from patterns—consistencies—in random data. But if an event doesn’t take place unless it’s observed… then a law doesn’t exist unless it’s understood. But that begs the question, doesn’t it: understood by whom? Who decides what ‘consistent’ means? Who decides what form a ‘law’ can take—or what constitutes an ‘explanation'?

“If the universe instantly succumbed to any human explanation whatsoever… we’d be living in a world where Stone Age cosmology was literally true. Or… it would be like the old satires of the afterlife—a separate heaven for every conflicting faith—even before we died. But the world just isn’t like that. However much people disagree, we still find ourselves together, arguing about the nature of reality. We don’t float off into individual universes where our own private explanations are the ultimate truth.”

“Well, no.” I had a vivid image of the Mystical Renaissance theatre troupe following Carl Jung—dressed in a Pied Piper costume—down a psychedelic wormhole into another cosmos entirely, where no rationalists could follow.

I said, “Doesn’t that suggest to you that the universe might not be participatory, after all? That the laws just might be fixed principles, independent of the people who understand them?”

“No.” Conroy smiled gently, as if this suggestion struck her as quaintly naive. “Everything in relativity and quantum mechanics cries out against any absolute backdrop: absolute time, absolute history… absolute laws. But I think it does suggest that the whole idea of participation needs to be formulated rigorously in the mathematics of information theory, and different possibilities analyzed with great care.”

It was hard to argue with that. “To what end, though? If you’re not competing for the discovery of a successful TOE…?”

“The point is to understand the means by which TOE science can give rise to an active TOE. How knowledge of the equations can fix the reality they describe firmly in place—so firmly that we can’t even hope to see behind them, to glimpse the process which holds them there.”

I laughed. “If you admit we can’t hope to do that, you’ve just crossed right over into metaphysics.”

Conroy was unfazed. “Certainly. But we believe it can still be done in the spirit of science: applying logic, using appropriate mathematical tools. That’s what Anthrocosmology is: the old information-theoretic approach, revived as something external to physics. It may not be needed to discover the TOE itself—but I believe it can make sense of the fact that there is a TOE at all.”

I leaned forward—I think I was smiling, almost unwillingly—fascinated in spite of my skepticism. As cult pseudoscience went, at least this was high-class bullshit.

“How, exactly? Which of these possibilities you’ve ‘analyzed with great care’ can give a theory any kind of power which wasn’t already there in nature ?”

Conroy said, “Imagine this cosmology: Forget about starting the universe with just the right finely-tuned Big Bang needed to create stars, planets, intelligent life… and a culture capable of making sense of it all. Instead, take as your ’starting point’ the fact that there’s a living human being who can explain an entire universe, in terms of a single theory. Turn everything around, and take it as the only thing given that this one person exists.”

I said irritably, “How can it be the only thing? You can’t have a living human being… and nothing else. And if it’s given that this person can explain the universe, then there has to be a universe to explain.”

“Exactly.”

Conroy smiled, calmly and sanely, but the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I suddenly knew what she was going to say next.

“From this person, the universe ‘grows out’ of the power to explain it: out in all directions, and forward and backward in time. Instead of being blasted out of pre-space—instead of being ‘caused’ inexplicably at the beginning of time—it crystallizes quietly around a single human being.

“That’s why the universe obeys a single law—a Theory of Everything. It’s all explained by a single person. We call this one person the Keystone. Everyone, and everything, exists because the Keystone exists. The Big Bang model of cosmology can lead to anything at all: a universe of cold dust, a universe of black holes, a universe of dead planets. But the Keystone needs everything which the universe actually contains—stars, planets, life—in order to explain vis own existence. And not only needs them: the Keystone can account for all of them, make sense of all of them, without gaps, without flaws, without contradictions.

“That’s why it’s possible for billions of people to be wrong. That’s why we’re not living with Stone Age cosmology or even Newtonian physics. Most explanations just aren’t powerful, rich or coherent enough to bring a whole universe into being—and to explain a mind capable of holding such an explanation.”

I sat and stared at Conroy, not wishing to insult her, but at a loss for anything polite to say. This was pure cult-speak at last: she might as well have been telling me that Violet Mosala and Henry Buzzo were the incarnations of a pair of warring Hindu deities, or that Atlantis would rise from the ocean and the stars would fall from the sky when the Final Equation was written.

Except that, if she had, I doubt I would have felt the same uneasy tingling down my back and across my forearms. She’d steered close enough to the shores of science, for enough of the way, to disarm me a little.

She continued. “We can’t watch the universe emerge; we’re part of it, we’re trapped inside the space-time created by the act of explanation. All we can hope to witness, in the progression of time, is one person become the first to hold the TOE in vis mind, and grasp its consequences, and—invisibly, imperceptibly—understand us all into being.”

She laughed suddenly, breaking the spell. “It’s only a theory. The mathematics behind it makes perfect sense—but the reality is untestable, by its very nature. So of course, we could be wrong.

“But now, can you understand why someone like Akili—who believes, perhaps too passionately, that we could be right—wishes to be certain that Violet Mosala will come to no harm?”

I walked further south than I needed to, heading for a tram stop some way down the line from the point where I’d disembarked. I needed to be out under the stars for a while, to come back down to Earth. Even if Stateless didn’t exactly qualify as solid ground.

I was greatly relieved by the night’s revelations: they seemed to wrap up everything, to make sense, finally, of all the distractions which had been keeping me from doing my job.

The ACs were harmless cranks—and, entertaining as it might be to give them a footnote in Violet Mosala, it would hardly undermine the integrity of the whole documentary to leave them out—as they wished, as Mosala wished. Why offend both parties in the name of fearless journalism—in reality, just to raise a brief smirk with SeeNet’s target audience?

And Kuwale was—understandably, if not justifiably—thoroughly paranoid. The life of a potential Keystone was not a matter to be taken lightly. It wasn’t a question of the universe crumbling; if you died before “explaining everything into being,” then obviously someone else would have to do it, and you simply weren’t the one. That didn’t exclude a great deal of reverence, though, for the, as yet, mere candidate creators—and the rumors of Mosala’s emigration must have been enough to start Kuwale seeing enemies crawling out of the reef-rock.

I waited for the tram on a deserted street, gazing up through the clear, cold air at a dazzling richness of stars—and satellites—Conroy’s perversely elegant fantasy still running through my head. I thought: If Mosala is the Keystone, it’s a good thing that she treats the ACs with such contempt. If her explanation of the universe included a conventional TOE, and nothing else, then all was fine. If she’d taken Anthrocosmology seriously, though… surely that would have plucked her right out of the tight web of explanation she was supposed to be spinning for us all. A Theory of Everything wasn’t a Theory of Everything if there was another level, a deeper layer of truth.

And it seemed a sufficiently tall order to have to grow your own universe to wrap yourself in: your own ancestors (needed to explain your own existence), your own billions of human cousins (an unavoidable logical consequence—as would be more distant relatives, animal and plant), your own world to stand on, sun to orbit—and other planets, suns, and galaxies, not obviously essential for survival… but possibly allowing a relatively simple TOE (which could fit in one mind) to be traded for a trickier version which was more economical with cosmic real estate. Explaining all that into existence would be hard enough; you wouldn’t want to be obliged to create the power to create it, as well—to have to explain into being the Anthrocosmology which allowed you to explain things into being.

A wise separation of powers. Leave the metaphysics to someone else.

I boarded the tram. A couple of the passengers smiled and greeted me, and chatted for a while—without anyone drawing a weapon and demanding money.

Walking up the street toward the hotel, I scrolled through a few documents on my notepad, just to check that nothing had been lost in the blackout. I’d made a list of the questions I’d planned to ask the Anthrocosmologists; I checked through them, to see how I’d done. I’d only missed one point; not bad for someone used to a permanent electronic crutch, but it was still an irritation.

Kuwale had said that ve was “mainstream AC.” So if all of the wild metaphysics which Conroy had just fed me was the mainstream of Anthrocosmology… what did they believe out on the fringe?

My complacency was beginning to unravel. All I’d heard was one version of the ACs’ doctrine. Conroy had taken it upon herself to speak for all of them—but that didn’t prove that they all agreed. At the very least, I needed to speak to Kuwale again… but I had better things to do than stake out the house in the hope that ve would turn up there.

Back in my room, I had Hermes scan the world’s communications directories. There were over seven thousand Kuwales listed, with primary addresses in a dozen countries—but no Akili. Which meant it was probably a nickname, a diminutive, or an unofficial nom de asex. Without even knowing what country ve came from, it was going to be impossible to narrow the search.

I hadn’t filmed my conversation with Kuwale—but I closed my eyes and invoked Witness, and played with the identikit option until I had vis face clearly in front of me—in digital form in my gut memory, as well as in my mind’s eye. I plugged in the umbilical fiber and moved the image into my notepad, then searched the global news databases for a match to either name or face. Not everyone had their fifteen minutes of fame, but with nine million non-profit netzines on top of all the commercial media, you didn’t exactly have to be a celebrity to make it into the archives. Win an agrotech competition in rural Angola, score the winning goal for even the most obscure Jamaican soccer team, and—

No such luck. The electronic teat fails again—at a cost of three hundred dollars.

So where was I meant to look for ver, if not on the nets? Out in the world. But I couldn’t scour the streets of Stateless…

I invoked Witness again, and flagged the identikit image for continuous real-time search. If Kuwale so much as appeared in the corner of my eye—whether or not I was recording, and whether or not I noticed— Witness would let me know.

16

Karin De Groot led me into Violet Mosala’s suite. Despite the difference in scale, it had the same sunny-but-spartan feel as my own single room. A skylight added to the sense of space and light, but ever this touch failed to create the impression of opulence which it might have done in another building, in another place. Nothing on Stateless appeared lavish to me, however grand, but I couldn’t decide to what extent this judgment was the product of the architecture itself, and how much was due to an awareness of the politics and biotechnology which lay behind every surface.

De Groot said, “Violet won’t be long. Take a seat. She’s talking to her mother, but I’ve already reminded her about the interview. Twice.”

It was three in the morning in South Africa. “Has something happened? I can come back later.” I didn’t want to intrude in the middle of a family crisis.

De Groot reassured me, “Everything’s fine. Wendy keeps strange hours, that’s all.”

I sat in one of the armchairs arranged in a cluster near the middle of the room; they looked like they might have been left that way after a meeting. Some kind of late-night brainstorming session… between Mosala, Helen Wu, and a few other colleagues? Whoever it was, I should have been there, fuming. I was going to have to push harder for access, or Mosala would keep me at a distance to the end. But I was going to have to win her confidence somehow, or pushing would only get me shut out even more. Mosala clearly had no particular desire for publicity—let alone the desperate need of a politician or a hack. The only thing I could offer her was the chance to communicate her work.

De Groot remained standing, one hand on the back of a chair. I said, “So how did you get to meet her?”

“I answered an advertizement. I didn’t know Violet, personally, before I took the job.”

“You have a science background too, though?”

She smiled. “Too. My background’s probably more like yours than like Violet’s—I have a degree in science and journalism.”

“Did you ever work as a journalist?”

“I was science correspondent for Proteus, for six years. The charming Mr. Savimbi is my successor.”

“I see.” I strained my ears; I could just make out Mosala in the adjoining room, still talking. I said quietly, “What Savimbi said on Monday, about death threats—was there anything in that?”

De Groot eyed me warily. “Don’t bring that up. Please. Do you really want to make everything as difficult as you possibly can for her?”

I protested, “No, but put yourself in my position. Would you ignore the whole issue? I don’t want to inflame the situation, but if some cultural purity group is issuing death sentences against Africa’s top scientists, don’t you think that’s worthy of serious discussion?”

De Groot said impatiently, “But they’re not. For a start, the Stockholm quote was picked up and mangled by a Volksfront netzine—running the bizarre line that Violet was saying that the Nobel wasn’t hers, wasn’t ‘Africa’s,’ but really belonged to ‘white intellectual culture'—for which she was only a politically expedient figurehead. That ’story’ got taken up and echoed in other places—but nobody except the original audience would have believed for a second that it was anything but ludicrous propaganda. As for PACDF, they’ve never done so much as acknowledge Violet’s existence.”

“Okay. Then what made Savimbi leap to the wrong conclusion?”

De Groot glanced toward the doorway. “Garbled fifth-hand reports.”

“Of what? Not just the netzine propaganda itself. He could hardly be that naive.”

De Groot leaned toward me with an anguished expression, torn between discretion and the desire to set me straight. “She had a break-in. All right? A few weeks ago. A burglar. A teenage boy with a gun.”

“Shit. What happened? Was she hurt?”

“No, she was lucky. Her alarm went off—he’d disabled one, but she had a backup—and there was a patrol car nearby at the time. The burglar told the police he’d been paid to frighten her. But he couldn’t name names, of course. It was just a pathetic excuse.”

“Then why should Savimbi take it seriously? And why ‘fifth-hand reports'? Surely he would have read the whole story?”

“Violet dropped the charges. She’s an idiot, but that’s the kind of thing she does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But someone in the police must have leaked—”

Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that we’d been doing our best to avoid being overheard.

I moved to fill the silence. “How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine. She’s in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought Craft, though, so she’s not getting much sleep.” Wendy Mosala ran one of Africa’s largest software houses; she’d built it up herself over thirty years, from a one-person operation. “She’s bidding for a license for the Kaspar clonelets, two years in advance of release, and if it all pans out…” She caught herself. “All of which is strictly confidential, okay?”

“Of course.” Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software, currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus and its numerous cousins—which had been created fully-fledged, instantly “adult” by design—Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more anthropomorphically styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I found it a little disquieting… and I wasn’t sure that I wanted a clonelet—a pared-down copy of the original—sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.

De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.

I said, “Are you ready to start?”

She nodded, and smiled half-heartedly. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’s over.”

I invoked Witness. The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of rather more flattering light sources.

I said, “Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in science?”

Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, “I don’t know! Was it your mother who inspired you to come up with that kind of pathetic—”

She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. “I'm sorry. Can we start again?”

“No need. Don’t worry about continuity; it’s not your problem. Just keep on talking. And if you’re halfway through an answer and you change your mind—just stop, and start afresh.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight. “My mother. My childhood. My role models.” She opened her eyes and pleaded, “Can’t we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?”

I said patiently, “I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit—but if the network executives don’t see the required quota of formative childhood influences… they’ll screen you at three a.m. after a last-minute program change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-resistant skin diseases.” SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their viewers, of course) had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera—a slick paint-by-numbers guide to commodifying human beings… as well as a template for deluding yourself into thinking that you’d explained them. A sort of externalized version of Lament’s area.

Mosala said, “Three a.m.? You’re serious, aren’t you?” She thought it over. “Okay. If that’s what it comes down to… I can play along.”

“So tell me about your mother.” I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to answer more or less at random, so long as you don’t contradict yourself.

She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. “My mother gave me an education. By which I don’t mean school. She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult’s knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up… the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn’t steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history… anything. I wasn’t pushed in any direction. I was just set free.”

“And your father?”

“My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four.”

“That must have been traumatic. But… do you think that early loss might have given you the drive, the independence… ?”

Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. “My father was shot in the head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty thousand people whose views he found completely repugnant. And—this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for your timeslot—he was someone I loved, and who I still love; he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clock-work. He was not an absence to be compensated for.”

I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview material with reminiscences from childhood friends… stock footage of Cape Town schools in the thirties… whatever.

“You’ve said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life—for purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But… when do you think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?”

Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. “About two years later, I suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi.”

She hadn’t mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I’d seen—and it was lucky I’d stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?

“So you were influenced by technoliberation?”

“Of course.” She frowned slightly, bemused—as if I’d just asked her if she’d ever heard of Albert Einstein. I wasn’t even sure if she was being honest, or whether she was still just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet’s demand for clichés—but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.

She said, “Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could… incinerate any doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted.” She hesitated, then recited:

“When Leopold the Second rises from the grave Saying, ‘My conscience plagues me, take back This un-Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!’ Then I will renounce my ill-gotten un-African gains And piously abandon the calculus and all its offspring To… I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both Died childless.”

I laughed. Mosala said soberly, “You’ve no idea what it was like though, to have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science, traditionalist backlash didn’t really hit South Africa until the forties—but when it did, so many people in public life who’d spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another… until science was somehow either the rightful ‘property’ of ’the West'—which Africa didn’t need or want anyway—or it was nothing but a weapon of cultural assimilation and genocide.”

“It has been used as exactly that.”

Mosala eyed me balefully. “No shit. Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy—to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.” She reached out and mimed taking hold of a handful of space, saying, “There is no male or female vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean space-time. Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist—or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses—and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the color of their skin was.”

I tried not to smile; this was all highly usable. I had no idea which of these slogans were sincere, and which were conscious theatrics—where the telegenic sugar-coating I’d asked for ended, and Mosala’s real passions began—but then, she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.

I hesitated. My next note read: Emigration rumors? Now was the logical time to raise the issue—but that progression could be reconstructed during editing. I wasn’t going to risk blowing the interview until I had a lot more material safely in the can.

I skipped ahead to safer ground. “I know you don’t want to reveal the full details of your TOE before your lecture on the eighteenth—but maybe you could give me a rough sketch of the theory, in terms of what’s already been published?”

Mosala relaxed visibly. “Of course. Though the main reason I can’t give you all the details is that I don’t even know them myself.” She explained, “I’ve chosen the complete mathematical framework. All the general equations are fixed. But getting the specific results I need involves a lot of supercomputer calculations, which are in progress even as we speak. They should be completed a few days before the eighteenth, though—barring unforeseen disasters.”

“Okay. So tell me about the framework.”

“That part is extremely simple. Unlike Henry Buzzo and Yasuko Nishide, I'm not looking for a way to make ‘our’ Big Bang seem like less of a ‘coincidence.’ Buzzo and Nishide both take the view that an infinite number of universes must have arisen out of pre-space—freezing out of that perfect symmetry with different sets of physical laws. And they both aim to re-evaluate the probability of a universe ‘more-or-less like our own’ being included in that infinite set. It’s relatively easy to find a TOE in which our universe is possible, but freakishly unlikely. Buzzo and Nishide define a successful TOE as one which guarantees that there are so many universes similar to our own that we’re not unlikely at all—that we’re not some kind of miraculous, perfect bull’s-eye on a meta-cosmic dartboard, but just one unexceptional point on a much larger target.”

I said, “A bit like proving—from basic astrophysical principles—that thousands of planets in the galaxy should have carbon-and-water-based life, and not just Earth.”

“Yes and no. Because… yes, the probability of other Earth-like planets can be computed from theory, alone—but it can also be validated by observation. We can observe billions of stars, we’ve already deduced the existence of a few thousand extrasolar planets—and eventually, we’ll visit some of them, and find other carbon-and-water-based life. But although there are no end of elegant frameworks for assigning probabilities to hypothetical other universes… there is no prospect of observing or visiting them, no conceivable method for checking the theory. So I don’t believe we should choose a TOE on that basis.

“The whole point of moving beyond the Standard Unified Field Theory is that, one, it’s an ugly mess, and two, you have to feed ten completely arbitrary parameters into the equations to make them work. Melting total space into pre-space—moving to an All-Topologies Model—gets rid of the ugliness and the arbitrary nature of the SUET. But following that step by tinkering with the way you integrate across all the topologies of pre-space—excluding certain topologies for no good reason, throwing out one measure and adopting a new one whenever you don’t like the answers you’re getting—seems like a retrograde step to me. And instead of ’setting the dials’ of the SUFT machine to ten arbitrary numbers, you now have a sleek black box with no visible controls, apparently self-contained—but in reality, you’re just opening it up and tearing out every internal component which offends you, to much the same effect.”

“Okay. So how do you get around that?”

Mosala said, “I believe we have to take a difficult stand and declare: the probabilities just don’t matter. Forget the hypothetical ensemble of other universes. Forget the need to fine-tune the Big Bang. This universe does exist. The probability of our being here is one hundred percent. We have to take that as given, instead of bending over backward trying to contrive assumptions which do their best to conceal the fact of that certainty.”

Forget fine-tuning the Big Bang. Take our own existence as given. The parallels with Conroy’s spiel the night before were striking, but I should hardly have been surprised. The whole modus operandi of pseudoscience was to cling as closely as possible to the language and ideas of the orthodoxy of the day—to adopt appropriate camouflage. The ACs would have read every paper Mosala had published—but a similar ring to their words hardly granted their ideas the same legitimacy. And if they clearly shared her vehement distaste for the fantasy that every culture could somehow inhabit a cosmology of its own choosing, I didn’t doubt for a moment that Mosala was infinitely more repelled by their alternative, in which a lone TOE specialist played absolute monarch. Worse than a Belgian or Zairian space-time: a Buzzo, Mosala, or Nishide cosmos.

I said, “So you take the universe for granted. You’re against twisting the mathematics to conform to a perceived need to prove that what we see around us is ‘likely.’ But you don’t exactly go back to setting the dials on the SUFT machine, either.”

“No. I feed in complete descriptions of experiments, instead.”

“You choose the most general All-Topologies Model possible—but you break the perfect symmetry by giving a one-hundred-percent probability to the existence of various setups of experimental apparatus?”

“Yes. Can I just—?” She rose from her chair and went into the bedroom, then returned with her notepad. She held up the screen for me. “Here’s one example. It’s a simple accelerator experiment: a beam of protons and antiprotons collide at a certain energy, and a detector is used to pick up any positrons emitted from the point of collision at a certain angle, with a certain range of energies. The experiment itself has been carried out, in one form or another, for eighty or ninety years.”

The animation showed an architectural schematic of a full-size accelerator ring, and zoomed in toward one of several points where counter-rotating particle beams crossed, and spilled their debris into elaborate detectors.

“Now, I don’t even try to model this entire set-up—a piece of apparatus ten kilometers wide—on a subatomic level, atom by atom, as if I needed to start with a kind of blank, ‘naive’ TOE which would somehow succeed in telling me that all the superconducting magnets would produce certain fields with certain measurable effects, and the walls of the tunnel would deform in certain ways due to the stresses imposed on them, and the protons and antiprotons would circle in opposite directions. I already know all of those things. So I assign them a probability of one hundred percent. I take these established facts as a kind of anchor… and then reach down to the level of the TOE, down to the level of infinite sums over all topologies. I calculate what the consequences of my assumptions are… and then I follow them all the way back up again to the macroscopic level, to predict the ultimate results of the experiment: how many times a second will the positron detector register an event.”

The graphics responded to her narration, zooming in from a schematic of the detector array criss-crossed with particle tracks, down into the froth of the vacuum itself, thirty-five powers of ten beyond the reach of vision, into the chaos of writhing wormholes and higher-dimensional deformations—color-coded by topological classification, a thrashing nest of brightly-hued snakes blurring into whiteness at the center of the screen, where they moved and changed too rapidly to follow. But these otherwise perfectly symmetrical convulsions were forced to take heed of the certain existence of accelerator, magnets, and detector—a process hinted at by the panchromatic whiteness acquiring a specific blue tinge… and then the view pulled back, zooming out to an ordinary human scale again, to show the imprint of this submicroscopic bias on the detector circuitry’s final, visible behavior.

The animation, of course, was ninety percent metaphor, a colorful splash of poetic license—but a supercomputer somewhere was crunching away at the serious, unmetaphoric calculations which made these pictures more than stylish whimsy.

And after all my hasty skimming of incomprehensible scientific papers, and all my agonizing over the near-impenetrable mathematics of ATMs, I thought I finally had a handle on Mosala’s philosophy.

I said tentatively, “So instead of thinking of pre-space as something from which the whole universe can be derived in one stroke… you see it more as a link between the kind of events we can observe with our raw senses. Something which… glues together the particular set of macroscopic things we find in the world. A star full of fusing hydrogen, and a human eye full of cold protein molecules, are bridged across distances and energies… are able to co-exist, and affect each other… because at the deepest level, they both break the symmetry of pre-space in the same way.”

Mosala seemed pleased with this description. “A link, a bridge. Exactly.” She leaned toward, reached over and took my hand; I glanced down, thinking: I'm in shot now, so this is unusable.

She said, “Without pre-space to mediate between us—without an infinite mixture of topologies able to represent us all with a single flicker of asymmetry—nobody could even touch.

“That’s what the TOE is. And even if I'm wrong in every detail—and Buzzo is wrong, and Nishide is wrong… and nothing is resolved for a thousand years—I still know it’s down there, waiting to be found. Because there has to be something which lets us touch.”

We broke off for a while, and Mosala called room service. After three days on the island, I still had no appetite, but I ate a few of the snacks she offered me from the tray which emerged from the service chute, just to be polite. My stomach began protesting—loudly—as soon as I swallowed the first mouthful, rather defeating the point.

Mosala said, “Did you know that Yasuko hasn’t arrived yet? I don’t suppose you’ve heard what’s holding him up?”

“I'm afraid not. I’ve left three messages with his secretary in Kyoto, trying to schedule an interview, and all I’ve got back are promises that he’ll be in touch with me ’very soon.'”

“It’s odd.” She pursed her lips, obviously concerned, but trying not to plunge the conversation into gloom. “I hope he’s all right. I heard he’d been sick for a while, early in the year—but he assured the convenors he’d be here, so he must have expected to be well enough to travel.”

I said, “Travel to Stateless is more than… travel.”

“That’s a point. He should have pretended to belong to Humble Science! and stolen a ride on one of their charter flights.”

“He might have had better luck with Mystical Renaissance. He’s a self-described Buddhist, so they almost forgive him for working on TOEs. So long as he didn’t remind them that he once wrote that The Tao of Physics was to Zen what a Creation Science biology text was to Christianity.”

Mosala reached up and started massaging the back of her neck, as if talk of the journey was rekindling its symptoms. “I would have brought Pinda, if the flight had been shorter. She would have loved it here. Left me to my boring lectures, and dragged her father off to explore the reefs.”

“How old is she?”

“Three and a bit.” She glanced at her watch and complained wistfully, “It’s still only four in the morning, back home. Not much chance of a call from her, for two or three hours.”

It was another opportunity to raise the emigration rumors—but I held off, yet again.

We resumed the interview. The beam from the skylight had shifted to the east, leaving Mosala almost silhouetted against the window and a dazzling blue sky. When I invoked Witness again, it reached up into my retinas and made some adjustments, enabling me to register the fine details other face in spite of the back-lighting.

I moved on to the question of Helen Wu’s analysis.

Mosala explained, “My TOE predicts the outcome of various experiments, given a detailed description of the apparatus involved: details which ‘betray’ clues about all the less-fundamental physics which—some people insist—a TOE is meant to pull out of thin air, all by itself. But unraveling those clues certainly isn’t trivial. You or I can’t just glance at an idle particle accelerator and predict, instantly, the outcome of any experiment which might be performed with the machine.”

“But a supercomputer, programmed with your TOE, can. So is that good, bad, or indifferent… are you guilty of circular logic, or not?”

Mosala seemed unsure of the verdict, herself. “Helen and I have been talking it over, trying to thrash out exactly what it means. I have to confess that I started out resenting what she was doing—and then ignoring most of her later work. Now, though… I'm beginning to find it very exciting.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. It was clear that her ideas on this were too new, too unformed; she really didn’t want to say anything more. But I waited patiently, without prompting her, and she finally relented.

“Ask yourself this: If Buzzo or Nishide can come up with a TOE in which the whole universe is more or less implicit in a detailed description of the Big Bang—details deduced, right here and now, from observations of helium abundance, galactic clustering, the cosmic background radiation, and so on—no one accuses them of circular logic. Feeding in the results of any number of ’telescope experiments’ is fine, apparently. So why is it any more ‘circular’ to have a TOE in which the universe is implicit in the details of ten contemporary particle physics experiments'

I said, “Okay. But isn’t Helen Wu saying that your equations have virtually no physical content at all? I mean, no amount of pure mathematics could ever produce Newton’s law of gravity—because there’s no purely mathematical reason why the inverse square law couldn’t be replaced by something different. The whole basis for it lies in the way the universe happens to work. Isn’t Wu trying to show that your TOE doesn’t rely on anything out there in the world—that it collapses into a lot of statements about numbers, which simply have to be true?”

Mosala replied, frustrated, “Yes! But even if she’s right… when those ’statements which have to be true’ are coupled with real, tangible experiments—which are very much ‘out there in the world'—the theory ceases to be pure mathematics… in the same way that the pure symmetry of pre-space ceases to be symmetrical.

“Newton came up with the inverse square law by analyzing existing astronomical observations. By treating the solar system in the way I treat a particle accelerator: saying, ‘This much we know for a fact.’ Later, the law was used to make predictions and those predictions turned out to be correct. Okay… but where exactly does the physical content reside, in that whole process? With the inverse-square law itself… or with the observed motions of the planets, from which that equation was deduced in the first place? Because if you stop treating Newton’s law as something given, standing outside the whole show as an eternal truth, and look at… the link, the bridge… between all the different planets orbiting different stars, coexisting in the same universe, having to be consistent with each other… what you’re doing starts to become much more like pure mathematics.”

I thought I had an inkling of what she was suggesting. “It’s a bit like saying that… the general principle that ‘people form net clans with other people with whom they have something in common’ has nothing to do with what those common interests happen to be. Exactly the same process brings together… fans of Jane Austen, or students of the genetics of wasps, or whatever.”

“Right. Jane Austen ‘belongs’ to all the people who read her—not to the sociological principle which suggests that they’ll get together to discuss her books. And the law of gravity ‘belongs’ to all the systems which obey it— not to a TOE which predicts that they’ll get together to form a universe.

“And maybe the Theory of Everything should collapse into nothing but ’statements about numbers which have to be true.’ Maybe pre-space itself has to melt into nothing but simple arithmetic, simple logic—leaving us with no choices to make about its structure at all.”

I laughed. “I think even SeeNet’s audience might have some trouble wrapping their minds around that.” I certainly did. “Look, maybe it’s going to take a while for you and Helen Wu to make sense of all this. We can always do an update on it, back in Cape Town, if it turns out to be an important development.”

Mosala agreed, relieved. Throwing ideas around was one thing, but she clearly didn’t want to take a position on this, officially. Not yet.

Before I could lose my nerve, I said, “Do you think you’ll still be living in Cape Town, in six months’ time?”

I’d braced myself for the kind of outburst the word Anthrocosmologist had produced—but Mosala simply observed drily, “Well, I didn’t think it could remain a secret for long. I suppose the whole conference is talking about it.”

“Not exactly. I heard it from a local.”

She nodded, unsurprised. “I’ve been having discussions with the academic syndicates here, for months. So it’s probably all over the island by now.” She flashed a wry smile. “Not much into confidentiality, these anarchists. But what can you expect from patent violators and intellectual property thieves?”

I said, “So what’s the attraction?”

She stood. “Can you stop recording, please?” I complied. “When all the details have been worked out, I’ll make a public statement—but I don’t want some off-the-cuff remark on the subject coming out first.”

“I understand.”

She said, “What’s the attraction of patent violators and intellectual property thieves? That very fact. Stateless is renegade, they flout the biotech licensing laws. She turned toward the window, and stretched out her arms. “And look at them! They’re not the wealthiest people on the planet—but no one here is starving. No one. That’s not true in Europe, Japan, Australia—let alone in Angola, Malawi…” She trailed off, and studied me for a moment, as if trying to decide if I really had stopped filming. If she really should trust me at all.

I waited. She continued.

“What’s that got to do with me? My own country’s doing well enough. I'm not exactly in danger of malnutrition, am I?” She closed her eyes and groaned. “This is very hard for me to say. But… like it or not, the Nobel prize has given me a certain kind of power. If I move to Stateless—and state the reasons why—it will make news. It will make an impact, in certain places.”

She hesitated again.

I said, “I can keep my mouth shut.”

Mosala smiled faintly. “I know that. I think.”

“So what kind of impact do you want to make?”

She walked over to the window. I said, “Is this some kind of political gesture against traditionalists like PACDF?”

She laughed. “No, no, no! Well… maybe it will be that as well, coincidentally. But that’s not the point.” She steeled herself. “I’ve had assurances. From a number of highly placed people. I’ve been promised that if I move to Stateless… not because I matter, but because it will make news, and create a pretext… the South African government will unilaterally drop all sanctions against the island, within six months.”

I had goose bumps. One country might make no difference—except that South Africa was the major trading partner of about thirty other African nations.

Mosala said quietly, “The voting patterns in the UN don’t show it, but the fact is, the anti-sanctions faction is not a tiny minority. At present, there’s all kinds of bloc solidarity and surface agreement, because everyone believes they can’t win, and they don’t want to cause offense.”

“But if someone gave the right little push, they might start an avalanche?”

“Maybe.” She laughed, embarrassed. “Talk about delusions of grandeur. The truth is, I get sick to the core every time I think about it— and I don’t actually believe anything dramatic is going to happen.”

“One person to break the symmetry. Why not?”

She shook her head firmly. “There’ve been other attempts to shift the vote, which have all fallen through. Anything’s worth trying, but I have to keep my feet on the ground.”

Several things were running through my mind at once—though what might happen if the biotech patent laws ever really collapsed, globally, was almost too distant a prospect to contemplate. But the fact remained that Mosala had more use for the documentary than I’d ever imagined—and she’d told me all this to let me know as much, to give me the leverage she wanted me to employ, to ensure that her emigration did cause a stir.

It was also clear that the whole endeavor—however Quixotic—would be extremely unpopular in certain quarters.

Was that what Kuwale had had in mind? Not the Ignorance Cults, not PACDF fundamentalists, not even pro-science South African nationalists outraged by Mosala’s ‘desertion’—but powerful defenders of the biotech status quo? And if the teenaged burglar ‘paid’ to frighten her, hadn’t been lying, after all…

Mosala walked over to a side table and poured herself a glass of water. “Now you know all my deepest secrets, so I declare this interview over.” She raised the glass and declaimed self-mockingly, “Vive la technoliberation!”

“Vive.”

She said seriously, “Okay: there are rumors. Maybe half of Stateless knows exactly what’s going on—but I still don’t want those rumors confirmed until certain arrangements, certain agreements, are much more solid.”

“I understand.” And I realized, with a kind of astonishment, that somewhere along the way I’d won some measure of trust from her. Of course she was using me—but she must have believed that my heart was in the right place, that I’d let myself be used.

I said, “Next time you’re arguing circularity with Helen Wu deep into the night, do you think I could…?”

“Sit in? And record it?” She seemed to find the prospect dubious, but she said, “All right. Just so long as you promise not to fall asleep before we do.”

She walked me to the door, and we shook hands. I said, “Be careful.” She smiled serenely, slightly amused at my concern, as if she didn’t have an enemy in the world. “Don’t worry. I will.”

17

I was woken by a call just after four, the ringing growing louder and more shrill until it reached into my melatonin dreams and turned the darkness of my skull inside-out. For an instant, the mere fact of consciousness was shocking, unspeakable; I was outraged as a newborn child. Then I stretched out an arm and groped around on the bedside table for my notepad. I squinted at the screen, blinded for a moment by its brightness.

The call was from Lydia. I almost refused to take it, assuming that she’d somehow miscalculated the time zones, but then I woke sufficiently to realize that it was the middle of the night for her, too. Sydney was only two hours behind Stateless. Geographically, if not politically.

She said, “Andrew, I'm sorry to disturb you, but I thought you had a right to hear this in realtime.” She looked uncharacteristically grim, and though I was still too groggy even to speculate about what was coming next, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

I said hoarsely, “That’s okay. Go ahead.” I tried not to imagine what I looked like, gaping bleary-eyed at the camera. Lydia seemed to be in a darkened room, herself, her face lit only by the image on the screen… of me, lit only by the image other. Was that possible? I suddenly realized that I had a pounding headache.

“Junk DNA is going to have to be re-edited, with the Landers story removed. If you had time, of course I’d ask you to do it yourself, but I'm assuming that’s not possible. So I’ll give it to Paul Kostas; he used to be one of our news room editors, but he’s freelance now. I’ll send you his final cut, and if you strongly disagree with anything, you’ll have an opportunity to change it. Just remember that it’s being screened in less than a fortnight.”

I said, “That’s fine, that’s all… fine.” I knew Kostas; he wouldn’t mutilate the program. “Why, though? Was there some legal glitch? Don’t tell me Landers is suing?”

“No. Events have overtaken us. I won’t try to explain; I’ve sent you a trailer from the San Francisco bureau—it’ll all be public by morning, but…” She was too tired to elaborate, but I understood; she didn’t want me to learn about this as just another viewer. A quarter of Junk DNA, and some three months’ work on my part, had just been rendered obsolete, but Lydia was doing her best to salvage some vestige of my professional dignity. This way, at least I’d stay a few hours ahead of the masses.

I said, “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

We bid each other goodnight, and I viewed the “trailer"—a hastily assembled package of footage and text, alerting other news rooms to the story, and giving them the choice either to wait for the polished item soon to follow, or to edit the raw material themselves and put out their own version. It consisted mainly of FBI news releases, plus some archival background material.

Ned Landers, his two chief geneticists, and three of his executives, had just been arrested in Portland. Nine other people—working for an entirely separate corporation—had been arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Laboratory equipment, biochemical samples, and computer records had been taken from both sites in pre-dawn raids. All fifteen people had been charged with violating federal biotechnology safety laws—but not because of Landers’ highly publicized neo-DNA and symbiont research. At the Chapel Hill laboratory, according to the charges, workers had been manipulating infectious, natural-RNA viruses—in secret, without permission. Landers had been footing the bills, circuitously.

The purpose of these viruses remained unknown; the data and samples were yet to be analyzed.

There were no statements from the accused; their lawyers were counseling silence. There were some external shots of the Chapel Hill laboratory, sealed off behind police barricades. All the footage of Landers himself was relatively old material; the latest was cannibalized from my interview with him (not completely wasted, after all).

The lack of detail was frustrating, but the implications already seemed clear. Landers and his collaborators had been constructing perfect viral immunity for themselves beyond the specific powers of any one vaccine or drug, beyond the fear of mutant strains out-evolving their defenses… while engineering new viruses capable of infecting the rest of us. I stared at the screen, which was frozen on the last frame of the report: Landers, as I’d seen him in the flesh, myself, smiling at the vision of his brand new kingdom. And though I balked at accepting the obvious conclusion… what possible use could he have had for a novel human virus except for some kind of thinning?.

I sprinted to the bathroom, and brought up the meager contents of my stomach. Then I knelt by the bowl, shivering and sweating—lapsing into microsleeps, almost losing my balance. The melatonin wanted me back, but I was having trouble convincing myself that I was through vomiting. Pampered hypochondriac that I was, I would have consulted my pharm at once if I’d had it, for a precise diagnosis and an instant, optimal solution. With visions of choking to death in my sleep, I contemplated tearing off my shoulder patch—but the symbolic attempt to surrender to natural circadian forces would have taken hours to produce any effect at all—and then it would have rendered me, at best, a zombie for the rest of the conference.

I retched, voluntarily, for a minute or two, and nothing more emerged, so I staggered back to bed.

Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn’t been far enough. He’d still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn’t enough; he’d aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

And he’d almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word… which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

Vive la technoliberation! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan—and apocalypse for everyone else.

That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?

I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

And if I’d dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him…

Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

She said, “Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can’t you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what’s going on inside your brain.”

I started to comply—but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she’d discover.

She kissed me again. “No more arguments. If you love me, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.”

She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner—it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prised away layer after layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part…

I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn’t really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. “Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out…” SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.

I wasn’t in a charitable mood; the three hours’ sleep I’d had after Lydia’s call had been about as refreshing as a blow to the head. I went through the motions, feigning fascination, and trying half-heartedly to steer the interview in a direction which might produce some material I could actually use.

“What kind of place in history do you think the discoverer of the TOE will attain? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate form of scientific immortality?”

Buzzo became self-deprecating. “There’s no such thing as immortality, for a scientist. Not even for the greatest. Newton and Einstein are still famous today—but for how long? Shakespeare will probably outlast them both… and maybe even Hitler will, too.”

I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him that none of these were exactly household names anymore.

I said, “Newton’s and Einstein’s theories have been swallowed whole, though. Absorbed into larger schemes. I know, you’ve already carved your name on one TOE which turned out to be provisional—but all of the SUFT’s architects said at the time that it was just a stepping stone. Don’t you think the next TOE will be the real thing: the final theory which lasts forever?”

Buzzo had given the question a lot more thought than I had. He said, “It might. It certainly might. I can imagine a universe in which we can probe no further, in which deeper explanations are literally, physically, impossible. But…”

“Your own TOE describes such a universe, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. But it could be right about everything else, and wrong about that. The same is true of Mosala’s and Nishide’s.”

I said sourly, “So when will we know, one way or the other? When will we be sure that we’ve struck bottom?”

“Well… if I'm right, then you’ll never be sure that I'm right. My TOE doesn’t allow itself to be proved final and complete—even if it is final and complete.” Buzzo grinned, delighted at the prospect of such a perverse legacy. “The only kind of TOE which could leave any less room for doubt would be one which required its own finality—which made that fact absolutely central.

“Newton was swallowed up and digested, Einstein was swallowed up and digested… and the old SUET will go the same way, in a matter of days. They were all closed systems, they were all vulnerable. The only TOE which could be guaranteed immune to the process would be one which actively defended itself—which turned its gaze outward to describe, not just the universe, but also every conceivable alternative theory which could somehow supersede it—and then rendered them all demonstrably false, in a single blow,”

He shook his head gleefully. “But there’s nothing like that on offer, here. If you want absolute certainty, you’ve come to the wrong side of town.”

The other side of town was still just outside the hotel’s main entrance; the Mystical Renaissance carnival hadn’t gone away. I headed out on to the street, anyway; I urgently needed a dose of fresh air if I was going to be more than half-conscious for the lecture on ATM software techniques which Mosala was due to attend at nine. The sky was dazzling, and the air was already warm; Stateless seemed unable to decide whether to surrender to a temperate autumn, or hold out for an Indian summer. The sunshine lifted my spirits, slightly, but I still felt crippled, beaten, overwhelmed.

I weaved my way past the stalls and small tents, dodging goldfish-bowl-jugglers and hand-stilt-walkers—impressive acts, mostly; it was only the droning songs of the buskers which really made me feel that I was running a gauntlet. While members of Humble Science! had been showing up at every press conference and doing their best to repeat the tone of Walsh’s encounter with Mosala, MR had remained endearingly innocuous by comparison. I was beginning to suspect that it was a deliberate strategy: a good cult/bad cult game, to widen their combined appeal. Humble Science! had nothing to lose by extremism; those few members who left in disgust at Walsh’s tactics (to join MR, most likely) would be more than compensated for by an influx from groups like Celtic Wisdom and Saxon Light—northern Europe’s equivalents of PACDF, only more influential.

I recalled a scene from one of the Muteba Kazadi biographies I’d skimmed: when asked in reproving tones by а ВВС journalist why he’d declined an invitation to take part in a traditional Lunda fertility ceremony, he’d politely suggested that she go home and berate a few cabinet ministers for failing to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge. Ten years later, there were half a dozen MPs who seemed to have taken the suggestion at face value. No cabinet ministers, though. So far.

I paused to watch the MR theatre troupe, ready to play spot-the-mutilated-classic. After a few baffling lines of garbled biotech-speak—unplaceable, but weirdly familiar—hairs stood up on the back of my neck. They’d seized on the news of Landers and his viruses, and were acting out their own hastily scripted version of the story. What’s more, most of their descriptions of Landers’ modified personal biochemistry came straight out of the narration to Junk DNA; SeeNet’s news editors must have mined the discarded segment of the documentary for some instant technical background when they put together their final release.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this—but the speed with which events thousands of kilometers away had been recycled as an instant parable was unsettling enough; hearing my own words echoed back at me as part of the feedback loop verged on the surreal.

An actor playing one of the FBI agents sent to gather Landers’ computer files turned to the audience (all three of us) and proclaimed, “This knowledge could destroy us all! We must avert our gaze!” His companion replied mournfully, “Yes—but this is only one man’s folly! The same sacred mysteries are spelled out in ten million other machines! Until every one of those files is erased… none of us will ever sleep safely!”

My head throbbed and my throat tightened. I couldn’t deny that in the dead of night, confused and in pain, I’d shared this sentiment entirely.

And now?

I walked on. I had no time to waste on Landers, or MR; keeping up with Violet Mosala was already proving near enough to impossible. The whole documentary kept being transmuted into something new before my eyes—and however gloriously unworldly her arcane physics, Mosala was entangled in so many political complications that I was beginning to lose count.

Had Sarah Knight known about Mosala’s plans to emigrate to Stateless? If she had, it would have made the project a thousand times more attractive to her than any deal with the Anthrocosmologists. Would she have kept a selling point like that from SeeNet, though? Maybe, if she’d wanted to take it to another network—but in that case, why wasn’t she here, shouldering me aside, making Violet Mosala: Technoliberated? Or maybe Mosala had sworn her to secrecy and she’d honored that promise, even though it had meant losing the job?

It was driving me insane: even in her absence, Sarah seemed to be one step ahead of me all the way. At the very least, I should have asked her to collaborate; it would have been worth splitting my fee with her, and giving her a co-director’s credit, just to find out what she knew.

A bright red graphic flashed up over my visual field, a small circle at the center of a larger one with cross-hairs. I froze, confused. As I shifted my gaze, the target clung to a face in the crowd. It was a person in a clown suit, handing out MR literature.

Akili Kuwaie?

Witness thought it was.

The clown wore a mask of active make-up, currently a checkerboard of green and white. From this distance, ve might have been any gender, including asex; ve was about the right build and height—and vis features weren’t dissimilar, so far as I could tell with squares painted all over them. It wasn’t impossible—but I wasn’t convinced.

I approached. The clown called out, “Get your Daily Archetype! Get the truth about the dangers of frankenscience!” The accent, even if I couldn’t place it geographically, was unmistakable—and this hawker’s cry sounded every bit as ironic as Kuwale’s observations about Janet Walsh.

I walked up to the clown; ve regarded me impassively. I said, “How much?”

“The truth costs nothing… but a dollar would help the cause.”

“Which cause is that? MR or AC?”

Ve said quietly, “We all have our roles to play. I'm pretending to be MR. You’re pretending to be a journalist.”

That stung. I said, “Fair enough. I admit I still don’t know half as much as Sarah Knight… but I'm getting there. And I’d get there faster with your help.”

Kuwale regarded me with undisguised mistrust. The checkerboard on vis face suddenly melted into blue-and-red diamonds—a disorienting sight, though vis fixed stare throughout the transition only made vis contempt shine through all the more clearly.

Ve said, “Why don’t you just take a pamphlet and fuck off?” Ve held one out to me. “Read it and eat it.”

“I’ve swallowed enough bad news today. And the Keystone—”

Ve grinned sardonically. “Ah, Amanda Conroy summons you to her hearthside, and you think you know it all.”

“If I thought I knew it all, why would I be pleading with you to tell me what I’ve missed?”

Ve hesitated. I said, “On Sunday night, you asked me to keep my eyes open. Tell me why, and tell me what I'm looking for—and I’ll do it. I don’t want to see Mosala hurt, any more than you do. But I need to know exactly what’s going on.”

Kuwale thought it over, still suspicious, but clearly tempted. Short of Mosalas colleagues, or Karin De Groot—all highly unlikely to cooperate—I was probably the closest ve could ever hope to get to vis idol.

Ve mused, “If you were working for the other side, why would you pretend to be so incompetent?”

I took the insult in my stride. “I'm not even sure that I know who the other side is.”

Kuwale caved in. “Meet me outside this building in half an hour.” Ve took my hand and wrote an address on my palm; it wasn’t the house where I’d met Conroy. In half an hour, I was supposed to be filming Mosala at yet another lecture—but the documentary would survive with a few less reaction shots to choose from, and Mosala would probably be relieved to be left in peace for a change.

Kuwale thrust a rolled-up pamphlet into my open hand before I turned away. I almost discarded it, but then I changed my mind. Ned Landers was on the cover, bolts protruding from the side of his neck, while an Escher-rip-off effect had him reaching out of the portrait and painting it himself. The headline read: THE MYTH OF A SELF-MADE MAN—which was, at least, wittier than anything the murdochs would come up with. When I flicked through the article within, though… there was no talk of monitoring or restricting access to human genome data, no discussion of US and Chinese resistance to international inspections of sites with DNA synthesis equipment, no practical suggestions whatsoever for preventing another Chapel Hill. Beyond a call for all human DNA maps to be “erased and undiscovered"—about as useful as imploring the people of the world to forget the true shape of the planet—there was nothing but cult-speak: the danger of meddling with quintessential mysteries, the “human need” for an ineffable secret to life, the techno-rape of the collective soul.

If Mystical Renaissance really wanted to speak for all humanity, define the fit and proper boundaries of knowledge, and dictate—or censor—the deepest truths of the universe… they were going to have to do better than this.

I closed my eyes, and laughed with relief and gratitude. Now that it had passed, I could admit it: For a while, I’d almost believed that they might have claimed me. I’d almost imagined that I might have ended up crawling into their recruitment tent on my hands and knees, head bowed with appropriate humility (at last), proclaiming: “I was blind, but now I see! I was psychically numbed, but now I'm attuned! I was all Yang and no Yin—left-brained, linear, and hierarchical—but now I'm ready to embrace the Alchemical Balance between the Rational and the Mystical! Only say the word… and I will be Healed!”

The address Kuwale had given me was a baker’s shop. Imported luxuries aside, all the food on Stateless came from the sea—but the proteins and starches in the nodules of the engineered seaweeds which flourished at the borders of the reefs were all but identical to those in any grain of wheat, and so was the smell they produced on baking. The familiar aroma made me light-headed with hunger, but the thought of swallowing a single mouthful of fresh bread was enough to make me nauseous. I should have known, by then, that there was something physically wrong with me—beyond the after-effect of the flight, beyond broken melatonin sleep, beyond my sadness over losing Gina, beyond the stress of finding myself at the deep end of a story which showed no sign of bottoming out. But I didn’t have my pharm to pronounce the illness real, I didn’t trust the local doctors, I didn’t have time to be sick. So I told myself that it was all in my head—and the only possible cure was to try to ignore it.

Kuwale appeared, sans clown suit, just in time to save me from either passing out or throwing up. Ve walked past without even glancing at me, radiating nervous energy; I followed—and started recording—resisting the urge to shout out vis name and deflate the implied cloak-and-dagger solemnity.

I caught up, and walked alongside ver. “What does ‘mainstream AC’ mean, anyway?”

Kuwale glanced at me sideways, edgy and irritated, but ve deigned to answer. “We don’t know who the Keystone is. We accept that we may never know, for certain. But we respect all the people who seem to be likely candidates.”

That all sounded obscenely moderate and reasonable. “Respect, or revere.”

Ve rolled vis eyes. “The Keystone is just another person. The first to grasp the TOE completely—but there’s no reason why a billion others can’t do the same, after ver. Someone has to be first—it’s as simple as that. The Keystone is not—remotely—a ‘god'; the Keystone need not even know that ve’s created the universe. All ve has to do is explain it.”

“While people like you stand back and explain that act of creation?”

Kuwale made a dismissive gesture, as if ve had no time to waste on metaphysical nit-picking.

I said, “So why are you so concerned about Violet Mosala, if she’s nothing so cosmically special after all?”

Ve was bemused. “Does a person have to be some kind of supernatural being, to deserve not to be killed? Do I have to get down on my knees and worship the woman as Mother Goddess of the Universe, in order to care whether she lives or dies?”

“Call her Mother Goddess of the Universe to her face, and you’d soon wish you were dead, yourself.”

Kuwale grinned. “And rightly so.” Ve added stoically, “But I know she thinks AC is even lower than the Ignorance Cults; the very fact that we desist from god-talk only makes us more insidious, in her eyes. She thinks we’re parasites feeding off science: following the work of TOE theorists, stealing it, abusing it… and not even having the honesty to speak the language of the anti-rationalists.” Ve shrugged lightly. “She despises us. I still respect her, though. And whether she’s the Keystone or not… she’s one of the greatest physicists of her generation, she’s a powerful force for technoliberation… why should I need to deify her, to value her life?”

“Okay.” This whole laid-back attitude seemed far too good to be true—but it wasn’t inconsistent with anything I’d heard from Conroy. “That’s mainstream AC. Now tell me about the heretics.”

Kuwale groaned. “The permutations are… endless. Imagine any variation you like, and there’s sure to be someone on the planet who embraces it as the truth. We don’t have a patent on Anthrocosmology. There are ten billion people out there, and they’re all capable of believing anything they want to, however close to us in metaphysics, however far away in spirit.”

This was pure evasion, but I didn’t get a chance to press the point. Kuwale saw a tram ahead, beginning to move away from its stop, and ve started running for it. I struggled to keep up; we both made it, but I took a while to get my breath back. We were headed west, out toward the coast.

The tram was only half-full, but Kuwale remained standing in the doorway, gripping a hand rail and leaning out into the wind. Ve said, “If I show you the people you need to recognize, will you let me know if you see them? I’ll give you a contact number, and an encryption algorithm, and all you have to do is—”

I said, “Slow down. Who are these people?”

“They’re a danger to Violet Mosala.”

“You mean, you suspect they’re a danger.”

“I know it.”

“Okay. So who are they?”

“What difference would it make if I told you their names? It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“No, but you can tell me who they’re working for. Which government, which biotech company…?”

Vis face hardened. “I told Sarah Knight too much. I'm not repeating that mistake.”

“Too much for what? Did she betray you? To… SeeNet?” “No!” Kuwale scowled; I was missing the point. “Sarah told me what happened with SeeNet. You pulled a few strings… and all the work she’d done counted for nothing. She was angry, but she wasn’t surprised. She said that’s what the networks were like. And she bore you no real grudge; she said she was ready to pass on everything she knew, if you agreed to refund her costs out of your research budget, and maintain confidentiality.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

“I gave her the okay to tell you everything she knew about AC. Why do you think I made such a fool of myself, at the airport? If I’d known you were still in the dark, do you think I would have approached you like that?”

“No.” That much, at least, made sense. “But why would she tell you she was going to brief me, and then change her mind? I haven’t heard a word from her. She doesn’t answer my calls—”

Kuwale fixed vis eyes on me, sad and ashamed, but suddenly, painfully, honest.

“And she doesn’t answer mine.”

We left the tram, at a stop on the outskirts of a small industrial complex, then walked southeast. If we were under professional surveillance, all of this incessant motion would change nothing—but if Kuwale believed it made it safe for us to talk more freely, I was willing to tag along.

I didn’t accept for a moment that anything had happened to Sarah; she had every reason to wish both of us out of her life—a wish which a few words to her communications software could have granted. She might have had a brief, magnanimous fantasy about putting me in the picture, in spite of what I’d done to her, out of sheer journalistic solidarity—all of us pulling together for the sake of Mosala’s history-making-story-which-must-be-told, ra ra—but then felt differently in the morning, once the chemical solace had worn off.

What’s more, I was beginning to have second thoughts about the threat to Mosala herself.

I turned to Kuwale. “If biotech interests ever did assassinate Violet Mosala, she’d be an instant martyr for technoliberation. And as a corpse, she’d be just as good a mascot, just as good an excuse for the South African government to lead an anti-boycott revolt in the UN.”

“Maybe,” ve conceded. “If the headlines told the right story.”

“How could the story fail to get out? Mosala’s backers would hardly stay silent.”

Kuwale smiled grimly. “Do you know who owns most of the media?”

“Yes, I do, so don’t give me that paranoid bullshit. A hundred different groups, a thousand different people…”

“A hundred different groups—most of which also own large biotech concerns. A thousand different people—most of them on the boards of at least one major player, from AgroGenesis to VivoTech.”

“That’s true, but there are other interests, with other agendas. It’s not as simple as you make it sound.”

We were alone now, on a large stretch of flat but unpaved reef-rock, prepared but not yet built upon; some small-scale construction machinery was clustered in the distance, but it appeared to be idle. Munroe had told me that no one could own land on Stateless—any more than they could own air—but equally, there was nothing to stop people fencing off and monopolizing vast tracts of it. That they chose not to made me distinctly uneasy; it seemed like an unnatural exercise of restraint—a delicately balanced consensus poised ready to collapse into a spate of land grabs, the creation of de facto titles, and an outraged—probably violent—backlash from those who hadn’t got in first.

And yet… Why come all the way out here, just to play Lord of the Flies? No society chooses to destroy itself. And if an ignorant tourist was capable of imagining how disastrous a land rush would be, the residents of Stateless must have thought it through themselves, in a thousand times more detail.

I spread my arms to encompass the whole renegade island. “If you really think the biotech companies can get away with murder, tell me why they haven’t turned Stateless into a fireball?”

“Bombing El Nido made that solution unrepeatable. You need a government to do it for you—and no government, now, would risk the backlash.”

“Sabotaged it, then? If EnGeneUity can’t come up with something to dissolve their own creation back into the sea, then the Beach Boys were lying.”

“The Beach Boys?”

“'Californian biotechnologists are the best in the world.’ Wasn’t that one of theirs?”

Kuwale said, “EnGeneUity are selling versions of Stateless all over the Pacific. Why would they sabotage their best demonstration model— their best advertizement, unauthorized or not? They might not have planned it this way, but the truth is, Stateless has cost them nothing—so long as no one else goes renegade.”

I wasn’t convinced, but the argument was going nowhere. “Do you want to show me your gallery of alleged corporate assassins? And then explain to me, very carefully, exactly what you plan to do if I tell you that I’ve sighted one of these people? Because if you think I'm entering into a conspiracy to murder—even in defense of the Keystone herself, even on Stateless—”

Kuwale cut me off. “There’s no question of violence. All we want to do is watch these people, gather the necessary intelligence, and tip off conference security as soon as we have something tangible.”

Vis notepad beeped. Ve halted, took it out of vis pocket and gazed at the screen for several seconds, then carefully paced a dozen meters south. I said, “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing?”

Kuwale beamed proudly. “My data security is linked to the Global Positioning System. The most crucial files can’t be opened, even with the right passwords and voiceprint, unless you’re standing on the right spot—which changes, hour by hour. And I'm the only one who knows exactly how it changes.”

I almost asked: Why not memorize a long list of passwords, instead of locations? Stupid question. The GPS was there, so it had to be used—and a more convoluted security scheme was better, not because it was any more secure, but because the complexity of the system was an end in itself. Technophilia was like any other aesthetic; there was no point asking why?

Kuwale was only half a generation younger than me, and we probably shared eighty percent of our world views—but ve’d pushed all the things we both believed much further. Science and technology seemed to have given ver everything ve could ask for: an escape from the poisoned battleground of gender, a political movement worth fighting for, and even a quasi-religion—insane enough in its own way, but unlike most other science-friendly faiths, at least it wasn’t a laboriously contrived synthesis of modern physics and some dog-eared historical relic: a mock truce like the fatuities of Quantum Buddhism, or the Church of the Revised Standard Judaeo-Christian Big Bang.

I watched ver tinkering with the software, waiting for some conjunction of satellites and atomic clocks, and wondered: Would I have been happier, if I’d made the same decisions? As an asex—saved from a dozen screwed-up relationships. As a technoliberateur—with ideological zeal to shield me from any doubts about Nagasaki or Ned Landers. As an Anthrocosmologist—with a final explanation for everything which put me one up on even the TOE theorists, and inoculated me against competing religions in my old age.

Would I have been happier?

Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

Kuwale’s software chimed success. I walked over and accepted the data ve’d unlocked, tight-beam infrared flowing between our notepads.

I said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me how you know about these people? Or how I'm meant to verify what you say about them?”

“That’s what Sarah Knight asked me.”

“I'm not surprised. And now I'm asking.”

Kuwale ignored me; the subject was closed. Ve gestured at my abdomen with vis notepad, and instructed me solemnly, “Move everything in there, first chance you get. Perfect security. You’re lucky.”

“Sure. While one EnGeneUity assassin is running around Stateless with your notepad, trying to find the right geographical coordinates, the others will be saving time by carving me open.”

Kuwale laughed. “That’s the spirit. You may not be much of a journalist, but we’ll make a revolutionary martyr out of you yet.”

Ve pointed across the expanse of reef-rock, glistening green and silver in the morning sun. “We should return to the city by separate routes. If you head that way, you’ll hit the southwest tram line in twenty minutes.”

“Okay.” I didn’t have the energy to argue. As ve turned to leave, though, I said, “Before you vanish, will you answer one last question?”

Ve shrugged. “No harm in asking.”

“Why are you doing this? I still don’t understand. You say you really don’t care whether Violet Mosala is the Keystone or not. But even if she’s such a great human being that her death would be a global tragedy… what makes that your personal responsibility? She knows exactly what she’s buying into, moving to Stateless. She’s a grown woman, with resources of her own, and more political clout than you or I could ever hope for. She’s not helpless, she’s not stupid—and if she knew what you were doing, she’d probably strangle you with her bare hands. So… why can’t you leave her to take care of herself?”

Kuwale hesitated, and cast vis eyes down. I seemed to have hit a nerve, at last; ve had the air of someone searching for the right words with which to unburden verself.

The silence stretched on, but I waited patiently. Sarah Knight had extracted the whole story, hadn’t she? There was no reason why I couldn’t do the same.

Kuwale looked up and replied casually, “Like I said: no harm in asking.

Ve turned and walked away.

18

I viewed the data Kuwale had given me while I waited for the tram. Eighteen faces, but no names. The images were standardized 3D portraits: backgrounds removed, lighting homogenized, like police mug shots. There were twelve men and six women, of diverse ages and ethnicities. It seemed a curiously large number; Kuwale hadn’t suggested that every one of them was actually on Stateless—but how, exactly, could ve have got hold of portraits of the eighteen corporate assassins most likely to be sent to the island? What kind of source, what kind of leak, what kind of data theft could have yielded precisely this much, and no more?

In any case, I had no intention of letting the ACs know if I spotted one of these faces in a crowd—less out of fear that I might be putting myself at risk by siding with radical technoliberateurs against powerful vested interests, than out of a lingering suspicion that Kuwale might yet prove to be entirely off the planet—as paranoid a Mosala fan as I’d first imagined, and more. Without any way of confirming vis story, I could hardly unleash an unknown retribution on some total stranger who happened to stray too close to Violet Mosala. For all I knew, this was a gallery of innocent Ignorance Cultists, snapped as they disembarked from a charter flight. The fact that Mosala had no shortage of potential enemies didn’t prove that Kuwale knew who they were—or that ve’d told me the truth about anything.

Even the version of Anthrocosmology I’d been fed sounded far too reasonable and dispassionate to be true. The Keystone is just another person, honestly—all our concern for Violet Mosala is due to her numerous other good points. Why go to the trouble of inventing a cult which elevates someone to the status of Prime Cause for Everything—and then treat that fact as all but insignificant? Kuwale had protested too much.

By the time I reached the hotel, the ATM software lecture was almost over, so I sat in the lobby to wait for Mosala to emerge.

The more I thought about it, the less I was prepared to trust anything Kuwale and Conroy had told me—but I knew it could take months to find out what the Anthrocosmologists were really about. Other than Indrani Lee, there was only one person who was likely to hold the answers—and I was sick of remaining ignorant out of sheer dumb pride.

I called Sarah. If she was in Australia, it was broad daylight on the east coast by now… but the same answering system responded as before.

I left another message for her. I couldn’t bring myself to come right out and say it in plain English: I abused my position with SeeNet. I stole the project from you, and I didn’t deserve it. That was wrong, and I'm sorry. Instead, I offered her participation in Violet Mosala in whatever role now suited her, on whatever terms we could agree were mutually fair.

I signed off, expecting to feel at least some small measure of relief from this belated attempt to make amends. Instead, a powerful sense of unease descended on me. I looked around the brightly lit lobby, staring at the dazzling patches of sunshine on the ornately patterned gold-and-white floor—Stateless-spartan as ever—as if hoping that the light itself might flood in through my eyes and clear the fog of panic from my brain. It didn’t.

I sat with my head in my hands, unable to make sense of the dread I felt. Thing’s weren’t that desperate. I was still in the dark about far too much—but less so than four days ago. I was making progress, wasn’t I? I was staying afloat. Barely.

The space around me seemed to expand. The lobby, the sunlit floor, retreated—an infinitesimal shift, but it was impossible to ignore. I glanced down at my notepad clock, light-headed with fear; Mosala’s lecture was due to end in three minutes, but the time seemed to stretch out ahead of me, an uncrossable void. I had to make contact with someone, or something.

Before I could change my mind, I had Hermes call Caliban, a front end for a hacking consortium. An androgynous grinning face appeared—mutating and flowing, changing its features second-by-second as it spoke; only the whites of its eyes stayed constant, as if peering out from behind an infinitely malleable mask.

“Bad weather coming down, petitioner. There’s ice on the signal wires.” Snow began to swirl around the faces; their skin tones favored grays and blues. “Nothing’s clear, nothing’s easy.”

“Spare me the hype.” I transmitted Sarah Knight’s communications number. “What can you tell me about that, for… one hundred dollars?”

Caliban leered. “The Styx is frozen solid.” Frost formed on its various lips and eyelashes.

“A hundred and fifty.” Caliban seemed unimpressed—but Hermes flashed up a window showing a credit transfer request; I okayed it, reluctantly.

A screenful of green text, mockingly out-of-focus, appeared to illuminate the software faces. “The number belongs to Sarah Alison Knight, Australian citizen, primary residence 17E Parade Avenue, Lindfield, Sydney. En-fem, date-of-birth April 4th, 2028.”

“I know all that, you useless shit. Where is she now—precisely? And when did she last accept a call, in person?”

The green text faded, and Caliban shivered. “Wolves are howling on the steppes. Underground rivers are turning to glaciers.”

I restrained myself from wasting more invective. “I’ll give you fifty.”

“Veins of solid ice beneath the rock. Nothing moves, nothing changes.”

I gritted my teeth. “A hundred.” My research budget was vanishing fast—and this had nothing to do with Violet Mosola. But I had to know.

Orange symbols danced across gray flesh. Caliban announced, “Our Sarah last accepted a call—in person, on this number—in the central metropolitan footprint for Kyoto, Japan, at 10:23:14 Universal Time, on March 26th, 2055.”

“And where is she now?”

“No device has connected to the net under this ID since the stated call.” Meaning: she hadn’t used her notepad to contact anyone, or to access any service. She hadn’t so much as viewed a news bulletin, or downloaded a three-minute music video. Unless…

“Fifty bucks—take it or leave it—for her new communications number.”

Caliban took it, and smiled. “Bad guess. She has no new number, no new account.”

I said numbly, “That’s all. Thank you.”

Caliban mimed astonishment at this unwarranted courtesy, and blew me a parting kiss. “Call again. And remember, petitioner: data wants to be free!”

Why Kyoto? The only connection I could think of was Yasuko Nishide. Meaning what? She’d still planned to cover the Einstein Conference, after all—but with a rival profile of a rival theorist? And the only reason she wasn’t yet on Stateless was Nishide’s illness?

Why the communications blackout, though? Kuwale’s grim unspoken conclusion made no sense. Why would biotech interests want to harm Sarah Knight, if she’d shown every sign of abandoning Violet Mosala for another—thoroughly apolitical—physicist?

People began to cross the lobby, talking excitedly. I looked up. The auditorium down the corridor was emptying. Mosala and Helen Wu emerged together; I met up with them.

Mosala was beaming. “Andrew! You missed all the fun! Serge Bischoff just released a new algorithm which is going to save me days of computer time!”

Wu frowned and corrected her. “Save all of us days, please!”

“Of course.” Mosala stage-whispered to me, “Helen still doesn’t realize that she’s on my side, whether she likes it or not.” She added, “I have a summary of the lecture, if you want to see it?”

I said tonelessly, “No.” I realized how blunt that sounded, but I felt so spaced out, so disconnected, that I really didn’t care. Mosala gave me a curious look, more concerned than angry.

Wu left us. I asked Mosala, “Have you heard any more about Nishide?”

“Ah.” She became serious. “It seems he’s not going to make it to the conference, after all. His secretary contacted the organizers; he’s had to be hospitalized. It’s pneumonia again.” She added sadly, “If this keeps up… I don’t know. He may retire altogether.”

I closed my eyes; the floor began to tilt. A distant voice asked, “Are you all right? Andrew?” I pictured my face, glowing white hot.

I opened my eyes. And I thought I finally understood what was happening.

I said, “Can I talk to you? Please?”

“Of course.”

Sweat began running down my cheeks. “Don’t lose your temper. Just hear me out.”

Mosala leant forward, frowning. She hesitated, then put a hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up. You need to see a doctor, straight away.”

I screamed at her hoarsely, “Just listen! Listen to me!”

People around us were staring. Mosala opened her mouth, outraged, ready to put me in my place—but then she changed her mind. “Go ahead. I'm listening.”

“You need blood tests, a full… micropathology report… everything. You’re asymptomatic, now, but… however you feel… do it… there’s no way of knowing what the incubation period might be.” I was dripping sweat, and swaying on my feet; every breath felt like a lungful of fire. “What did you think they were going to do? Send in a hit squad with machine guns? I doubt… I wasn’t meant to get sick… at all… but the thing must have mutated on the way. Keyed to your genome… but the lock fell off, en route.” I laughed. “In my blood. In my brain.”

I sagged, and dropped to my knees. A convulsion passed through my whole body, like a peristaltic spasm trying to squeeze the flesh right out of my skin. People around me were shouting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I struggled to lift my head—but when I succeeded, briefly, black and purple bruises flowered across my vision.

I stopped fighting it. I closed my eyes and lay down on the cool, welcoming tiles.

In the hospital ward, for a long time, I paid no attention to my surroundings. I thrashed about in a knot of sweat-soaked sheets, and let the world remain mercifully out of focus. I sought no information from the people around me; in my delirium, I believed I had all the answers:

Ned Landers was behind everything. When we met, he’d infected me with one of his secret viruses. And now, because I’d traveled so far to escape it… although Helen Wu had proved that the whole world was nothing but a loop, and everything led back to the same point… now I was coming down with Landers’ secret weapon against Violet Mosala, Andrew Worth, and all his other enemies.

I was coming down with Distress.

A tall Fijian man dressed in white poked a drip into my elbow. I tried to shake it out; he held me still. I muttered triumphantly, “Don’t you know there’s no point? There’s no cure!” Distress was nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined; I wasn’t screaming like the woman in Miami, was I?

I was nauseous and feverish—but I felt sure that I was headed for some form of beautiful, painless oblivion. I smiled up at the man. “I'm gone forever now! I’ve gone away!”

He said, “I don’t think so. I think you’ve been there, and you’re coming back.”

I shook my head defiantly, but then cried out in surprise and pain. My bowels had gone into spasm, and I was emptying them, uncontrollably, into a pan I hadn’t even noticed beneath me. I tried to stop. I couldn’t. But it wasn’t the incontinence that horrified me, as much as the… consistency. This wasn’t diarrhea; it was water.

The motion stopped eventually, but I kept shuddering. I pleaded for an explanation. “What’s happening to me?”

“You have cholera. Drug-resistant cholera. We can control the fever, and keep you hydrated—but the disease is going to have to run its course. So you’re in for a long haul.”

19

As the first wave of delirium subsided, I tried to assess my position dispassionately, to arm myself with the facts. I was not an infant, I was not old. I was not suffering from malnutrition, parasite infestation, an impaired immune system, or any other complicating factor. I was in the care of qualified people. My condition was being monitored constantly by sophisticated machines. I told myself that I was not going to die. Fever and nausea, absent in “classical” cholera, meant that I had the Mexico City biotype—first seen in the aftermath of the quake of ’15, long since distributed globally. It entered the bloodstream as well as the gut, producing a wider range of symptoms, a greater risk to health. Nevertheless, millions of people survived it every year—often in much worse circumstances: without antipyritics to control the fever, without intravenous electrolytes, without any antibiotics at all—making drug resistance academic. In the largest metropolitan hospitals, in Santiago or Bombay, the particular strain of Vibrio cholerae could be sequenced completely, and a de novo drug designed and synthesized in a matter of hours. Most people who contracted the disease, though, had no prospect whatsoever of receiving this luxurious miracle cure. They simply lived through the rise and fall of the bacterial empire inside them. They rode it out.

I could do the same.

There was only one small flaw in this clear-eyed, optimistic scenario:

Most people had no reason to suspect that their guts were full of a genetic weapon which had detonated one step short of its target. Engineered to mimic a natural strain of cholera as closely as possible—but engineered to push the envelope of plausible symptoms far enough to kill a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old woman, receiving the best care that Stateless could provide.

The ward was clean, bright, spacious, quiet. I spent most of my time screened off from the other patients, but the white translucent partitions let the daylight through—and even when my skin was on fire, the faint touch of radiant warmth reaching my body was strangely comforting, like a familiar embrace.

By late afternoon on the first day, the antipyritics seemed to be working. I watched the graph on the bedside monitor; my temperature was still pathological, but the immediate risk of brain damage had passed. I tried to swallow liquids, but nothing stayed down—so I moistened my parched lips and throat, and let the intravenous drip do the rest.

Nothing could stop the cramps and the bowel spasms. When they came, it was like demonic possession, like being ridden by a voodoo god: an obscene bear-hug by something powerful and alien constricting inside my flesh. I couldn’t believe that any muscle in my own rag-doll body could still be so strong. I tried to stay calm—to accept each brutal convulsion as inevitable, to keep my mind fixed on the sure and certain knowledge that this too would pass—but every time, the surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.

My melatonin patch had been removed; the abyssal sleep it generated was too dangerous, now. But I couldn’t begin to tell the difference between the erratic rhythms of melatonin withdrawal, and my otherwise natural state: long stretches of half-sensate paralytic stupor, broken up by brief, violent dreams—and moments of panic-stricken clarity each time I believed my intestines were about to rupture and wash out of me in a red and gray tide.

I told myself that I was stronger and more patient than the disease. Generations of bacteria could come and go; all I had to do was hang on. All I had to do was outlive them.

On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.

Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, “I’ve taken your advice; I’ve been examined thoroughly. I'm not infected, Andrew. I’ve spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane.”

I croaked, “Has anyone else, on the same flight—?”

“No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen.”

I didn’t have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free-market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.

That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael—the Fijian man who’d greeted me when I first woke, and who’d since explained that he was “both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here"—sat by my bed for most of the night… or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.

I slept three straight hours from dawn to mid-morning—long enough for my first coherent dream. Clawing my way up toward consciousness, I clung defiantly to the happy ending: The disease had run its course, it had burned itself out. My symptoms had vanished. Gina had even flown in overnight—to take me back, to take me home.

I’d been woken by an intense cramp. I was soon expelling gray water full of intestinal mucus, gasping obscenities, wanting to die.

In the late afternoon, with the sunlit ward behind the screens as vague and luminous as heaven—re-enacting the same convulsions for the thousandth time, shitting out, yet again, every last drop of fluid the drip had fed into me—I found myself emitting a keening noise, baring my teeth and shivering, like a dog, like a sick hyena.

Early on the fourth day, my fever almost vanished. Everything which had come before seemed like an anesthetized nightmare, violent and frightening but inconsequential—a dream sequence shot through gauze.

A merciless gray solidity clung to everything in sight. The screens around me were caked with dust. The sheets were stained yellow from dried sweat. My skin was coated with slime. My lips, my tongue, my throat, were cracked and stinging, sloughing dead cells and seeping a thin discharge which tasted more like salt than blood. Every muscle from my diaphragm to my groin felt injured, useless, tortured beyond repair— but tensed like an animal flinching from a rain of blows, ready for more. The joints of my knees felt as if I’d been crouching for a week on cold, hard ground.

The cramps, the spasms, began again. I’d never been so lucid; they’d never been worse.

I had no patience left. All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I’d lost interest.

I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen, I wasn’t delirious—but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice, such an obvious solution, that for a moment I suspended all disbelief.

And I finally understood, as I never had before—not through sex, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinpricks of a hundred petty injuries and instantly cured diseases—that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream.

This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-god living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid arsehole, this was the instrument of everything I’d ever do, ever feel, ever be.

I’d never believed otherwise—but I’d never really felt it, never really known it. I’d never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.

Was this what Daniel Cavolini had learned, when he tore away his blindfold? I stared up at the ceiling, tense and shivering, claustrophobic, all the nausea and pain spread across my abdomen hardening into rigid bands like metal embedded in the flesh.

By noon, my temperature started climbing again. I was glad: I wanted delirium, I wanted confusion. Sometimes the fever flayed every nerve, magnified and sharpened every sensation—but I still hoped it might erase this new understanding, which was worse than the pain.

It didn’t.

Mosala visited again. I smiled and nodded, but said nothing, and I couldn’t concentrate on her words. The two screens either side of the bed remained in place, but the third had been moved aside, and when I raised my head I could see the patient opposite me, a forlorn skinny boy with a drip, his parents beside him. His father was reading to him quietly; his mother held his hand. The whole tableau seemed impossibly distant, separated from me by an unbridgeable gulf; I couldn’t imagine ever again having the power to climb to my feet and walk five meters.

Mosala left. I drifted.

Then I noticed someone standing near the foot of the bed, and an electric jolt ran through my body. A shock of transcendental awe.

Striding through unforgiving reality: an angel.

Janet Walsh turned, half toward me. I raised myself up on my elbows and called out to her, terrified, enraptured. “I think I understand now. Why you do it. Not how… but why.”

She looked straight at me, mildly puzzled, but unperturbed.

I said, “Please talk to me. I'm ready to listen.”

Walsh frowned slightly, tolerant but uncomprehending, her wings fluttering patiently.

“I know I’ve offended you. I'm sorry. Can’t you forgive me? I want to hear everything now. I want to understand how you make it work.”

She regarded me in silence.

I said, “How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, know the whole truth… and go on pretending that none of it matters? What’s the secret? What’s the trick? What’s the magic?”

My face was already burning white hot, but I leaned forward, hoping that her sheer radiance might infect me with her great transforming insight.

“I'm trying! You have to believe I'm trying!” I looked away, suddenly at a loss for words, struck dumb by the ineffable mystery of her presence. Then a cramp seized me; the thing I could no longer pretend was a demon snake constricted inside me.

I said, “But when the truth, the underworld, the TOE… reaches up, takes you in its fist, and squeezes…” I raised my own hand, meaning to demonstrate, but it was already clenched tight involuntarily. “How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you’ve ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show?”

Sweat was running into my eyes, blinding me. I brushed it away with my clenched fist, laughing. “When every cell, every fucking atom in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for… is just the scum on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep—how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to that?"

I waited for her answer. Solace, redemption, were within my grasp. I held my arms out toward her in supplication.

Walsh smiled faintly, then walked on without saying a word.

I woke in the early hours of the morning. Burning up again, drenched in sweat.

Michael was sitting on the chair beside me, reading from his notepad. The whole ward was lit softly from above, but the light of the words shone up more brightly.

I whispered, “Today, I tried to become… everything I despise. But I couldn’t even manage that.”

He put the notepad down, and waited for me to continue.

“I'm lost. I really am lost.”

Michael glanced at the bedside monitor, and shook his head. “You’re going to live through this. In a week, you won’t even be able to imagine how you feel right now.”

“I'm not talking about the cholera. I'm having—” I laughed; it hurt. “I'm having what Mystical Renaissance would call a spiritual crisis. And I have nowhere to turn to for comfort. Nowhere to turn to for strength. No lover, no family, no nation. No religion, no ideology. Nothing.”

Michael said calmly, “Then you’re lucky. I envy you.”

I gaped at him, appalled by this heartlessness.

He said, “Nowhere to bury your head. Like an ostrich on reef-rock. I envy you. You might learn something.”

I had no reply to that. I started shivering; I was sweating and aching, but icy cold. “I take back what I said about the cholera. It’s fifty-fifty. I'm being equally fucked by both.”

Michael put his hands behind his neck and stretched, then rearranged himself on the chair. “You’re a journalist. Do you want to hear a story?”

“Don’t you have some vital medical work to do?”

“I'm doing it.”

Waves of nausea began sweeping up from my bowels. “Okay, I’ll listen. If you’ll let me record. What’s this story about?”

He grinned. “My own spiritual crisis, of course.”

“I should have guessed.” I closed my eyes and invoked Witness. The whole action was instinctive, and it was over in half a second—but when it was done, I was shocked. I felt like I was on the verge of disintegrating… but this machinery—as much a part of me as anything organic—still worked perfectly.

He began, “When I was a child, my parents used to take me to the most beautiful church in the world.”

“I’ve heard that line before.”

“This time it’s true. The Reformed Methodist Church in Suva. It was a huge, white building. It looked plain from the outside—austere as a barn. But it had a row of stained glass windows, showing scenes from the scriptures, carved by a computer in sky-blue, rose and gold. Every wall was lined with a hundred kinds of flowers—hibiscus, orchids, lillies— piled up to the roof. And the pews were always crammed with people; everyone wore their finest, brightest clothes, everyone sang, everyone smiled. It was like stepping straight into heaven. Even the sermons were beautiful: no hell-fire, only comfort and joy. No ranting about sin and damnation: just some modest suggestions about kindness, charity, love.”

I said, “Sounds perfect. What happened? Did God send a Greenhouse storm to put an end to all this blasphemous happiness and moderation?”

“Nothing happened to the church. It’s still there.”

“But you parted company? Why?”

“I took the scriptures too literally. They said put away childish things. So I did.”

“Now you’re being facetious.”

He hesitated. “If you really want to know the precise escape route… it all started with just one parable. Have you heard the story of the widow’s mite?”

“Yes.”

“For years, as a schoolboy, I turned it over and over in my head. The poor widow’s small gift was more precious than the rich man’s large one. Okay. Fine. I understood the message. I could see the dignity it gave to every act of charity. But I could see a whole lot more encoded in that parable, and those other things wouldn’t go away.

“I could see a religion which cared more about feeling good than doing good. A religion which valued the pleasure of giving—or the pain—more than any tangible effect. A religion which put… saving your own soul through good works far above their worldly consequences.

“Maybe I was reading too much into one story. But if it hadn’t started there, it would have started somewhere else. My religion was beautiful—but I needed more than that. I demanded more. It had to be true. And it wasn’t.”

He smiled sadly, and raised his hands, let them fall. I thought I could see the loss in his eyes, I thought I understood.

He said, “Growing up with faith is like growing up with crutches.”

“But you threw away your crutches and walked?”

“No. I threw away my crutches and fell flat on my face. All the strength had gone into the crutches—I had none of my own. I was nineteen, when it finally all fell apart for me. The end of adolescence is the perfect age for an existential crisis, don’t you think? You’ve left yours awfully late.”

My face burned with humiliation. Michael reached over and touched my shoulder. He said, “I’ve had a long shift, my judgment’s slipping. I'm not trying to be cruel.” He laughed. “Listen to me, spouting ’season for everything’ bullshit—like the Edenites meet Il Duce: Get those emotional trains running on time!” He leaned back, and ran a hand through his hair. “But I was nineteen, there’s no getting around it. And I’d lost God. What can I say? I read Sartre, I read Camus, I read Nietzche—”

I winced. Michael was puzzled. “You have a problem with Friedrich?”

The cramp tightened. I replied through gritted teeth, “Not at all. All the best European philosophers went mad and committed suicide.”

“Exactly. And I read them all.”

“And?”

He shook his head, smiling, embarrassed. “For a year or so… I really believed it: Here I am, staring into the abyss with Nietzche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness: the Enlightenment’s unspeakable godless rational damnation. One wrong step, and I’ll go spiraling down.”

He hesitated. I watched him closely, suddenly suspicious. Was he making this up as he went along? A little improvised Care-for-the-Whole-Patient routine? And even if he wasn’t… we’d had different lives, different histories. What use was any of this to me?

I listened, though.

“But I didn’t go spiraling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we’re animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand.”

I said, “There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise.”

Michael shrugged. “What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling? If you desperately, passionately want to plummet into the abyss, of course its possible—but only if you work hard. Only if you will the entire thing into being. Only if you manufacture every last centimeter of it, on your way down.

“I don’t believe that honesty leads to madness. I don’t believe we need delusions to stay sane. I don’t believe the truth is strewn with booby-traps, waiting to swallow up anyone who thinks too much. There is nowhere to fall—not unless you stand there digging the hole.”

I said, “You fell, didn’t you? When you lost your faith.”

“Yes—but how far? What have I become? A serial killer? A torturer?”

“I sincerely hope not. But you lost a lot more than ‘childish things,’ didn’t you? What about all those stirring sermons on kindness, charity and love?”

Michael laughed softly. “And the least of these is faith. What makes you think I’ve lost anything? I’ve stopped pretending that the things I value are locked up in some magical vault called ‘God'—outside the universe, outside time, outside myself. That’s all. I don’t need beautiful lies anymore, just to make the decisions I want to make, to try to live a life I think is good. If the truth had taken those things away… I could never really have had them in the first place.

“And I still clean up your shit, don’t I? I still tell you stories at three in the morning. If you want greater miracles than that, you’re out of luck.”

Whether it was genuine autobiography, or just a slick piece of ad hoc therapy, Michael’s story began to undermine my panic and claustrophobia. His arguments made too much sense to me; they sliced through my self-pity like a hot wire. If the universe itself wasn’t a cultural construct, the gray terror I felt from seeing myself as a part of it certainly was. I’d never had the honesty to embrace the molecular nature of my own existence—but then, the whole society I’d inhabited had been equally coy. The reality had always been glossed over, censored, ignored. I’d spent thirty-six years in a world still infested with lingering dualism, with tacit dumb spirituality—where every movie, every song, still wailed about the immortal soul… while everyone swallowed designer drugs predicated on pure materialism. No wonder the truth had come as a shock.

The abyss—like everything else—was understandable. I lost interest in digging myself a hole.

Vibrio cholerae declined to follow my example.

I lay curled on my side, my notepad propped up against an extra pillow, while Sisyphus showed me what was happening inside me.

“The В subunit of the choleragen molecule binds to the surface of the intestinal mucosal cell; the A subunit detaches and traverses the membrane. This catalyzes increased adenylate cyclase activity, which in turn raises the level of cyclic AMP, stimulating the secretion of sodium ions. The ordinary concentration gradient is reversed, and fluid is pumped in the wrong direction: out into the intestinal space.”

I watched the molecules interlocking, I watched the merciless random dance. This was what I was—whether it gave me any comfort to understand it, or not. The same physics which had kept me alive for thirty-six years might or might not casually destroy me—but if I couldn’t accept that simple, obvious truth, I had no business explaining the world to anyone. Solace and redemption could screw themselves. I’d been tempted by the Ignorance Cults—and maybe I half understood what drove them, now—but what did they have to offer, in the end? Alienation from reality. The universe as an unspeakable horror to be endlessly denied, shrouded in saccharine artificial mysteries, every truth subjugated to doublethink and fairy tales.

Fuck that. I was sick from too little honesty, not too much. Too many myths about the H-word, not too few. I would have been better prepared for the whole ordeal by a lifetime spent calmly facing the truth, than a lifetime spent rehearsing the most seductive denials.

I watched a schematic of the worst-case scenario. “If antibiotic-resistant, Mexico City V. cholerae succeed in crossing the blood-brain barrier, immunosuppressants can limit the fever—but bacterial toxins themselves are likely to cause irreversible damage.”

Mutant choleragen molecules fused with neural membranes. The cells collapsed like punctured balloons.

I still feared death as much as ever—but the truth had lost its sting. If the TOE had taken me in its fist and squeezed… at least it had proved that there was solid ground beneath me: the final law, the simplest pattern, holding up the world in all its strangeness.

I’d hit bottom. Once you’d touched the bedrock of the underworld, the foundations of the universe, there was nowhere else to fall.

I said, “That’s enough. Now find something to cheer me up.”

“How about the Beat poets?”

I smiled. “Perfect.”

Sisyphus ransacked the libraries, and played them reading their own works. Ginsberg howling “Moloch! Moloch!” Burroughs rasping “A Junkie’s Christmas"—all severed limbs in suitcases, and scoring the immaculate fix.

And best of all, Kerouac himself, wild and melodic, stoned and innocent: “What If The Three Stooges Were Real?”

Afternoon sunlight slanted across the ward and brushed the side of my face, bridging distance, energy, scale, complexity. This was not a reason for terror. It was not a reason for awe. It was the most ordinary thing imaginable.

I was as ready as I’d ever be. I closed my eyes.

Someone prodded my shoulder, and said for the fourth or fifth time, “Wake up, please.”

I’d lost all choice in the matter. I opened my eyes.

A young woman stood beside me, no one I’d seen before. She had serious, dark brown eyes. Olive skin, long black hair. She spoke with a German accent.

“Drink this.” She held out a small vial of clear liquid.

“I can’t keep anything down. Didn’t they tell you?”

“This, you will.”

I was past caring; vomiting was as natural to me as breathing. I took the vial and tipped the contents down my throat. My esophagus spasmed, and acid hit the roof of my mouth—but nothing more.

I coughed. “Why didn’t someone offer me that sooner?”

“It only just arrived.”

“From where?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I blinked at her. My head cleared slightly. “Arrived? What kind of drug wouldn’t be in stock already?”

“What do you think?”

The flesh at the base of my spine went cold. “Am I dreaming? Or am I dead?”

“Akili had samples of your blood smuggled out to… a certain country, and analyzed by friends. You just swallowed a set of magic bullets for every stage of the weapon. You’ll be on your feet in a matter of hours.”

My head throbbed. The weapon. My worst fear had just been confirmed and banished in the same sentence; it was disorienting. “Every stage? What would have come next? What have I missed out on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I think you’re right.” I still wasn’t convinced that any of this was happening. “Why? Why did Akili go to all that trouble just to save me?”

“We had to find out exactly what you were carrying. Violet Mosala might still be at risk, even though she’s showing no symptoms. We had to have a cure for her, ready, here on the island.”

I absorbed that. At least she hadn’t said: We don’t care who is or isn’t the Keystone. We’re all prepared to risk our lives to protect just about anyone.

“So what was I carrying? And why did it detonate prematurely?”

The young AC frowned solemnly. “We still haven’t worked out all the details—but the timing fell apart. It looks like the bacteria generated confused internal signals, due to a disparity between intracellular molecular clocks and the host’s biochemical cues. The melatonin receptors were choked, saturated—” She stopped, alarmed. “I don’t understand. Why are you laughing?”

By the time I left the hospital, on Tuesday morning, I had my strength back—and I was enraged. The conference was half over, but TOEs were no longer the story—and if Sarah Knight, for whatever unfathomable reasons, had abandoned the war over Mosala to sit by Yasuko Nishide’s bedside, incommunicado… I’d finally have to start unraveling the whole complicated truth for myself.

Back in my hotel room, I plugged in my umbilical fiber, passed Kuwale’s eighteen mug shots to Witness, and flagged them for constant real-time search.

I called Lydia. “I need five thousand dollars extra for research: database access and hacking fees. More is going on here than I can begin to describe. And if you don’t agree that it’s worth every cent in a week’s time, I’ll refund it all.”

We argued for fifteen minutes. I improvised; I dropped misleading hints about PACDF and an impending political storm, but I said nothing about Mosala’s planned emigration. In the end, Lydia caved in. I was astonished.

I used the software Kuwale had given me to send ver a deep-encrypted message. “No, I haven’t spotted one of your goons. But if you expect any more help from me—beyond acting as a living culture medium—you’re going to have to give me all the details: who these people are, who employed them, your analysis of the weapon… everything. Take it or leave it. Meet me at the same place as last time, in an hour.”

I sat back and took stock of what I knew, what I believed. Biotech weapons, biotech interests! Whether or not that was true, the boycott itself had almost killed me. I’d always seen both sides of the gene patent laws, I’d always been equally suspicious of the corporations and the renegades—but now the symmetry was broken. I had a long history of apathy and ambivalence—and I was ashamed to admit that it had taken so much to politicize me—but now I was ready to embrace technoliberation, I was ready to do everything I could to expose Mosala’s enemies and help her cause.

The Beach Boys never lied, though. I couldn’t believe that a weapon from EnGeneUity and their allies would have failed because of anything as simple as my distorted melatonin cycle. That sounded more like the work of brilliant, resourceful amateurs making do with limited knowledge, limited tools.

PACDF? The Ignorance Cults? Hardly.

Other technoliberateurs, who’d decided that Mosala’s original scheme would benefit greatly from a Nobel-prize-winning martyr? Unaware that they were pitted against people who largely shared their goals—but who weren’t merely averse to treating people as expendable, but who had elevated the sacrificial celebrity in question to the status of creator of the universe?

There was an irony there, somewhere: the cool, pragmatic realpolitik faction of technoliberation seemed to be infinitely more fanatical than the quasi-religious Anthrocosmologists.

An irony, or a misunderstanding.

Kuwale’s reply arrived while I was in the shower, scouring away the dead skin and the sour odor I’d been unable to remove in the hospital bathroom.

“The data you insist on seeing can’t be unlocked at the place you’ve specified. Meet me at these coordinates.”

I checked a map of the island. There was no point arguing.

I dressed, and set out for the northern reefs.