Distress - A Novel Part 11

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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d-given, infallible; the bal- 131.

ance could be disturbed in a thousand ways: mutants could arise, compet.i.tors could move in, phages could wipe out bacteria, climate change could s.h.i.+ft 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 n.o.body 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 ofViolet 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 b.u.t.ton; 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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?"

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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-n.o.bel-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."

133.

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 t.i.tle, 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, n 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?

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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-cla.s.s inst.i.tution 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 doc.u.mentary 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- 135.

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 Sen-ghor's negritnde to Mobutu's "authenticity" to Black Consciousness in all its forms-were dismissed as corrupt, a.s.similationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism-according to the most vocal of the new tradi-tionalists-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'etre 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 Sav-imbi'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 136.

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 s.e.xual 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, impa.s.sioned pleas for "the use of knowledge in the service of freedom"; he'd called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public owners.h.i.+p 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 partic.i.p.ate 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" neu-roactive 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 137.

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 a.s.signment. 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 deja vul 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."

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"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 appet.i.te-and it occurred to me that Lee might have some professional insights into technohberation 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-s.h.i.+rts displayed Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Joseph Camp-bell, 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-s.h.i.+rt; 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 admonis.h.i.+ng 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 139.

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."

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"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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 compa.s.sion 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."

141.

We walked on through the warm night, pa.s.sing 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?"

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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 relations.h.i.+p in an instant."