Distress - A Novel Part 16

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 doc.u.mentaries 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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."

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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 ofMosala's and Nis.h.i.+de'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 demon-strably 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 185.

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 a aan 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-cla.s.sic. 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 ofLanders 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 doc.u.mentary 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.

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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 doc.u.mentary kept being trans.m.u.ted 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: Technotiberatew? 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 as.e.x; ve was about the right build and height-and vis features 187.

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 impa.s.sively. 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 s.h.i.+ne through all the more clearly.

Ve said, "Why don't you just take a pamphlet and f.u.c.k 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."

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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 doc.u.mentary 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 grat.i.tude. Now that it had pa.s.sed, 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 189.

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 mela-tonin 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 p.r.o.nounce the illness real, I didn't trust the local doctors, 1 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 pa.s.sing 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 'G.o.d'; 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 190.

and wors.h.i.+p the woman as Mother G.o.ddess of the Universe, in order to care whether she lives or dies?"

"Call her Mother G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d-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 att.i.tude 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?"

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"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 pa.s.s 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 192.

story-which-must-be-told, a a-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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 bulls.h.i.+t. 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 t.i.tles, 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 Flies7 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 encompa.s.s 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 193.