Distress - A Novel Part 14

give them a footnote in Violet Mosala, it would hardly undermine the integrity of the whole doc.u.mentary 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 Anthrocosmol-ogy 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 pa.s.sengers smiled and greeted me, and chatted for a while-without anyone drawing a weapon and demanding money.

163.

Walking up the street toward the hotel, I scrolled through a few doc.u.ments 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 Anthro-cosmologists; 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 as.e.x. 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 compet.i.tion 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 1 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.

164.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 rea.s.sured me, "Everything's fine. Wendy keeps strange hours, that's all."

I sat in one of the armchairs arranged in a cl.u.s.ter 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, 1 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?"

165.

"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 n.o.bel 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 n.o.body 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."

"s.h.i.t. 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."

166.

"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.

1 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-"

167.

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 bulls.h.i.t as read, and get on to the TOE?"

I said patiently, "I know it's bulls.h.i.t, you know it's bulls.h.i.t-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 168.

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 a.s.sembly 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 technoliberationi"

"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 cliches-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."

169.

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 a.s.similation and genocide."

"It has been used as exactly that."

Mosala eyed me balefully. "No s.h.i.t. 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 s.p.a.ce, saying, "There is no male cafe-male vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean s.p.a.ce-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 pa.s.sions began-but then, she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.

I hesitated. My next note read: Emigration rumors7 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 170.

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-s.p.a.ce-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 50 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 a.s.signing 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 s.p.a.ce into pre-s.p.a.ce-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-s.p.a.ce-excluding certain topologies for no good 171.

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 a.s.sumptions 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 s.p.a.ce-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 172.

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 a.s.sign 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 a.s.sumptions 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 cla.s.sification, 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.

173.

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-s.p.a.ce 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-s.p.a.ce in the same way."