Distress - A Novel Part 22

I pleaded, "Why should it7 If Mosala is the Keystone, she doesn't need this"-I tugged at my hands, wishing I could point at the travesty-"to explain her own existence! Her TOE doesn't predict it, doesn't allow it!"

"No, it doesn't. But her TOE can't survive its own expression. It can make her the Keystone. It can grant her a seamless past. It can manufacture twenty billion years of cosmology. But once it's been stated explicitly, it will resolve itself into pure mathematics, pure logic." He joined his hands together, fingers interlocked-and then dragged them slowly apart. "You can't hold a universe together with a system which spells out its own lack of physical content. There's no ... friction anymore. No fire in the equations."

Behind him, the tapestry was coming apart; all the ornate dazzling patterns of knowledge were disintegrating. Not devoured by entropy, or halted and reversed like the galaxies' flight; the process was simply pushing on, relentlessly, toward a conclusion which had been implicit from the start. Every possible rearrangement of meaning had been extracted from the Aleph 'knot'-except the very last. It wasn't a knot at all: it was a simple loop, leading nowhere. The colors of a thousand different explanatory threads had encoded only the lack of awareness of their hidden connections. And the universe which had bootstrapped itself into existence by spinning those explanations into a billion tangled hierarchies of ever-increasing complexity . . . was finally unwinding into a naked statement of its own tautology.

A plain white circle spun in the darkness for a second, and then the screen switched off.

The demonstration was over. Three began to untie me from the chair.

I said, "There's something I have to tell you. I've kept it from everyone-SeeNet, Conroy, Kuwale. Sarah Knight never found out. No one else knows, except me and Mosala. But you really need to hear it."

Twenty said, "We're listening." She stood by the blank display screen, watching me patiently, the model of polite interest.

This was the last chance I had to change their minds. I struggled to concentrate, to put myself in their place. Would it make any difference to their plans, if they knew that Buzw was wrong7 Probably not. With or 243.

without other candidates to take her place, Mosala would be equally dangerous. If Nishide died, his intellectual legacy could still be pursued-and they'd simply race to protect his successors, and to slaughter Mosala's.

I said, "Violet Mosala completed her TOE back in Cape Town. The computing she's doing now is all just cross-checking; the real work was finished months ago. So ... she's already become the Keystone. And nothing's happened, the sky isn't falling, we're all still here." I tried to laugh. "The experiment you think is too dangerous to risk is already over. And we've survived."

Twenty continued to watch me, with no change of expression. A wave of intense self-consciousness swept over me. I was suddenly aware of every muscle in my face, the angle of my head, the stoop of my shoulders, the direction of my gaze. I felt like a barely man-shaped lump of clay, which would need to be molded, painstakingly, into a convincing likeness of a human being speaking the truth.

And I knew that every bone, every pore, every cell in my body was betraying the effort I was making to fake it.

Rule number one: never let on that there are any rules at all.

Twenty nodded at Three, and he untied me from the chair. I was taken back to the hold, lowered in with the winch, and bound to Kuwale again.

As the others began to climb out on the rope ladder, Three hesitated. He crouched down beside me and whispered, like a good friend offering painful but essential advice: "I don't blame you for trying, man. But hasn't anyone ever told you that you're the worst liar in the world?"

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23.

When I'd finished my account of the killers' media presentation, Kuwale said flatly, "Don't kid yourself that you ever had a chance. No one could have talked them out of it."

"No?" I didn't believe ver. They'd talked themselves into it, systematically enough. There had to be a way to unravel their own supposedly watertight logic before their eyes-to force them to confront its absurdity.

I hadn't been able to find it, though. I hadn't been able to get inside their heads.

I checked the time with Witness; it was almost dawn. I couldn't stop shivering; the slick of algae on the floor felt damper than ever, and the hard polymer beneath had grown cold as steel.

"Mosala will be under close protection." Kuwale had been despondent when I left ver, but in my absence ve seemed to have recovered a streak of defiant optimism. "I sent a copy of your mutant cholera genome to conference security, so they know the kind of risk she's facing-even it she won't acknowledge it herself. And there are plenty of other mainstream AC back on Stateless."

"No one back on Stateless knows that Wu is involved, do they? And anyway . . . Wu could have infected Mosala with a bioweapon days ago. Do you think they would have confessed everything, on camera, if the a.s.sa.s.sination wasn't already a fait accompli7. They wanted to ensure that they'd receive due credit, they had to get in early and avoid the rush, before everyone from PACDF to EnGeneUity comes under suspicion. But it would have to be the last thing they'd do, before confirming that she's dead, and fleeing Stateless." Meaning that nothing I'd said above deck could have made the slightest difference? Not quite. They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.

245.

Kuwale fell silent. I listened for distant voices or footsteps, but there was nothing: the creaking of the hull, the white noise of a thousand waves.

So much for my grandiose visions of rebirth through adversity as a fearless champion of technoliberation. All I'd done was stumble into a vicious game between rival lunatic G.o.d-makers-and been cut back down to my proper station in life: conveyor of someone else's messages.

Kuwale said, "Do you think they're monitoring us, right now? Up on deck?"

"Who knows?" I looked around the dark hold; I wasn't even sure if the faint gray light which might have been the far wall was real, or just retinal static and imagination. I laughed. "What do they think we're going to do? Jump six meters into the air, punch a hole in the hatch, and then swim a hundred kilometers-all dressed as Siamese twins?"

I felt a sudden sharp tug on the rope around my hands. Irritated, I almost protested aloud-but I stopped myself in time. It seemed Kuwale had made good use of an hour without vis wrists jammed between our backs. Working some slack into vis own bonds and then hiding the loop between vis hands . . . which in turn might have helped ver keep them slightly apart, when we were tied together again? Whatever houdini ve'd used, after a few more minutes of painstaking manipulation the tension on the rope vanished. Kuwale pulled vis arms free of the s.p.a.ce between us, and stretched them wide.

I couldn't help feeling a rush of pure, dumb elation-but I waited for the inevitable sound of boots on the deck. IR cameras in the hold, monitored non-stop by software, would have registered this transgression easily.

The silence stretched on. Grabbing us must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when they intercepted my call to Kuwale-if they'd planned it in advance, they would have had handcuffs, at the very least. Maybe their surveillance technology, at short notice, was as down-market as their ropes and nets.

Kuwale shuddered with relief-I envied ver; my own shoulders were painfully cramped-then squeezed vis hands back into the gap.

The polymer rope was slippery, and knotted tight-and Kuwale's fingernails were cut short (they ended up in my flesh several times). When my hands were finally untied, it was an anticlimax; the surge of elation had long faded, I knew we didn't have the slightest chance of escape. But 246.

anything was better than sitting in the dark and waiting for the honor of announcing Mosala's death to the world.

The net was made from a smart plastic which adhered selectively to its own opposite surface-presumably for ease of repair-and the join was as strong as the stuff itself. We'd been wrapped tight with our arms behind us, though; now that they were free, there was some slack-four or five centimeters. We rose to our feet awkwardly, shoes slipping on the algal slime. I exhaled, and flattened my stomach, glad of my recent fast.

The first dozen attempts failed. In the dark, it took ten or fifteen minutes of tortuous repositioning to find a way of standing which minimized our combined girth all the way down. It seemed like the kind of arduous, inane activity contestants would have to go through on game shows in h.e.l.l. By the time the net touched the floor, I'd lost all feeling in my calves; I took a few steps across the hold and almost keeled over. I could hear the faint click of fingernails slipping over plastic; Kuwale was already working on the rope around vis feet. No one had bothered to bind my legs, the second time; I paced a few meters in the darkness, working out the kinks, making the most of the visceral illusion of freedom while it lasted.

I walked back to where Kuwale was sitting, and bent down until I could make out the whites of vis eyes; ve reached up and pressed a vertical finger to my lips. I nodded a.s.sent. So far, it seemed we'd been lucky- no IR camera-but there might still be audio surveillance, and there was no way of knowing how smart the listening software might be.

Kuwale stood up, turned and vanished; vis T-shirt had gone dead, deprived of sunlight for so long. I heard occasional squeaks from the wet soles of vis shoes; ve seemed to be slowly circ.u.mnavigating the hold. I had no idea what ve was hoping to find-some unlikely breach in the structure itself? I stood and waited. The faint line of light on the floor was visible again, just barely. Dawn was breaking, and daylight could only mean more people awake on deck.

I heard Kuwale approach; ve tapped my arm, then took my elbow. I followed ver to a corner of the hold. Ve pressed my hand to the wall, about a meter up. Ve'd found some kind of utilities panel, guarded by a protective cover, a small spring-loaded door flush with the wall. I hadn't noticed it when we were being lowered in, but the walls were heavily stained and spattered, an effective camouflage pattern.

I explored the exposed panel with my fingertips. There was a low voltage DC power socket. Two threaded metal fittings, each a couple of 247.

centimeters wide, with flow-control levers beneath them. Whatever they supplied-or whatever they were meant to pump out-they didn't strike me as much of an a.s.set. Unless Kuwale had visions of flooding the hold, so we could float up to the hatch?

I almost missed it. At the far right of the panel, there was a shallow-rimmed circular aperture, just five or six millimeters wide. An optical interface port.

Connected to what? The boat's main computer? If the vessel's original design had allowed for carrying cargo, maybe a crew member with a portable terminal would have fed in inventory data from here. In a fishing boat leased to Anthrocosmologists, I didn't have high hopes that it was configured to do anything at all.

I unb.u.t.toned my shirt, while invoking Witness. The software had a crude "virtual terminal" option which would let me view any incoming data, and mime-type as if on a keyboard. I unsealed the interface port in my navel, and stood pressed against the wall, trying to align the two connectors. It was awkward-but after wriggling out of the fishing net, this seemed like no challenge at all.

The best I could get was a brief surge of random text-and then an error message from the software itself. It was picking up an answering signal but the data was scrambled beyond recognition. Both ports were sockets, designed to be joined to an umbilical's connector. Their identical protective rims kept them too far apart-their photodetectors a millimeter beyond the plane of focus of each others signal lasers.

I stepped back, trying not to vent my frustration audibly. Kuwale touched my arm, inquiringly. I put vis hand to my face, shook my head, then guided vis finger to my artificial navel. Ve clapped me on the shoulder: I understand. Okay. We tried.

I stood slumped against the wall beside the panel. It occurred to me that if I buried the ACs' confession, EnGeneUity might still get the blame. If Helen Wu and friends, in hiding, tried claiming responsibility after the fact, they were more than likely to be written off as obscure cranks. No one had ever heard of Anthrocosmologists. Mosala's martyrdom could, still, break the boycott wide open.

I could already hear myself reciting the comforting rationalization over and over in my head: It would have been what she wanted.

I took off my belt and forced the p.r.o.ng of the buckle into the flesh around my metal navel. There was a thin layer of bioengineered connective 248.

tissue around the surgical steel, sealing the permanent wound against infection; the sound of tearing collagen set my teeth on edge, but there were no nerve endings to register the damage. A couple of centimeters down, though, I hit the metal f.l.a.n.g.e which anch.o.r.ed the port in place. I levered the flesh away from the tube, and managed to force the p.r.o.ng past the edge of the f.l.a.n.g.e.

It had seemed like a small enough piece of DIY surgery: enlarging the existing hole in the abdominal wall by seven or eight millimeters. My body disagreed. I persisted, digging around under the f.l.a.n.g.e and trying to twist it free, while conflicting waves of chemical messengers flooded out from the site, delivering razor-sharp rebukes and a.n.a.lgesic comfort in turn. Kuwale came over and helped me, pulling the aperture open. As vis warm fingers brushed the scars where I'd slashed myself in front of Gina, I found I had an erection; it was the wrong response for so many reasons that I almost burst out laughing. Sweat ran into my eyes, blood trickled down toward my groin-and my body kept on blindly signaling desire. And the truth was, if ve'd been willing, I would have happily lain down on the floor and made love in any way possible. Just to feel more of vis skin against my skin. Just to believe that we'd made some kind of connection.

The buried steel tube emerged, trailing a short length of blood-slick optical fiber. I turned away and spat out a mouthful of acid. Mercifully, nothing followed.

I waited for my fingers to stop shaking, then wiped everything clean on my shirt, and unscrewed the whole end a.s.sembly, leaving the windowed port naked, unenc.u.mbered. More like circ.u.mcision than phalloplasty-and a lot of trouble to go through for a millimeter of penetration. I pocketed the metal foreskin, then found the wall socket and tried again.

Large, cheerful, blue-on-white letters appeared in front of me- unable to dazzle, but no less of a shock.

Mitsubishi Shanghai Marine Model Number LMHDV-12-5600 Emergency Options: F-launch Flares B-activate radio Beacon I hit all the possible escape codes, in the hope of finding some wider menu-but this was it, the complete list of choices. All the glorious 249.

fantasies I hadn't dared entertain had involved reaching the ship's main computer, gaining instant access to the net, and archiving the ACs' pre-recorded confession in twenty safe places, while simultaneously sending copies to everyone at the Einstein Conference. This was nothing but a vestigial emergency system-probably built into the design as a minimum statutory requirement, and then ignored when the ship was fitted out by a third party with proper communications and navigation equipment. Ignored-or disconnected? I mimed typing B.

The text of a simple mayday broadcast flowed across the virtual screen. It gave the ship's model number, serial number, lat.i.tude and longitude-if I remembered the map of Stateless correctly, we were closer to the island than I'd thought-and stated that "survivors" were located in the "main cargo hold." I suddenly had a strong suspicion that if we'd bothered to search the rest of the hold, we might have found another panel, hiding two fist-sized red b.u.t.tons labeled BEACON and FLARES-but I didn't want to think about that.

Somewhere up on deck, a siren started screaming. Kuwale was dismayed. "What did you do7 Trigger a fire alarm?" "I broadcast a mayday. I thought flares might get us into trouble." I closed the panel and started reb.u.t.toning my b.l.o.o.d.y shirt, as if hiding the evidence might help.

I heard someone heavy running across the deck. A few seconds later, the siren shut off. Then the hatch was wound halfway open, and Three peered down at us. He was holding a gun, almost absent mindedly. "What good do you think that's going to do you? We're sending out the false-alarm code already; no one's going to take any notice." He seemed more bemused than angry. "All you have to do is sit tight and stop f.u.c.king about, and you'll be free soon enough. So how about some cooperation?"

He unfurled the ladder and came down, alone. I stared up at the strip of pale dawn sky behind him; I could see a fading satellite, but I had no way to reach it. Three picked up two pieces of discarded rope and tossed them at us. "Sit down and tie your feet together. Do it properly and you might get breakfast." He yawned widely, then turned and yelled, "Gior-gio! Anna! Give me a hand!"

Kuwale rushed him, faster than I'd seen anyone move in my life. Three raised the gun and shot ver in the thigh. Kuwale staggered, pirouetting, still moving forward. Three kept the gun aimed squarely 250.

on ver, as vis knees buckled and vis head sagged. As the shot's reverb faded from my skull, I could hear ver gasping for breath.

I stood and shouted abuse at him, barely conscious of what I was saying. I'd lost it: I wanted to take the hold, the ship, the ocean, and wipe them all away like cobwebs. I stepped forward, waving my arms wildly, screaming obscenities. Three glanced at me, perplexed, as if he couldn't imagine what all the fuss was about. I took another step, and he aimed the gun at me.

Kuwale sprang forward and knocked him off his feet. Before he could rise, ve leapt on him and pinned his arms, slamming his right hand against the floor. I was paralyzed for a second, convinced that the struggle was futile, but then I ran to help.

Three must have looked like an indulgent father playing with two belligerent five-year-olds. I tugged at the gun barrel protruding from his huge fist; the weapon might as well have been set in stone. He seemed ready to climb to his feet as soon as he caught his breath, with or without Kuwale's slender frame attached.

I kicked him in the head. He protested, outraged. I attacked the same spot repeatedly, fighting down my revulsion. The skin above his eye split open; I ground my heel hard into the wound, crouching down and pulling on the gun. He cried out in pain and let it slip free-and then half sat up, throwing Kuwale to one side. I fired the gun into the floor behind me, hoping to discourage him from making me use it. Another shot rang out, above. I looked up. Nineteen-Anna?-was lying on her stomach at the edge of the hold.

I aimed the gun at Three, stepping back a few paces. He stared at me, bloodied and angry-but still curious, trying to fathom my senseless actions.

"You want it, don't you? The unraveling. You want Mosala to take the world apart." He laughed and shook his head. "You're too late."

Anna called out, "There's no need for any of this. Please. Put the gun down, and you'll be back on Stateless in an hour. No one wants to harm you."

I shouted back, "Bring me a working notepad. Fast. You have two minutes before I blow his brains out." I meant it-if only for as long as it took to get the words out.

Anna crawled back from the edge; I heard a murmur of angry low voices as she consulted with the others.

251.

Kuwale limped over to me. Vis wound was bleeding steadily; the bul- let had clearly missed the femoral artery, but vis breathing was ragged, ve needed help. Ve said, "They're not going to do it. They'll just keepi stalling. Put yourself in their place-"

Three said calmly, "Ve's right. Whatever value anyone puts on my life ... if Mosala becomes the Keystone, we all die anyway. If you're trying to save her, you've got nothing to trade-because whatever you threaten, it's forfeit either way."

I glanced up toward the deck; I could still hear them arguing. But if they had enough faith in their cosmology to kill Mosala-and to trash their own lives and become self-righteous fugitives, hiding out in rural Mongolia or Turkistan without so much as a share of the media rights ... the threat of one more death was not going to dent their conviction. I said, "I think your work is in urgent need of peer review." I handed Kuwale the gun, then took off my shirt and tied it around the top of vis leg. I'd stopped bleeding, myself; the ruptured sealant tissue was oozing a colorless balm of antibiotics and coagulants.

I returned to the utilities panel and plugged myself in again. Independent of the main computer, the emergency system couldn't be shut down; I repeated the mayday, then fired the flares. I heard three loud hisses of expanding gas-and then a merciless actinic glare began to spread down the far wall, displacing the soft dawn light. The brown patina of algal stains had never been clearer-but it lost its camouflage value completely: the edges of another recessed compartment appeared, the gap around the protective cover starkly etched in black. I looked inside; there were two large b.u.t.tons, just as I'd suspected, and an emergency air supply as well. On close inspection, the faintest hint of a cryptic logo-incomprehensible across all languages and cultures-showed through the stains on the compartment's door.

The conversation above had fallen silent. I was just hoping they wouldn't panic, and rush us.

Three seemed tempted to say something disparaging, but he kept his mouth shut. He eyed Kuwale nervously; maybe he'd decided that ve was the real fanatic who wanted the unraveling, and I'd merely been duped into helping ver.

The flare rose toward the zenith, its light filling the hold. I said, "I don't understand. How do you get to the point where you're ready to kill an innocent woman-just because some computer tells you she can 252.

bring on Armageddon?" Three mimed indifference in the presence of fools. I said, "So you found a theory that could swallow any TOE. A system that could out-explain any kind of physics. But don't kid yourself: it's not science. You might as well have stumbled on some way to add up the gematria numbers of'Mosala' to get 666."

Three said mildly, "Ask Kuwale if it's all cabalistic gibberish. Ask ver about Kinshasa in '43."

"What?"

"That's just . . . apocryphal bulls.h.i.t." Kuwale was drenched in sweat, and showing signs of going into shock. I took the gun, and ve went to sit against the wall.

Three persisted, "Ask ver how Muteba Kazadi died."

I said, "He was seventy-eight years old." I struggled to recall what his biographers had said about his death; given his age, I hadn't paid much attention. "I think the words you're looking for are 'cerebral hemorrhage.'"

Three laughed, disbelieving, and a chill ran through me. Of course they had more than pure information theory behind their beliefs: they also had at least one mythical death by forbidden knowledge-to validate everything, to convince them that the abstractions had teeth.

I said, "Okay. But if Muteba didn't bring down the universe when he went. . . why should Mosala?"

"Muteba wasn't a TOE theorist; he couldn't have become the Keystone. No one knows exactly what he was doing; all his notes have been lost. But some of us think he found a way to mix with information-and when it happened, the shock was too much for him."

Kuwale snorted derisively.

I said, "What's 'mix with information' supposed to mean?"

Three said, "Every physical structure encodes information-but normally it's the laws of physics alone which control how the structure behaves." He grinned. "Drop a Bible and a copy of the Principia together, and they'll fall side-by-side all the way. The fact that the laws of physics are themselves information is invisible, irrelevant. They're as absolute as Newtonian s.p.a.ce-time-a fixed backdrop, not a player.

"But nothing's pure, nothing's independent. Time and s.p.a.ce mix at high velocities. Macroscopic possibilities mix at the quantum level. The four forces mix at high temperatures. And physics and information mix . . . by an unknown process. The symmetry group isn't clear, let alone the 253.

detailed dynamics. But it could just as easily be triggered by pure knowledge-knowledge of information cosmology itself, encoded in a human brain-as by any physical extreme."

"To what effect?"

"Hard to predict." The blood on his face resembled a black caul in the flare's light. "Maybe . . . exposing the deepest unification: revealing precisely how physics is created by explanation-and vice versa. Spinning the vector, rotating all the hidden machinery into view."

"Yeah? If Muteba had such a great cosmic revelation . . . how do you know it didn't turn him into the Keystone? The instant before he died?" I knew I was probably wasting my breath, but I couldn't stop trying to get Mosala off the hook.

Three smirked at my ignorance. "I don't think so. I've seen models of an information cosmos with a Keystone who mixed. And I know we don't live in that universe."

"Why?"

"Because after the Aleph moment, everyone else would get dragged along. Exponential growth: one person mixing, then two, four, eight . .. if that had happened in '43, we'd all have followed Muteba Kazadi by now. We'd all know, firsthand, exactly what killed him."

The flare descended out of sight, plunging the hold into grayness again. I invoked Witness, adapting my eyes to the ambient light again instantly.