Distress - A Novel Part 7

But S=l +(-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)...

=1+0+0+0...

= 1.

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

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

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

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

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

Her critics said she used circular reasoning, a.s.suming from the very 84.beginning all the results she was trying to prove. The details she fed into her computations included 50 much about the known physics of the experimental apparatus that-indirectly, but inevitably-they gave the whole game away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inland, a sprinkling of lights hinted at a city's orderly grid. I felt a sudden rush of unease. Stateless was as beautiful as any atoll, as spectacular as any ocean liner . . . with none of the rea.s.suring qualities of either. How could 1 trust this bizarre artifact not to crumble into the sea7 I 86.was accustomed to standing on solid rock a billion years old, or riding machines of a suitably modest human scale. In my own lifetime, this whole island had been nothing but a cloud of minerals adrift over half the Pacific-and from this vantage, it didn't seem beyond belief that the ocean might surge in through a thousand invisible pores and channels to dissolve it all, reclaim it all, at any moment.

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

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

There was a security gate at the end of the umbilical, but no airport staff in sight, and no obvious device for interrogating my pa.s.sport. Stateless placed no restrictions on immigration, let alone the entry of temporary visitors-but they did prohibit certain imports. Beside the gate was a multilingual sign which read: feel FEEL TO TRY TO BRING THROUGH WEAPONS. we'll FEEL FREE TO TRY TO DESTROY THEM.

STATELESS AIRPORT SYNDICATE.

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

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

Nevertheless, I stood back for several minutes, hoping that someone in uniform would appear to put my mind at ease. My insurance company 88.had declined to offer me any kind of cover once I was on Stateless-and when my bank found out I'd been here, they wouldn't be pleased; they still owned most of the chips in my gut. Legally, the risk wasn't mine to take.

No one turned up. I walked through. The frame of the scanner was loose, and it shuddered slightly-my body pinning a tiny portion of the magnetic flux, dragging it forward, then releasing it to rebound like elastic-but no microwave pulses seared my abdomen, and no alarms went off.

The gate led into a modern airport, not much different from many I'd seen in small European cities, with clean-lined architecture, and movable seating which groups of people had arranged in inward-facing rings. There were only three airline counters, and they all displayed much smaller versions of their logos than usual, as if not wishing to attract too much attention. Booking pa.s.sage here, I'd found no flights advertised openly on the net; I'd had to post a specific query in order to obtain any information. The European Federation, India, and several African and Latin American countries only enforced the minimal boycott of selected high technology which the UN demanded; these airlines were operating entirely within the laws of their home nations. Still, irritating the j.a.panese, Korean, Chinese and US governments- not to mention the biotech multinationals-would always carry a risk. Committing the offense discreetly wouldn't conceal anything, but no doubt it acted as a gesture of obeisance, and lessened the perceived need for examples to be made of the collaborators.

I collected my suitcase and stood by the baggage roundabout, trying to get my bearings. I watched my fellow pa.s.sengers drift away, some greeted by friends, some going on alone. Most spoke in English or French; there was no official language here, but almost two-thirds of the population had migrated from other Pacific islands. Choosing to live on Stateless might always be a political decision in the end-and some Greenhouse refugees apparently preferred to spend years in Chinese detention camps instead, in the hope of eventually being accepted into that entrepreneurial dreamland-but after seeing your home washed into the ocean, I could imagine that a self-repairing (and currently increasing) landma.s.s might hold a special attraction. Stateless represented a reversal of fortune: sunlight and biotechnology playing the whole disaster movie backward. Better than raging at the storm. Fiji and 89.Samoa were finally growing new islands of their own, but they weren't yet habitable-and both governments were paying several billion dollars for the privilege, in license fees and consultants' charges. They'd carry the debt into the twenty-second century.

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

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

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

Walsh made a short speech, wisps of gray hair blowing in the breeze. I couldn't fault her skills with camera or crowd: she had the knack of appearing dignified and authoritative, without seeming stern or aloof.

90.And I had to admire her stamina: she displayed more energy after the long flight than I could have summoned if my life had been in danger.

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

The small crowd roared, "NO!"

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

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

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

"Yes. How-?"

"Come to film Violet Mosala."

"That's right. Do you . . . work with her?" Ve looked almost too young even to be a doctoral student-but then, Mosala had completed her own PhD at twenty.

Ve shook vis head. "I've never met her."

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

"Here for the Einstein Conference?"

91."Why else?"

I shrugged. "There must be other things happening on Stateless." Ve didn't reply.

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

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

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

I said, "Good idea. I could use some fresh air."

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

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

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

Kuwale said, "Sarah Knight was a great admirer of Violet Mosala. I think she would have done a good job. Careful. Thorough." That threw me. "You know Sarah?" "We've been in touch." I laughed wearily. "What is this? Sarah Knight is a big fan of Mosala . . .

92.and I'm not. So what7 I'm not some Ignorance Cult member here to do a hatchet job; I'll still treat her fairly."

"That's not the issue."

"It's the only issue I'm willing to discuss with you. Why do you imagine it's any of your business how this doc.u.mentary's made?"

Kuwale said calmly, "I don't. The doc.u.mentary's not important."

"Right. Thanks."

"No offense. But it's not what I'm talking about."

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

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

"I'm an interested observer."

"Yeah? That explains everything."

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

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

"For what?"

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

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

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

Kuwale was clearly having grave second thoughts about me. I still wanted to know what the first ones had been. Ve said derisively, "Sarah Knight never agreed to anything-not in so many words-but at least she understood what was going on. What kind of journalist are you? Do 93.you ever go looking for information? Or do you just grab an electronic teat and see what comes out when you suck7"

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

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

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

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

I asked Sisyphus, "So what does AC stand for?"

"In what context?"

"Any context. Besides alternating current."

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

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

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

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

94."So what's the meaning which makes perfect sense-but isn't listed in any respectable database? What's the one answer I can't get out of my favorite electronic teat?"

Sisyphus didn't dignify that with a reply.

I nearly apologized, but I caught myself in time.

95.11.

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

And I was finally going to meet my subject.

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

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

It was all too good, by far. Peaceful surroundings and an untraumatic 96.subject-what had I done to deserve this? I'd never even found out who Lydia had sent into the breach to make Distress. Who'd be spending the day in a psychiatric hospital in Miami or Berne, while tranquilizers were withdrawn from one strait-jacketed victim after another, to test the effects of some non-sedative drug on the syndrome, or to obtain scans of the neuropathology unsullied by pharmacological effects?

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

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

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

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

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

Marian Fox, president of the International Union of Theoretical Physicists, took the stage and introduced Mosala. She uttered all the words of praise that anyone would have used in her place: respected, inspirational, dedicated, exceptional. I had no doubt that she was perfectly sincere . . . but the language of achievement always seemed to me to crumble into self-parody. How many people on the planet could be exceptional7 How many could be unique? I had no wish to see Violet Mosala portrayed as no different from the most mediocre of her colleagues . . . but all the laudatory cliches conveyed nothing. They just rendered themselves meaningless.

Mosala walked to the podium, trying to look graceful under hyperbole; 97.a section of the audience applauded wildly, and several people rose to their feet. I made a mental note to ask Indrani Lee for her thoughts as to when and why these strange adulatory rituals-observed almost universally with actors and musicians-had begun to be followed for a handful of celebrity scientists. I suspected it was all down to the Ignorance Cults; they'd struggled so hard to raise popular interest in their cause that it would have been surprising if they hadn't ended up generating some equally vehement opposing pa.s.sions. And there were plenty of social strata where the cults were pure establishment, and there could be no greater act of rebellion than idolizing a physicist.

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

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