I wandered through the airport, not really looking to buy anything, just filming the scene for my scrapbook. People were shouting and haggling in Portuguese, Bahasa and English—and, according to Sisyphus, Tetum and Vaiqueno, local languages undergoing a slow resurrection. The air conditioning was probably working, but the body heat of the crowd must have almost balanced its effect; after five minutes, I was dripping with sweat.
Traders were selling rugs, T-shirts, pineapples, oil paintings, statues of saints. I passed by a stall of dried fish, and had to concentrate to keep my stomach from heaving; the smell was no problem, but however many times I confronted it, the sight of dead animals offered for human consumption still left me reeling, more than a human corpse ever did.
Engineered crops could match or exceed all the nutritional benefits of meat; a small flesh trade still existed in Australia, but it was discreet and heavily cosmeticized.
I saw a rack of what looked like Masarini jackets, on sale for a tenth of the price they would have fetched in New York or Sydney. I waved my notepad at them; it found one in my size, interrogated the tag in the collar, and chimed approval—but I had my doubts. I asked the thin teenage boy who was standing by the rack, “Are these real authentication chips, or…?” He smiled innocently and said nothing. I bought the jacket, then ripped out the tag and handed the chip back to him. “You might as well get some more use out of it.”
I ran into Indrani Lee beside a software stall. She said, “I think I’ve spotted someone else who’s headed for the conference.”
“Where?” I felt a mixture of excitement and panic; if it was Violet Mosala herself, I was still unprepared to face her.
I followed Lee’s gaze to an elderly Caucasian woman, who was arguing heatedly with a trader selling scarves. Her face was vaguely familiar, but in profile I couldn’t put a name to it.
“Who is that?”
“Janet Walsh.”
“No. You’re joking.”
But it was her.
Janet Walsh was an award-winning English novelist—and one of the world’s most prominent members of Humble Science! She’d first come to fame in the twenties with Wings of Desire ("a delicious, mischievous, incisive fable"—The Sunday Times), a story set among an “alien race,” who happened to look exactly like humans… except that their males were born with large butterfly wings growing out of their penises, which were necessarily and bloodily severed when they lost their virginity. The alien females (who lacked hymens), were all callous and brutal. After being raped and abused by everyone in sight for most of the novel, the hero discovers a magical technique for making his lost wings grow back—on his shoulders—and flies off into the sunset. ("Gleefully subverts all gender stereotypes"—Playboy.)
Since then, Walsh had specialized in morality tales concerning the evils of “male science” (sic), an ill-defined but invariably calamitous activity—which even women could perform if they were led sufficiently astray, although apparently that was no excuse to change the label. I’d quoted her pithiest comment on the subject in Gender Scrutiny Overload: “If it’s arrogant, hubristic, dominating, reductionist, exploitative, spiritually impoverished, and dehumanizing—what else should we call it but male?”
I said, “Why! Why is she here?”
“Hadn’t you heard? But you were probably traveling; I saw it on the net just before I left. One of the murdochs hired her as a special correspondent to cover the Einstein Conference. Planet News, I think.”
“Janet Walsh is going to report on progress in Theories of Everything?” Even for Planet Noise, that was surreal. Sending members of the British royal family to cover famines, and soap opera stars to cover summit meetings, didn’t come close.
Lee said drily, “'Report’ may not be quite the word for it.”
I hesitated. “Can I ask you something? I… never really had a chance before I left to look into the cults’ response to the conference.” Sisyphus would have picked up any relevant stories—but I’d requested a briefing pared down to the essentials. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard whether or not they’re… taking much interest?”
Lee regarded me with amazement. “They’ve been chartering direct flights from all over the planet for the past week. If Walsh is coming the long way, at the last minute, it’s only to keep up appearances for her employer’s sake—to maintain a veneer of non-partisanship. Stateless will be swarming with her supporters.” She added gleefully, “Janet Walsh! Now that makes the trip worthwhile!”
I felt a stab of betrayal. “You said you weren’t—”
She scowled. “Not because I'm a follower! Janet Walsh is a hobby of mine. By day I study the rationalists. By night I study their opposites.”
“How very… Manichean.” Walsh bought the scarf and started walking away from the stall, not quite toward us. I turned so my face was hidden from her. We’d met once, at a bioethics conference in Zambia; it hadn’t been pleasant. I laughed numbly. “So this is going to be your ideal working holiday?”
Lee was puzzled. “And yours, too, surely? You must have been hoping desperately for something more than a few sleepy seminars to film. Now you’ll have Violet Mosala versus Janet Walsh. Physics versus the Ignorance Cults. Maybe even riots in the streets: anarchy comes to Stateless, at last. What more could you possibly ask for?”
Denied access to Australian, Indonesian and Papua-New-Guinean airspace, the (Portuguese-registered) plane headed southwest across the Indian Ocean. The waters looked wind-swept, gray-blue and threatening, though the sky above was clear. We’d curve right around the continent of Australia, and we wouldn’t sight land again until we arrived.
I was seated beside two middle-aged Polynesian men in business suits, who conversed loudly and incessantly in French. Mercifully, their dialect was so unfamiliar to me that I could almost tune them out; there was nothing on the plane’s headset worth listening to, and without a signal the device made a poor substitute for earplugs.
Sisyphus could reach the net via IR and the plane’s satellite link, and I considered downloading the reports I’d missed about the cult presence on Stateless—but I’d be there soon enough; anticipation seemed masochistic. I forced my attention back to the subject of All-Topology Models.
The concept of ATMs was simple enough to state: the universe was considered to possess, at the deepest level, a mixture of every single mathematically possible topology.
Even in the oldest quantum theories of gravity, the “vacuum” of empty space-time had been viewed as a seething mass of virtual worm-holes, and other more exotic topological distortions, popping in and out of existence. The smooth appearance at macroscopic lengths and human timescales was just the visible average of a hidden riot of complexity. In a way, it was like ordinary matter: a sheet of flexible plastic betrayed nothing to the naked eye of its microstructure—molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks—but knowledge of those constituents allowed the bulk substance’s physical properties to be computed: its modulus of elasticity, for example. Space-time wasn’t made of atoms, but its properties could be understood by viewing it as being “built” from a hierarchy of ever more convoluted deviations from its apparent state of continuity and mild curvature. Quantum gravity had explained why observable space-time, underpinned by an infinite number of invisible knots and detours, behaved as it did in the presence of mass (or energy): curving in exactly the fashion required to produce the gravitational force.