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 practitioner 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. 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? asex? 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 sparsely, 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 pronounced 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?”
“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… and I'm not. So what? 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 documentary’s made?”
Kuwale said calmly, “I don’t. The documentary’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?”