The auditorium exploded with laughter. Walsh remained standing for a few seconds, then took her seat with remarkable dignity: unrepentant, unashamed, unfazed. I wondered if all she’d wanted was for Mosala to hit back on the same level. There was no question that Planet Noise would find a way to twist the exchange into a victory for Walsh: SCIENCE PRODIGY, CONFRONTED WITH THE FACTS, INSULTS RESPECTED AUTHOR. But most of the media would report that Mosala had responded with great restraint to deliberate provocation.
There were a few more questions—all of them innocuous and mildly technical—then the session was declared at an end. I walked around to the back of the stage, where Karin De Groot was waiting for me.
De Groot was unmistakably ifem—a look which was not at all “halfway toward” androgynous; it was far more distinctive than that. While ufems and umales exaggerated well-established facial gender cues, and asexes eliminated them, the first ifems and imales had modeled the human visual system and found completely new clusters of parameters which would set them apart at a glance—without rendering them all homogeneous.
She shook my hand then led me toward one of the hotel’s small meeting rooms. She said quietly, “Go easy on her, will you? That wasn’t pleasant back there.”
“I can’t imagine anyone handling it better.”
“Violet’s not someone I’d want as an enemy; she never hits back without thinking it through. But that doesn’t mean she’s made of stone.”
The room had a table and seating for twelve, but only Mosala was waiting there. I’d been half expecting a private security guard—but then, the fan club notwithstanding, she wasn’t quite in the rock star league. And Kuwale’s dire intimations notwithstanding, there was probably no need.
Mosala greeted me warmly. “I'm sorry we couldn’t do this earlier, but I'm afraid I hadn’t set aside any time for it. After all those meetings with Sarah Knight, I’d assumed the whole planning stage was over.”
All those meetings with Sarah Knight? Pre-production should never have gone that far without SeeNet’s approval.
I said, “I'm sorry to put you through it again. There’s always some unavoidable duplication when a new director takes over a project.”
Mosala nodded, distracted. We sat and went through the whole conference timetable together, comparing notes. Mosala asked not to be filmed at more than fifty percent of the sessions she attended. “I’d go mad if you were watching me all the time, catching me out whenever I pulled a face at something I disagreed with.” I agreed, but then we haggled over the particular fifty percent—I definitely wanted reaction shots for all the talks where her work would be explicitly discussed.
We decided on three interview sessions, two hours each, the first on Wednesday afternoon.
Mosala said, “I still have some trouble understanding what your aim is with this program. If the subject is TOEs… why not just cover the whole conference, instead of putting the spotlight on me?”
“Audiences find the theories more accessible if they come packaged as something which a particular person has done.” I shrugged. “Or so the network executives have convinced themselves—and probably convinced the audiences as well, by now.” SeeNet stood for Science, Education and Entertainment Network, but the S-word was often treated as a source of embarrassment incapable of being intrinsically interesting, and requiring the maximum possible sugar-coating. “With a profile we can touch on some broader issues, though, in terms of the way they affect your day-to-day life. The Ignorance Cults, for example.”
Mosala said drily, “You don’t think they get enough publicity already?”
“Yes—but most of it’s on their own terms. The profile could be a chance for people to see them through your eyes.”
She laughed. “You want me to tell your audience what I think of the cults? You won’t have time for anything else, if I get started.”
“You could stick to the big three.”
Mosala hesitated. De Groot flashed me a warning look, but I ignored it. I said, “Culture First?”
“Culture First is the most pathetic. It’s the last refuge for people desperate to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals'—while remaining complete scientific illiterates. Most of them are just nostalgic for the era when a third of the planet was controlled by people whose definition of a civilized education was Latin, European military history, and the selected doggerel of a few overgrown British schoolboys.”
I grinned. “Mystical Renaissance?”
Mosala smiled ironically. “They start from such good intentions, don’t they? They say most people are blind to the world around them: sleepwalkers in a zombie’s routine of mundane work and mind-numbing entertainment. I couldn’t agree more. They say they want everyone on the planet to become ‘attuned’ to the universe we’re living in, and to share the awe they feel when they confront the deep strangeness of it alclass="underline" the dizzying length and time scales of cosmology, the endlessly rich complexities of the biosphere, the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
“Well… all of those things inspire awe in me, too—some of the time—but Mystical Renaissance treats that response as an end in itself. And they want science to pull back from investigating anything which gives them a high in its pristine, unexplained state—in case they don’t get the same rush from it, once it’s better understood. Ultimately, they’re not interested in the universe at all—any more than people who romanticize the life of animals into a cartoon world where no blood is spilled… or people who deny the existence of ecological damage, because they don’t want to change the way they live. Followers of Mystical Renaissance only want the truth if it suits them, if it induces the right emotions. If they were honest, they’d just stick a hot wire in their brain at whatever location made them believe they were undergoing a constant mystical epiphany—because in the end, that’s all they’re after.”
This was priceless; no one of Mosala’s stature had ever really let fly against the cults like this. Not on the public record. “Humble Science!?”
Mosala’s eyes flashed with anger. “They’re the worst, by far. The most patronizing, the most cynical. Janet Walsh is just a tactician and a figurehead; most of the real leaders are far better educated. And in their collective wisdom, they’ve decided that the fragile blossom of human culture just can’t survive any more revelations about what human beings really are, or how the universe actually functions.
“If they spoke out against the abuse of biotechnology, I’d back them all the way. If they spoke out against weapons research, I’d do the same. If they stood for some coherent system of values which made the most pitiless scientific truths less alienating to ordinary people… without denying those truths… I’d have no quarrel with them at all.
“But when they decide that all knowledge—beyond a border which is theirs to define—is anathema to civilization and sanity, and that it’s up to some self-appointed cultural elite to generate a set of hand-made ‘life-affirming’ myths to take its place… to imbue human existence with some suitably uplifting—and politically expedient—meaning… they become nothing but the worst kind of censors and social engineers.”
I suddenly noticed that Mosala’s slender arms, spread out on the table in front of her, were trembling; she was far angrier than I’d realized. I said, “It’s almost nine, but we could take this up again after Buzzo’s lecture, if you have time?”