De Groot touched her elbow. They leaned toward each other, and conversed sotto voce, at length.
Mosala said, “We have an interview scheduled for Wednesday, don’t we? I'm sorry, but I can’t spare any time before then,”
“Of course, that’s fine.”
“And those comments I just made are all off the record. They’re not to be used.”
My heart sank. “Are you serious?”
“This was supposed to be a meeting to discuss your filming schedule. Nothing I said here was intended to be made public.”
I pleaded, “I’ll put it all in context: Janet Walsh went out of her way to insult you—and at the media conference you kept your cool, you were restrained—but afterward, you expressed your opinions in detail. What’s wrong with that? Or do you want Humble Science! to start censoring you!"
Mosala closed her eyes for a moment then said carefully, “Those are my opinions, yes, and I'm entitled to them. I'm also entitled to decide who hears them and who doesn’t. I don’t want to inflame this whole ugly mess any further. So would you please respect my wishes and tell me that you won’t use any of it?”
“We don’t have to sort this out immediately. I can send you a rough cut—”
Mosala gestured dismissively. “I signed an agreement with Sarah Knight, saying I could veto anything, on the spot, with no questions asked.”
“If you did, that was with her, personally, not with SeeNet. All SeeNet have from you is a standard clearance.”
Mosala did not look happy. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you? Sarah said you’d explain why you had to take over the project at such short notice. After all the work she put into it, all she left was a ten-second message saying: ‘I'm off the profile, Andrew Worth is the new director, he’ll tell you the reason why.'”
I said carefully, “Sarah may have given you the wrong impression. SeeNet had never officially chosen her to make the documentary. And it was SeeNet who approached you and set things up initially—not Sarah. It was never a freelance project she was developing independently, to offer to them. It was a SeeNet project which she wanted to direct, so she sank a lot of her own time into trying to make that happen.”
De Groot said, “But why didn’t it happen? All that research, all that preparation, all that enthusiasm… why didn’t it pay off?”
What could I say? That I’d stolen the project from the one person who truly deserved it… so I could have a fully paid South Pacific holiday, away from the stresses of serious frankenscience?
I said, “Network executives are in a world of their own. If I could understand how they made their decisions, I’d probably be up there with them myself.”
De Groot and Mosala regarded me with silent disbelief.
12
TechnoLalia, SeeNet’s major rival, insisted on labeling Henry Buzzo “the revered guru of trans-millennial physics"—and frequently implied that he should retire as soon as possible, leaving the field open to younger colleagues who rated more dynamic clichés: wunderkinder und enfants terrible “surfing pre-space’s infinite-dimensional nouvelle vague.” (Lydia dismissed TL as a guccione, “all hip and no brain.” I couldn’t argue with that, but I often feared that SeeNet was heading for a similar fate.) Buzzo had shared the Nobel back in 2036, with the seven other architects of the Standard Unified Field Theory—but he, too, was now trying to demolish, or at least supersede, it. I was reminded of two early-twentieth-century physicists: J. J. Thomson, who’d established the existence of electrons as distinct particles, and George Thomson, his son, who’d shown that they could also behave like waves. It was an enlargement of vision, not a contradiction—and no doubt Buzzo was hoping to perform a similar feat in a single generation.
Buzzo was a tall, bald, heavily wrinkled man, eighty-three years old but showing no signs of frailty. He was a lively speaker, and he seemed to strike sparks off the audience of ATM specialists… but even his arcane jokes, which left them in stitches, went over my head. His introduction contained plenty of familiar phrases, and plenty of equations which I’d seen before—but once he started doing things with those equations, I was completely out of my depth. Every now and then he’d display graphics: knotted gray-white tubes, with green-gridded surfaces and bright red geodesic lines snaking across them. Triplets of mutually perpendicular arrowed vectors would blossom from a point, then move around a loop or a knot, tipping and twisting along the way. No sooner would I start to feel that I was making sense of these diagrams, though, than Buzzo would wave a hand at the screen dismissively and say something like: “I can’t show you the most crucial aspect—what’s happening in the bundle of linear frames—but I'm sure you can all picture it: just imagine embedding this surface in twelve dimensions…”
I sat two (empty) seats to the left of Violet Mosala, but I hardly dared glance her way. When I did, she kept her eyes on Buzzo, but her expression became stony. I couldn’t imagine what means she suspected I’d employed to win the contract for the documentary. (Bribery? Extortion? Sex? If only SeeNet could have been so divertingly Byzantine.) It didn’t really matter how I’d done it, though; the injustice of the end result was self-evident, regardless.
“So this path integral,” said Buzzo, “gives us an invariant!” His latest crisp diagram of knotted tubes suddenly blurred into an amorphous gray-green haze—symbolizing the shift from a particular space-time to its generalization in pre-space—but the three vectors he’d sent to circumnavigate the simulated universe remained fixed. “Invariants” in an All-Topologies Model were physical quantities which could be shown to be independent of such things as the curvature of space-time in the region of interest, and even how many dimensions it possessed; finding invariants was the only way to make any kind of coherent physics emerge from the daunting indeterminacy of pre-space. I fixed my gaze on Buzzo’s steady vectors; I wasn’t entirely lost yet, after all.
“But that’s obvious. Now comes the tricky part: imagine extending the same operator to spaces where the Ricci curvature is nowhere-defined—”
Now I was lost.
I gave serious thought to calling Sarah again, and asking if she’d be willing to take back Violet Mosala. I could have handed her the footage I’d shot so far, smoothed out the administrative glitches with Lydia, and then crawled away somewhere to recover—from Gina’s departure, from Junk DNA—without having to pretend that I was doing anything but convalescing. I’d told myself that I couldn’t afford to stop working, even for a month… but that was a question of what I was used to, not a question of starvation—and without someone to share the rent, I was going to have to move house anyway. Distress would have kept me in leafy, tranquil Eastwood for a year or more—but whatever I did now, I was headed back to the outer sprawl.
I don’t know what stopped me from walking out of that incomprehensible lecture and away from Mosala’s justified distaste. Pride? Stubbornness? Inertia? Maybe it came down to the presence of the cults. Walsh’s tactics could only become uglier—but that only made it seem more of a betrayal to abandon the project. I’d given in to SeeNet’s demands for frankenscience in Junk DNA; this was a chance to atone, by showing the world someone who was standing up against the cults. And it wasn’t as if the rhetoric was about to give way to violence, Kuwale notwithstanding. This was arcane physics, not biotechnology, and even at the Zambian bioethics conference, where I’d last seen Walsh, it was God’s Image as usual—not Humble Science!—who’d pelted speakers with monkey embryos and doused unsympathetic journalists in human blood. No religious fundamentalists had bothered with the Einstein Centenary Conference; TOEs were either beyond their comprehension, or beneath their contempt.