Mosala said softly, “That’s nonsense.”
I glanced at her warily. She was smiling. She turned to me, all hostilities momentarily forgotten, and whispered, “He’s wrong! He thinks he’s found a way to discard the isolated-point topologies; he’s cooked up an isomorphism which maps them all into a set of measure zero. But he’s using the wrong measure. In this context, he has to use Perrini’s, not Saupe’s! How could he have missed that?”
I had only the vaguest idea of what she was talking about. Isolated-point topologies were “spaces” where nothing actually touched anything else. A “measure” was a kind of generalization of length, like a higher-dimensional area or volume—only they included much wilder abstractions than that. When you summed something over all the topologies, you multiplied each contribution to the infinite sum by a “measure” of “how big” the topology was… a bit like weighting the worldwide average of some statistic according to the population of each country or according to its land area, or its Gross Domestic Product, or some other measure of its relative significance.
Buzzo believed he’d found a way of tackling the calculation of any real physical quantity which made the effective contribution of all the universes of isolated points equal to zero.
Mosala believed he was mistaken.
I said, “So, you’ll confront him when he’s finished?”
She turned back to the proceedings, smiling to herself. “Let’s wait and see. I don’t want to embarrass him. And someone else is sure to spot the error.”
Question time arrived. I strained my limited grasp of the subject, trying to decide if any of the issues raised were Mosala’s in disguise—but I thought not. When the session ended and she still hadn’t spoken, I asked point blank: “Why didn’t you tell him?”
She became irritated. “I could be mistaken. I’ll have to give it more thought. It’s not a trivial question; he may have had a good reason for the choice he made.”
I said, “This was a prelude to his paper on Sunday week, wasn’t it? Clearing the ground for his masterpiece?” Buzzo, Mosala and Yasuko Nishide were scheduled to present their rival TOEs—in strict alphabetical order—on the last day of the conference.
“That’s right.”
“So… if he’s wrong about the choice of measure, he could end up falling flat on his face?”
Mosala gave me a long, hard look. I wondered if I’d finally managed to push the decision out of my hands: if she’d withdraw her cooperation entirely, leaving me with no subject to film, no reason to remain.
She said coldly, “I have enough trouble deciding when my own techniques are valid; I don’t have time to be an expert on everyone else’s work as well.” She glanced at her notepad. “I believe that’s all the filming we agreed on for today. So if you’ll excuse me, I'm meeting someone for lunch.”
I saw Mosala heading for one of the hotel restaurants, so I turned the other way and walked out of the building. The midday sky was dazzling; in the shadows of awnings the buildings retained their subtle hues, but in the glare of full sunlight they took on an appearance reminiscent of the oldest quarters of some North African cities, all white stone against blue sky. There was an ocean-scented breeze from the east, warm but not unpleasant.
I walked down side streets at random, until I came to an open square. In the middle there was a small circular park, some twenty meters wide, covered with luxuriant grass—wild and unmown—and dotted with small palms. It was the first vegetation I’d seen on Stateless, except for potted plants in the hotel. Soil was a luxury here; all the necessary minerals could be found in the ocean, in trace amounts, but trying to provide the island with enough topsoil for agriculture would have meant trawling several thousand times the area of water required for the algae-and-plankton-based food chain which met all the same needs.
I gazed at this modest patch of greenery, and the longer I stared, the more the sight of it unnerved me. It took me a while longer to understand why.
The whole island was an artifact, as much as any building of metal and glass. It was maintained by engineered lifeforms—but their wild ancestors were as remote to them as ancient buried ore bodies were to gleaming titanium alloy. This tiny park, which was really just an overgrown potted plant, should have driven that home mercilessly, puncturing the illusion that I was standing on anything but the deck of a vast machine.
It didn’t.
I’d seen Stateless from the air, spreading its tendrils out into the Pacific, as organically beautiful as any living creature on the planet. I knew that every brick and tile in this city had been grown from the sea, not fired in any kiln. The whole island appeared so “natural,” on its own terms, that it was the grass and the trees which looked artificial. This patch of wild—"authentic"—nature seemed alien and contrived.
I sat on a bench—reef-rock, but softer than the paving beneath it; more polymer, less mineral?—half shaded by one of the (ironic?) palm-tree-shaped sculptures which ringed the edge of the square. None of the locals were walking on the grass, so I stayed back. I hadn’t regained my appetite, so I just sat and let the warm air and the sight of the people wash over me.
Unwillingly, I recalled my ludicrous fantasy of endless carefree Sunday afternoons with Gina. Why had I ever imagined that she’d want to sit by a fountain in Epping with me, for the rest other life? How could I have believed, for so long, that she was happy… when all I’d made her feel, in the end, was ignored and invisible, suffocated and trapped?
My notepad beeped. I slid it from my pocket and Sisyphus announced, “WHO epidemiology statistics for March have just been released. Notified cases of Distress now number five hundred and twenty-three. That’s a thirty percent increase in a month.” A graph appeared on the screen. “There have been more new cases reported in March than in the previous six months combined.”
I said numbly, “I don’t remember asking to be told this.”
“August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m.” The hotel room in Manchester. “You said, ‘Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.'”
“Okay. Go on.”
“There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last inquired.” A list of titles appeared. “Do you want to hear their abstracts?”
“Not really.”
I glanced up from the screen, and noticed a man working at an easel on the far side of the square. He was a stocky Caucasian, probably in his fifties, with a tanned, lined face. Since I wasn’t eating, I should have been making good use of my time by replaying Henry Buzzo’s lecture to myself, or diligently plowing through some relevant background material. After a few minutes contemplating this prospect, I got up and walked around to take a look at the work-in-progress.
The picture was an impressionistic snapshot of the square. Or partly impressionistic; the palms and the grass looked like patches of green light caught reflected on an uneven windowpane, through which the rest of the scene was viewed—but the buildings and pavement were rendered as soberly as they would have been by any architect’s computer. The whole thing was executed on Transition—a material which changed color under the influence of an electric stylus. Different voltages and frequencies made each type of embedded metal ion migrate toward the surface of the white polymer at a different rate; it looked almost like oil paint appearing from nowhere—and I’d heard that creating a desired color could be as much of an art as mixing oils. Erasure was easy, though; reversing the voltage drove all the pigments back out of sight.