We seemed to be alone in the house. Conroy said, “Take a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?” She moved toward a small beverage dispenser in a corner of the room. I glanced at the machine, and declined. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar synthesizer model—essentially a scaled-up pharm; it could have served anything from orange juice to a cocktail of neuroactive amines. Its presence on Stateless surprised me—I hadn’t been allowed to bring my own out-of-date pharm here—but not having memorized the schedules to the UN resolution, I wasn’t sure what technology was prohibited universally, and what was banned only from Australian exports.
Conroy sat opposite me, composed, but thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, “Akili Kuwale is a very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful person, but ve’s something of a loose cannon.” She smiled disarmingly. “I can’t imagine what impression you have of us, after ve led you on with all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense.” She glanced at my notepad again, meaningfully. “I suppose our insistence on strict privacy doesn’t help matters, either—but there’s nothing sinister about that, I assure you. You must appreciate the power of the media to take a group of people, and their ideas, and distort the representation of both to suit… any number of agendas.” I started to reply—to concede the point, actually—but she cut me off. “I'm not trying to libel your profession, but we’ve seen it happen so many times, to other groups, that you shouldn’t be surprised if we treat it as an inevitable consequence of going public.
“So we’ve made the difficult choice, for the sake of autonomy, to refuse to be represented by outsiders at all. We don’t wish to be portrayed to the world at large: fairly or unfairly, sympathetically or otherwise. And if we have no public image whatsoever, the problem of distortion vanishes. We are who we are.”
I said, “And yet, you’ve asked me here.”
Conroy nodded, regretfully. “Wasting your time, and risking making things even worse. But what choice did we have? Akili stirred your curiosity, and we could hardly expect you to let the matter drop. So… I'm willing to discuss our ideas with you directly rather than leaving you to track down and piece together a lot of unreliable hearsay from third parties. But it must, all, be off the record.”
I shifted in my seat. “You don’t want me drawing any more attention to you by asking questions of the wrong people—so you’ll answer them yourself, just to shut me up?”
I’d expected this blunt appraisal to be met with wounded denials and a barrage of euphemisms but Conroy replied calmly, “That’s right.”
Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value: Just say I asked you more or less at random—that I’ve been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you. If the ACs thought my hastily improvised story for Lee about the “vanishing informant” Kuwale was in the process of being repeated to every last journalist and physicist on Stateless, no wonder they’d wasted no time in calling me in.
I said, “Why are you willing to trust me? What’s to stop me from using everything you say?”
Conroy spread her hands. “Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I’ve viewed your previous work; it’s clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don’t interest you. You’re here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference—which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture—they’re forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we’re not. And with no images of us—unless you care to fake them—what would you put in your documentary? A five-minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?”
I didn’t know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosalas antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.
What’s more, I couldn’t help but sympathize a little with the ACs’ stand. It seemed that almost everyone I’d encountered in the last few years—from gender migrants fleeing other people’s definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe—was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons, although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.
I said cautiously, “I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I’ll try to respect your wishes.”
This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she’d weighed up everything before we’d even met and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.
She said, “Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won’t waste your time, though, listing what we do and don’t have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth-century France, or eighteenth-century Germany… you can mine all the distant history yourself, if you really care. I’ll start with a man I'm sure you’ve heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler.” I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he’d played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.
Conroy continued, “Wheeler was a great advocate of the idea of a participatory universe: a universe shaped by the inhabitants who observe and explain it. He had a favorite metaphor for this concept… do you know the old game of twenty questions? One person thinks of an object, and the other keeps asking yes-or-no questions, to try to find out what it is.
“There’s another way to play the game, though. You don’t choose any object at all, to start with. You just answer the questions ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ more or less at random—but constrained by the need to be consistent with what you’ve already said. If you’ve said that ‘it’ is blue all over, you can’t change your mind later and say that it’s red… even though you still have no precise idea what ‘it’ really is. But as more and more questions are asked, what ‘it’ might be becomes narrower and narrower.
“Wheeler suggested that the universe itself behaved like that undefined object—only coming into being as something specific through a similar process of interrogation. We make observations, we carry out experiments—we ask questions about ‘it.’ We get back answers—some of them more or less random—but they’re never absolute contradictions. And the more questions we ask… the more precisely the universe takes shape.”
I said, “You mean like… making measurements on microscopic objects? Some properties of subatomic particles don’t exist until they’re measured—and the measurement you get has a random component—but if you measure the same thing a second time, you get the same result.” This was old, old ground, well-established and uncontroversial. “Surely that’s the kind of thing Wheeler would have meant?”
Conroy agreed. “That’s the definitive example. Which dates back to Neils Bohr, of course, whom Wheeler studied under in Copenhagen, in the nineteen-thirties. Quantum measurement was certainly the inspiration for the whole model. Wheeler and his successors took it further, though.