“That’s why it’s possible for billions of people to be wrong. That’s why we’re not living with Stone Age cosmology or even Newtonian physics. Most explanations just aren’t powerful, rich or coherent enough to bring a whole universe into being—and to explain a mind capable of holding such an explanation.”
I sat and stared at Conroy, not wishing to insult her, but at a loss for anything polite to say. This was pure cult-speak at last: she might as well have been telling me that Violet Mosala and Henry Buzzo were the incarnations of a pair of warring Hindu deities, or that Atlantis would rise from the ocean and the stars would fall from the sky when the Final Equation was written.
Except that, if she had, I doubt I would have felt the same uneasy tingling down my back and across my forearms. She’d steered close enough to the shores of science, for enough of the way, to disarm me a little.
She continued. “We can’t watch the universe emerge; we’re part of it, we’re trapped inside the space-time created by the act of explanation. All we can hope to witness, in the progression of time, is one person become the first to hold the TOE in vis mind, and grasp its consequences, and—invisibly, imperceptibly—understand us all into being.”
She laughed suddenly, breaking the spell. “It’s only a theory. The mathematics behind it makes perfect sense—but the reality is untestable, by its very nature. So of course, we could be wrong.
“But now, can you understand why someone like Akili—who believes, perhaps too passionately, that we could be right—wishes to be certain that Violet Mosala will come to no harm?”
I walked further south than I needed to, heading for a tram stop some way down the line from the point where I’d disembarked. I needed to be out under the stars for a while, to come back down to Earth. Even if Stateless didn’t exactly qualify as solid ground.
I was greatly relieved by the night’s revelations: they seemed to wrap up everything, to make sense, finally, of all the distractions which had been keeping me from doing my job.
The ACs were harmless cranks—and, entertaining as it might be to give them a footnote in Violet Mosala, it would hardly undermine the integrity of the whole documentary to leave them out—as they wished, as Mosala wished. Why offend both parties in the name of fearless journalism—in reality, just to raise a brief smirk with SeeNet’s target audience?
And Kuwale was—understandably, if not justifiably—thoroughly paranoid. The life of a potential Keystone was not a matter to be taken lightly. It wasn’t a question of the universe crumbling; if you died before “explaining everything into being,” then obviously someone else would have to do it, and you simply weren’t the one. That didn’t exclude a great deal of reverence, though, for the, as yet, mere candidate creators—and the rumors of Mosala’s emigration must have been enough to start Kuwale seeing enemies crawling out of the reef-rock.
I waited for the tram on a deserted street, gazing up through the clear, cold air at a dazzling richness of stars—and satellites—Conroy’s perversely elegant fantasy still running through my head. I thought: If Mosala is the Keystone, it’s a good thing that she treats the ACs with such contempt. If her explanation of the universe included a conventional TOE, and nothing else, then all was fine. If she’d taken Anthrocosmology seriously, though… surely that would have plucked her right out of the tight web of explanation she was supposed to be spinning for us all. A Theory of Everything wasn’t a Theory of Everything if there was another level, a deeper layer of truth.
And it seemed a sufficiently tall order to have to grow your own universe to wrap yourself in: your own ancestors (needed to explain your own existence), your own billions of human cousins (an unavoidable logical consequence—as would be more distant relatives, animal and plant), your own world to stand on, sun to orbit—and other planets, suns, and galaxies, not obviously essential for survival… but possibly allowing a relatively simple TOE (which could fit in one mind) to be traded for a trickier version which was more economical with cosmic real estate. Explaining all that into existence would be hard enough; you wouldn’t want to be obliged to create the power to create it, as well—to have to explain into being the Anthrocosmology which allowed you to explain things into being.
A wise separation of powers. Leave the metaphysics to someone else.
I boarded the tram. A couple of the passengers smiled and greeted me, and chatted for a while—without anyone drawing a weapon and demanding money.
Walking up the street toward the hotel, I scrolled through a few documents on my notepad, just to check that nothing had been lost in the blackout. I’d made a list of the questions I’d planned to ask the Anthrocosmologists; I checked through them, to see how I’d done. I’d only missed one point; not bad for someone used to a permanent electronic crutch, but it was still an irritation.
Kuwale had said that ve was “mainstream AC.” So if all of the wild metaphysics which Conroy had just fed me was the mainstream of Anthrocosmology… what did they believe out on the fringe?
My complacency was beginning to unravel. All I’d heard was one version of the ACs’ doctrine. Conroy had taken it upon herself to speak for all of them—but that didn’t prove that they all agreed. At the very least, I needed to speak to Kuwale again… but I had better things to do than stake out the house in the hope that ve would turn up there.
Back in my room, I had Hermes scan the world’s communications directories. There were over seven thousand Kuwales listed, with primary addresses in a dozen countries—but no Akili. Which meant it was probably a nickname, a diminutive, or an unofficial nom de asex. Without even knowing what country ve came from, it was going to be impossible to narrow the search.
I hadn’t filmed my conversation with Kuwale—but I closed my eyes and invoked Witness, and played with the identikit option until I had vis face clearly in front of me—in digital form in my gut memory, as well as in my mind’s eye. I plugged in the umbilical fiber and moved the image into my notepad, then searched the global news databases for a match to either name or face. Not everyone had their fifteen minutes of fame, but with nine million non-profit netzines on top of all the commercial media, you didn’t exactly have to be a celebrity to make it into the archives. Win an agrotech competition in rural Angola, score the winning goal for even the most obscure Jamaican soccer team, and—
No such luck. The electronic teat fails again—at a cost of three hundred dollars.
So where was I meant to look for ver, if not on the nets? Out in the world. But I couldn’t scour the streets of Stateless…
I invoked Witness again, and flagged the identikit image for continuous real-time search. If Kuwale so much as appeared in the corner of my eye—whether or not I was recording, and whether or not I noticed— Witness would let me know.
16
Karin De Groot led me into Violet Mosala’s suite. Despite the difference in scale, it had the same sunny-but-spartan feel as my own single room. A skylight added to the sense of space and light, but ever this touch failed to create the impression of opulence which it might have done in another building, in another place. Nothing on Stateless appeared lavish to me, however grand, but I couldn’t decide to what extent this judgment was the product of the architecture itself, and how much was due to an awareness of the politics and biotechnology which lay behind every surface.