On one level, I couldn’t help but be swept along with vis urgent logic—but as the initial shock of recognition faded, I began to wonder again if we weren’t simply reading our own meaning into the four patients’ bizarre soliloquies. Anthrocosmology had never before made a single testable prediction. I didn’t doubt that it could provide an elegant mathematical underpinning to any TOE—but if the first distinct evidence for the theory itself consisted of the rantings of four people suffering from a new and exotic mental disease, that was a slender basis on which to throw out everything I believed about the universe.
And as for the prognosis, if Kuwale was right, of a world completely afflicted by Distress… that was a cataclysm as unthinkable as the moderates’ unraveling.
I kept my doubts to myself, but by the time I left the ward—leaving Kuwale immersed in a conference with the other mainstream ACs—I had my feet back on the ground. All this talk of echoes of the future Aleph moment had to be ranked as less plausible than even the most far-fetched conventional alternatives.
Maybe a neuroactive military pathogen gone wrong, targeting a specific region of the brain, could induce the ordinary symptoms of Distress in most of its victims—plus these outbursts of manic-but-precise observations in four out of three thousand cases. Reasoning was the product of organic events in the brain, like every other mental process—and if a paranoid schizophrenic, injured by crude accidents of genetics and disease, could find personal significance in every advertising sign, every cloud, every tree… maybe the combination of the right scientific background with the highly focused damage wrought by this viral weapon could trigger an equally uncontrollable—but much more rigorous—avalanche of meaning. If the original aim of the weapon had been to impair analytical thought, it wasn’t inconceivable that a wild version might end up overstimulating the very neural pathways it had been designed to destroy.
I went back to the electrical shop and bought myself another notepad. I called De Groot from the street; she seemed upset, but she didn’t want to talk on the net.
We met at the hotel, in Mosala’s suite. De Groot ushered me in, in silence. “Is Violet—?” Dust motes swam beneath the skylight; when I spoke, the room sounded hollow.
“She’s been admitted. I wanted to stay at the hospital, but she sent me away.” De Groot stood opposite me, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. She said quietly, “You know, we’ve had crank mail from just about everyone. Every cult, every lunatic on the planet wanted to let Violet in on their amazing cosmic revelations—or let her know that she was desecrating their precious mythology, and would burn in Hell for it… or drive away all the Buddha-nature… or crush the world’s great civilizations into nihilistic rubble, with her male Western reductionist hubris. The Anthrocosmologists were just… one more voice shouting noise.” She looked at me squarely. “Would you have picked them as the threat? Not the fundamentalists. Not the racists. Not the psychotics who gave detailed descriptions of what they planned to do to her corpse. People who sent us long dissertations on information theory—and P.S., we’d be happy to see you create the universe, but certain other parties may try to stop you.”
I said, “No one could have picked them.”
De Groot ran a hand across her temple, then stood in silence, shielding her eyes.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, and laughed humorlessly. “Headache, that’s all.” She inhaled deeply, visibly steeling herself to push on. “They found traces of foreign proteins in her bloodstream, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. They can’t resolve the molecular structures, though—and she’s showing no symptoms, so far. So they’ve put her on a mixture of strong antiviral drugs—and until something happens, all they can do is watch her.”
“Is security—?”
“She’s under guard. For what that’s worth now.”
“And Buzzo?”
“Apparently his scan was clear.” De Groot snorted, angry and bewildered. “He’s unmoved by… all of this. He believes that Nishide simply died of natural causes, Violet has some harmless pollutant in her body, and your cholera analysis was some kind of forgery for the sake of a media beat-up. The only thing he seems worried about is how he’s going to get home at the end of the conference if the airport is still closed.”
“But he has bodyguards—?”
“I don’t know; you’d have to ask him that. Oh—and Violet asked him to give a media conference himself, announcing the flaw in his TOE. The antiviral drugs are debilitating; she’s so nauseous that she can barely speak. Buzzo made some vague promise to her—but then he muttered something to me about looking at the issues more closely before he retracted anything. So I don’t know what he’ll do.”
I felt a stab of anger and frustration, but I said, “He’s heard all the evidence, it’s his decision.” I didn’t much want to think about Buzzo’s enemies, myself. Sarah Knight’s body hadn’t even been found yet—but the possibility that her killer was on Stateless unnerved me more than anything else. The moderates had let me walk free, once they’d reasoned that they could still get what they wanted. The extremists had nearly killed me, once already—and they hadn’t even been trying.
I said, “Even if this weapon is about to go off at any moment… there’s nothing anyone can do on Stateless that couldn’t be done in an air ambulance. Right? And… surely your government would be willing to send a fully equipped military hospital jet—”
De Groot gave a hollow laugh. “Yeah? You make it sound so easy. Violet has some friends in high places—and some sworn enemies… but most of all, a lot of fucking pragmatists who’ll happily use her in whatever way they see fit. It would take a small miracle for them to weigh up the pros and cons, take sides, battle it out, and make a decision, all in one day—even if Stateless was at peace, and the jet could land right at the airport.”
“Come on! The whole island’s as flat as a runway! Okay, it’s soft at the edges, but there must be a… twenty-kilometer radius in which the ground is hard enough,”
“All within reach of a missile from the airport.”
“Yeah, but why should the mercenaries care about a medical evacuation? They must be expecting foreign navies to start moving in soon to take their nationals off the island. This is no different; it’s just faster.”
De Groot shook her head sadly; she wanted to be convinced, but I wasn’t making sense to her. “Whatever you and I might think about the risks, it’s just guesswork and wishful thinking. The government is still going to assess the situation from their own point of view—and they’re not going to make a decision in thirty seconds. Tens of thousands of dollars for a mercy flight is one thing. A plane shot down over Stateless is another. And the last thing Violet—or any sane person—would want is three or four innocent people blown out of the sky for no reason.”
I turned away from her, and crossed to the window. From what I could see of the streets below, Stateless was still at peace. But whatever bloody havoc the mercenaries were planning… surely the last thing their employers wanted was a world-famous martyr for technoliberation?. That was why EnGeneUity had never really made sense as her would-be assassins: her death would be as bad for them as her highly publicized emigration.
It was a delicate proposition, though. What would they be admitting, if they made an exception for her? And which scenario would they consider most damaging to the anti-boycott push: the cautionary tale of Mosala’s tragic death from a reckless flirtation with renegades—or the heart-warming story of survival when a mercy flight whisked her back into the fold (where every gene belonged to its rightful owner, and every disease had an instant cure)?