Distress

by Greg Egan

  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 realtime 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.

  Chapter 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 even this touch failed to create the impression of opulence which it might have, 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.

  De Groot said, “Violet won’t be long. Take a seat. She’s talking to her mother, but I’ve already reminded her about the interview. Twice.”

  It was three in the morning in South Africa. “Has something happened? I can come back later.” I didn’t want to intrude in the middle of a family crisis.

  De Groot reassured me, “Everything’s fine. Wendy keeps strange hours, that’s all.”

  I sat in one of the armchairs arranged in a cluster near the middle of the room; they looked like they might have been left that way after a meeting. Some kind of late-night brainstorming session … between Mosala, Helen Wu, and a few other colleagues? Whoever it was, I should have been there, filming. I was going to have to push harder for access, or Mosala would keep me at a distance to the end. But I was going to have to win her confidence somehow, or pushing would only get me shut out even more. Mosala clearly had no particular desire for publicity – let alone the desperate need of a politician or a hack. The only thing I could offer her was the chance to communicate her work.

  De Groot remained standing, one hand on the back of a chair. I said, “So how did you get to meet her?”

  “I answered an advertisement. I didn’t know Violet, personally, before I took the job.”

  “You have a science background too, though?”

  She smiled. “ Too. My background’s probably more like yours than like Violet’s – I have a degree in science and journalism.”

  “Did you ever work as a journalist?”

  “I was science correspondent for Proteus, for six years. The charming Mr. Savimbi is my successor.”

  “I see.” I strained my ears; I could just make out Mosala in the adjoining room, still talking. I said quietly, “What Savimbi said on Monday, about death threats – was there anything in that?”

  De Groot eyed me warily. “Don’t bring that up. Please. Do you really want to make everything as difficult as you possibly can for her?”

  I protested, “No – but put yourself in my position. Would you ignore the whole issue? I don’t want to inflame the situation – but if some cultural purity group is issuing death sentences against Africa’s top scientists, don’t you think that’s worthy of serious discussion?”

  De Groot said impatiently, “But they’re not. For a start, the Stockholm quote was picked up and mangled by a Volksfront netzine – running the bizarre line that Violet was saying that the Nobel wasn’t hers, wasn’t ‘Africa’s’, b
ut really belonged to ‘white intellectual culture’ – for which she was only a politically expedient figurehead. That ‘story’ got taken up and echoed in other places – but nobody except the original audience would have believed for a second that it was anything but ludicrous propaganda. As for PACDF, they’ve never done so much as acknowledge Violet’s existence.”

  “Okay. Then what made Savimbi leap to the wrong conclusion?”

  De Groot glanced toward the doorway. “Garbled fifth hand reports.”

  “Of what? Not just the netzine propaganda itself. He could hardly be that naïve.”

  De Groot leaned toward me with an anguished expression, torn between discretion and the desire to set me straight. “She had a break-in. All right? A few weeks ago. A burglar. A teenage boy with a gun.”

  “ Shit. What happened? Was she hurt?”

  “No, she was lucky. Her alarm went off – he’d disabled one, but she had a backup – and there was a patrol car nearby at the time. The burglar told the police he’d been paid to frighten her. But he couldn’t name names, of course. It was just a pathetic excuse.”

  “Then why should Savimbi take it seriously? And why ‘fifth hand reports’? Surely he would have read the whole story?”

  “Violet dropped the charges. She’s an idiot, but that’s the kind of thing she does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But someone in the police must have leaked—”

  Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that we’d been doing our best to avoid being overheard.

  I moved to fill the silence. “How’s your mother?”

  “She’s fine. She’s in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought Craft, though, so she’s not getting much sleep.” Wendy Mosala ran one of Africa’s largest software houses; she’d built it up herself over thirty years, from a one-person operation. “She’s bidding for a license for the Kaspar clonelets – two years in advance of release – and if it all pans out—” She caught herself. “All of which is strictly confidential, okay?”

  “Of course.” Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software, currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus and its numerous cousins – which had been created fully-fledged, instantly “adult” by design – Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more anthropomorphically-styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I found it a little disquieting … and I wasn’t sure that I wanted a clonelet – a pared-down copy of the original – sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.

  De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.

  I said, “Are you ready to start?”

  She nodded, and smiled halfheartedly. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’s over.”

  I invoked Witness . The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of – rather more flattering – light sources.

  I said, “Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in science?”

  Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, “I don’t know! Was it your mother who inspired you to come up with that kind of pathetic—” She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. “I’m sorry. Can we start again?”

  “No need. Don’t worry about continuity; it’s not your problem. Just keep on talking. And if you’re halfway through an answer and you change your mind – just stop, and start afresh.”

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight. “My mother. My childhood. My role models .” She opened her eyes and pleaded, “Can’t we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?”

  I said patiently, “ I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit – but if the network executives don’t see the required quota of formative childhood influences … they’ll screen you at three a.m. – after a last-minute program change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-resistant skin diseases.” SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their viewers, of course) had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera – a slick paint-by-numbers guide to commodifying human beings … as well as a template for deluding yourself into thinking that you’d explained them. A sort of externalized version of Lamont’s area.

  Mosala said, “Three a.m.? You’re serious, aren’t you?” She thought it over. “Okay. If that’s what it comes down to … I can play along.”

  “So tell me about your mother.” I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to answer more or less at random, so long as you don’t contradict yourself.

  She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. “My mother gave me an education. By which I don’t mean school . She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult’s knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up … the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn’t steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history … anything. I wasn’t pushed in any direction. I was just set free.”

  “And your father—?”

  “My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four.”

  “That must have been traumatic. But … do you think that early loss might have given you the drive, the independence—?”

  Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. “ My father was shot in the head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty thousand people whose views he found completely repugnant. And – this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for your timeslot – he was someone I loved, and who I still love; he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clockwork. He was not an absence to be compensated for .”

  I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview material with reminiscences from childhood friends … stock footage of Cape Town schools in the thirties … whatever.

  “You’ve said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life – for purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But … when do you think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?”

  Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. “About two years later, I suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi.”

  She hadn’t mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I’d seen – and it was lucky I’d stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?

  “So you were influenced by technolibération ?”

  “Of course.” She frowned slightly, bemused – as if I’d just asked her if she’d ever heard of Albert Einstein. I wasn’t even sure if she was being honest, or whether she was still just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet’s demand for clichés – but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.

  She said, “Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could … incinerate any doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted.” She hesitated, then recited:

  “When Leopold
the Second rises from the grave

  Saying, ‘My conscience plagues me, take back

  This un-Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!’

  Then I will renounce my ill-gotten un-African gains

  And piously abandon the calculus and all its offspring

  To … I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both

  Died childless.”

  I laughed. Mosala said soberly, “You’ve no idea what it was like, though, to have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science, traditionalist backlash didn’t really hit South Africa until the forties – but when it did, so many people in public life who’d spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another … until science was somehow either the rightful ‘property’ of ‘the West’ – which Africa didn’t need or want anyway … or it was nothing but a weapon of cultural assimilation and genocide.”

  “It has been used as exactly that.”

  Mosala eyed me balefully. “No shit. Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy – to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.” She reached out and mimed taking hold of a handful of space, saying, “There is no male or female vacuum. There is no Belgian or Zairean space-time. Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist – or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses – and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the color of their skin was.”

  I tried not to smile; this was all highly usable. I had no idea which of these slogans were sincere, and which were conscious theatrics – where the telegenic sugar-coating I’d asked for ended, and Mosala’s real passions began – but then, she may not have been entirely clear about the borders, herself.