Distress

by Greg Egan

  I waited. She continued.

  “What’s that got to do with me? My own country’s doing well enough. I’m not exactly in danger of malnutrition, am I?” She closed her eyes and groaned. “This is very hard for me to say. But … like it or not, the Nobel prize has given me a certain kind of power. If I move to Stateless – and state the reasons why – it will make news. It will make an impact, in certain places.”

  She hesitated again.

  I said, “I can keep my mouth shut.”

  Mosala smiled faintly. “I know that. I think.”

  “So what kind of impact do you want to make?”

  She walked over to the window. I said, “Is this some kind of political gesture – against traditionalists like PACDF?”

  She laughed. “No, no, no! Well … maybe it will be that as well, coincidentally. But that’s not the point.” She steeled herself. “I’ve had assurances. From a number of highly placed people. I’ve been promised that if I move to Stateless … not because I matter, but because it will make news , and create a pretext … the South African government will unilaterally drop all sanctions against the island, within six months.”

  I had goose bumps. One country might make no difference – except that South Africa was the major trading partner of about thirty other African nations.

  Mosala said quietly, “The voting patterns in the UN don’t show it – but the fact is, the anti-sanctions faction is not a tiny minority. At present, there’s all kinds of bloc solidarity and surface agreement, because everyone believes they can’t win, and they don’t want to cause offense.”

  “But if someone gave the right little push, they might start an avalanche?”

  “Maybe.” She laughed, embarrassed. “Talk about delusions of grandeur. The truth is, I get sick to the core every time I think about it – and I don’t actually believe anything dramatic is going to happen.”

  “One person to break the symmetry. Why not?”

  She shook her head firmly. “There’ve been other attempts to shift the vote, which have all fallen through. Anything’s worth trying – but I have to keep my feet on the ground.”

  Several things were running through my mind at once – though what might happen if the biotech patent laws ever really collapsed, globally, was almost too distant a prospect to contemplate. But the fact remained that Mosala had more use for the documentary than I’d ever imagined – and she’d told me all this to let me know as much, to give me the leverage she wanted me to employ, to ensure that her emigration did cause a stir.

  It was also clear that the whole endeavor – however Quixotic – would be extremely unpopular in certain quarters.

  Was that what Kuwale had had in mind? Not the Ignorance Cults, not PACDF fundamentalists, not even pro-science South African nationalists outraged by Mosala’s “desertion” – but powerful defenders of the biotech status quo? And if the teenaged burglar “paid to frighten her” hadn’t been lying, after all…

  Mosala walked over to a side table and poured herself a glass of water. “Now you know all my deepest secrets, so I declare this interview over.” She raised the glass and declaimed self-mockingly, “ Vive la technolibération! ”

  “ Vive .”

  She said seriously, “Okay: there are rumors. Maybe half of Stateless knows exactly what’s going on – but I still don’t want those rumors confirmed until certain arrangements, certain agreements, are much more solid.”

  “I understand.” And I realized, with a kind of astonishment, that somewhere along the way I’d won some measure of trust from her. Of course she was using me – but she must have believed that my heart was in the right place, that I’d let myself be used.

  I said, “Next time you’re arguing circularity with Helen Wu deep into the night, do you think I could…?”

  “Sit in? And record it?” She seemed to find the prospect dubious – but she said, “All right. Just so long as you promise not to fall asleep before we do.”

  She walked me to the door, and we shook hands. I said, “Be careful.”

  She smiled serenely, slightly amused at my concern, as if she didn’t have an enemy in the world.

  “Don’t worry. I will.”

  Chapter 17

  I was woken by a call just after four, the ringing growing louder and more shrill until it reached into my melatonin dreams and turned the darkness of my skull inside-out. For an instant, the mere fact of consciousness was shocking, unspeakable; I was outraged as a newborn child. Then I stretched out an arm and groped around on the bedside table for my notepad. I squinted at the screen, blinded for a moment by its brightness.

  The call was from Lydia. I almost refused to take it, assuming that she’d somehow miscalculated the time zones, but then I woke sufficiently to realize that it was the middle of the night for her, too. Sydney was only two hours behind Stateless. Geographically, if not politically.

  She said, “Andrew, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I thought you had a right to hear this in realtime.” She looked uncharacteristically grim, and though I was still too groggy even to speculate about what was coming next, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  I said hoarsely, “That’s okay. Go ahead.” I tried not to imagine what I looked like, gaping bleary-eyed at the camera. Lydia seemed to be in a darkened room, herself, her face lit only by the image on the screen … of me, lit only by the image of her. Was that possible? I suddenly realized that I had a pounding headache.

  “ Junk DNA is going to have to be re-edited, with the Landers story removed. If you had time, of course I’d ask you to do it yourself, but I’m assuming that’s not possible. So I’ll give it to Paul Kostas; he used to be one of our news room editors, but he’s freelance now. I’ll send you his final cut, and if you strongly disagree with anything, you’ll have an opportunity to change it. Just remember that it’s being screened in less than a fortnight.”

  I said, “That’s fine, that’s all … fine.” I knew Kostas; he wouldn’t mutilate the program. “Why, though? Was there some legal glitch? Don’t tell me Landers is suing?”

  “No. Events have overtaken us. I won’t try to explain; I’ve sent you a trailer from the San Francisco bureau – it’ll all be public by morning, but … ” She was too tired to elaborate, but I understood; she didn’t want me to learn about this as just another viewer. A quarter of Junk DNA , and some three months’ work on my part, had just been rendered obsolete – but Lydia was doing her best to salvage some vestige of my professional dignity. This way, at least I’d stay a few hours ahead of the masses.

  I said, “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  We bid each other goodnight, and I viewed the “trailer” – a hastily-assembled package of footage and text, alerting other news rooms to the story, and giving them the choice either to wait for the polished item soon to follow, or to edit the raw material themselves and put out their own version. It consisted mainly of FBI news releases, plus some archival background material.

  Ned Landers, his two chief geneticists, and three of his executives, had just been arrested in Portland. Nine other people – working for an entirely separate corporation – had been arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Laboratory equipment, biochemical samples, and computer records had been taken from both sites in pre-dawn raids. All fifteen people had been charged with violating federal biotechnology safety laws – but not because of Landers’ highly publicized neo-DNA and symbiont research. At the Chapel Hill laboratory, according to the charges, workers had been manipulating infectious, natural-RNA viruses – in secret, without permission. Landers had been footing the bills, circuitously.

  The purpose of these viruses remained unknown; the data and samples were yet to be analyzed.

  There were no statements from the accused; their lawyers were counseling silence. There were some external shots of the Chapel Hill laboratory, sealed off behind police barricades. All the footage of Landers himself was relatively old material; the latest was cannibalized fr
om my interview with him (not completely wasted, after all).

  The lack of detail was frustrating – but the implications already seemed clear. Landers and his collaborators had been constructing perfect viral immunity for themselves – beyond the specific powers of any one vaccine or drug, beyond the fear of mutant strains out-evolving their defenses … while engineering new viruses capable of infecting the rest of us. I stared at the screen, which was frozen on the last frame of the report: Landers, as I’d seen him in the flesh, myself, smiling at the vision of his brand new kingdom. And though I balked at accepting the obvious conclusion … what possible use could he have had for a novel human virus – except for some kind of thinning?

  I sprinted to the bathroom, and brought up the meager contents of my stomach. Then I knelt by the bowl, shivering and sweating – lapsing into microsleeps, almost losing my balance. The melatonin wanted me back, but I was having trouble convincing myself that I was through vomiting. Pampered hypochondriac that I was, I would have consulted my pharm at once if I’d had it, for a precise diagnosis and an instant, optimal solution. With visions of choking to death in my sleep, I contemplated tearing off my shoulder patch – but the symbolic attempt to surrender to natural circadian forces would have taken hours to produce any effect at all – and then it would have rendered me, at best, a zombie for the rest of the conference.

  I retched, voluntarily, for a minute or two, and nothing more emerged, so I staggered back to bed.

  Ned Landers had gone further than any gender migrant, any anarchist, any Voluntary Autist. No man is an island? Just watch me. And yet, apparently, it still hadn’t been far enough. He’d still felt crowded, threatened, encroached-upon. A biological kingdom wasn’t enough; he’d aspired to more elbow room than even that unbridgeable genetic gulf could provide.

  And he’d almost attained it. That was what species self-knowledge had given him: a precise, molecular definition of the H-word … which he could personally transcend, before turning it against everyone who remained in its embrace.

  Vive la technolibération! Why not have a million Ned Landers? Why not let every solipsistic lunatic and paranoid, self-appointed ethnic-group-savior on the planet wield the same power? Paradise for yourself and your clan – and apocalypse for everyone else.

  That was the fruit of perfect understanding.

  What’s wrong, don’t you like the taste?

  I clutched my stomach and slid my knees toward my chin; it changed the character of the nausea, if not exactly removing it. The room tipped, my limbs grew numb, I strived for absolute blankness.

  And if I’d dug deeper, done my job properly, I might have been the one to find him out, to stop him—

  Gina touched my cheek, and kissed me tenderly. We were in Manchester, at the imaging lab. I was naked, she was clothed.

  She said, “Climb inside the scanner. You can do that for me, can’t you? I want us to be much, much closer, Andrew. So I need to see what’s going on inside your brain.”

  I started to comply – but then I hesitated, suddenly afraid of what she’d discover.

  She kissed me again. “No more arguments. If you love me, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.”

  She forced me down, and closed the hatch of the machine. I saw my body from above. The scanner was more than a scanner – it raked me with ultraviolet lasers. I felt no pain, but the beams prized away layer after layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part—

  I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

  #

  At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn’t really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. “Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out … ” SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.

  I wasn’t in a charitable mood; the three hours’ sleep I’d had after Lydia’s call had been about as refreshing as a blow to the head. I went through the motions, feigning fascination, and trying halfheartedly to steer the interview in a direction which might produce some material I could actually use.

  “What kind of place in history do you think the discoverer of the TOE will attain? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate form of scientific immortality?”

  Buzzo became self-deprecating. “There’s no such thing as immortality, for a scientist. Not even for the greatest. Newton and Einstein are still famous today – but for how long? Shakespeare will probably outlast them both … and maybe even Hitler will, too.”

  I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him that none of these were exactly household names anymore.

  I said, “Newton’s and Einstein’s theories have been swallowed whole, though. Absorbed into larger schemes. I know, you’ve already carved your name on one TOE which turned out to be provisional – but all of the SUFT’s architects said at the time that it was just a stepping stone. Don’t you think the next TOE will be the real thing: the final theory which lasts forever?”

  Buzzo had given the question a lot more thought than I had. He said, “It might . It certainly might. I can imagine a universe in which we can probe no further, in which deeper explanations are literally, physically, impossible. But…”

  “Your own TOE describes such a universe, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. But it could be right about everything else, and wrong about that. The same is true of Mosala’s and Nishide’s.”

  I said sourly, “So when will we know, one way or the other? When will we be sure that we’ve struck bottom?”

  “Well … if I’m right, then you’ll never be sure that I’m right. My TOE doesn’t allow itself to be proved final and complete – even if it is final and complete.” Buzzo grinned, delighted at the prospect of such a perverse legacy. “The only kind of TOE which could leave any less room for doubt would be one which required its own finality – which made that fact absolutely central.

  “Newton was swallowed up and digested, Einstein was swallowed up and digested … and the old SUFT will go the same way, in a matter of days. They were all closed systems, they were all vulnerable. The only TOE which could be guaranteed immune to the process would be one which actively defended itself – which turned its gaze outward to describe, not just the universe, but also every conceivable alternative theory which could somehow supersede it – and then rendered them all demonstrably false, in a single blow.”

  He shook his head gleefully. “But there’s nothing like that on offer, here. If you want absolute certainty, you’ve come to the wrong side of town.”

  #

  The other side of town was still just outside the hotel’s main entrance; the Mystical Renaissance carnival hadn’t gone away. I headed out onto the street, anyway; I urgently needed a dose of fresh air if I was going to be more than half-conscious for the lecture on ATM software techniques which Mosala was due to attend at nine. The sky was dazzling, and the air was already warm; Stateless seemed unable to decide whether to surrender to a temperate autumn, or hold out for an Indian summer. The sunshine lifted my spirits, slightly, but I still felt crippled, beaten, overwhelmed.

  I weaved my way past the stalls and small tents, dodging goldfish-bowl-jugglers and hand-stilt-walkers – impressive acts, mostly; it was only the droning songs of the buskers which really made me feel that I was running a gauntlet. While members of Humble Science! had been showing up at every press conference and doing their best to repeat the tone of Walsh’s encounter with Mosala, MR had remained endearingly innocuous, by comparison. I was beginning to suspect that it was a deliberate strategy: a good cult/bad cult game, to widen their combined appeal. Humble Science! had nothing to lose by extremism; those few
members who left in disgust at Walsh’s tactics (to join MR, most likely) would be more than compensated for by an influx from groups like Celtic Wisdom and Saxon Light – northern Europe’s equivalents of PACDF, only more influential. I recalled a scene from one of the Muteba Kazadi biographies I’d skimmed: when asked in reproving tones by a BBC journalist why he’d declined an invitation to take part in a traditional Lunda fertility ceremony, he’d politely suggested that she go home and berate a few cabinet ministers for failing to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge. Ten years later, there were half a dozen MPs who seemed to have taken the suggestion at face value. No cabinet ministers, though. So far.

  I paused to watch the MR theater troupe, ready to play spot-the-mutilated-classic. After a few baffling lines of garbled biotech-speak – unplaceable, but weirdly familiar – hairs stood up on the back of my neck. They’d seized on the news of Landers and his viruses, and were acting out their own hastily-scripted version of the story. What’s more, most of their descriptions of Landers’ modified personal biochemistry came straight out of the narration to Junk DNA ; SeeNet’s news editors must have mined the discarded segment of the documentary for some instant technical background when they put together their final release.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this – but the speed with which events thousands of kilometers away had been recycled as an instant parable was unsettling enough; hearing my own words echoed back at me as part of the feedback loop verged on the surreal.

  An actor playing one of the FBI agents sent to gather Landers’ computer files turned to the audience (all three of us) and proclaimed, “This knowledge could destroy us all! We must avert our gaze!” His companion replied mournfully, “Yes – but this is only one man’s folly! The same sacred mysteries are spelled out in ten million other machines! Until every one of those files is erased … none of us will ever sleep safely!”

  My head throbbed and my throat tightened. I couldn’t deny that in the dead of night, confused and in pain, I’d shared this sentiment entirely.