Distress - A Novel Part 12

"I don't want to publicize anything about them. This is purely off the record, I swear. I'm just curious."

"Then it won't do you any harm to wait a few years, will it?"

A few years? I said, "All right, I'm more than curious."

"Why?"

I thought it over: I could tell her about Kuwale-and ask her to swear to keep it to herself, to avoid embroiling Mosala in any more unwelcome speculation. Except that . . . how could I ask her to betray one confidence while begging her to respect another? It would be pure hypocrisy-and if she was willing to swap secrets with me, what would her promise be worth?

I said, "What have they got against journalists, anyway? Most cults are dying to recruit new members. What sort of ethos-?"

Lee eyed me suspiciously. "I'm not going to be tricked into any more indiscretions. It's my fault entirely that the name slipped out, but the topic is now closed. The Anthrocosmologists are a non-subject."

I laughed. "Oh, come on! This is absurd! You're one of them, aren't you? No secret handshakes; your notepad is sending out coded infrared: I am Indrani Lee, High Priestess of the Revered and Sacred Order."

She took a swat at me with the back other hand; I pulled back just in time. She said, "They certainly don't have priestesses."

"You mean they're s.e.xist? All male?"

She scowled. "Or priests. And I'm not saying anything more."

We walked on in silence. I took out my notepad and gave Sisyphus several meaningful glances. The full word had unlocked no Aladdin's cave of data, though: every search on "Anthrocosmologists" came up blank.

143.

I said, "I apologize. No more questions, no more provocation. What if I really do need to get in touch with them, though, but I just can't tell you why?"

Lee was unmoved. "That sounds unlikely."

I hesitated. "Someone called Kuwale has been trying to contact me. Ve's been sending me cryptic messages for days. But ve failed to turn up at an arranged meeting last night, so I just want to find out what's going on." Almost none of this was true, but I wasn't going to admit that I'd screwed up a perfect opportunity to discover for myself what AC was about. In any case, Lee remained impa.s.sive; if she'd heard the name before, she showed no sign of it.

I said, "Can't you pa.s.s on the message that I want to speak to them? Give them the right to choose for themselves whether or not to turn me down?"

She stopped walking, A cultist on stilts reached down and thrust a stack of edible pamphlets in her face, MR's own Einstein Conference Newsletter in the non-electronic edition. Lee waved the woman away irritably. "You're asking a lot. If they take offense, and I lose five years' work..."

I thought: You wouldn't lose five years' work; you'd finally be free to publish. But it didn't seem diplomatic to put it that way.

I said, "I first heard the term Anthrocosmotogists from Kuwale, not you. So you don't even have to tell them that you admitted knowing anything. 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."

She hesitated. I said, "Kuwale was dropping hints about. . . violence. So what am I supposed to do? Just forget about ver? Or start trying to navigate my way through whatever bizarre apparatus Stateless employs for dealing with suspicious disappearances ?"

Lee gave me a look which seemed to imply that she hadn't been taken in by any of this-but then she said begrudgingly, "If I tell them you've been blundering around shooting your mouth off, I suppose they can't hold that against me."

"Thank you."

She didn't look happy. "Violence7 Against whom?"

I shook my head. "Ve didn't say. I mean, it may all come to nothing, but I still have to follow it up."

"I want to hear everything, when you do."

144.

"You will, I promise."

We'd arrived back at the theatre group, who were now acting out a laborious fable about a child with cancer . . . whose life could only be saved if he was kept from hearing the-stressful, immunosuppressant- truth. Look, Ma, real science! Except that the effects of stress on the immune system had been amenable to pharmacological control for the last thirty years.

I stood and watched for a while, playing devil's advocate against my own first impressions, trying to convince myself that there might be some real insight hidden in the story: some eternal verity which transcended the outdated medical contingencies.

If there was, I honestly couldn't find it. The earnest clowns might as well have been envoys from another planet, for all that they conveyed to me about the world we supposedly shared.

And if I was wrong, and they were right? If everything I saw as specious contrivance was, in fact, luminous with wisdom? If this clumsy, sentimental fairy tale spoke the deepest truth about the world?

Then I was more than wrong. I was utterly deluded. I was lost beyond redemption-a foundling from another cosmology, another logic entirely, with no place in this one at all.

There was no possibility of compromise, no question of building bridges. We couldn't both be "half-right." Mystical Renaissance endlessly proclaimed that they'd found "the perfect balance" between mysticism and rationality-as if the universe had been waiting for this cozy detente before deciding how to conduct itself, and was, frankly, relieved that the conflicting parties had been able to reach an amicable settlement which would respect everyone's delicate cultural sensibilities and give due weight to everyone's views. Except, of course, the view that the human ideals of balance and compromise, however laudable in political and social spheres, had absolutely nothing to do with the way the universe itself behaved.

Humble Science! could denounce as "tyrants of scientism" anyone who expressed this opinion, Mystical Renaissance could call them "victims of psychic numbing" who needed to be "healed" . . . but even if the cults were right, the principle itself could not be diluted, reconciled with its opposites, brought into the fold. It was either true or false-or truth and falsehood were meaningless, and the universe was an incomprehensible blur.

145.

I thought: Empathy at last. If any of this was mutual-if MR felt half as alienated and dispossessed by the prospect of a TOE, as I did at the thought of their lunatic ideas shaping the ground beneath my feet-then I finally understood why they'd come here.

The actors bowed. A few people, mainly other cultists in fancy dress, applauded. I suspected there'd been a happy ending; I'd stopped paying attention. I took out my notepad and transferred twenty dollars to the one they'd placed before them on the ground. Even Jungians in clown costumes had to eat: First Law of Thermodynamics.

I turned to Indrani Lee. "Tell me, honestly: Are you really the one person who can step outside every culture, every belief system, every source of bias and confusion, and see the truth?"

She nodded una.s.sumingly. "Of course I am. Aren't you?"

Back in my room, I stared blankly at the first page of Helen Wu's most controversial Physical Review article-and tried to piece together how Sarah Knight could have stumbled on the Anthrocosmologists in the course of her research for Violet Mosala. Maybe Kuwale had heard about the project and approached her, just as ve'd approached me.

Heard about it how?

Sarah had come out of politics, but she'd already completed one science doc.u.mentary for SeeNet. I checked the schedules. The t.i.tle was Holding Up the Sky . . . and the subject was fringe cosmology. It wasn't due to be broadcast until June, but it was sitting in SeeNet's private library-to which I had full access.

I viewed the whole thing. It ranged from near-orthodox (but probably untestable) theories: quantum parallel universes (diverging from a single Big Bang), multiple Big Bangs freezing out of pre-s.p.a.ce with different physical constants, universes "reproducing" via black holes and pa.s.sing on "mutated" physics to their offspring . . . through to more exotic and fanciful concepts: the cosmos as a cellular automaton, as the coincidental by-product of disembodied Platonic mathematics, as a "cloud" of random numbers which only possessed form by virtue of the fact that one possible form happened to include conscious observers.

There was no mention of the Anthrocosmologists, but maybe Sarah had been saving them for a later project-by which time she hoped to have won their confidence and secured their cooperation? Or maybe 146.

she'd been saving them for Violet Mosflla, if there was a substantial connection between the two-if it was more than a coincidence that Kuwale was a devotee of both.

I sent Sisyphus exploring the nooks and crannies of the interactive version of Holding Up the Sky, but there were no buried references, no hints of more to come. And no public database on the planet contained a single entry on the ACs. Every cult employed image managers to try to keep the right spin on their media representations . . . but total invisibility suggested extraordinary discipline, not expensive PR.

The cult of Anthrocosmology. Meaning: Human knowledge of the universe? It was not an instantly transparent label. At least Mystical Renaissance, Humble Science! and Culture First didn't leave you guessing about their priorities.

It did contain the H-word, though. No wonder they had opposing factions-a mainstream and a fringe.

I closed my eyes. I thought I could hear the island breathing, ceaselessly exhaling-and the subterranean ocean, scouring the rock beneath me.

I opened my eyes. This close to the center, I was still above the guyot. Underneath the reef-rock was solid basalt and granite, all the way down to the ocean floor.

Sleep reached up and took me, regardless.

147.

15.I arrived early for Helen Wu's lecture. The auditorium was almost empty-but Mosala was there, studying something on her notepad intently. I took a seat one s.p.a.ce removed from her. She didn't look up.

"Good morning."

She glanced at me, and replied coldly, "Good morning," then went back to whatever she was viewing. If I kept filming her like this, the audience would conclude that the whole doc.u.mentary had been made at gunpoint.

Body language could always be edited.

That wasn't the point, though.

I said, "How does this sound? I promise not to use anything you said about the cults-yesterday, if you agree to give me something more considered later on."

She thought it over, without lifting her eyes from the screen.

"All right. That's fair." She glanced at me again, adding, "I don't mean to be rude, but I really do have to finish this." She showed me her notepad; she was half-way through one of Wu's papers, a Physical Review article about six months old.

I didn't say anything, but I must have looked momentarily scandalized. Mosala said defensively, "There are only twenty-four hours in a day. Of course I should have read this months ago, but. . ." She gestured impatiently.

"Can I film you reading it?"

She was horrified. "And let everyone know?"

I said, '"n.o.bel laureate catches up on homework.' It would show that you have something in common with us mortals." I almost added: "It's what we call humanization."

Mosala said firmly, "You can start filming when the lecture begins. That's what it says on the schedule we agreed to. Right?"

148.

"Right."

She carried on reading-now truly ignoring me; all the self-consciousness and hostility had vanished. I felt a wave of relief wash over me: between us, we'd probably just saved the doc.u.mentary. Her reaction to the cults had to be dealt with, but she had a right to express it more diplomatically. It was a simple, obvious compromise; I only wished I'd thought of it sooner.

I peeked at Mosala's notepad while she read (without recording). She invoked some kind of software a.s.sistant every time she came to an equation: windows blossomed on the screen, full of algebraic cross-checking and detailed a.n.a.lysis of the links between the steps in Wu's argument. I wondered if I would have been able to make better sense of Wu's papers myself, with this kind of help. Probably not: some of the notation in the "explanatory" windows looked even more cryptic to me than that of the original text.

I could follow, in the broadest qualitative terms, most of the issues being discussed at the conference-but Mosala, with a little computerized help, could clearly penetrate right down to the level where the mathematics either survived rigorous scrutiny, or fell apart. No seductive rhetoric, no persuasive metaphors, no appeals to intuition: just a sequence of equations where each one did or did not lead inexorably to the next. Pa.s.sing this inspection wasn't proof of anything, of course; an immaculate chain of reasoning led to nothing but an elegant fantasy, if the premises were, physically, wrong. It was crucial to be able to test the connections themselves, though, to check every strand in the web of logic which bound two possibilities together.

The way I saw it, every theory and its logical consequences-every set of general laws, and the specific possibilities they dictated-formed an indivisible whole. Newton's universal laws of motion and gravity, Kepler's idealized elliptical orbits, and any number of particular (pre-Einsteinian) models of the solar system, were all part of the same fabric of ideas, the same tightly knit layer of reasoning. None of which had turned out to be entirely correct, so the whole layer of Newtonian cosmology had been peeled away (fingernails slipped under the unraveling corner where velocities approached the speed of light) in search of something deeper . . . and the same thing had happened half a dozen times since. The trick was to know precisely what const.i.tuted each layer, to 149.

prise away each interlinked set of falsified ideas and failed predictions, no more and no less . . . until a layer was reached which was seamless, self-consistent-and which fit every available observation of the real world.

That was what set Violet Mosala apart (from half her colleagues, no doubt, as well as third-rate science journalists-and which no amount of humanization would ever change): If a proposed TOE was inconsistent with experimental data, or unraveled under its own contradictions, she had the ability to follow the logic as far as it went, and peel away the whole beautiful failure, like a perfect sheet of dead skin.

And if it wasn't a beautiful failure? If the TOE in question turned out to be flawless? Watching her pa.r.s.e Wu's elaborate mathematical arguments as if they were written in the most transparent prose, I could picture her, when that day came-whether the TOE was her own or not-patiently mapping out the theory's consequences at every scale, every energy, every level of complexity, doing her best to weave the universe into an indivisible whole.

The auditorium began to fill. Mosala finished the paper just as Wu arrived at the podium. 1 whispered, "What's the verdict?"

Mosala was pensive. "I think she's largely correct. She hasn't quite proved what she's set out to prove-not yet. But I'm almost certain that she's on the right track."

I was startled. "But doesn't that worry-?" She raised a finger to her lips. "Be patient. Let's hear her out." Helen Wu lived in Malaysia, but had worked for the University of Bombay for the last thirty years. She'd co-auth.o.r.ed at least a dozen seminal papers-including two with Buzzo and one with Mosala-but somehow she'd never reached the same quasi-celebrity status. She was probably every bit as ingenious and imaginative as Buzzo, and maybe even as rigorous and thorough as Mosala, but she seemed to have been slower to move straight to the frontiers of the field (always really visible only in retrospect), and not as lucky in choosing problems which had yielded spectacular general results.

Much of the lecture was simply beyond me. I covered every word, every graphic, scrupulously, but my thoughts wandered to the question of how I could paraphrase the message without the technicalities. With an interactive dialogue, maybe?

150.

Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don't tell me what it is.

[Thinks... 575]

Add the digits together.

[17].

Add them again.

[8].

Add3.

[11].

Subtract this from the original number.

[564].

Add the digits together. [15]

Find the remainder left when you divide by nine. [6]

Square it. [36] Add 6. [42]

The number in your head now 15 ... 42? [Yes!] Now try it once again . . .

The end result, of course, was guaranteed to be the same every time; all the elaborate steps of this cheap party trick were just a long-winded way of saying that X minus X would always equal zero.

Wu was suggesting that Mosala's whole approach to building a TOE amounted to much the same thing: all the mathematics simply canceled itself out. On a grander scale, and in a far less obvious manner-but in the end, a tautology was still a tautology.

Wu spoke quietly as equations flowed across the display screen behind her. To spell out these connections, to short-circuit one part of Mosala's work with another, Wu had had to prove half a dozen new theorems in pure mathematics-difficult results, all of them, and useful in their own right. (This was not my own uneducated opinion; I'd checked the databases for citations other earlier work, which had prepared the ground for this presentation.) And that was the extraordinary thing, for me: that such a rich and complex restatement of"X minus X equals zero" was even possible. It was as if an elaborately twisted length of rope, weaving in and out of its own 151.

detours a few hundred thousand times, had turned out not to be knotted at all, but just a simple loop-ornately arranged, but ultimately able to be completely untangled. Maybe that would make a better metaphor-and in the interactive, viewers with force gloves could reach in and prove for themselves that the "knot" really was just a loop in disguise ...

You couldn't grab hold of a couple of Mosala's tensor equations and simply tug, though, to find out how they were joined. You had to unpick the false knot in your mind's eye (with help from software-but it couldn't do everything). Subtle mistakes were always possible. The details were everything.

Wu finished, and began taking questions. The audience was subdued; there were only a couple of tentative requests for clarification, expressing no hint of acceptance or rejection.