Distress

by Greg Egan

  Mosala said dryly, “You don’t think they get enough publicity already?”

  “Yes – but most of it’s on their own terms. The profile could be a chance for people to see them through your eyes.”

  She laughed. “You want me to tell your audience what I think of the cults? You won’t have time for anything else, if I get started.”

  “You could stick to the big three.”

  Mosala hesitated. De Groot flashed me a warning look, but I ignored it. I said, “Culture First—?”

  “Culture First is the most pathetic. It’s the last refuge for people desperate to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals’ – while remaining complete scientific illiterates. Most of them are just nostalgic for the era when a third of the planet was controlled by people whose definition of a civilized education was Latin, European military history, and the selected doggerel of a few overgrown British schoolboys.”

  I grinned. “Mystical Renaissance?”

  Mosala smiled ironically. “They start from such good intentions, don’t they? They say most people are blind to the world around them: sleepwalkers in a zombie’s routine of mundane work and mind-numbing entertainment. I couldn’t agree more. They say they want everyone on the planet to become ‘attuned’ to the universe we’re living in, and to share the awe they feel when they confront the deep strangeness of it all: the dizzying length and time scales of cosmology, the endlessly rich complexities of the biosphere, the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

  “Well … all of those things inspire awe in me, too – some of the time – but Mystical Renaissance treats that response as an end in itself . And they want science to pull back from investigating anything which gives them a high in its pristine, unexplained state – in case they don’t get the same rush from it, once it’s better understood. Ultimately, they’re not interested in the universe at all – any more than people who romanticize the life of animals into a cartoon world where no blood is spilt … or people who deny the existence of ecological damage, because they don’t want to change the way they live. Followers of Mystical Renaissance only want the truth if it suits them, if it induces the right emotions . If they were honest, they’d just stick a hot wire in their brain at whatever location made them believe they were undergoing a constant mystical epiphany – because in the end, that’s all they’re after.”

  This was priceless; no one of Mosala’s stature had ever really let fly against the cults like this. Not on the public record.

  “Humble Science!?”

  Mosala’s eyes flashed with anger. “They’re the worst, by far. The most patronizing, the most cynical. Janet Walsh is just a tactician and a figurehead; most of the real leaders are far better educated. And in their collective wisdom, they’ve decided that the fragile blossom of human culture just can’t survive any more revelations about what human beings really are, or how the universe actually functions.

  “If they spoke out against the abuse of biotechnology, I’d back them all the way. If they spoke out against weapons research, I’d do the same. If they stood for some coherent system of values which made the most pitiless scientific truths less alienating to ordinary people … without denying those truths … I’d have no quarrel with them at all.

  “But when they decide that all knowledge – beyond a border which is theirs to define – is anathema to civilization and sanity, and that it’s up to some self-appointed cultural elite to generate a set of hand-made ‘life-affirming’ myths to take its place … to imbue human existence with some suitably uplifting – and politically expedient – meaning … they become nothing but the worst kind of censors and social engineers.”

  I suddenly noticed that Mosala’s slender arms, spread out on the table in front of her, were trembling; she was far angrier than I’d realized. I said, “It’s almost nine, but we could take this up again after Buzzo’s lecture, if you have time—?”

  De Groot touched her elbow. They leaned toward each other, and conversed sotto voce , at length.

  Mosala said, “We have an interview scheduled for Wednesday, don’t we? I’m sorry, but I can’t spare any time before then.”

  “Of course, that’s fine.”

  “And those comments I just made are all off the record. They’re not to be used.”

  My heart sank. “Are you serious?”

  “This was supposed to be a meeting to discuss your filming schedule. Nothing I said here was intended to be made public.”

  I pleaded, “I’ll put it all in context: Janet Walsh went out of her way to insult you – and at the media conference you kept your cool, you were restrained – but afterward, you expressed your opinions in detail. What’s wrong with that? Or do you want Humble Science! to start censoring you? ”

  Mosala closed her eyes for a moment, then said carefully, “Those are my opinions, yes, and I’m entitled to them. I’m also entitled to decide who hears them and who doesn’t. I don’t want to inflame this whole ugly mess any further. So would you please respect my wishes and tell me that you won’t use any of it?”

  “We don’t have to sort this out immediately. I can send you a rough cut—”

  Mosala gestured dismissively. “I signed an agreement with Sarah Knight, saying I could veto anything, on the spot, with no questions asked.”

  “If you did, that was with her, personally, not with SeeNet. All SeeNet have from you is a standard clearance.”

  Mosala did not look happy. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you? Sarah said you’d explain why you had to take over the project at such short notice. After all the work she put into it, all she left was a ten-second message saying: I’m off the profile, Andrew Worth is the new director, he’ll tell you the reason why.”

  I said carefully, “Sarah may have given you the wrong impression. SeeNet had never officially chosen her to make the documentary. And it was SeeNet who approached you and set things up initially – not Sarah. It was never a freelance project she was developing independently, to offer to them. It was a SeeNet project which she wanted to direct, so she sank a lot of her own time into trying to make that happen.”

  De Groot said, “But why didn’t it happen? All that research, all that preparation, all that enthusiasm … why didn’t it pay off?”

  What could I say? That I’d stolen the project from the one person who truly deserved it … so I could have a fully-paid South Pacific holiday, away from the stresses of serious frankenscience?

  I said, “Network executives are in a world of their own. If I could understand how they made their decisions, I’d probably be up there with them, myself.”

  De Groot and Mosala regarded me with silent disbelief.

  Chapter 12

  TechnoLalia, SeeNet’s major rival, insisted on labeling Henry Buzzo “the revered guru of trans-millennial physics” – and frequently implied that he should retire as soon as possible, leaving the field open to younger colleagues who rated more dynamic clichés: wunderkinder und enfants terrible “surfing pre-space’s infinite-dimensional nouvelle vague .” (Lydia dismissed TL as a guccione, “all hip and no brain.” I couldn’t argue with that, but I often feared that SeeNet was heading for a similar fate.) Buzzo had shared the Nobel back in 2036, with the seven other architects of the Standard Unified Field Theory – but he, too, was now trying to demolish, or at least supersede, it. I was reminded of two early twentieth-century physicists: J.J. Thomson, who’d established the existence of electrons as distinct particles, and George Thomson, his son, who’d shown that they could also behave like waves. It was an enlargement of vision, not a contradiction – and no doubt Buzzo was hoping to perform a similar feat in a single generation.

  Buzzo was a tall, bald, heavily wrinkled man, eighty-three years old but showing no signs of frailty. He was a lively speaker, and he seemed to strike sparks off the audience of ATM specialists … but even his arcane jokes, which left them in stitches, went over my head. His introduction contained plenty of familiar phrases, and plenty of equations
which I’d seen before – but once he started doing things with those equations, I was completely out of my depth. Every now and then he’d display graphics: knotted gray-white tubes, with green-gridded surfaces and bright red geodesic lines snaking across them. Triplets of mutually perpendicular arrowed vectors would blossom from a point, then move around a loop or a knot, tipping and twisting along the way. No sooner would I start to feel that I was making sense of these diagrams, though, than Buzzo would wave a hand at the screen dismissively and say something like: “I can’t show you the most crucial aspect – what’s happening in the bundle of linear frames – but I’m sure you can all picture it: just imagine embedding this surface in twelve dimensions…”

  I sat two (empty) seats to the left of Violet Mosala, but I hardly dared glance her way. When I did, she kept her eyes on Buzzo, but her expression became stony. I couldn’t imagine what means she suspected I’d employed to win the contract for the documentary. (Bribery? Extortion? Sex? If only SeeNet could have been so divertingly Byzantine.) It didn’t really matter how I’d done it, though; the injustice of the end result was self-evident, regardless.

  “So this path integral,” said Buzzo, “gives us an invariant!” His latest crisp diagram of knotted tubes suddenly blurred into an amorphous gray-green haze – symbolizing the shift from a particular space-time to its generalization in pre-space – but the three vectors he’d sent to circumnavigate the simulated universe remained fixed. “Invariants” in an All-Topologies Model were physical quantities which could be shown to be independent of such things as the curvature of space-time in the region of interest, and even how many dimensions it possessed; finding invariants was the only way to make any kind of coherent physics emerge from the daunting indeterminacy of pre-space. I fixed my gaze on Buzzo’s steady vectors; I wasn’t entirely lost yet, after all.

  “But that’s obvious. Now comes the tricky part: imagine extending the same operator to spaces where the Ricci curvature is nowhere-defined —”

  Now I was lost.

  I gave serious thought to calling Sarah again, and asking if she’d be willing to take back Violet Mosala . I could have handed her the footage I’d shot so far, smoothed out the administrative glitches with Lydia, and then crawled away somewhere to recover – from Gina’s departure, from Junk DNA – without having to pretend that I was doing anything but convalescing. I’d told myself that I couldn’t afford to stop working, even for a month … but that was a question of what I was used to, not a question of starvation – and without someone to share the rent, I was going to have to move house anyway. Distress would have kept me in leafy, tranquil Eastwood for a year or more – but whatever I did now, I was headed back to the outer sprawl.

  I don’t know what stopped me from walking out of that incomprehensible lecture – and away from Mosala’s justified distaste. Pride? Stubbornness? Inertia? Maybe it came down to the presence of the cults. Walsh’s tactics could only become uglier – but that only made it seem more of a betrayal to abandon the project. I’d given in to SeeNet’s demands for frankenscience in Junk DNA ; this was a chance to atone, by showing the world someone who was standing up against the cults. And it wasn’t as if the rhetoric was about to give way to violence – Kuwale notwithstanding. This was arcane physics, not biotechnology – and even at the Zambian bioethics conference, where I’d last seen Walsh, it was God’s Image as usual – not Humble Science! – who’d pelted speakers with monkey embryos and doused unsympathetic journalists in human blood. No religious fundamentalists had bothered with the Einstein Centenary Conference; TOEs were either beyond their comprehension, or beneath their contempt.

  Mosala said softly, “That’s nonsense.”

  I glanced at her warily. She was smiling. She turned to me, all hostilities momentarily forgotten, and whispered, “He’s wrong! He thinks he’s found a way to discard the isolated-point topologies; he’s cooked up an isomorphism which maps them all into a set of measure zero. But he’s using the wrong measure . In this context, he has to use Perrini’s, not Saupe’s! How could he have missed that?”

  I had only the vaguest idea of what she was talking about. Isolated-point topologies were “spaces” where nothing actually touched anything else. A “measure” was a kind of generalization of length, like a higher-dimensional area or volume – only they included much wilder abstractions than that. When you summed something over all the topologies, you multiplied each contribution to the infinite sum by a “measure” of “how big” the topology was … a bit like weighting the worldwide average of some statistic according to the population of each country – or according to its land area, or its Gross Domestic Product, or some other measure of its relative significance.

  Buzzo believed he’d found a way of tackling the calculation of any real physical quantity which made the effective contribution of all the universes of isolated points equal to zero.

  Mosala believed he was mistaken.

  I said, “So, you’ll confront him when he’s finished?”

  She turned back to the proceedings, smiling to herself. “Let’s wait and see. I don’t want to embarrass him. And someone else is sure to spot the error.”

  Question time arrived. I strained my limited grasp of the subject, trying to decide if any of the issues raised were Mosala’s in disguise – but I thought not. When the session ended and she still hadn’t spoken, I asked point blank: “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  She became irritated. “ I could be mistaken. I’ll have to give it more thought. It’s not a trivial question; he may have had a good reason for the choice he made.”

  I said, “This was a prelude to his paper on Sunday week, wasn’t it? Clearing the ground for his masterpiece?” Buzzo, Mosala and Yasuko Nishide were scheduled to present their rival TOEs – in strict alphabetical order – on the last day of the conference.

  “That’s right.”

  “So … if he’s wrong about the choice of measure, he could end up falling flat on his face?”

  Mosala gave me a long, hard look. I wondered if I’d finally managed to push the decision out of my hands: if she’d withdraw her cooperation entirely, leaving me with no subject to film, no reason to remain.

  She said coldly, “I have enough trouble deciding when my own techniques are valid; I don’t have time to be an expert on everyone else’s work, as well.” She glanced at her notepad. “I believe that’s all the filming we agreed on for today. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m meeting someone for lunch.”

  #

  I saw Mosala heading for one of the hotel restaurants, so I turned the other way and walked out of the building. The midday sky was dazzling; in the shadows of awnings the buildings retained their subtle hues, but in the glare of full sunlight they took on an appearance reminiscent of the oldest quarters of some North African cities, all white stone against blue sky. There was an ocean-scented breeze from the east, warm but not unpleasant.

  I walked down side streets at random, until I came to an open square. In the middle there was a small circular park, some twenty meters wide, covered with luxuriant grass – wild and unmown – and dotted with small palms. It was the first vegetation I’d seen on Stateless, except for potted plants in the hotel. Soil was a luxury here; all the necessary minerals could be found in the ocean, in trace amounts, but trying to provide the island with enough topsoil for agriculture would have meant trawling several thousand times the area of water required for the algae-and-plankton-based food chain which met all the same needs.

  I gazed at this modest patch of greenery – and the longer I stared, the more the sight of it unnerved me. It took me a while longer to understand why.

  The whole island was an artifact , as much as any building of metal and glass. It was maintained by engineered lifeforms – but their wild ancestors were as remote to them as ancient buried ore bodies were to gleaming titanium alloy. This tiny park, which was really just an overgrown potted plant, should have driven that home mercilessly, puncturing the illusion that I w
as standing on anything but the deck of a vast machine.

  It didn’t.

  I’d seen Stateless from the air, spreading its tendrils out into the Pacific, as organically beautiful as any living creature on the planet. I knew that every brick and tile in this city had been grown from the sea, not fired in any kiln. The whole island appeared so “natural”, on its own terms, that it was the grass and the trees which looked artificial. This patch of wild – “authentic” – nature seemed alien and contrived.

  I sat on a bench – reef-rock, but softer than the paving beneath it; more polymer, less mineral? – half shaded by one of the (ironic?) palm-tree-shaped sculptures which ringed the edge of the square. None of the locals were walking on the grass, so I stayed back. I hadn’t regained my appetite, so I just sat and let the warm air and the sight of the people wash over me.

  Unwillingly, I recalled my ludicrous fantasy of endless carefree Sunday afternoons with Gina. Why had I ever imagined that she’d want to sit by a fountain in Epping with me, for the rest of her life? How could I have believed, for so long, that she was happy … when all I’d made her feel, in the end, was ignored and invisible, suffocated and trapped?

  My notepad beeped. I slid it from my pocket and Sisyphus announced, “WHO epidemiology statistics for March have just been released. Notified cases of Distress now number five hundred and twenty-three. That’s a thirty per cent increase in a month.” A graph appeared on the screen. “There have been more new cases reported in March than in the previous six months combined.”

  I said numbly, “I don’t remember asking to be told this.”

  “August 7th last year. 9:43 p.m.” The hotel room in Manchester. “You said, ‘Let me know if the numbers ever really take off.’”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “There have also been twenty-seven new journal articles published on the topic since you last enquired.” A list of titles appeared. “Do you want to hear their abstracts?”