by Greg Egan
Heard about it how?
Sarah had come out of politics – but she’d already completed one science documentary for SeeNet. I checked the schedules. The title 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-space with different physical constants, universes “reproducing” via black holes and passing 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 she’d been saving them for Violet Mosala , 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.
Chapter 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 space 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 documentary 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 halfway 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, “‘Nobel 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?”
“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 documentary. 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 assistant every time she came to an equation: windows blossomed on the screen, full of algebraic cross-checking and detailed analysis 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. Passing 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 constituted each layer, to prize 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 parse 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. I 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-authored 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?
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]
Add 3.
[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 is … 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 of her 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 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.
I turned to Mosala. “Do you still think she’s on the right track?”
She hesitated. “Yes, I do.”
The auditorium was emptying around us. In the corner of my eye, I could see people’s gaze lingering on Mosala as they made their way past us. It was all very civilized – no swooning teenagers begging for autographs – but there were unmistakable flashes of infatuation, reverence, adoration. I recognized some members of the fan club whose support had been so evident at the press conference – but I still hadn’t so much as glimpsed Kuwale anywhere in the building. If ve was so concerned about Mosala, why wasn’t ve here?
I said, “What does that mean for your TOE? If Wu is correct—?”
Mosala smiled. “Maybe that strengthens my position.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
She glanced at her notepad. “It’s a complicated issue. Maybe we could go into it tomorrow?”
Wednesday afternoon: our first interview session.
“Of course.”
We began to walk out together. Mosala clearly had another appointment; it was now or never. I said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I don’t know if it’s important, but…”
She seemed distracted, but she said, “Go on.”
“When I arrived, I was met at the airport by someone called Akili Kuwale.” She didn’t react to the name, so I continued. “Ve said ve was a ‘mainstream Anthrocosmologist’, and—”
Mosala groaned softly, closed her eyes, and stopped dead. Then she turned on me. “Let me make this absolutely clear . If you so much as mention the Anthrocosmologists in this documentary, I’ll—”
I broke in hurriedly, “I have no intention of doing that.”
She stared at me angrily, disbelieving.
I added, “Do you think they’d let me , even if I wanted to?”
She wasn’t mollified. “I never know what they might do. What did this person want from you, if it wasn’t coverage for their lunatic views?”
I said carefully, “Ve seemed to feel you might be in some kind of danger.” I contemplated raising the question of emigration to Stateless , but Mosala was already so close to flashpoint that I didn’t think it was worth the risk.
She said acidly, “Well, that’s the Anthrocosmologists for you, and their concern is very touching, but I’m not in any danger , am I?” She gestured at the empty auditorium, as if to point out the absence of lurking assassins. “So they can relax, and you can forget about them, and we can both get on with our jobs. Right?”
I nodded dumbly. She started to walk away; I caught up with her. I said, “Look, I didn’t seek these people out. I was approached straight off the plane by this mysterious person making cryptic remarks about your safety. I thought you had a right to hear about it; it’s as simple as that. I didn’t know ve was a member of your least favorite cult. And if the whole subject’s taboo … fine. I’ll never speak their name in your presence again.”
Mosala stopped, her expression softening. She said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to chew your head off. But if you knew the kind of pernicious nonsense —” She broke off. “Never mind. You say the subject’s closed? You have no interest in them?” She smiled sweetly. “Then there’s nothing to argue about, is there?” She walked to the doorway, then turned and called back, “So – I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon? We can finally have a talk about some things that matter. I’m looking forward to that .”
I watched her walk away, then I retreated back into the empty room and sat down in a front-row seat – wondering how I’d ever talked myself into believing that I could “explain” Violet Mosala to the world. I hadn’t even known what my own lover was thinking, living with her week after week – so what kind of ludicrous misjudgments would I make with this highly-strung, mercurial stranger … whose life revolved around mathematics I could barely comprehend?
My notepad beeped urgently. I took it from my pocket; Hermes had deduced that the lecture was over, and audible signaling was now acceptable. There was a message for me from Indrani Lee:
“Andrew, you may not fully appreciate what kind of coup this is – but a representative of the people we discussed last night has agreed to speak with you. Off the record, of course. 27 Chomsky Avenue. Nine o’clock tonight.”
I clutched my stomach, and tried not to laugh.
I said, “I’m not going. I’m not risking it. What if Mosala finds out? Of course I’m curious – but it’s just not worth it.”
After a few seconds, Hermes asked, “Is that a reply to the sender?”
I shook my head. “No. And it’s not even the truth, either.”
#
The address Lee had given me was a short walk from the north-east tram line, through what looked – almost – like a patch of middle class suburbia back home … except that there was no vegetation, ostentatious or otherwise, just
relatively large paved courtyards and occasional kitsch statuary. No obviously electrified fences, either. The air was chilly; autumn was making itself felt here, after all. The dazzling coral of Stateless gave the wrong impression entirely; the natural cousins of its engineered polyps would not have thrived, this far from the tropics.
I thought: Sarah Knight had been in touch with the Anthrocosmologists, and Mosala had never got to hear of it. She would hardly have spoken about Sarah in such glowing terms, if she’d known there’d been some kind of deal between her and Kuwale. That was pure supposition, but it made sense: research for Holding Up the Sky must have led Sarah to the ACs, who were at least part of the reason why she’d worked so hard to get the contract for Violet Mosala . And maybe the Anthrocosmologists had now decided to offer the same deal to me. Help us keep watch over Violet Mosala, and we’ll give you a world exclusive: the first media coverage of the planet’s most secretive cult.
Why did they feel it was their duty to guard Mosala, though? What role did TOE specialists play in the Anthrocosmologists’ scheme of things? Revered gurus? Unworldly holy fools who needed to be protected from their enemies by a secret cadre of devoted followers? Sanctifying physicists would make a change from sanctifying ignorance – but I could imagine Mosala finding it even more galling to be told that she was some kind of precious (but ultimately, naïve and helpless) conduit for mystical insights, than to be told she was in need of being humbled , or healed .
Number 27 was a single-story house of silver-gray granite-like reef-rock. It was large, but no mansion; four or five bedrooms, maybe. It made sense for the reclusive ACs to lease themselves something out in the suburbs; it was certainly more discreet than booking themselves rooms in a hotel swarming with journalists. Warm yellow light showed through windows set to opalescent, a deliberately welcoming configuration. I walked through the unlocked gate, crossed the empty courtyard, steeled myself, and rang the bell. If Mystical Renaissance could don clown costumes and talk about “imagination-driven self-narratives” out on the street for all the world to see, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a cult whose practices had to take place behind closed doors.
