Distress

enthusiastic punishment of the “anarchists” went above and beyond the call of realpolitik. There were flights from Phnom Penh to Dili, though, and from there I could finally reach my destination.

It was no mystery why Sydney-to-Dili was out of the question. After Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, they’d split the profits—the Timor Gap oilfields—with their silent partner, Australia. In 2036, with half a million East Timorese dead, and the oil wells irrelevant—hydrocarbons being molecules which engineered algae made from sunlight, in any shape and size, for a tenth of the cost of milk—the Indonesian government, under pressure more from its own citizens than from any of its allies, had finally, reluctantly acceded to demands for autonomy for the province of Timor Timur. Formal independence had followed in 2040. But fifteen years later, the lawsuits against the oil thieves still hadn’t been settled.

I boarded through the umbilical, and took my seat. A few minutes later, a woman in a bright red sarong and white blouse sat down beside me. We exchanged nods and smiles.

She said, “You wouldn’t believe the rigmarole I'm going through. Once in a blue moon my people hold a conference off the nets—and they had to choose the most difficult place in the world to reach.”

“You mean Stateless?”

She regarded me sympathetically. “You too?”

I nodded.

“You poor man. Where have you come from?”

“Sydney.”

Her accent was almost certainly Bombay but she said, “I'm from Kuala Lumpur. So you’ve had it worse. I'm Indrani Lee.”

“Andrew Worth.”

We shook hands. She said, “Of course, I'm not giving a paper myself. And the proceedings will be on-line the day after the conference finishes. But… if you don’t turn up, you miss all the gossip, don’t you?” She smiled conspiratorially. “People grow so desperate to talk off the nets knowing there’ll be no record, no audit trail. By the time each face-to-face meeting comes around, they’re ready to tell you all their secrets in five minutes. Don’t you find?”

“I hope so. I'm a journalist—I'm covering the conference for SeeNet.” A risky confession, but I wasn’t about to try imitating a TOE specialist.

Lee showed no obvious signs of disdain. The plane began its almost vertical ascent; I was in the cheap center aisle, but my screen showed Phnom Penh as it receded beneath us—an astonishing jumble of styles, from vine-covered stone temples (real and faux) to faded French colonial (ditto) to gleaming black ceramic. Lee’s screen began to display an emergency procedures audiovisual; my recent-enough spate of flights on identical planes qualified me for an exemption.

When the AV was over, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what your field is? I mean, TOEs, obviously, but which approach—?”

“I'm not a physicist. What I do is much closer to your own line of work.”

“You’re a journalist?”

“I'm a sociologist. Or if you want my full title: I study the Dynamics of Contemporary Ideas. So… if physics is about to come to an end, I thought I’d better be on hand to witness the event.”

“You want to be there to remind the scientists that they’re ’really just priests and story-tellers'?” I’d meant that as a joke—her own comment had been tongue-in-cheek, and I’d tried to match her tone—but my words came out sounding like an accusation.

She gave me a reproving glare. “I'm not a member of any Ignorance Cult. And I'm afraid you’re twenty years out of date if you think sociology is some kind of hotbed for Humble Science! or Mystical Renaissance. In academia, they’re all in the History Departments now.” Her expression softened to a kind of weary resignation. “We still get all the flak, though. It’s unbelievable: a couple of badly-framed studies from the nineteen eighties still get thrown in my face by medical researchers, as if I was personally responsible.”

I apologized; she waved the offense away. A robot trolley offered us food and drink; I declined. It was absurd, but the first leg of my zig-zag path to Stateless had left me feeling worse than any non-stop flight across the entire Pacific.

As lush Vietnamese jungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view—and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. “What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean… if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?”

“Yes—but my jobs very different from yours. Ultimately, I'm just a communications technician.”

She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later. “The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs, right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?”

“More or less.”

“Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances.” She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. “I'm not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked—as groups like Culture First continue to insist—just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of extreme violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one level: most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.

“But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of ‘dethroning’ physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science.” She added, in mock reproof, “And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones.”

I said, “But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?”

Lee confessed without hesitation: “I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

“The physicists have it easy—with their subject, if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prising out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.

“People are the very opposite. There’s nothing to which we’ll devote more time, and energy, and cunning, than burying the truth.”

East Timor from the air was a dense patchwork of fields along the coast, and what looked like native jungle and savanna in the highlands. A dozen tiny fires dotted the mountains, but the blackened pinpricks beneath the smoke trails were dwarfed by the scars of old open-cut mines. We spiraled down over the island in a helical U-turn, hundreds of small villages coming into sight and then slipping away.

The fields displayed no trademark pigments (let alone the logos of fourth-generation biotech); visibly, at least, the farmers were refusing the temptation to go renegade, and were using only old, out-of-patent crops. Agriculture for export was almost dead; even hyper-urbanized Japan could feed its own population. Only the poorest countries, unable to afford the license fees for state-of-the-art produce, struggled for self-sufficiency. East Timor imported food from Indonesia.

It was just after midday as we touched down in the tiny capital. There was no umbilical; we walked across the sweltering tarmac. The melatonin patch on my shoulder, pre-programmed by my pharm, was nudging me relentlessly toward Stateless time, two hours later than Sydney’s— but Dili was two hours in the other direction. I