Distress

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 spilled… 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.

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 cliches: 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