Distress

I laughed. “Not exactly. But I'm sure I'm not missing out on much. Soap operas staring physicists are just as dull as any other kind; I really don’t care who’s screwing whom, or who’s stealing whose brilliant ideas.”

He frowned amiably. “Well, neither do I—but I wouldn’t mind knowing if the rumor about Violet Mosala has any substance.”

I hesitated. “Which rumor did you have in mind? There are so many.” It sounded pitiful even as I said it; I might as well have come right out and admitted that I had no idea what he was talking about.

“There’s only one serious question, isn’t there?”

I shrugged. Munroe looked irritated, as if he believed I was being disingenuous, and not just trying to conceal my ignorance.

I said candidly, “Violet Mosala and I aren’t exactly swapping intimate secrets. The way things are going, if I make it through to the end of the conference with decent coverage of all her public appearances, I’ll count myself lucky. Even if I have to spend the next six months chasing her between appointments in Cape Town, trying to flesh things out.”

Munroe nodded with grim satisfaction, like a cynic whose opinions had just been confirmed. “Cape Town? Right. Thanks.”

“For what?”

He said, “I never believed it; I just wanted to hear it put to rest by someone in a position to be sure. Violet Mosala—Nobel-prize-winning physicist, inspiration to millions, twenty-first-century Einstein, architect of the TOE most likely to succeed… ‘abandons’ her home country— just when the peace in Natal is starting to look more solid than ever— not for Caltech, not for Bombay, not for CERN, not for Osaka… but to join the rabble on Stateless?

“Not in a million years.”

14

Back at the hotel, climbing the stairs to my room, I asked Sisyphus:

“Can you name a group of political activists—with the initials AC—who might have taken an interest in Violet Mosala emigrating to Stateless?”

“No.”

“Come on! A is for anarchy… ?”

“There are two thousand and seventy-three organizations with ‘anarchy’ or a related word in their title, but they all contain more than two words.”

“Okay.” Maybe AC itself was shorthand, like US for USA. But then, if Munroe was to be believed, no serious anarchist would ever use the A-word.

I tried a different angle. “What about A for African, С for culture… with any number of other letters?”

“There are two hundred and seven matches.”

I scrolled through the list; AC didn’t seem like a plausible abbreviation for any of them. One name was familiar, though; I replayed a section of the audio log from the morning’s press conference:

“William Savimbi, Proteus Information. You speak approvingly of a convergence of ideas which has no respect for ancestral cultures—as if your own heritage were of no importance to you at all. Is it true that you received death threats from the Pan-African Cultural Defense Front, after you publicly stated that you didn’t consider yourself to be an African woman?”

Mosala had put the quote in context—but she hadn’t answered the question. If a comment like that had been enough to result in death threats, what might rumors of “defection'—baseless or not—bring down on her?

I had no idea; I knew even less about South African cultural politics than I knew about ATMs. Mosala would hardly be the first prominent scientist to leave the country, but she would be one of the most celebrated—and the first to emigrate to Stateless. Chasing money and prestige at a world-class institution was one thing, but it would be hard to read a move to Stateless (which could offer neither) as anything but a deliberate renunciation of her nationality.

I paused on the landing, and stared at my useless electronic teat. AC? Mainstream AC? Sisyphus was silent. Whoever they were, Sarah Knight had managed to find them. I was beginning to feel an ache in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about what I’d done to her. It was clear that she’d prepared for this job meticulously, researching every issue surrounding Mosala—and coming from politics, where nothing on the nets was true, she’d probably gone out and talked to everyone in the flesh. Someone must have told her about the rumors, and put her on the trail which led to Kuwale —all off the record, of course. I’d stolen the project, walked in cold, and now I couldn’t even tell whether I was making a documentary about an emigrant anarcho-physicist in fear of her life… or whether I was jumping at shadows, and the only threat anyone on Stateless faced was being goaded into giving Janet Walsh some long overdue career advice.

I had Hermes call every hotel on the island, and inquire about a guest called Akili Kuwale.

No luck.

In my room, I turned up the windows’ sound insulation, and tried to psych myself into doing some work. The next morning I was scheduled to film a lecture by Helen Wu, chief advocate of the view that Mosalas methodology verged on circular logic. Before letting Munroe talk me into filming the inland divers, I’d been planning to spend the whole afternoon reading Wu’s previous papers; I had a lot of catching up to do.

First, though…

I scanned the relevant databases (eschewing help from Sisyphus, and taking three times as long). The Pan-African Cultural Defense Front turned out to be a loose affiliation of fifty-seven radical traditionalist groups from twenty-three nations, with a council of representatives which met each year to decide strategies and issue proclamations. PACDF itself was twenty years old; it had appeared in the wake of a resurgence of the traditionalist debate in the early thirties, when a num ber of academics and activists, mostly in central Africa, had begun to speak of the need to “re-establish continuity” with the pre-colonial past. Political and cultural movements of the previous century—from Senghor’s negritude to Mobutu’s “authenticity” to Black Consciousness in all its forms—were dismissed as corrupt, assimilationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism—according to the most vocal of the new traditionalists—was to excise it from history completely: to aim to behave, in its aftermath, as if it had never happened.

PACDF was the most extreme manifestation of this philosophy, taking an uncompromising and far from populist line. They decried Islam as an invader religion, as much as Christianity or Syncretism. They opposed vaccination, bioengineered crops, electronic communications. And if there was more to the group than a catalog of the foreign (or local, but insufficiently ancient) influences they explicitly renounced, they might have found it hard to differentiate themselves without such a hit-list. Many of the policies they advocated—wider official use of local languages, greater support for traditional cultural forms—were already high on the agenda of most governments, or were being lobbied for from other quarters. PACDF’s raison d'etre seemed to consist of being greater purists than anyone else. When the most effective anti-malarial vaccine on the planet was manufactured in Nairobi—based on research carried out in that well-known imperialist superpower, Colombia— condemning its use as “a criminal betrayal of traditional healing practices” sounded like sheer fundamentalist perversity to me.

If Violet Mosala had chosen to emigrate to Stateless, I would have thought they’d be glad to be rid of her. She might have been a hero on half the continent, but to PACDF she could never have been anything but a traitor. And I could find no report of a death threat, so maybe Savimbi’s claim had been pure hype; the reality might have involved nothing more than an anonymous call to his news desk.

I plowed on, regardless. Maybe Kuwale’s mysterious faction had revealed themselves by taking part in the other side of the debate? There was certainly no shortage of vocal opposition to PACDF—from more moderate traditionalists, from numerous professional bodies, from pluralist organizations, and from self-described