Distress

a Volksfront netzine—running the bizarre line that Violet was saying that the Nobel wasn’t hers, wasn’t ‘Africa’s,’ but really belonged to ‘white intellectual culture'—for which she was only a politically expedient figurehead. That ’story’ got taken up and echoed in other places—but nobody except the original audience would have believed for a second that it was anything but ludicrous propaganda. As for PACDF, they’ve never done so much as acknowledge Violet’s existence.”

“Okay. Then what made Savimbi leap to the wrong conclusion?”

De Groot glanced toward the doorway. “Garbled fifth-hand reports.”

“Of what? Not just the netzine propaganda itself. He could hardly be that naive.”

De Groot leaned toward me with an anguished expression, torn between discretion and the desire to set me straight. “She had a break-in. All right? A few weeks ago. A burglar. A teenage boy with a gun.”

“Shit. What happened? Was she hurt?”

“No, she was lucky. Her alarm went off—he’d disabled one, but she had a backup—and there was a patrol car nearby at the time. The burglar told the police he’d been paid to frighten her. But he couldn’t name names, of course. It was just a pathetic excuse.”

“Then why should Savimbi take it seriously? And why ‘fifth-hand reports'? Surely he would have read the whole story?”

“Violet dropped the charges. She’s an idiot, but that’s the kind of thing she does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But someone in the police must have leaked—”

Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that we’d been doing our best to avoid being overheard.

I moved to fill the silence. “How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine. She’s in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought Craft, though, so she’s not getting much sleep.” Wendy Mosala ran one of Africa’s largest software houses; she’d built it up herself over thirty years, from a one-person operation. “She’s bidding for a license for the Kaspar clonelets, two years in advance of release, and if it all pans out…” She caught herself. “All of which is strictly confidential, okay?”

“Of course.” Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software, currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus and its numerous cousins —which had been created fully-fledged, instantly “adult” by design—Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more anthropomorphically styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I found it a little disquieting… and I wasn’t sure that I wanted a clonelet—a pared-down copy of the original—sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.

De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.

I said, “Are you ready to start?”

She nodded, and smiled half-heartedly. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’s over.”

I invoked Witness. The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of rather more flattering light sources.

I said, “Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in science?”

Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, “I don’t know! Was it your mother who inspired you to come up with that kind of pathetic—”

She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. “I'm sorry. Can we start again?”

“No need. Don’t worry about continuity; it’s not your problem. Just keep on talking. And if you’re halfway through an answer and you change your mind—just stop, and start afresh.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight. “My mother. My childhood. My role models.” She opened her eyes and pleaded, “Can’t we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?”

I said patiently, “I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit—but if the network executives don’t see the required quota of formative childhood influences… they’ll screen you at three a.m. after a last-minute program change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-resistant skin diseases.” SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their viewers, of course) had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera—a slick paint-by-numbers guide to commodifying human beings… as well as a template for deluding yourself into thinking that you’d explained them. A sort of externalized version of Lament’s area.

Mosala said, “Three a.m.? You’re serious, aren’t you?” She thought it over. “Okay. If that’s what it comes down to… I can play along.”

“So tell me about your mother.” I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to answer more or less at random, so long as you don’t contradict yourself.

She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. “My mother gave me an education. By which I don’t mean school. She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult’s knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up… the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn’t steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history… anything. I wasn’t pushed in any direction. I was just set free.”

“And your father?”

“My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four.”

“That must have been traumatic. But… do you think that early loss might have given you the drive, the independence… ?”

Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. “My father was shot in the head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty thousand people whose views he found completely repugnant. And—this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for your timeslot—he was someone I loved, and who I still love; he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clock-work. He was not an absence to be compensated for.”

I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview material with reminiscences from childhood friends… stock footage of Cape Town schools in the thirties… whatever.

“You’ve said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life—for purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But… when do you think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?”

Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. “About two years later, I suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi.”

She hadn’t mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I’d seen—and it was lucky I’d stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?

“So you were influenced by technoliberation?”

“Of course.” She frowned slightly, bemused—as if I’d just asked her if she’d ever heard of Albert Einstein. I wasn’t even sure if she was being honest, or whether she was still just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet’s demand for cliches—but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.

She said, “Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could… incinerate any doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted.” She hesitated, then recited:

“When Leopold the Second rises from the grave Saying, ‘My conscience plagues me, take back This un- Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!’ Then I will renounce my ill-gotten un-African gains And piously abandon the