Distress

course.”

I said wearily, “What do you expect other ACs to call you?”

“Forget other ACs. You should make your own judgment—once you’ve heard all the facts.”

“I think you blew any chance of a favorable opinion when you infected me with your home-brewed cholera.”

“That wasn’t us.”

“No? Who was it, then?”

“The same people who infected Yasuko Nishide with a virulent natural strain of pneumococcus.”

A chill ran through me. I didn’t know if I believed her, but it fit with Kuwale’s description of the extremists.

Nineteen said, “Are you recording, now?”

“No.” It was the truth; although I’d captured their faces, I’d stopped continuous filming hours before, back in the hold.

“Then start. Please.” Nineteen looked and sounded Scandinavian; it seemed every faction of AC was relentlessly internationalist. Those cynics who claimed that people who forged transglobal friendships on the nets never came together in the flesh were wrong, of course. All it required was a good enough reason.

“Why?”

“You’re here to make a documentary about Violet Mosala, aren’t you? Don’t you want to tell the whole story? Right to the end?”

Twenty explained, “When Mosala’s dead, there’ll be an uproar, naturally, and we’ll have to go into hiding. And we’re not interested in martyrdom—but we’re not afraid of being identified, once the mission’s over. We’re not ashamed of what we’re doing here; we have no reason to be. And we want someone objective, non-partisan, trustworthy, to carry our side of the story to the world.”

I stared at her. She sounded perfectly sincere—and even formally apologetic, as if she was asking for a slightly inconvenient favor.

I glanced at the others. Three regarded me with studied nonchalance. Five was tinkering with the electronics. Nineteen stared back, unwavering in her solidarity.

I said, “Forget it. I don’t do snuff movies.” It was a nice line; if I hadn’t recalled Daniel Cavolini’s interrogation the moment the words were out, I might have had a warm inner glow for hours.

Twenty put me straight, politely. “No one expects you to film Mosala’s death. That would be impractical, as well as tasteless. We only want you to be in a position to explain to your viewers why her death was necessary.”

My grasp on reality was slipping. In the hold, I’d anticipated torture. I’d imagined, in detail, the process of being made to look like a plausible victim of a shark attack.

But not this.

I forced myself to speak evenly. “I'm not interested in an exclusive interview with my subject’s murderers.” The thought crossed my mind that half of SeeNet’s executives would never forgive those words, if they ever found out that I’d uttered them. “Why don’t you take out a paid spot on TechnoLalia? I'm sure their viewers would give you an unqualified vote of support—if you pointed out that it was necessary to kill Mosala in order to preserve the possibility of wormhole travel to other universes.'

Twenty frowned, unjustly slandered. “I knew Kuwale was feeding you poisonous lies. Is that what ve told you?”

I was growing light-headed, disbelieving; her obsessive concern with exactly the wrong proprieties was surreal. I shouted, “It doesn’t matter what the fucking reason is!” I tried to stretch my hands out, to implore her to see sense; they were tied firmly to the back of the chair. I said numbly, “I don’t know… maybe you just think Henry Buzzo has more gravitas, more presidential style. A suitably Jehovian manner. Or maybe you think he has more elegant equations.” I very nearly told them what Mosala had told me: Buzzo’s methodology was fatally flawed; their favorite contender could never be the Keystone. I caught myself in time. “I don’t care. It’s still murder.”

“But it’s not. It’s self-defense.”

I turned. The voice had come from the doorway of the cabin.

Helen Wu met my eyes, and explained sadly, “Wormholes have nothing to do with it. Buzzo has nothing to do with it. But if we don’t intervene, Violet will soon have the power to kill us all.”

22

After Helen Wu entered the cabin, I recorded everything. Not for SeeNet. For Interpol.

“I’ve done all I can to try to steer her onto safer ground,” Wu insisted solemnly. “I thought, if she understood where she was heading, she’d change her methods—for conventional scientific reasons. For the sake of a theory with physical content—which is what most of her peers expect of a TOE.” She raised her hands in a gesture of despair. “Nothing stops Violet! You know that. She absorbed every criticism I offered—and turned it into a virtue. I’ve only made things worse.”

Twenty said, “I don’t expect Amanda Conroy even began to convey a true picture of the richness of information cosmology. What did she describe to you? One model only: a Keystone creating a perfect, seamless universe—with no observable effects, ever, violating the TOE? No prospect of seeing through to the metaphysics beneath?”

“That’s right.” I’d given up expressing outrage; the best strategy I could think of was to play along, let them incriminate themselves as much as they wanted, and cling to the hope that I might still have a chance to warn Mosala.

“That’s only one possibility, among millions. And it’s about as simplistic as the earliest cosmological models of General Relativity from the nineteen twenties: perfectly homogeneous universes, bland and empty as giant toy balloons. They were only studied because anything more plausible was too difficult to analyze, mathematically. Nobody ever believed that they described reality.”

Wu took up the thread. “Conroy and her friends are not scientists; they’re enthusiastic dilettantes. They seized hold of the very first solution that came along, and decided it was everything they wanted.” I didn’t know about the others, but Wu had a career, a comfortable life, which she was tearing to shreds before my eyes. Maybe the intellectual energy she’d devoted to Anthrocosmology had already cost her any success she might have had with ATMs—but now she was sacrificing everything.

“That kind of perfect, stable cosmos isn’t impossible—but it depends entirely on the structure of the theory. The observable physics, and the information metaphysics underlying it, can only be guaranteed independent and separable under certain rigorous constraints. Mosala’s work shows every sign of violating those constraints in the most dangerous manner possible.”

Wu stared at me for a moment longer, as if trying to judge whether or not she’d hammered home the gravity of the situation. Nothing in her manner betrayed any hint of paranoia or fanaticism; however mistaken she was, she seemed as sober to me as a Manhattan Project scientist, terrified that the first A-bomb test might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would engulf the world.

I must have looked suitably dismayed; she turned to Five, and said, “Show him.” Then she left the room.

My heart sank. I said, “Where’s she going?” Back to Stateless, in another boat! No one here had a better chance of getting close to Mosala than Wu. I remembered the two of them walking through the hotel lobby, laughing, almost arm in arm.

“Helen already knows too much about Mosala’s TOE—and too much information cosmology,” Nineteen explained. “Pushing that any further could make a dangerous combination, so she no longer attends sessions where we discuss new results. There’s no point taking risks.”

I absorbed that in silence. The ACs’ obsessive secrecy went far beyond Conroy’s fear of media ridicule, or the need to plot assassinations unobserved. They really did believe that their ideas alone were as perilous as any physical weapon.

I could hear the ocean moving gently around us, but the windows only mirrored the scene within. My