Distress

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 technoliberateurs.

Mismatched initials aside, I couldn't quite see a member of the African Union for the Advancement of Science collaring journalists in airports and asking them to play unofficial bodyguard to a world-renowned physicist. And while the African Pluralists League organized worldwide student exchange programs, theatre and dance tours, physical and net-based art exhibitions, and lobbied aggressively against cultural isolationism and discriminatory treatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities… I doubted they had time on their hands to fret about Violet Mosala.

The late Muteba Kazadi had coined the term technoliberation, to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the 'liberation' of the technology itself from restrictive hands. Muteba had been a communications engineer, poet, science writer—and Minister for Development in Zaire in the late thirties. I viewed some of his speeches, impassioned pleas for 'the use of knowledge in the service of freedom'; he'd called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public ownership of communications resources, and a universal right of access to scientific information. As well as championing the obvious pragmatism of 'liberation biology' (though Zaire had never gone renegade and used unlicensed crops), he'd spoken of the long-term need for African nations to participate in pure research in every area of basic science—an extraordinary stand at a time when such activities were deeply unpopular in the wealthiest countries on the planet, and unthinkable in terms of his own government's immediate priorities.

Muteba had had his eccentricities, his three biographers concurred, with a leaning toward Nietzschean metaphysics, fringe cosmology, and dramatic conspiracy theories—including the old one that 'El Nido de Ladrones,' the bioengineered haven built by drug runners on the Peruvian-Colombian border, had been H-bombed in 2035 not because the modified forest was out of control and threatening to overrun the whole Amazon basin, but because some kind of 'dangerously liberating' neuroactive virus had been invented there. The act had been an obscenity, thousands of people had died—and the public outrage it attracted had quite possibly helped to save Stateless from a similar fate—but I thought the more prosaic explanation was far more likely to be true.

Learned commentators from every part of the continent stated that Muteba's legacy lived on, and that proud technoliberateurs were active across the face of Africa, and beyond. I found it difficult to pin down his direct intellectual descendants, though; hundreds of academic and political groups, and tens of thousands of individuals, cited Muteba as a source of inspiration—and many people who'd spoken out against PACDF in net debates had explicitly labeled themselves technoliberateurs—but each seemed to have adapted the philosophy to a slightly different agenda. I had no doubt that every one of them would have been horrified at the thought of Violet Mosala coming to harm—but I was no wiser as to who might have taken it upon themselves to watch over her.

Around seven, I headed downstairs. Sarah Knight still hadn't returned my call—and I could hardly blame her for snubbing me. I thought again about offering to hand back the project, but I told myself that I'd left it too late, and she'd probably committed herself to another assignment. The truth was, the more the complications surrounding Mosala mocked the fantasy I'd held of retreating into the 'inconsequential' abstractions of TOEs, the harder it became to imagine walking away. If this was the reality behind the mirage, I had an obligation to face it.

I was heading toward the main restaurant when I spotted Indrani Lee coming down one of the corridors which led into the lobby. She was with a small group, but they were splitting up—with volleys of rejoinders and afterthoughts, as if they'd just emerged from a long, hectic meeting and couldn't bear each other's company any longer, but couldn't quite bring themselves to end the discussion, either. I approached; she saw me and raised a hand in greeting.

I said, 'I missed you on the connecting flight. How are you settling in?'

'Fine, fine!' She seemed happy and excited; the conference was obviously living up to her expectations. 'But you don't look at all well.'

I laughed. 'As a student, did you ever find yourself sitting for an exam where all the questions on the paper, and all the questions you'd stayed up until dawn preparing to answer… had so little in common that they might as well have come from two completely different subjects?'

'Several times. But what's brought on the deja vu? Is all the mathematics going over your head?'

'Well, yes, but that's not the problem.' I glanced around the lobby; no one was likely to overhear us, but I didn't want to add to the rumors about Mosala if I could help it. I said, 'You looked like you were in a hurry. Maybe I'll bore you with all my tribulations on the flight back to Phnom Penh.'

'In a hurry? No, I was just going out for some air. If you're not busy yourself, you're welcome to join me.'

I accepted gratefully. I'd been planning to eat, but I still had no real appetite—and it occurred to me that Lee might have some professional insights into technoliberation which she'd be willing to share.

As we stepped through the doors, though, I could see what she'd really meant by 'going out for some air': Mystical Renaissance had decided to show themselves, crowding the street outside the hotel. Banners read: TO EXPLAIN IS TO DESTROY! REVERE THE NUMEN! SAY NO TO TOE! T-shirts displayed Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Joseph Campbell, Fritjof Capra, the cult's late founder Gunter Kleiner, event artist Sky Alchemy—and even Einstein, poking his tongue out.

No one was chanting slogans; after Janet Walsh's confrontationist salvo, Mystical Renaissance had opted for a carnival atmosphere, all mime artists and fire-jugglers, palmists and tarot card readers. Tumbling firesticks cast oscillating deep-blue shadows everywhere, giving the street an oceanic cast. Bemused locals threaded their way through this obstacle course with expressions of weary resignation; they hadn't asked to have a circus shoved down their throats. So far as I could see, it was only a few badge-wearing conference members who were availing themselves of the free entertainment, or giving money to the buskers and fortune-tellers.

One of the cultists who'd stolen Albert was singing 'Puff, the Magic Dragon,' accompanying himself on a keyboard—a common brand, like his T-shirt; both had IR programming ports. I paused in front of him, smiling appreciatively, while I invoked some notepad software I'd written several years before, and quietly typed