Distress

indefinite probation. Disclosing information to a journalist would destroy the whole relationship in an instant.'

'I don't want to publicize anything about them. This is purely off the record, I swear. I'm just curious.'

'Then it won't do you any harm to wait a few years, will it?'

A few years? I said, 'All right, I'm more than curious.'

'Why?'

I thought it over: I could tell her about Kuwale—and ask her to swear to keep it to herself, to avoid embroiling Mosala in any more unwelcome speculation. Except that… how could I ask her to betray one confidence while begging her to respect another? It would be pure hypocrisy—and if she was willing to swap secrets with me, what would her promise be worth?

I said, 'What have they got against journalists, anyway? Most cults are dying to recruit new members. What sort of ethos—?'

Lee eyed me suspiciously. 'I'm not going to be tricked into any more indiscretions. It's my fault entirely that the name slipped out, but the topic is now closed. The Anthrocosmologists are a non-subject.'

I laughed. 'Oh, come on! This is absurd! You're one of them, aren't you? No secret handshakes; your notepad is sending out coded infrared: I am Indrani Lee, High Priestess of the Revered and Sacred Order.'

She took a swat at me with the back other hand; I pulled back just in time. She said, 'They certainly don't have priestesses.'

'You mean they're sexist? All male?'

She scowled. 'Or priests. And I'm not saying anything more.'

We walked on in silence. I took out my notepad and gave Sisyphus several meaningful glances. The full word had unlocked no Aladdin's cave of data, though: every search on 'Anthrocosmologists' came up blank.

I said, 'I apologize. No more questions, no more provocation. What if I really do need to get in touch with them, though, but I just can't tell you why?'

Lee was unmoved. 'That sounds unlikely.'

I hesitated. 'Someone called Kuwale has been trying to contact me. Ve's been sending me cryptic messages for days. But ve failed to turn up at an arranged meeting last night, so I just want to find out what's going on.' Almost none of this was true, but I wasn't going to admit that I'd screwed up a perfect opportunity to discover for myself what AC was about. In any case, Lee remained impassive; if she'd heard the name before, she showed no sign of it.

I said, 'Can't you pass on the message that I want to speak to them? Give them the right to choose for themselves whether or not to turn me down?'

She stopped walking, A cultist on stilts reached down and thrust a stack of edible pamphlets in her face, MR's own Einstein Conference Newsletter in the non-electronic edition. Lee waved the woman away irritably. 'You're asking a lot. If they take offense, and I lose five years' work…'

I thought: You wouldn't lose five years' work; you'd finally be free to publish. But it didn't seem diplomatic to put it that way.

I said, 'I first heard the term Anthrocosmotogists from Kuwale, not you. So you don't even have to tell them that you admitted knowing anything. Just say I asked you more or less at random—that I've been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you.'

She hesitated. I said, 'Kuwale was dropping hints about… violence. So what am I supposed to do? Just forget about ver? Or start trying to navigate my way through whatever bizarre apparatus Stateless employs for dealing with suspicious disappearances ?'

Lee gave me a look which seemed to imply that she hadn't been taken in by any of this—but then she said begrudgingly, 'If I tell them you've been blundering around shooting your mouth off, I suppose they can't hold that against me.'

'Thank you.'

She didn't look happy. 'Violence? Against whom?'

I shook my head. 'Ve didn't say. I mean, it may all come to nothing, but I still have to follow it up.'

'I want to hear everything, when you do.'

'You will, I promise.'

We'd arrived back at the theatre group, who were now acting out a laborious fable about a child with cancer… whose life could only be saved if he was kept from hearing the—stressful, immunosuppressant—truth. Look, Ma, real science! Except that the effects of stress on the immune system had been amenable to pharmacological control for the last thirty years.

I stood and watched for a while, playing devil's advocate against my own first impressions, trying to convince myself that there might be some real insight hidden in the story: some eternal verity which transcended the outdated medical contingencies.

If there was, I honestly couldn't find it. The earnest clowns might as well have been envoys from another planet, for all that they conveyed to me about the world we supposedly shared.

And if I was wrong, and they were right? If everything I saw as specious contrivance was, in fact, luminous with wisdom? If this clumsy, sentimental fairy tale spoke the deepest truth about the world?

Then I was more than wrong. I was utterly deluded. I was lost beyond redemption—a foundling from another cosmology, another logic entirely, with no place in this one at all.

There was no possibility of compromise, no question of building bridges. We couldn't both be 'half-right.' Mystical Renaissance endlessly proclaimed that they'd found 'the perfect balance' between mysticism and rationality—as if the universe had been waiting for this cozy detente before deciding how to conduct itself, and was, frankly, relieved that the conflicting parties had been able to reach an amicable settlement which would respect everyone's delicate cultural sensibilities and give due weight to everyone's views. Except, of course, the view that the human ideals of balance and compromise, however laudable in political and social spheres, had absolutely nothing to do with the way the universe itself behaved.

Humble Science! could denounce as 'tyrants of scientism' anyone who expressed this opinion, Mystical Renaissance could call them 'victims of psychic numbing' who needed to be 'healed'… but even if the cults were right, the principle itself could not be diluted, reconciled with its opposites, brought into the fold. It was either true or false—or truth and falsehood were meaningless, and the universe was an incomprehensible blur.

I thought: Empathy at last. If any of this was mutual—if MR felt half as alienated and dispossessed by the prospect of a TOE, as I did at the thought of their lunatic ideas shaping the ground beneath my feet—then I finally understood why they'd come here.

The actors bowed. A few people, mainly other cultists in fancy dress, applauded. I suspected there'd been a happy ending; I'd stopped paying attention. I took out my notepad and transferred twenty dollars to the one they'd placed before them on the ground. Even Jungians in clown costumes had to eat: First Law of Thermodynamics.

I turned to Indrani Lee. 'Tell me, honestly: Are you really the one person who can step outside every culture, every belief system, every source of bias and confusion, and see the truth?'

She nodded unassumingly. 'Of course I am. Aren't you?'

Back in my room, I stared blankly at the first page of Helen Wu's most controversial Physical Review article—and tried to piece together how Sarah Knight could have stumbled on the Anthrocosmologists in the course of her research for Violet Mosala. Maybe Kuwale had heard about the project and approached her, just as ve'd approached me.

Heard about it how?

Sarah had come out of politics, but she'd already completed one science documentary for SeeNet. I checked the schedules. The title was Holding Up the Sky… and the subject was fringe cosmology. It wasn't due to be broadcast until June, but it was sitting in SeeNet's private library—to which I had full access.

I viewed the whole thing. It ranged from near-orthodox (but probably untestable) theories: quantum