Distress

I said, 'I'm not going. I'm not risking it. What if Mosala finds out? Of course I'm curious—but it's just not worth it.'

After a few seconds, Hermes asked, 'Is that a reply to the sender?'

I shook my head. 'No. And it's not even the truth, either.'

The address Lee had given me was a short walk from the north-east tram line, through what looked— almost—like a patch of middle-class suburbia back home… except that there was no vegetation, ostentatious or otherwise, just relatively large paved courtyards and occasional kitsch statuary. No obviously electrified fences, either. The air was chilly; autumn was making itself felt here, after all. The dazzling coral of Stateless gave the wrong impression entirely; the natural cousins of its engineered polyps would not have thrived, this far from the tropics.

I thought: Sarah Knight had been in touch with the Anthrocosmologists, and Mosala had never got to hear of it. She would hardly have spoken about Sarah in such glowing terms, if she'd known there'd been some kind of deal between her and Kuwale. That was pure supposition, but it made sense: research for Holding Up the Sky must have led Sarah to the ACs, who were at least part of the reason why she'd worked so hard to get the contract for Violet Mosala. And maybe the Anthrocosmologists had now decided to offer the same deal to me. Help us keep watch over Violet Mosala, and we'll give you a world exclusive: the first media coverage of the planet's most secretive cult.

Why did they feel it was their duty to guard Mosala, though? What role did TOE specialists play in the Anthrocosmologists' scheme of things? Revered gurus? Unworldly holy fools who needed to be protected from their enemies by a secret cadre of devoted followers? Sanctifying physicists would make a change from sanctifying ignorance—but I could imagine Mosala finding it even more galling to be told that she was some kind of precious (but ultimately, naive and helpless) conduit for mystical insights, than to be told she was in need of being humbled, or healed.

Number 27 was a single-storey house of silver-gray granite-like reef-rock. It was large, but no mansion; four or five bedrooms, maybe. It made sense for the reclusive ACs to lease themselves something out in the suburbs; it was certainly more discreet than booking themselves rooms in a hotel swarming with journalists. Warm yellow light showed through windows set to opalescent, a deliberately welcoming configuration. I walked through the unlocked gate, crossed the empty courtyard, steeled myself, and rang the bell. If Mystical Renaissance could don clown costumes and talk about 'imagination-driven self-narratives' out on the street for all the world to see, I wasn't sure I was ready for a cult whose practices had to take place behind closed doors.

My notepad emitted a brief, soft squeal, like a children's toy impaled on a knife. I took it from my pocket; the screen was blank—the first time ever I'd seen it that way. The door opened, and an elegantly dressed woman smiled at me and extended a hand, saying, 'You must be Andrew Worth. I'm Amanda Conroy.'

'Pleased to meet you.'

Still clutching my notepad, I shook her hand. She glanced at the dead machine. 'It won't be damaged—but you understand, this is off the record.' She had a West Coast US accent, and unashamedly unnatural milk-white skin, smooth as polished marble. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty.

I followed her into the house, down a plushly carpeted hallway, and into the living room. There were half a dozen wall-hangings: large, abstract and colorful. They looked to me like Brazilian Mock Primitive—the work of a school of fashionable Irish artists—but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were the 'genuine' article: self-consciously exploitative 'remixes' of twenties Sao Paulo ghetto art, currently valued at a hundred thousand times the price of the real thing from Brazil. The four-meter wall-screen certainly wasn't cheap, though, and nor was the hidden device which had turned my notepad into a brick. I didn't even contemplate trying to invoke Witness; I was just glad I'd transmitted the morning's footage to my editing console at home, before leaving the hotel.

We seemed to be alone in the house. Conroy said, 'Take a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?' She moved toward a small beverage dispenser in a corner of the room. I glanced at the machine, and declined. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar synthesizer model—essentially a scaled-up pharm; it could have served anything from orange juice to a cocktail of neuroactive amines. Its presence on Stateless surprised me—I hadn't been allowed to bring my own out-of-date pharm here—but not having memorized the schedules to the UN resolution, I wasn't sure what technology was prohibited universally, and what was banned only from Australian exports.

Conroy sat opposite me, composed, but thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, 'Akili Kuwale is a very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful person, but ve's something of a loose cannon.' She smiled disarmingly. 'I can't imagine what impression you have of us, after ve led you on with all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense.' She glanced at my notepad again, meaningfully. 'I suppose our insistence on strict privacy doesn't help matters, either—but there's nothing sinister about that, I assure you. You must appreciate the power of the media to take a group of people, and their ideas, and distort the representation of both to suit… any number of agendas.' I started to reply—to concede the point, actually—but she cut me off. 'I'm not trying to libel your profession, but we've seen it happen so many times, to other groups, that you shouldn't be surprised if we treat it as an inevitable consequence of going public.

'So we've made the difficult choice, for the sake of autonomy, to refuse to be represented by outsiders at all. We don't wish to be portrayed to the world at large: fairly or unfairly, sympathetically or otherwise. And if we have no public image whatsoever, the problem of distortion vanishes. We are who we are.'

I said, 'And yet, you've asked me here.'

Conroy nodded, regretfully. 'Wasting your time, and risking making things even worse. But what choice did we have? Akili stirred your curiosity, and we could hardly expect you to let the matter drop. So… I'm willing to discuss our ideas with you directly rather than leaving you to track down and piece together a lot of unreliable hearsay from third parties. But it must, all, be off the record.'

I shifted in my seat. 'You don't want me drawing any more attention to you by asking questions of the wrong people—so you'll answer them yourself, just to shut me up?'

I'd expected this blunt appraisal to be met with wounded denials and a barrage of euphemisms but Conroy replied calmly, 'That's right.'

Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value: 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. If the ACs thought my hastily improvised story for Lee about the 'vanishing informant' Kuwale was in the process of being repeated to every last journalist and physicist on Stateless, no wonder they'd wasted no time in calling me in.

I said, 'Why are you willing to trust me? What's to stop me from using everything you say?'

Conroy spread her hands. 'Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I've viewed your previous work; it's clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don't interest you. You're here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference—which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture—they're forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we're not. And with no images of us—unless you care to fake them—what would you put in your documentary? A five-minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?'

I didn't know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosalas antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.

What's more, I couldn't help but sympathize a little with the ACs' stand. It seemed that almost everyone I'd encountered in the last few years—from gender migrants fleeing other people's definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe—was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons, although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.

I said cautiously, 'I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I'll try to respect your wishes.'

This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she'd weighed up everything before we'd even met and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.

She said, 'Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won't waste your time, though, listing what we do and don't have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth-century France, or eighteenth-century Germany… you can mine all the distant history