Distress

Mosala had published—but a similar ring to their words hardly granted their ideas the same legitimacy. And if they clearly shared her vehement distaste for the fantasy that every culture could somehow inhabit a cosmology of its own choosing, I didn't doubt for a moment that Mosala was infinitely more repelled by their alternative, in which a lone TOE specialist played absolute monarch. Worse than a Belgian or Zairian space-time: a Buzzo, Mosala, or Nishide cosmos.

I said, 'So you take the universe for granted. You're against twisting the mathematics to conform to a perceived need to prove that what we see around us is 'likely.' But you don't exactly go back to setting the dials on the SUFT machine, either.'

'No. I feed in complete descriptions of experiments, instead.'

'You choose the most general All-Topologies Model possible—but you break the perfect symmetry by giving a one-hundred-percent probability to the existence of various setups of experimental apparatus?'

'Yes. Can I just—?' She rose from her chair and went into the bedroom, then returned with her notepad. She held up the screen for me. 'Here's one example. It's a simple accelerator experiment: a beam of protons and antiprotons collide at a certain energy, and a detector is used to pick up any positrons emitted from the point of collision at a certain angle, with a certain range of energies. The experiment itself has been carried out, in one form or another, for eighty or ninety years.'

The animation showed an architectural schematic of a full-size accelerator ring, and zoomed in toward one of several points where counter-rotating particle beams crossed, and spilled their debris into elaborate detectors.

'Now, I don't even try to model this entire set-up—a piece of apparatus ten kilometers wide—on a subatomic level, atom by atom, as if I needed to start with a kind of blank, 'naive' TOE which would somehow succeed in telling me that all the superconducting magnets would produce certain fields with certain measurable effects, and the walls of the tunnel would deform in certain ways due to the stresses imposed on them, and the protons and antiprotons would circle in opposite directions. I already know all of those things. So I assign them a probability of one hundred percent. I take these established facts as a kind of anchor… and then reach down to the level of the TOE, down to the level of infinite sums over all topologies. I calculate what the consequences of my assumptions are… and then I follow them all the way back up again to the macroscopic level, to predict the ultimate results of the experiment: how many times a second will the positron detector register an event.'

The graphics responded to her narration, zooming in from a schematic of the detector array criss-crossed with particle tracks, down into the froth of the vacuum itself, thirty-five powers of ten beyond the reach of vision, into the chaos of writhing wormholes and higher-dimensional deformations—color-coded by topological classification, a thrashing nest of brightly-hued snakes blurring into whiteness at the center of the screen, where they moved and changed too rapidly to follow. But these otherwise perfectly symmetrical convulsions were forced to take heed of the certain existence of accelerator, magnets, and detector—a process hinted at by the panchromatic whiteness acquiring a specific blue tinge… and then the view pulled back, zooming out to an ordinary human scale again, to show the imprint of this submicroscopic bias on the detector circuitry's final, visible behavior.

The animation, of course, was ninety percent metaphor, a colorful splash of poetic license—but a supercomputer somewhere was crunching away at the serious, unmetaphoric calculations which made these pictures more than stylish whimsy.

And after all my hasty skimming of incomprehensible scientific papers, and all my agonizing over the near- impenetrable mathematics of ATMs, I thought I finally had a handle on Mosala's philosophy.

I said tentatively, 'So instead of thinking of pre-space as something from which the whole universe can be derived in one stroke… you see it more as a link between the kind of events we can observe with our raw senses. Something which… glues together the particular set of macroscopic things we find in the world. A star full of fusing hydrogen, and a human eye full of cold protein molecules, are bridged across distances and energies… are able to co-exist, and affect each other… because at the deepest level, they both break the symmetry of pre-space in the same way.'

Mosala seemed pleased with this description. 'A link, a bridge. Exactly.' She leaned toward, reached over and took my hand; I glanced down, thinking: I'm in shot now, so this is unusable.

She said, 'Without pre-space to mediate between us—without an infinite mixture of topologies able to represent us all with a single flicker of asymmetry—nobody could even touch.

'That's what the TOE is. And even if I'm wrong in every detail—and Buzzo is wrong, and Nishide is wrong… and nothing is resolved for a thousand years—I still know it's down there, waiting to be found. Because there has to be something which lets us touch.'

We broke off for a while, and Mosala called room service. After three days on the island, I still had no appetite, but I ate a few of the snacks she offered me from the tray which emerged from the service chute, just to be polite. My stomach began protesting—loudly—as soon as I swallowed the first mouthful, rather defeating the point.

Mosala said, 'Did you know that Yasuko hasn't arrived yet? I don't suppose you've heard what's holding him up?'

'I'm afraid not. I've left three messages with his secretary in Kyoto, trying to schedule an interview, and all I've got back are promises that he'll be in touch with me 'very soon.''

'It's odd.' She pursed her lips, obviously concerned, but trying not to plunge the conversation into gloom. 'I hope he's all right. I heard he'd been sick for a while, early in the year—but he assured the convenors he'd be here, so he must have expected to be well enough to travel.'

I said, 'Travel to Stateless is more than… travel.'

'That's a point. He should have pretended to belong to Humble Science! and stolen a ride on one of their charter flights.'

'He might have had better luck with Mystical Renaissance. He's a self-described Buddhist, so they almost forgive him for working on TOEs. So long as he didn't remind them that he once wrote that The Tao of Physics was to Zen what a Creation Science biology text was to Christianity.'

Mosala reached up and started massaging the back of her neck, as if talk of the journey was rekindling its symptoms. 'I would have brought Pinda, if the flight had been shorter. She would have loved it here. Left me to my boring lectures, and dragged her father off to explore the reefs.'

'How old is she?'

'Three and a bit.' She glanced at her watch and complained wistfully, 'It's still only four in the morning, back home. Not much chance of a call from her, for two or three hours.'

It was another opportunity to raise the emigration rumors—but I held off, yet again.

We resumed the interview. The beam from the skylight had shifted to the east, leaving Mosala almost silhouetted against the window and a dazzling blue sky. When I invoked Witness again, it reached up into my retinas and made some adjustments, enabling me to register the fine details other face in spite of the back-lighting.

I moved on to the question of Helen Wu's analysis.

Mosala explained, 'My TOE predicts the outcome of various experiments, given a detailed description of the apparatus involved: details which 'betray' clues about all the less-fundamental physics which—some people insist —a TOE is meant to pull out of thin air, all by itself. But unraveling those clues certainly isn't trivial. You or I can't just glance at an idle particle accelerator and predict, instantly, the outcome of any experiment which might be performed with the machine.'

'But a supercomputer, programmed with your TOE, can. So is that good, bad, or indifferent… are you guilty of circular logic, or not?'

Mosala seemed unsure of the verdict, herself. 'Helen and I have been talking it over, trying to thrash out exactly what it means. I have to confess that I started out resenting what she was doing—and then ignoring most of her later work. Now, though… I'm beginning to find it very exciting.'

'Why?'

She hesitated. It was clear that her ideas on this were too new, too unformed; she really didn't want to say anything more. But I waited patiently, without prompting her, and she finally relented.

'Ask yourself this: If Buzzo or Nishide can come up with a TOE in which the whole universe is more or less