Distress

layer of living tissue with merciless precision. All the skin, all the flesh, which concealed my secrets dissolved into a red mist around me, and then the mist began to part…

I dreamed that I woke up screaming.

At seven-thirty, I interviewed Henry Buzzo in one of the hotel meeting rooms. He was charming and articulate, a natural performer, but he didn't really want to talk about Violet Mosala; he wanted to recount anecdotes about famous dead people. 'Of course Steve Weinberg tried to prove that I was wrong about the gravitino, but I soon straightened him out…' SeeNet alone had devoted three full-length documentaries to Buzzo, over the years, but it seemed that there were still more names he desperately needed to drop, on camera, before dying.

I wasn't in a charitable mood; the three hours' sleep I'd had after Lydia's call had been about as refreshing as a blow to the head. I went through the motions, feigning fascination, and trying half-heartedly to steer the interview in a direction which might produce some material I could actually use.

'What kind of place in history do you think the discoverer of the TOE will attain? Wouldn't that be the ultimate form of scientific immortality?'

Buzzo became self-deprecating. 'There's no such thing as immortality, for a scientist. Not even for the greatest. Newton and Einstein are still famous today—but for how long? Shakespeare will probably outlast them both… and maybe even Hitler will, too.'

I didn't have the heart to break the news to him that none of these were exactly household names anymore.

I said, 'Newton's and Einstein's theories have been swallowed whole, though. Absorbed into larger schemes. I know, you've already carved your name on one TOE which turned out to be provisional—but all of the SUFT's architects said at the time that it was just a stepping stone. Don't you think the next TOE will be the real thing: the final theory which lasts forever?'

Buzzo had given the question a lot more thought than I had. He said, 'It might. It certainly might. I can imagine a universe in which we can probe no further, in which deeper explanations are literally, physically, impossible. But…'

'Your own TOE describes such a universe, doesn't it?'

'Yes. But it could be right about everything else, and wrong about that. The same is true of Mosala's and Nishide's.'

I said sourly, 'So when will we know, one way or the other? When will we be sure that we've struck bottom?'

'Well… if I'm right, then you'll never be sure that I'm right. My TOE doesn't allow itself to be proved final and complete—even if it is final and complete.' Buzzo grinned, delighted at the prospect of such a perverse legacy. 'The only kind of TOE which could leave any less room for doubt would be one which required its own finality—which made that fact absolutely central.

'Newton was swallowed up and digested, Einstein was swallowed up and digested… and the old SUET will go the same way, in a matter of days. They were all closed systems, they were all vulnerable. The only TOE which could be guaranteed immune to the process would be one which actively defended itself—which turned its gaze outward to describe, not just the universe, but also every conceivable alternative theory which could somehow supersede it—and then rendered them all demonstrably false, in a single blow,'

He shook his head gleefully. 'But there's nothing like that on offer, here. If you want absolute certainty, you've come to the wrong side of town.'

The other side of town was still just outside the hotel's main entrance; the Mystical Renaissance carnival hadn't gone away. I headed out on to the street, anyway; I urgently needed a dose of fresh air if I was going to be more than half-conscious for the lecture on ATM software techniques which Mosala was due to attend at nine. The sky was dazzling, and the air was already warm; Stateless seemed unable to decide whether to surrender to a temperate autumn, or hold out for an Indian summer. The sunshine lifted my spirits, slightly, but I still felt crippled, beaten, overwhelmed.

I weaved my way past the stalls and small tents, dodging goldfish-bowl-jugglers and hand-stilt-walkers— impressive acts, mostly; it was only the droning songs of the buskers which really made me feel that I was running a gauntlet. While members of Humble Science! had been showing up at every press conference and doing their best to repeat the tone of Walsh's encounter with Mosala, MR had remained endearingly innocuous by comparison. I was beginning to suspect that it was a deliberate strategy: a good cult/bad cult game, to widen their combined appeal. Humble Science! had nothing to lose by extremism; those few members who left in disgust at Walsh's tactics (to join MR, most likely) would be more than compensated for by an influx from groups like Celtic Wisdom and Saxon Light—northern Europe's equivalents of PACDF, only more influential.

I recalled a scene from one of the Muteba Kazadi biographies I'd skimmed: when asked in reproving tones by а ВВС journalist why he'd declined an invitation to take part in a traditional Lunda fertility ceremony, he'd politely suggested that she go home and berate a few cabinet ministers for failing to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge. Ten years later, there were half a dozen MPs who seemed to have taken the suggestion at face value. No cabinet ministers, though. So far.

I paused to watch the MR theatre troupe, ready to play spot-the-mutilated-classic. After a few baffling lines of garbled biotech-speak—unplaceable, but weirdly familiar—hairs stood up on the back of my neck. They'd seized on the news of Landers and his viruses, and were acting out their own hastily scripted version of the story. What's more, most of their descriptions of Landers' modified personal biochemistry came straight out of the narration to Junk DNA; SeeNet's news editors must have mined the discarded segment of the documentary for some instant technical background when they put together their final release.

I shouldn't have been surprised by any of this—but the speed with which events thousands of kilometers away had been recycled as an instant parable was unsettling enough; hearing my own words echoed back at me as part of the feedback loop verged on the surreal.

An actor playing one of the FBI agents sent to gather Landers' computer files turned to the audience (all three of us) and proclaimed, 'This knowledge could destroy us all! We must avert our gaze!' His companion replied mournfully, 'Yes—but this is only one man's folly! The same sacred mysteries are spelled out in ten million other machines! Until every one of those files is erased… none of us will ever sleep safely!'

My head throbbed and my throat tightened. I couldn't deny that in the dead of night, confused and in pain, I'd shared this sentiment entirely.

And now?

I walked on. I had no time to waste on Landers, or MR; keeping up with Violet Mosala was already proving near enough to impossible. The whole documentary kept being transmuted into something new before my eyes— and however gloriously unworldly her arcane physics, Mosala was entangled in so many political complications that I was beginning to lose count.

Had Sarah Knight known about Mosala's plans to emigrate to Stateless? If she had, it would have made the project a thousand times more attractive to her than any deal with the Anthrocosmologists. Would she have kept a selling point like that from SeeNet, though? Maybe, if she'd wanted to take it to another network—but in that case, why wasn't she here, shouldering me aside, making Violet Mosala: Technoliberated? Or maybe Mosala had sworn her to secrecy and she'd honored that promise, even though it had meant losing the job?

It was driving me insane: even in her absence, Sarah seemed to be one step ahead of me all the way. At the very least, I should have asked her to collaborate; it would have been worth splitting my fee with her, and giving her a co-director's credit, just to find out what she knew.

A bright red graphic flashed up over my visual field, a small circle at the center of a larger one with cross- hairs. I froze, confused. As I shifted my gaze, the target clung to a face in the crowd. It was a person in a clown suit, handing out MR literature.

Akili Kuwaie?

Witness thought it was.

The clown wore a mask of active make-up, currently a checkerboard of green and white. From this distance, ve might have been any gender, including asex; ve was about the right build and height—and vis features weren't dissimilar, so far as I could tell with squares painted all over them. It wasn't impossible—but I wasn't