Kuwale had said that ve was "mainstream AC." So if all of the wild metaphysics which Conroy had just fed me was the mainstream of Anthrocosmology… what did they believe out on the fringe?
My complacency was beginning to unravel. All I'd heard was one version of the ACs' doctrine. Conroy had taken it upon herself to speak for all of them—but that didn't prove that they all agreed. At the very least, I needed to speak to Kuwale again… but I had better things to do than stake out the house in the hope that ve would turn up there.
Back in my room, I had Hermes scan the world's communications directories. There were over seven thousand Kuwales listed, with primary addresses in a dozen countries—but no Akili. Which meant it was probably a nickname, a diminutive, or an unofficial nom de asex. Without even knowing what country ve came from, it was going to be impossible to narrow the search.
I hadn't filmed my conversation with Kuwale—but I closed my eyes and invoked Witness, and played with the identikit option until I had vis face clearly in front of me—in digital form in my gut memory, as well as in my mind's eye. I plugged in the umbilical fiber and moved the image into my notepad, then searched the global news databases for a match to either name or face. Not everyone had their fifteen minutes of fame, but with nine million non-profit netzines on top of all the commercial media, you didn't exactly have to be a celebrity to make it into the archives. Win an agrotech competition in rural Angola, score the winning goal for even the most obscure Jamaican soccer team, and—
No such luck. The electronic teat fails again—at a cost of three hundred dollars.
So where was I meant to look for ver, if not on the nets? Out in the world. But I couldn't scour the streets of Stateless…
I invoked Witness again, and flagged the identikit image for continuous real-time search. If Kuwale so much as appeared in the corner of my eye—whether or not I was recording, and whether or not I noticed— Witness would let me know.
16
Karin De Groot led me into Violet Mosala's suite. Despite the difference in scale, it had the same sunny-but-spartan feel as my own single room. A skylight added to the sense of space and light, but ever this touch failed to create the impression of opulence which it might have done in another building, in another place. Nothing on Stateless appeared lavish to me, however grand, but I couldn't decide to what extent this judgment was the product of the architecture itself, and how much was due to an awareness of the politics and biotechnology which lay behind every surface.
De Groot said, "Violet won't be long. Take a seat. She's talking to her mother, but I've already reminded her about the interview. Twice."
It was three in the morning in South Africa. "Has something happened? I can come back later." I didn't want to intrude in the middle of a family crisis.
De Groot reassured me, "Everything's fine. Wendy keeps strange hours, that's all."
I sat in one of the armchairs arranged in a cluster near the middle of the room; they looked like they might have been left that way after a meeting. Some kind of late-night brainstorming session… between Mosala, Helen Wu, and a few other colleagues? Whoever it was, I should have been there, fuming. I was going to have to push harder for access, or Mosala would keep me at a distance to the end. But I was going to have to win her confidence somehow, or pushing would only get me shut out even more. Mosala clearly had no particular desire for publicity—let alone the desperate need of a politician or a hack. The only thing I could offer her was the chance to communicate her work.
De Groot remained standing, one hand on the back of a chair. I said, "So how did you get to meet her?"
"I answered an advertizement. I didn't know Violet, personally, before I took the job."
"You have a science background too, though?"
She smiled. "Too. My background's probably more like yours than like Violet's—I have a degree in science and journalism."
"Did you ever work as a journalist?"
"I was science correspondent for Proteus, for six years. The charming Mr. Savimbi is my successor."
"I see." I strained my ears; I could just make out Mosala in the adjoining room, still talking. I said quietly, "What Savimbi said on Monday, about death threats—was there anything in that?"
De Groot eyed me warily. "Don't bring that up. Please. Do you really want to make everything as difficult as you possibly can for her?"
I protested, "No, but put yourself in my position. Would you ignore the whole issue? I don't want to inflame the situation, but if some cultural purity group is issuing death sentences against Africa's top scientists, don't you think that's worthy of serious discussion?"
De Groot said impatiently, "But they're not. For a start, the Stockholm quote was picked up and mangled by a Volksfront netzine—running the bizarre line that Violet was saying that the Nobel wasn't hers, wasn't 'Africa's,' but really belonged to 'white intellectual culture'—for which she was only a politically expedient figurehead. That 'story' got taken up and echoed in other places—but nobody except the original audience would have believed for a second that it was anything but ludicrous propaganda. As for PACDF, they've never done so much as acknowledge Violet's existence."
"Okay. Then what made Savimbi leap to the wrong conclusion?"
De Groot glanced toward the doorway. "Garbled fifth-hand reports."
"Of what? Not just the netzine propaganda itself. He could hardly be that naive."
De Groot leaned toward me with an anguished expression, torn between discretion and the desire to set me straight. "She had a break-in. All right? A few weeks ago. A burglar. A teenage boy with a gun."
"Shit. What happened? Was she hurt?"
"No, she was lucky. Her alarm went off—he'd disabled one, but she had a backup—and there was a patrol car nearby at the time. The burglar told the police he'd been paid to frighten her. But he couldn't name names, of course. It was just a pathetic excuse."
"Then why should Savimbi take it seriously? And why 'fifth-hand reports'? Surely he would have read the whole story?"
"Violet dropped the charges. She's an idiot, but that's the kind of thing she does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But someone in the police must have leaked—"
Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that we'd been doing our best to avoid being overheard.
I moved to fill the silence. "How's your mother?"
"She's fine. She's in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought Craft, though, so she's not getting much sleep." Wendy Mosala ran one of Africa's largest software houses; she'd built it up herself over thirty years, from a one-person operation. "She's bidding for a license for the Kaspar clonelets, two years in advance of release, and if it all pans out…" She caught herself. "All of which is strictly confidential, okay?"
"Of course." Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software, currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus and its numerous cousins—which had been created fully-fledged, instantly "adult" by design—Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more anthropomorphically styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I found it a little disquieting… and I wasn't sure that I wanted a clonelet—a pared-down copy of the original—sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.
De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.
I said, "Are you ready to start?"
She nodded, and smiled half-heartedly. "The sooner we start, the sooner it's over."
I invoked Witness. The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of rather more flattering light sources.
I said, "Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in science?"
Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, "I don't know! Was it your mother who inspired you to come up with that kind of pathetic—"
She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. "I'm sorry. Can we start again?"
"No need. Don't worry about continuity; it's not your problem. Just keep on talking. And if you're halfway through an answer and you change your mind—just stop, and start afresh."
"Okay." She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight. "My mother. My childhood. My role models." She opened her eyes and pleaded, "Can't we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?"
I said patiently, "I know it's bullshit, you know it's bullshit—but if the network executives don't see the required quota of formative childhood influences… they'll screen you at three a.m. after a last-minute program change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-resistant skin diseases." SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their viewers, of course) had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera—a slick paint-by-numbers guide to commodifying human beings… as well as a template for deluding yourself into thinking that you'd explained them. A sort of externalized version of Lament's area.
Mosala said, "Three a.m.? You're serious, aren't you?" She thought it over. "Okay. If that's what it comes down to… I can play along."
"So tell me about your mother." I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to answer more or less at random, so long as you don't contradict yourself.
She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace of detectable irony. "My mother gave me an education. By which I don't mean school. She plugged me into the nets, she had me using an adult's knowledge miner by the time I was seven or eight. She opened up… the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn't steer me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history… anything. I wasn't pushed in any direction. I was just set free."
"And your father?"