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 convinced.
I approached. The clown called out, "Get your Daily Archetype! Get the truth about the dangers of frankenscience!" The accent, even if I couldn't place it geographically, was unmistakable—and this hawker's cry sounded every bit as ironic as Kuwale's observations about Janet Walsh.
I walked up to the clown; ve regarded me impassively. I said, "How much?"
"The truth costs nothing… but a dollar would help the cause."
"Which cause is that? MR or AC?"
Ve said quietly, "We all have our roles to play. I'm pretending to be MR. You're pretending to be a journalist."
That stung. I said, "Fair enough. I admit I still don't know half as much as Sarah Knight… but I'm getting there. And I'd get there faster with your help."
Kuwale regarded me with undisguised mistrust. The checkerboard on vis face suddenly melted into blue-and-red diamonds—a disorienting sight, though vis fixed stare throughout the transition only made vis contempt shine through all the more clearly.
Ve said, "Why don't you just take a pamphlet and fuck off?" Ve held one out to me. "Read it and eat it."
"I've swallowed enough bad news today. And the Keystone—"
Ve grinned sardonically. "Ah, Amanda Conroy summons you to her hearthside, and you think you know it all."
"If I thought I knew it all, why would I be pleading with you to tell me what I've missed?"
Ve hesitated. I said, "On Sunday night, you asked me to keep my eyes open. Tell me why, and tell me what I'm looking for—and I'll do it. I don't want to see Mosala hurt, any more than you do. But I need to know exactly what's going on."
Kuwale thought it over, still suspicious, but clearly tempted. Short of Mosalas colleagues, or Karin De Groot—all highly unlikely to cooperate—I was probably the closest ve could ever hope to get to vis idol.
Ve mused, "If you were working for the other side, why would you pretend to be so incompetent?"
I took the insult in my stride. "I'm not even sure that I know who the other side is."
Kuwale caved in. "Meet me outside this building in half an hour." Ve took my hand and wrote an address on my palm; it wasn't the house where I'd met Conroy. In half an hour, I was supposed to be filming Mosala at yet another lecture—but the documentary would survive with a few less reaction shots to choose from, and Mosala would probably be relieved to be left in peace for a change.
Kuwale thrust a rolled-up pamphlet into my open hand before I turned away. I almost discarded it, but then I changed my mind. Ned Landers was on the cover, bolts protruding from the side of his neck, while an Escher-rip-off effect had him reaching out of the portrait and painting it himself. The headline read: THE MYTH OF A SELF-MADE MAN—which was, at least, wittier than anything the murdochs would come up with. When I flicked through the article within, though… there was no talk of monitoring or restricting access to human genome data, no discussion of US and Chinese resistance to international inspections of sites with DNA synthesis equipment, no practical suggestions whatsoever for preventing another Chapel Hill. Beyond a call for all human DNA maps to be "erased and undiscovered"—about as useful as imploring the people of the world to forget the true shape of the planet—there was nothing but cult-speak: the danger of meddling with quintessential mysteries, the "human need" for an ineffable secret to life, the techno-rape of the collective soul.
If Mystical Renaissance really wanted to speak for all humanity, define the fit and proper boundaries of knowledge, and dictate—or censor—the deepest truths of the universe… they were going to have to do better than this.
I closed my eyes, and laughed with relief and gratitude. Now that it had passed, I could admit it: For a while, I'd almost believed that they might have claimed me. I'd almost imagined that I might have ended up crawling into their recruitment tent on my hands and knees, head bowed with appropriate humility (at last), proclaiming: "I was blind, but now I see! I was psychically numbed, but now I'm attuned! I was all Yang and no Yin—left-brained, linear, and hierarchical—but now I'm ready to embrace the Alchemical Balance between the Rational and the Mystical! Only say the word… and I will be Healed!"
The address Kuwale had given me was a baker's shop. Imported luxuries aside, all the food on Stateless came from the sea—but the proteins and starches in the nodules of the engineered seaweeds which flourished at the borders of the reefs were all but identical to those in any grain of wheat, and so was the smell they produced on baking. The familiar aroma made me light-headed with hunger, but the thought of swallowing a single mouthful of fresh bread was enough to make me nauseous. I should have known, by then, that there was something physically wrong with me—beyond the after-effect of the flight, beyond broken melatonin sleep, beyond my sadness over losing Gina, beyond the stress of finding myself at the deep end of a story which showed no sign of bottoming out. But I didn't have my pharm to pronounce the illness real, I didn't trust the local doctors, I didn't have time to be sick. So I told myself that it was all in my head—and the only possible cure was to try to ignore it.
Kuwale appeared, sans clown suit, just in time to save me from either passing out or throwing up. Ve walked past without even glancing at me, radiating nervous energy; I followed—and started recording—resisting the urge to shout out vis name and deflate the implied cloak-and-dagger solemnity.
I caught up, and walked alongside ver. "What does 'mainstream AC' mean, anyway?"
Kuwale glanced at me sideways, edgy and irritated, but ve deigned to answer. "We don't know who the Keystone is. We accept that we may never know, for certain. But we respect all the people who seem to be likely candidates."
That all sounded obscenely moderate and reasonable. "Respect, or revere."
Ve rolled vis eyes. "The Keystone is just another person. The first to grasp the TOE completely—but there's no reason why a billion others can't do the same, after ver. Someone has to be first—it's as simple as that. The Keystone is not—remotely—a 'god'; the Keystone need not even know that ve's created the universe. All ve has to do is explain it."
"While people like you stand back and explain that act of creation?"
Kuwale made a dismissive gesture, as if ve had no time to waste on metaphysical nit-picking.
I said, "So why are you so concerned about Violet Mosala, if she's nothing so cosmically special after all?"
Ve was bemused. "Does a person have to be some kind of supernatural being, to deserve not to be killed? Do I have to get down on my knees and worship the woman as Mother Goddess of the Universe, in order to care whether she lives or dies?"
"Call her Mother Goddess of the Universe to her face, and you'd soon wish you were dead, yourself."
Kuwale grinned. "And rightly so." Ve added stoically, "But I know she thinks AC is even lower than the Ignorance Cults; the very fact that we desist from god-talk only makes us more insidious, in her eyes. She thinks we're parasites feeding off science: following the work of TOE theorists, stealing it, abusing it… and not even having the honesty to speak the language of the anti-rationalists." Ve shrugged lightly. "She despises us. I still respect her, though. And whether she's the Keystone or not… she's one of the greatest physicists of her generation, she's a powerful force for technoliberation… why should I need to deify her, to value her life?"
"Okay." This whole laid-back attitude seemed far too good to be true—but it wasn't inconsistent with anything I'd heard from Conroy. "That's mainstream AC. Now tell me about the heretics."
Kuwale groaned. "The permutations are… endless. Imagine any variation you like, and there's sure to be someone on the planet who embraces it as the truth. We don't have a patent on Anthrocosmology. There are ten billion people out there, and they're all capable of believing anything they want to, however close to us in metaphysics, however far away in spirit."
This was pure evasion, but I didn't get a chance to press the point. Kuwale saw a tram ahead, beginning to move away from its stop, and ve started running for it. I struggled to keep up; we both made it, but I took a while to get my breath back. We were headed west, out toward the coast.
The tram was only half-full, but Kuwale remained standing in the doorway, gripping a hand rail and leaning out into the wind. Ve said, "If I show you the people you need to recognize, will you let me know if you see them? I'll give you a contact number, and an encryption algorithm, and all you have to do is—"
I said, "Slow down. Who are these people?"
"They're a danger to Violet Mosala."
"You mean, you suspect they're a danger."
"I know it."
"Okay. So who are they?"
"What difference would it make if I told you their names? It wouldn't mean anything to you."
"No, but you can tell me who they're working for. Which government, which biotech company…?"
Vis face hardened. "I told Sarah Knight too much. I'm not repeating that mistake."
"Too much for what? Did she betray you? To… SeeNet?" "No!" Kuwale scowled; I was missing the point. "Sarah told me what happened with SeeNet. You pulled a few strings… and all the work she'd done counted for nothing. She was angry, but she wasn't surprised. She said that's what the networks were like. And she bore you no real grudge; she said she was ready to pass on everything she knew, if you agreed to refund her costs out of your research budget, and maintain confidentiality."
I said, "What are you talking about?"