I'd expected, at least, deserted streets in the center of the island, but at first sight little seemed to have changed. There were no signs of panic- no queues of h.o.a.rders, no boarded-up shopfronts. When we pa.s.sed the hotel, though, I saw that the Mystical Renaissance carnival had gone to ground; I wasn't the only tourist who was suffering from a sudden desire to be invisible. Back on the boat, I'd heard that one woman had been injured slightly when the airport was captured, but most of the staff had simply walked away. Munroe had spoken of a militia on the island, and no doubt they outnumbered the invaders-but how their equipment, training and discipline compared, I had no idea. The mercenaries seemed content, so far, to dig themselves in at the airport-but if the ultimate aim was not to take power, but to bring "anarchy" to Stateless, I had a queasy suspicion that there'd be something a lot less palatable than the bloodless seizure of strategic a.s.sets, very soon.

The atmosphere at the hospital was calm. Vunibobo helped me get Kuwale into the building; ve smiled dreamily and tried to limp forward, but it took the two of us to keep ver from falling flat on vis face. Prasad Jwala had sent the scan of Kuwale's bullet wound ahead, and an operating theater was already prepared. I watched ver being wheeled in, trying to convince myself that I felt nothing but the same anxiety that I would have felt for anyone else. Vunibobo bid me farewell.

After waiting my turn in casualty, I was sewn up under local anesthetic. I'd managed to kill the bioengineered graft-which would have accelerated healing and formed a good seal-but the medic who treated me packed the wound with a spongy antibacterial carbohydrate polymer, which would slowly degrade in the presence of the growth factors secreted by the surrounding flesh. She asked what had made the hole. I told her the truth, and she seemed greatly relieved. "I was beginning to wonder if something had eaten its way out."

I stood up carefully, numb at the center, but feeling the pinched absence of skin and muscle tug on every part of me. The medic said, "Try to avoid strenuous bowel movements. And laughter."

263.

I found De Groot and Mosala in the anteroom to the Medical Imaging suite. Mosala looked drawn and nervous, but she greeted me warmly, shaking my hand, clasping my shoulder. "Andrew, are you all right?" "I'm fine. But the doc.u.mentary may have a small gap in it." She managed to smile. "Henry's being scanned right now. They're still processing my data; it could take a while. They're looking for foreign proteins, but there's some doubt as to whether the resolution's up to it. The machine's second-hand, twenty years old." She hugged herself, and tried to laugh. "Listen to me. If I'm planning to live here, I'd better get used to the facilities."

De Groot said, "No one I've spoken to has seen Helen Wu since early last night. Conference security checked out her room; it's empty."

Mosala still seemed stunned by the revelation of Wu's allegiance. "Why would she get involved with the Anthrocosmologists? She's a brilliant theorist in her own right-not some pseudoscientific hanger-on! I can understand how ... a certain kind of person might think there's something mystical about working on TOEs, when they find they can't grasp the details, themselves . . . but Helen understands my work almost better than I do!" I didn't think it was a good time to point out that that was half the problem. "As for these other thugs, who you think killed Yasuko . . . I'll be giving a media conference this afternoon, outlining the problems with Henry Buzzo's choice of measure and what it means for his TOE. That should concentrate their tiny minds." Her voice was almost calm-but she held her arms crossed in front of her, one hand clasped around the other wrist, trying to mask the faint tremor of rage. "And when I announce my own TOE on Friday morning . . . they can kiss their transcendence goodbye." "Friday morning?"

"Serge Bischoff's algorithms are working wonders. All my calculations will be finished by tomorrow night."

I said carefully, "If it turns out that you've been infected with a bioweapon-and if you become too sick to work-is there anyone else who could interpret these results, and put the whole thing together?"

Mosala recoiled. "What are you asking me to do? Anoint a successor to be targeted next?"

"No! But if your TOE is completed and announced, the moderates will have to admit that they've been proven wrong-and there's a chance they might hand over the antidote. I'm not asking you to publicize any'

264.

one's name! But if you can arrange for someone to put the finishing touches-"

Mosala said icily, "I have nothing to prove to these people. And I'm not risking someone else's life, trying."

Before I could pursue the argument any further, De Groot's notepad chimed. The head of security for the conference, Joe Kepa, had viewed the copy De Groot had sent him of my call from the fishing boat, and he wanted to talk to me. In person. Immediately.

In a small meeting room on the top floor of the hotel-with two large umale a.s.sociates looking on-Kepa grilled me for almost three hours, questioning everything right back to the moment when I'd begged SeeNet to give me the doc.u.mentary. He'd already seen reports from some of the farmers about events on the ACs' boat (they'd posted their accounts directly onto the local news nets), and he'd seen the cholera a.n.a.lysis-but he was still angry and suspicious, he still seemed to want to tear my story to pieces. I resented the hostile treatment, but I couldn't really blame him. Until the seizure of the airport, his biggest problem had been buskers in clown suits; now it was the threat of anything up to a full-scale military engagement around the hotel. Talk of information theorists armed with amateur bioweapons targeted at the conference's highest profile physicists must have sounded like either a sick hoax, or proof that he'd been singled out for divine punishment.

By the time Kepa told me the interview was over, though, I believed I'd convinced him. He was angrier than ever.

My testimony had been recorded to international judicial standards: each frame stamped with a centrally generated time code, and an encrypted copy lodged with Interpol. I was invited to scan through the file to verify that there'd been no tampering, before I electronically signed it. I checked a dozen points at random; I wasn't going to view the whole three hours.

I went to my room and took a shower, instinctively shielding the freshly bandaged wound although I knew there was no need to keep it dry. The luxury of hot water, the solidity of the plain elegant decor, seemed surreal. Twenty four hours before, I'd planned to do everything I could to help Mosala smash the boycott, reshaping the doc.u.mentary around the news of her emigration. But what could I do for technolibera' tion, now? Buy an external camera, and proceed to doc.u.ment her meaningless death, while Stateless collapsed in the background? Was that 265.

what I wanted? To claw back my delusions of objectivity, and calmly record whatever fate befell her7 I stared at myself in the mirror. What use was 1 to anyone now? The room had a wallphone; I called the hospital. There'd been no problems with the operation, but Akili was still sleeping off the anesthetic. I decided to visit ver anyway.

I walked through the hotel lobby just as the morning sessions were breaking up. The conference was still running on schedule-although screens announced a memorial for Yasuko Nishide later in the day-but the partic.i.p.ants were visibly nervous and subdued, talking quietly in small groups, or looking around furtively as if hoping to overhear some vital piece of news about the occupation, however unreliable.

I spotted a group of journalists, all people I knew slightly, and they let me join in as they swapped rumors. The consensus seemed to be that foreigners would be evacuated by the US (or New Zealand, or j.a.panese) navy within a matter of days, although no one could offer any firm evidence for this belief. David Connolly-Janet Walsh's photographer- said confidently, "There are three US n.o.bel prize-winners here. Do you really think they're going to be left stranded, indefinitely, while Stateless goes to h.e.l.l?"

The other consensus was that the airport had been taken by "rival anarchists"-the infamous US gun law "refugees." Biotech interests didn't rate a mention, and if Mosala's plan to migrate was common knowledge on the island, n.o.body here had bothered to talk to the locals long enough to find out.

These people would be reporting everything that happened on Stateless to the world-and none of them had the slighest idea of what was really going on.

On my way to the hospital, I spotted an electrical retailer. I bought a new notepad and a small, shoulder-mounted camera. I typed my personal code into the notepad, and the last satellite backup from the old machine flowed down from deep freeze and started catching up with real-time. The screen was a blur of activity for several seconds-and then Sisyphus announced, "Reported cases of Distress have* exceeded three thousand."

"I do not wish to know that." Three thousand? That was a sixfold increase in a fortnight. "Show me a case map." It looked more like the plot for a spontaneous cancer than any kind of infectious disease: a 266.

random scatter across the globe, ignoring every social and environmental factor, concentrated only by population density itself.

How could the numbers be increasing so rapidly-without any localized outbreaks? I'd heard that models based on airborne transmission, s.e.xual contact, water supplies, parasites, had all failed to match the epidemiology- "Any other news on this?"

"Not officially. But footage logged in SeeNet's library by your colleague John Reynolds includes the first reports of coherent speech by sufferers."

"Some people are recovering?"

"No. But some new sufferers have shown an intermittent change in the pathology."

"Change, or reduction?"

"The speech is coherent, but the subject matter is contextually inappropriate."

"You mean they're psychotic? When they finally stop screaming, and calm down long enough to string two words together . . . it's only to pa.s.s on the news that they've gone insane?"

"That's a matter for expert opinion."

I was almost at the hospital. I said, "Okay, show me some of this changed pathology. Show me some of the joys I've missed out on."

Sisyphus raided the library and brought me a clip. It was questionable etiquette to peek at other people's unfinished work, but if Reynolds had wanted the footage to be inaccessible to his colleagues, he would have encrypted it.

I watched the scene in the hospital elevator, alone-and I felt the blood draining from my face. There was no explanation for this, no possible way to make sense of it.

Reynolds had archived three other scenes of "coherent speech" from Distress patients. I viewed them all, unwinding the notepad's headset so I could listen in private as I made my way along the busy corridors. The exact words the patients used were different in every case-but the implications were the same.

I suspended judgment. Maybe I was still in shock or still affected by the drugs I'd been given on the boat. Maybe I was seeing connections which simply weren't there.

By the time I reached the ward, Akili was awake. Ve smiled ruefully 267.

when ve saw me-and I knew I had it bad. It wasn't just the fact that vis face seemed to have burned itself into my brain so deeply that I could no longer believe that I'd ever been attracted to anyone else. Beauty, after all, was the shallowest thing. But ver dark eyes showed a depth of pa.s.sion, humor, and intelligence that no one else I'd known had ever possessed_ I caught myself. This was ludicrous. To a total as.e.x, these were the sentiments of a hormone-driven wind-up toy, a pathetic biological robot. If ve ever found out how I felt... the most I could expect in return was to be pitied.

I said, "Have you heard about the airport?"

Ve nodded, dismayed. "And Nishide's death. How's Mosala taking all this?"

"She's not falling to pieces-but I'm not sure she's thinking straight." Not like me.

I recounted my conversation with her. "What do you think? If she can be kept alive until someone announces the TOE on her behalf, would the moderates recant and hand over the cure?"

Kuwale didn't look hopeful. "They might. If there was a clear proof that the TOE really had been completed, with no room for doubt. But they're on the run, now, they can't hand over anything."

"They could still transmit the molecule's structure."

"Yeah. And then we just hope there's a machine on Stateless which can synthesize it in time."

"If the whole universe is a conspiracy to explain the Keystone, don't you think she might get lucky?" I didn't believe a word of this, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

"Explaining the Aleph moment doesn't stretch to miraculous reprieves. Mosala doesn't have to be the Keystone-even with Nishide dead, and Buzzo's TOE refuted. If she survives, it will only be because the people who struggled to save her fought harder than those who struggled to kill her." Ve laughed wearily. "That's what a Theory of Everything means: there are no miracles, not even for the Keystone. Everyone lives and dies by exactly the same rules."

"I understand." I hesitated. "There's something I have to show you. Some news that's just broken, about Distress."

"Distress?"

"Humor me. Maybe it means nothing, but I need to know what you think."

268.

I had an obligation to Reynolds not to splash his unreleased footage around. The ward was full, but there were screens either side of us, and the man in a cast in the opposite bed appeared to be sleeping. I handed Kuwale my notepad, and had it replay one of the clips, with the volume down low.

A pale, disheveled, middle-aged woman with long black hair, restrained in a hospital bed, faced the viewer squarely. She didn't look drugged, and she certainly wasn't exhibiting the syndrome's characteristic behavior-but she regarded Reynolds with intense, horrified fascination.

She said, "This pattern of information, this state of being conscious and possessing these perceptions, wraps itself in ever-growing layers of corollaries: neurons to encode the information, blood to nourish the neurons, a heart to pump the blood, intestines to enrich it, a mouth to supply the intestines, food to pa.s.s through it, fields of crops, earth, sunlight, a trillion stars." Her gaze shifted slightly as she spoke, scanning back and forth across Reynolds' face. "Neurons, heart, intestines, cells of proteins and ions and water wrapped in lipid membranes, tissues differentiated in development, genes switched on by intersecting marker hormone gradients, a million interlocking molecular shapes, tetravalent carbon, monovalent hydrogen, electrons shared in bonds between nuclei of protons, neutrons to balance electrostatic repulsion, quarks spinning in both to partner the leptons in a hierarchy of field excitations, a ten-dimensional manifold to support them . . . defining a broken symmetry on the s.p.a.ce of all topologies." Her voice quickened. "Neurons, heart, intestines, morphogenesis converging back to a single cell, a fertilized egg in another body. Diploid chromosomes requiring a separate donor. Ancestry iterates. Mutations split species from earlier lineages, unicellular life, self-replicating fragments, nucleotides, sugars, amino acids, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen. A condensing protostellar cloud-rich in heavy elements synthesized in other stars, flung throughout a gravita-tionally unstable cosmos which starts and ends in singularities."

She fell silent, but her eyes kept moving; I could almost see the outline of Reynolds' face in the sweep of her gaze. And if he'd appeared to her, at first, as a bizarre apparition, flashes of intense comprehension now seemed to break through her astonishment-as if she was pushing her cosmological reasoning to its limits, and weaving this stranger, this logically necessary distant cousin, into the same unified scheme.

269.

But then something happened to put an end to her brief remission: an upwelling of horror and panic distorted her features. Distress had reclaimed her. I halted the replay before she could begin to thrash and scream.

I said, "There are three other cases, more or less the same. So am I putting my own spin on this raving-or does it sound the same to you? Because . . . what kind of plague could make people believe that they're the Keystone?"

Kuwale put the notepad down on the bed and turned to face me. "Andrew, if this is a hoax-"

"No! Why would I-?"

"To save Mosala. Because if it's a hoax, you'll never pull it off."

I groaned. "If I was going to invent a Keystone to get her off the hook, I would have simulated Yasuko Nishide on his deathbed having all the cosmic revelations-not some random psychiatric case." I explained about Reynolds and the SeeNet doc.u.mentary.

Ve searched my face, trying to decide if I was telling the truth. I gazed back at ver, too tired and confused now to conceal anything. There was a flicker of surprise, and then . . . amus.e.m.e.nt? I couldn't tell-and whatever ve felt, ve kept silent.

I said, "Maybe some other mainstream ACs faked it, hacked into SeeNet..." I was grasping at straws, but I couldn't make sense of this any other way.

Kuwale said flatly, "No. I would have heard."

"Then-?"

"It's genuine."

"How can it be?"

Ve met my eyes again, unashamed of vis fear. "Because everything we thought was true, is true-but we got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. The mainstream, the moderates, the extremists: we all made different a.s.sumptions-and we were all wrong."

"I don't understand."

"You will. We all will."

I suddenly recalled the apocryphal story from the AC on the boat about Muteba Kazadi's death. "You think Distress comes from . . . mixing with information?"

"Yes."

"If the Keystone does it, everyone else gets dragged along? Exponential growth? Just like a plague?"

270.

"Yes."

"But-how? Who was the Keystone? Who started it? Muteba Kazadi, all those years ago?"

Kuwale laughed crazily. "No!" The man in the opposite bed was awake now, and listening to every word, but I was past caring. "Miller didn't get around to telling you the strangest thing about that cosmologi-cal model."

Miller was the umale, the one I'd thought of as "Three."

"Which is-?"

"If you follow through with the calculations . . . the effect reaches back in time. Not far: exponential growth forward means exponential decay backward. But the absolute certainty of the Keystone mixing at the Aleph moment implies a small probability of other people being 'dragged along' at random even before the event. It's a continuity condition; there's no such thing in any system as an instantaneous jump from zero to one."

I shook my head, uncomprehending. I couldn't take this in.

Akili took my hand and squeezed it hard, unthinking, transmitting vis fear-and a vertiginous thrill of antic.i.p.ation-straight into my body, from skin to skin.

"The Keystone isn't the Keystone yet. The Aleph moment hasn't even happened-but we're already feeling the shock."

271.

25.Kuwale borrowed my notepad and rapidly sketched out the details of the information flows which ve believed lay behind Distress. Ve even attempted to fit a crude computer model of the process to the epi-demiological data-although ve ended up with a curve far less steep than the actual case figures (which had risen faster than exponential growth-"probably distorted by early under-reporting"), and a predicted date for the Aleph moment somewhere between February 7, 2055 . . . and June 12, 3070. Undeterred, ve struggled to refine the model. Graphs, network diagrams, and equations flickered across the screen beneath vis fingertips; it looked as impressive as anything I'd seen Violet Mosala do-and I understood it about as well.

On one level, I couldn't help but be swept along with vis urgent logic-but as the initial shock of recognition faded, I began to wonder again if we weren't simply reading our own meaning into the four patients' bizarre soliloquies. Anthrocosmology had never before made a single testable prediction. I didn't doubt that it could provide an elegant mathematical underpinning to any TOE-but if the first distinct evidence for the theory itself consisted of the rantings of four people suffering from a new and exotic mental disease, that was a slender basis on which to throw out everything I believed about the universe.

And as for the prognosis, if Kuwale was right, of a world completely afflicted by Distress . . . that was a cataclysm as unthinkable as the moderates' unraveling.

I kept my doubts to myself, but by the time I left the ward-leaving Kuwale immersed in a conference with the other mainstream ACs-I had my feet back on the ground. All this talk of echoes of the future Aleph moment had to be ranked as less plausible than even the most far-fetched conventional alternatives.

272.

Maybe a neuroactive military pathogen gone wrong, targeting a specific region of the brain, could induce the ordinary symptoms of Distress in most of its victims-plus these outbursts of manic-but-precise observations in four out of three thousand cases. Reasoning was the product of organic events in the brain, like every other mental process-and if a paranoid schizophrenic, injured by crude accidents of genetics and disease, could find personal significance in every advertising sign, every cloud, every tree . . . maybe the combination of the right scientific background with the highly focused damage wrought by this viral weapon could trigger an equally uncontrollable-but much more rigorous- avalanche of meaning. If the original aim of the weapon had been to impair a.n.a.lytical thought, it wasn't inconceivable that a wild version might end up overstimulating the very neural pathways it had been designed to destroy.

I went back to the electrical shop and bought myself another notepad. I called De Groot from the street; she seemed upset, but she didn't want to talk on the net.

We met at the hotel, in Mosala's suite. De Groot ushered me in, in silence. "Is Violet-?" Dust motes swam beneath the skylight; when I spoke, the room sounded hollow.

"She's been admitted. I wanted to stay at the hospital, but she sent me away." De Groot stood opposite me, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. She said quietly, "You know, we've had crank mail from just about everyone. Every cult, every lunatic on the planet wanted to let Violet in on their amazing cosmic revelations-or let her know that she was desecrating their precious mythology, and would burn in h.e.l.l for it ... or drive away all the Buddha-nature ... or crush the world's great civilizations into nihilistic rubble, with her male Western reductionist hubris. The Anthrocosmologists were just . . . one more voice shouting noise." She looked at me squarely. "Would you have picked them as the threat? Not the fundamentalists. Not the racists. Not the psychotics who gave detailed descriptions of what they planned to do to her corpse. People who sent us long dissertations on information theory-and P.S., we'd be happy to see you create the universe, but certain other parties may try to stop you."

I said, "No one could have picked them."