I was endlessly treading water.

I sank to my knees, fighting away vertigo. I lay face down, clinging to the reef-rock. The cool solidity of the ground refuted nothing.

But did it need to! Held up by aloof, timeless laws, or held up by the bootstrap of explanation ... it endured, regardless.

I thought of the inland divers who'd descended through every layer of the unnatural ecology which kept this island afloat, who'd witnessed the subterranean ocean ceaselessly corroding the rock from below.

They'd walked away-dazed, but exalted.

I could do the same.

336.

I rose to my feet unsteadily. I thought it was over: I thought I'd come through the mixing, unscathed. Kaspar could not have become the Keystone-and yet somehow the Aleph moment must have pa.s.sed safely, removing the distortion, banishing Distress. Maybe some mainstream AC had hacked into Mosala's account upon learning of her death and had grasped some crucial error in Kaspar's a.n.a.lysis before I'd read a word of it.

Akili was approaching-an indistinct figure in the distance, but I knew it could be no one else. I raised a hand tentatively, then waved in triumph. The figure waved back, stretching vis giant shadow west across the desert.

And everything I'd learned came together, like a thunderclap, like an ambush.

I was the Keystone. I'd explained the universe into being, wrapped it around the seed of this moment, layer after layer of beautiful convoluted necessity. The blazing wasteland of galaxies, twenty billion years of cosmic evolution, ten billion human cousins, forty billion species of life- the whole elaborate ancestry of consciousness flowed out of this singularity. I had no need to reach out and imagine every molecule, every planet, every face. This moment encoded them all.

My parents, friends, lovers . . . Gina, Angelo, Lydia, Sarah, Violet Mosala, Bill Munroe, Adelle Vunibobo, Karin De Groot. Akili. Even the helpless bellowing strangers, victims of the same revelation, had only been mouthing distorted echoes of my own horror at the understanding that I'd created them all.

This was the solipsistic madness I'd seen reflected in that first poor woman's face. This was Distress: not fear of the glorious machinery of the TOE, but the realization that I was alone in the darkness with a hundred billion dazzling cobwebs wrapped around my non-existent eyes- -and now that I knew it, the breath of my own understanding would sweep them all away.

Nothing could have been created without the full knowledge of how it was done: without the unified TOE, physical and informational. No Keystone could have acted in innocence, forging the universe unaware.

But that knowledge was impossible to contain. Kaspar had been right. The moderates had been right. Everything which had breathed fire into the equations would now unravel into empty tautology.

337.

I raised my face to the blank sky, ready to part the veil of the world and find nothing behind it.

Then Akili called my name, and I stopped dead. I looked down at ver-beautiful as ever, unreachable as ever.

Unknowable as ever.

And I saw the way through.

I saw the flaw in Kaspar's reasoning which had kept it from becoming the Keystone: an unexamined a.s.sumption-an unasked question, not yet true or false.

Could one mind, alone, explain another into being7 The TOE equation said nothing. The canonical experiments said nothing. There was nowhere to look for the answer but my own memories, my own life.

And all I had to do to tear myself out of the center of the universe- all I had to do to prevent the unraveling-was give up one last illusion.

338.

epilogue.As the plane touches down, I begin recording. Witness confirms: "Cape Town, Wednesday April 15, 2105. 7:12:10 GMT."

Karin De Groot has come to the airport to meet me. She looks astonishingly healthy, much more so in the flesh-though, as with all of us ancients, the losses are etched deep. We exchange greetings, then I glance around trying to take in the profusion of styles in anatomy and dress-no more than anywhere else, but every place has a different mix, a different set of fashions. Imposing retractable cowls full of dark violet photosynthetic symbionts seem to be popular throughout Southern Africa. Back home, sleek amphibian adaptions for underwater breathing and feeding are common.

After the Aleph moment, people had feared that the mixing would impose uniformity. It had never happened-any more than, in the Age of Ignorance, the brutal, inescapable truths that water was wet and the sky was blue had forced everyone on the planet to think and act identically. There are infinitely many ways to respond to the single truth of the TOE. What's become impossible is maintaining the pretense that every culture could ever have created its own separate reality-while we all breathed the same air and walked the same ground.

De Groot checks some schedule in her mind's eye. "So you didn't come straight from Stateless?"

"No. Malawi. There was someone I had to see. I wanted to say goodbye."

We descend to the subway, where the train is expecting us and lights a path for our eyes to the carriage door. It's almost fifty years since I've been in this city, and most of the infrastructure has changed; in unfamiliar surroundings, the TOE blazes out of every surface, unbidden, like an exuberant child boasting of the bright new things ve's made. Even the 339.

simplest novelties-the non-slip dirt-eating coating on the floor tiles, the luminous pigments of the living sculptures-catch my attention as they spell out their unique ways of coexisting.

Nothing is incomprehensible. Nothing can be mistaken for magic.

I say, "When I first heard that they were building the Violet Mosala Memorial Kindergarten, I imagined she would have been insulted. Which only goes to show how little I knew her. I don't know why I was invited."

De Groot laughs. "I'm just glad you didn't come all this way for the ceremony and nothing else. You could have done it on the net; no one would have minded."

"There's nothing like being there."

The train reminds us of our stop, holds the doors for us. We walk through the neat suburbs not far from the house where Mosala spent her childhood, though the streets now are lined with species of plants she would never have recognized. She never saw trees growing on Stateless, either. People stride past us, glancing up at the elegant logic of the cloudless blue sky.

The kindergarten is a small building, reconfigured into an auditorium for the occasion. Half a dozen speakers are here to address the fifty children. I lapse into reverie until one of Violet's grand-daughters, working on the Halcyon, explains the starship's drive; the core principle, close to the TOE, is easy to grasp. Karin De Groot speaks about Violet, anecdotes of generosity and intransigence. And one of the children sets the stage for me, telling the others about the Age of Ignorance.

"It hangs like a stalact.i.te from the Information Cosmos." The present tense is sophistication, not solecism; relativity demands it. "It's not autonomous, it doesn't explain itself-it needs to be joined to the Information Cosmos, in order to exist. We need it, too, though. It's a necessary history, a logical outgrowth if you try to extend time before the Aleph moment."

Ve summons vivid diagrams and equations into the air. The brilliant stellar cl.u.s.ter of the Information Cosmos, wrapped densely in explanatory threads, holds up the simple drab cone of the Age of Ignorance, which points back to the physical Big Bang. Vis audience of less precocious four-year-olds struggle with the concepts. Time before the Aleph moment7 Grandparents notwithstanding, it almost defies belief.

I rise to my feet and recite my prepared version of the events of fifty 340.

years ago-getting laughs of incredulity in all the right places. Ownership of genes? Centralized authorities? Ignorance Cults?

Ancient history always sounds quaint, old victories preordained, but I try to convey some sense of how long and hard their ancestors struggled to learn everything they now take for granted: that law and morality, physics and metaphysics, s.p.a.ce and time, pleasure, love, meaning ... are all the burden of the partic.i.p.ants. There are no immovable centers, dispensing absolutes like manna: no G.o.d, no Gaia, no beneficent rulers. No reality but the universe explained into being. No purpose to life unless we create it, together or alone.

Someone asks about the turmoil in the days after Aleph.

I say, "Everyone found the truth hard to swallow. Orthodox scientists-because the TOE had turned out to be grounded in nothing but its own explanatory powers. The Ignorance Cults-because even the partic.i.p.atory universe, the most subjective reality possible, was no synthesis of their favorite myths-which could never have created anything-but the product of universal scientific understanding of what coexistence really meant. Even the Anthrocosmologists turned out to have been wrong; they'd been so obsessed with the idea of a single Keystone that they'd barely considered the possibility that everyone, equally, could play that role. They'd missed the most stable, and symmetrical, solution: where every mind obeys the TOE-but it takes all of them, together, to create it."

One astute listener sees that I'm dodging the issue-a child I would have called "human," in the days before the H-word exploded and it was finally understood: the TOE is all we have in common.

"Most people weren't scientists, cultists, or Anthrocosmologists, were they? They had no stake in these ideas. So why were they so sad?"

Sad. There were nine million suicides. Nine million people we could not hold up, when all illusions of solidity vanished. And I'm still not certain that there was no other way-that I found the only possible bridge into the Information Cosmos. If I'd let myself descend into the madness of Distress, would someone else have asked a different last question, and found another way through7 No one has accused me, no one has judged me. I've never been d.a.m.ned as a criminal, or hailed as a savior. The idea that a single Keystone could ever have explained ten billion people into existence is absurd, now. In retrospect, Distress is seen as no different from the naive 341.

illusion that every galaxy is rushing away from us-when in truth, there is not, and cannot be, any center at all.

I talk haltingly about Lamont's Area. "It made people think that they knew each other, and could speak for each other, understand each other-much more than they really could. Some of you might still have it in your brain-but in the face of the evidence, now, it's easy to ignore."

I try to explain about the delusion of intimacy, and how much was invested in it once. They listen politely, but I can see that it makes no sense to them, because they know full well that they've lost nothing. Love in the face of the truth has turned out to be stronger than ever. Happiness never really depended on the old lies.

Not for these children, born without crutches.

In vis home in the dazzling bounteous engineered jungle of Malawi, I'd told Akili I was dying. After you, there was no one. And we'd touched for the last time.

I move on quickly.

"Other people," I add, "lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it's true that there are no more 'deep' surprises-there's nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there'll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there'll always be new stories written in the TOE- new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be other minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can't even imagine yet.

"Violet Mosala once said: 'Reaching the foundations doesn't mean hitting the ceiling.' She helped us all touch the foundations; I only wish she could have lived to see you building on them, higher than anyone has built before."

I take my seat. The children applaud politely-but I feel like a senile fool for telling them that their future is unbounded.

They already knew that, of course.342.

author's note Among many works which inspired me in the writing of this novel, I must single out Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said, and "Out of the Light, Back Into the Cave" by Andy Robertson (Interzone 65, November 1992). The excerpt from the poem Technoliberation is modeled on a pa.s.sage from Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.