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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.
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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:
Technotiberatew? 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.
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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
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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."
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Kuwale caved in. "Meet me outside this building in half an hour." Ve took my
hand and wrote an file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt
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file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt 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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]