I said, “I first heard the term Anthrocosmologists from Kuwale, not you. So you don’t even have to tell them that you admitted knowing anything. Just say I asked you more or less at random – that I’ve been asking everyone at the conference, and I just happened to include you.”

She hesitated. I said, “Kuwale was dropping hints about … violence. So what am I supposed to do? Just forget about ver? Or start trying to navigate my way through whatever bizarre apparatus Stateless employs for dealing with suspicious disappearances? ”

Lee gave me a look which seemed to imply that she hadn’t been taken in by any of this – but then she said begrudgingly, “If I tell them you’ve been blundering around shooting your mouth off, I suppose they can’t hold that against me.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t look happy. “ Violence? Against whom?”

I shook my head. “Ve didn’t say. I mean, it may all come to nothing, but I still have to follow it up.”

“I want to hear everything, when you do.”

“You will, I promise.”

We’d arrived back at the theater group, who were now acting out a laborious fable about a child with cancer … whose life could only be saved if he was kept from hearing the – stressful, immunosuppressant – truth. Look, Ma, real science! Except that the effects of stress on the immune system had been amenable to pharmacological control for the last thirty years.

I stood and watched for a while, playing devil’s advocate against my own first impressions, trying to convince myself that there might be some real insight hidden in the story: some eternal verity which transcended the outdated medical contingencies.

If there was, I honestly couldn’t find it. The earnest clowns might as well have been envoys from another planet, for all that they conveyed to me about the world we supposedly shared.

And if I was wrong, and they were right? If everything I saw as specious contrivance was, in fact, luminous with wisdom? If this clumsy, sentimental fairy tale spoke the deepest truth about the world?

Then I was more than wrong . I was utterly deluded. I was lost beyond redemption – a foundling from another cosmology, another logic entirely, with no place in this one at all.

There was no possibility of compromise, no question of building bridges. We couldn’t both be “half-right.” Mystical Renaissance endlessly proclaimed that they’d found “the perfect balance” between mysticism and rationality – as if the universe had been waiting for this cozy detente before deciding how to conduct itself, and was, frankly, relieved that the conflicting parties had been able to reach an amicable settlement which would respect everyone’s delicate cultural sensibilities and give due weight to everyone’s views. Except, of course, the view that the human ideals of balance and compromise – however laudable in political and social spheres – had absolutely nothing to do with the way the universe itself behaved.