Humble Science! could denounce as “tyrants of scientism” anyone who expressed this opinion, Mystical Renaissance could call them “victims of psychic numbing” who needed to be “healed” … but even if the cults were right, the principle itself could not be diluted, reconciled with its opposites, brought into the fold. It was either true or false – or truth and falsehood were meaningless, and the universe was an incomprehensible blur.

I thought: Empathy at last. If any of this was mutual – if MR felt half as alienated and dispossessed by the prospect of a TOE, as I did at the thought of their lunatic ideas shaping the ground beneath my feet – then I finally understood why they’d come here.

The actors bowed. A few people – mainly other cultists in fancy dress – applauded. I suspected there’d been a happy ending; I’d stopped paying attention. I took out my notepad and transferred twenty dollars to the one they’d placed before them on the ground. Even Jungians in clown costumes had to eat: First Law of Thermodynamics.

I turned to Indrani Lee. “Tell me, honestly: Are you really the one person who can step outside every culture, every belief system, every source of bias and confusion, and see the truth?”

She nodded unassumingly. “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

#

Back in my room, I stared blankly at the first page of Helen Wu’s most controversial Physical Review article – and tried to piece together how Sarah Knight could have stumbled on the Anthrocosmologists in the course of her research for Violet Mosala . Maybe Kuwale had heard about the project and approached her, just as ve’d approached me.

Heard about it how?

Sarah had come out of politics – but she’d already completed one science documentary for SeeNet. I checked the schedules. The title was Holding Up the Sky … and the subject was fringe cosmology. It wasn’t due to be broadcast until June, but it was sitting in SeeNet’s private library – to which I had full access.

I viewed the whole thing. It ranged from near-orthodox (but probably untestable) theories: quantum parallel universes (diverging from a single Big Bang), multiple Big Bangs freezing out of pre-space with different physical constants, universes “reproducing” via black holes and passing on “mutated” physics to their offspring … through to more exotic and fanciful concepts: the cosmos as a cellular automaton, as the coincidental by-product of disembodied Platonic mathematics, as a “cloud” of random numbers which only possessed form by virtue of the fact that one possible form happened to include conscious observers.

There was no mention of the Anthrocosmologists, but maybe Sarah had been saving them for a later project – by which time she hoped to have won their confidence and secured their cooperation? Or maybe she’d been saving them for Violet Mosala , if there was a substantial connection between the two – if it was more than a coincidence that Kuwale was a devotee of both.