Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value: 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. If the ACs thought my hastily improvised story for Lee about the “vanishing informant” Kuwale was in the process of being repeated to every last journalist and physicist on Stateless, no wonder they’d wasted no time in calling me in.

I said, “Why are you willing to trust me? What’s to stop me from using everything you say?”

Conroy spread her hands. “Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I’ve viewed your previous work; it’s clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don’t interest you. You’re here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference – which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture – they’re forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we’re not. And with no images of us – unless you care to fake them – what would you put in your documentary? A five minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?”

I didn’t know what to say; she was right on every count. And on top of all that was Mosala’s antipathy, and the risk I ran of losing her cooperation if I was caught straying into this territory at all.

What’s more, I couldn’t help but sympathize a little with the ACs’ stand. It seemed that almost everyone I’d encountered in the last few years – from gender migrants fleeing other people’s definitions of sexual politics, to refugees from nationalist cant like Bill Munroe – was weary of having someone else claim the authority to portray them. Even the Ignorance Cults and TOE specialists resented each other for similar reasons – although they were ultimately contesting the definition of something infinitely larger than their own identities.

I said cautiously, “I can hardly offer you a vow of unconditional secrecy. But I’ll try to respect your wishes.”

This seemed to be enough for Conroy. Perhaps she’d weighed up everything before we’d even met – and decided that a quiet briefing had to be the lesser of two evils, even if she could extract no guarantees.

She said, “ Anthrocosmology is really just the modern form of an ancient idea. I won’t waste your time, though, listing what we do and don’t have in common with various philosophers of classical Greece, the early Islamic world, seventeenth century France, or eighteenth century Germany … you can mine all the distant history yourself, if you really care. I’ll start with a man I’m sure you’ve heard of: a twentieth-century physicist called John Wheeler.” I nodded recognition, although all I could recall immediately was that he’d played a seminal role in the theory of black holes.