She continued. “We can’t watch the universe emerge; we’re part of it, we’re trapped inside the space-time created by the act of explanation. All we can hope to witness, in the progression of time, is one person become the first to hold the TOE in vis mind, and grasp its consequences, and – invisibly, imperceptibly – understand us all into being .”

She laughed suddenly, breaking the spell. “It’s only a theory. The mathematics behind it makes perfect sense – but the reality is untestable, by its very nature. So of course, we could be wrong.

“But now, can you understand why someone like Akili – who believes, perhaps too passionately, that we could be right – wishes to be certain that Violet Mosala will come to no harm?”

#

I walked further south than I needed to, heading for a tram stop some way down the line from the point where I’d disembarked. I needed to be out under the stars for a while, to come back down to Earth. Even if Stateless didn’t exactly qualify as solid ground.

I was greatly relieved by the night’s revelations: they seemed to wrap up everything, to make sense, finally, of all the distractions which had been keeping me from doing my job.

The ACs were harmless cranks – and, entertaining as it might be to give them a footnote in Violet Mosala , it would hardly undermine the integrity of the whole documentary to leave them out – as they wished, as Mosala wished. Why offend both parties in the name of fearless journalism – in reality, just to raise a brief smirk with SeeNet’s target audience?

And Kuwale was – understandably, if not justifiably – thoroughly paranoid. The life of a potential Keystone was not a matter to be taken lightly. It wasn’t a question of the universe crumbling; if you died before “explaining everything into being”, then obviously someone else would have to do it, and you simply weren’t the one. That didn’t exclude a great deal of reverence, though, for the, as yet, mere candidate creators – and the rumors of Mosala’s emigration must have been enough to start Kuwale seeing enemies crawling out of the reef-rock.

I waited for the tram on a deserted street, gazing up through the clear, cold air at a dazzling richness of stars – and satellites – Conroy’s perversely elegant fantasy still running through my head. I thought: If Mosala is the Keystone, it’s a good thing that she treats the ACs with such contempt. If her explanation of the universe included a conventional TOE, and nothing else, then all was fine. If she’d taken Anthrocosmology seriously, though … surely that would have plucked her right out of the tight web of explanation she was supposed to be spinning for us all. A Theory of Everything wasn’t a Theory of Everything if there was another level, a deeper layer of truth.