Five hesitated, but then condescended to point out a few features. “This is the age of the Earth, being refined toward a definite value, as various geophysical and biological conclusions feed into it. This is the commonality of the genetic code, on the way toward giving rise to a sharp set of possibilities for the origins of life. Here, the underlying regularity in the chemistry of the elements—”

“And you expect Violet Mosala to fall into some kind of trance, and think all these things through, right after her moment of apotheosis?”

He scowled. “No! All of this follows logically from the Keystone’s information content at the Aleph moment – it’s not a prediction of the Keystone’s thought processes . Do you imagine that … the Keystone has to count from one to a trillion – out loud – to create all the numbers in between, before arithmetic can make use of them? No. Zero, one, and addition are enough to imply all of them, and more. The universe is no different. It just grows out of a different seed.”

I glanced at the others. They were watching the screen with uneasy fascination – but no sign of anything remotely like religious terror. They might have been observing a runaway Greenhouse climate model, or a simulation of a meteor strike. Secrecy had insulated these people from any serious challenges to their ideas – but they still clung to some semblance of rationality. They hadn’t plucked the supposed need to kill Mosala out of thin air, and then invented Anthrocosmology after the fact, to justify it. They really did believe that they’d been forced to this unpalatable conclusion by reason alone.

And maybe the same relentless logic could still be used to change their minds. I was an ignorant outsider – but they’d invited my scrutiny for the sake of explaining their actions to the world. They’d brought me up here so they could argue their case for posterity – but if I accepted their terms as given, and argued back at them in their own language … maybe there was still a small chance that I could inject enough doubt to persuade them to spare Mosala.

I said carefully, “All right. Logical implication is enough; the Keystone doesn’t have to think through every last microscopic detail. But wouldn’t ve still have to sit down, eventually, and at least … map out the full extent of whatever vis TOE implies? And satisfy verself that there were no loose ends? That would still be a lifetime’s work. Maybe the race to complete the TOE is only the first step in the race to become the Keystone. How can anything be explained into being, until the Keystone knows that it’s been explained—?”