Three persisted, “Ask ver how Muteba Kazadi died.”

I said, “He was seventy-eight years old.” I struggled to recall what his biographers had said about his death; given his age, I hadn’t paid much attention. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘cerebral hemorrhage.’”

Three laughed, disbelieving, and a chill ran through me. Of course they had more than pure information theory behind their beliefs: they also had at least one mythical death by forbidden knowledge – to validate everything, to convince them that the abstractions had teeth.

I said, “Okay. But if Muteba didn’t bring down the universe when he went … why should Mosala?”

“Muteba wasn’t a TOE theorist; he can’t have become the Keystone. No one knows exactly what he was doing; all his notes have been lost. But some of us think he found a way to mix with information – and when it happened, the shock was too much for him.”

Kuwale snorted derisively.

I said, “What’s ‘mix with information’ supposed to mean?”

Three said, “Every physical structure encodes information – but normally it’s the laws of physics, alone, which control how the structure behaves.” He grinned. “Drop a Bible and a copy of the Principia together, and they’ll fall side-by-side all the way. The fact that the laws of physics are themselves information is invisible, irrelevant. They’re as absolute as Newtonian space-time – a fixed backdrop, not a player.

“But nothing’s pure, nothing’s independent. Time and space mix at high velocities. Macroscopic possibilities mix at the quantum level. The four forces mix at high temperatures. And physics and information mix … by an unknown process. The symmetry group isn’t clear, let alone the detailed dynamics. But it could just as easily be triggered by pure knowledge – knowledge of information cosmology itself, encoded in a human brain – as by any physical extreme.”

“To what effect?”

“Hard to predict.” The blood on his face resembled a black caul in the flare’s light. “Maybe … exposing the deepest unification: revealing precisely how physics is created by explanation – and vice versa. Spinning the vector, rotating all the hidden machinery into view.”

“Yeah? If Muteba had such a great cosmic revelation … how do you know it didn’t turn him into the Keystone? The instant before he died?” I knew I was probably wasting my breath, but I couldn’t stop trying to get Mosala off the hook.

Three smirked at my ignorance. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen models of an information cosmos with a Keystone who mixed . And I know we don’t live in that universe.”

“Why?”

“Because after the Aleph moment, everyone else would get dragged along. Exponential growth: one person mixing, then two, four, eight … if that had happened in ’43, we’d all have followed Muteba Kazadi by now. We’d all know, firsthand, exactly what killed him.”