“She’s been admitted. I wanted to stay at the hospital, but she sent me away.” De Groot stood opposite me, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. She said quietly, “You know, we’ve had crank mail from just about everyone. Every cult, every lunatic on the planet wanted to let Violet in on their amazing cosmic revelations – or let her know that she was desecrating their precious mythology, and would burn in Hell for it … or drive away all the Buddha-nature … or crush the world’s great civilizations into nihilistic rubble, with her male Western reductionist hubris. The Anthrocosmologists were just … one more voice shouting noise.” She looked at me squarely. “Would you have picked them as the threat? Not the fundamentalists. Not the racists. Not the psychotics who gave detailed descriptions of what they planned to do to her corpse. People who sent us long dissertations on information theory – and P.S., we’d be happy to see you create the universe, but certain other parties may try to stop you.”

I said, “No one could have picked them.”

De Groot ran a hand across her temple, then stood in silence, shielding her eyes.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, and laughed humorlessly. “Headache, that’s all.” She inhaled deeply, visibly steeling herself to push on. “They found traces of foreign proteins in her bloodstream, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. They can’t resolve the molecular structures, though – and she’s showing no symptoms, so far. So they’ve put her on a mixture of strong antiviral drugs – and until something happens, all they can do is watch her.”

“Is security—?”

“She’s under guard. For what that’s worth now.”

“And Buzzo?”

“Apparently his scan was clear.” De Groot snorted, angry and bewildered. “He’s unmoved by … all of this. He believes that Nishide simply died of natural causes, Violet has some harmless pollutant in her body, and your cholera analysis was some kind of forgery for the sake of a media beat-up. The only thing he seems worried about is how he’s going to get home at the end of the conference if the airport is still closed.”

“But he has bodyguards—?”

“I don’t know; you’d have to ask him that. Oh – and Violet asked him to give a media conference himself, announcing the flaw in his TOE. The antiviral drugs are debilitating; she’s so nauseous that she can barely speak. Buzzo made some vague promise to her – but then he muttered something to me about looking at the issues more closely before he retracted anything. So I don’t know what he’ll do.”