Traders were selling rugs, T-shirts, pineapples, oil paintings, statues of saints. I passed by a stall of dried fish, and had to concentrate to keep my stomach from heaving; the smell was no problem, but however many times I confronted it, the sight of dead animals offered for human consumption still left me reeling, more than a human corpse ever did. Engineered crops could match or exceed all the nutritional benefits of meat; a small flesh trade still existed in Australia, but it was discreet and heavily cosmeticized.

I saw a rack of what looked like Masarini jackets, on sale for a tenth of the price they would have fetched in New York or Sydney. I waved my notepad at them; it found one in my size, interrogated the tag in the collar, and chimed approval – but I had my doubts. I asked the thin teenage boy who was standing by the rack, “Are these real authentication chips, or – ?” He smiled innocently and said nothing. I bought the jacket, then ripped out the tag and handed the chip back to him. “You might as well get some more use out of it.”

I ran into Indrani Lee beside a software stall. She said, “I think I’ve spotted someone else who’s headed for the conference.”

“Where?” I felt a mixture of excitement and panic; if it was Violet Mosala herself, I was still unprepared to face her.

I followed Lee’s gaze to an elderly Caucasian woman, who was arguing heatedly with a trader selling scarves. Her face was vaguely familiar, but in profile I couldn’t put a name to it.

“Who is that?”

“Janet Walsh.”

“No. You’re joking.”

But it was her.

Janet Walsh was an award-winning English novelist – and one of the world’s most prominent members of Humble Science! She’d first come to fame in the twenties with Wings of Desire (“a delicious, mischievous, incisive fable”— The Sunday Times ), a story set among an “alien race”, who happened to look exactly like humans … except that their males were born with large butterfly wings growing out of their penises, which were necessarily and bloodily severed when they lost their virginity. The alien females (who lacked hymens), were all callous and brutal. After being raped and abused by everyone in sight for most of the novel, the hero discovers a magical technique for making his lost wings grow back – on his shoulders – and flies off into the sunset. (“Gleefully subverts all gender stereotypes”— Playboy .)

Since then, Walsh had specialized in morality tales concerning the evils of “male science” (sic), an ill-defined but invariably calamitous activity – which even women could perform if they were led sufficiently astray, although apparently that was no excuse to change the label. I’d quoted her pithiest comment on the subject in Gender Scrutiny Overload : “If it’s arrogant, hubristic, dominating, reductionist, exploitative, spiritually impoverished, and dehumanizing – what else should we call it but male? ”