By this logic, the only correct way to sum over all the topologies was to incorporate the fact that our universe had – by chance – emerged from pre-space in a certain way. Details of the broken symmetry had to be fed into the equations “by hand” – because there was no reason why they couldn’t have been utterly different. And if the physics resulting from this accident seemed improbably conducive to the formation of stars, planets, and life … then this universe was just one of a vast number which had frozen out of pre-space, each with a different set of particles and forces. If every possible set had been tried, it was hardly surprising that at least one of them had turned out to be favorable to life.

It was the old anthropic principle, the fudge which had saved a thousand cosmologies. And I had no real argument with it – even if all the other universes were destined to be forever hypothetical.

But Violet Mosala’s methods seemed neither more nor less circular. Her opponents had to “fine tune” a few parameters in their equations, to take account of the particular universe “our” Big Bang had created. Mosala and her supporters merely described real experiments in the real world so thoroughly that they “showed the equations” the very same thing.

It seemed to me that both groups of physicists were confessing – however reluctantly – that they couldn’t quite explain how the universe was built … without mentioning the fact that they were there inside it, looking for the explanation.

#

Silence filled the cabin as we flew into darkness. Display screens blinked out, one by one, as passengers dozed off; everyone had had a long journey, wherever they’d started from. I watched the cloud banks behind us darken – a swift, violent sunset, metallic and bruised – then I switched to a route map as we headed north-east, just beyond sight of New Zealand. I thought of space probes on slingshot orbits to Venus via Jupiter. It was as if we’d had to take the long way round to build up enough velocity – as if Stateless was moving too fast to be approached any other way.

An hour later, the island finally appeared ahead of us, like a pale stranded starfish. Six arms sloped gently down from a central plateau; along their sides, gray rock gave way to banks of coral, which thinned from a mass of solid outcrops to a lace-like presence barely breaking the surface of the water. A faint blue bioluminescent glow outlined the convoluted borders of the reefs, enclosed by a succession of other hues – the color-coded depth lines of a living navigation chart. A small cloud of flashing orange fireflies was clustered in the nearest of the starfish’s armpits; whether they were boats anchored in the harbor, or something more exotic, I couldn’t tell.