The auditorium exploded with laughter. Walsh remained standing for a few seconds, then took her seat with remarkable dignity: unrepentant, unashamed, unfazed. I wondered if all she’d wanted was for Mosala to hit back on the same level. There was no question that Planet Noise would find a way to twist the exchange into a victory for Walsh: SCIENCE PRODIGY, CONFRONTED WITH THE FACTS, INSULTS RESPECTED AUTHOR. But most of the media would report that Mosala had responded with great restraint to deliberate provocation.

There were a few more questions – all of them innocuous and mildly technical – then the session was declared at an end. I walked around to the back of the stage, where Karin De Groot was waiting for me.

De Groot was unmistakably ifem – a look which was not at all “halfway toward” androgynous; it was far more distinctive than that. While ufems and umales exaggerated well-established facial gender cues, and asexes eliminated them, the first ifems and imales had modeled the human visual system and found completely new clusters of parameters which would set them apart at a glance – without rendering them all homogeneous.

She shook my hand then led me toward one of the hotel’s small meeting rooms. She said quietly, “Go easy on her, will you? That wasn’t pleasant back there.”

“I can’t imagine anyone handling it better.”

“Violet’s not someone I’d want as an enemy; she never hits back without thinking it through. But that doesn’t mean she’s made of stone.”

The room had a table and seating for twelve, but only Mosala was waiting there. I’d been half expecting a private security guard – but then, the fan club notwithstanding, she wasn’t quite in the rock star league. And Kuwale’s dire intimations notwithstanding, there was probably no need.

Mosala greeted me warmly. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do this earlier, but I’m afraid I hadn’t set aside any time for it. After all those meetings with Sarah Knight, I’d assumed the whole planning stage was over.”

All those meetings with Sarah Knight? Pre-production should never have gone that far without SeeNet’s approval.

I said, “I’m sorry to put you through it again. There’s always some unavoidable duplication when a new director takes over a project.”

Mosala nodded, distracted. We sat and went through the whole conference timetable together, comparing notes. Mosala asked not to be filmed at more than fifty per cent of the sessions she attended. “I’d go mad if you were watching me all the time, catching me out whenever I pulled a face at something I disagreed with.” I agreed, but then we haggled over the particular fifty per cent – I definitely wanted reaction shots for all the talks where her work would be explicitly discussed.

We decided on three interview sessions, two hours each, the first on Wednesday afternoon.