Mosala said, “I still have some trouble understanding what your aim is with this program. If the subject is TOEs … why not just cover the whole conference, instead of putting the spotlight on me?”

“Audiences find the theories more accessible if they come packaged as something which a particular person has done.” I shrugged. “Or so the network executives have convinced themselves – and probably convinced the audiences as well, by now.” SeeNet stood for Science, Education and Entertainment Network, but the S-word was often treated as a source of embarrassment, incapable of being intrinsically interesting, and requiring the maximum possible sugar-coating. “With a profile we can touch on some broader issues, though, in terms of the way they affect your day-to-day life. The Ignorance Cults, for example.”

Mosala said dryly, “You don’t think they get enough publicity already?”

“Yes – but most of it’s on their own terms. The profile could be a chance for people to see them through your eyes.”

She laughed. “You want me to tell your audience what I think of the cults? You won’t have time for anything else, if I get started.”

“You could stick to the big three.”

Mosala hesitated. De Groot flashed me a warning look, but I ignored it. I said, “Culture First—?”

“Culture First is the most pathetic. It’s the last refuge for people desperate to think of themselves as ‘intellectuals’ – while remaining complete scientific illiterates. Most of them are just nostalgic for the era when a third of the planet was controlled by people whose definition of a civilized education was Latin, European military history, and the selected doggerel of a few overgrown British schoolboys.”

I grinned. “Mystical Renaissance?”

Mosala smiled ironically. “They start from such good intentions, don’t they? They say most people are blind to the world around them: sleepwalkers in a zombie’s routine of mundane work and mind-numbing entertainment. I couldn’t agree more. They say they want everyone on the planet to become ‘attuned’ to the universe we’re living in, and to share the awe they feel when they confront the deep strangeness of it all: the dizzying length and time scales of cosmology, the endlessly rich complexities of the biosphere, the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics.