“So this path integral,” said Buzzo, “gives us an invariant!” His latest crisp diagram of knotted tubes suddenly blurred into an amorphous gray-green haze – symbolizing the shift from a particular space-time to its generalization in pre-space – but the three vectors he’d sent to circumnavigate the simulated universe remained fixed. “Invariants” in an All-Topologies Model were physical quantities which could be shown to be independent of such things as the curvature of space-time in the region of interest, and even how many dimensions it possessed; finding invariants was the only way to make any kind of coherent physics emerge from the daunting indeterminacy of pre-space. I fixed my gaze on Buzzo’s steady vectors; I wasn’t entirely lost yet, after all.

“But that’s obvious. Now comes the tricky part: imagine extending the same operator to spaces where the Ricci curvature is nowhere-defined —”

Now I was lost.

I gave serious thought to calling Sarah again, and asking if she’d be willing to take back Violet Mosala . I could have handed her the footage I’d shot so far, smoothed out the administrative glitches with Lydia, and then crawled away somewhere to recover – from Gina’s departure, from Junk DNA – without having to pretend that I was doing anything but convalescing. I’d told myself that I couldn’t afford to stop working, even for a month … but that was a question of what I was used to, not a question of starvation – and without someone to share the rent, I was going to have to move house anyway. Distress would have kept me in leafy, tranquil Eastwood for a year or more – but whatever I did now, I was headed back to the outer sprawl.

I don’t know what stopped me from walking out of that incomprehensible lecture – and away from Mosala’s justified distaste. Pride? Stubbornness? Inertia? Maybe it came down to the presence of the cults. Walsh’s tactics could only become uglier – but that only made it seem more of a betrayal to abandon the project. I’d given in to SeeNet’s demands for frankenscience in Junk DNA ; this was a chance to atone, by showing the world someone who was standing up against the cults. And it wasn’t as if the rhetoric was about to give way to violence – Kuwale notwithstanding. This was arcane physics, not biotechnology – and even at the Zambian bioethics conference, where I’d last seen Walsh, it was God’s Image as usual – not Humble Science! – who’d pelted speakers with monkey embryos and doused unsympathetic journalists in human blood. No religious fundamentalists had bothered with the Einstein Centenary Conference; TOEs were either beyond their comprehension, or beneath their contempt.

Mosala said softly, “That’s nonsense.”