Distress полностью

If Violet Mosala had chosen to emigrate to Stateless, I would have thought they'd be glad to be rid of her. She might have been a hero on half the continent, but to PACDF she could never have been anything but a traitor. And I could find no report of a death threat, so maybe Savimbi's claim had been pure hype; the reality might have involved nothing more than an anonymous call to his news desk.

I plowed on, regardless. Maybe Kuwale's mysterious faction had revealed themselves by taking part in the other side of the debate? There was certainly no shortage of vocal opposition to PACDF—from more moderate traditionalists, from numerous professional bodies, from pluralist organizations, and from self-described technoliberateurs.

Mismatched initials aside, I couldn't quite see a member of the African Union for the Advancement of Science collaring journalists in airports and asking them to play unofficial bodyguard to a world-renowned physicist. And while the African Pluralists League organized worldwide student exchange programs, theatre and dance tours, physical and net-based art exhibitions, and lobbied aggressively against cultural isolationism and discriminatory treatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities… I doubted they had time on their hands to fret about Violet Mosala.

The late Muteba Kazadi had coined the term technoliberation, to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the "liberation" of the technology itself from restrictive hands. Muteba had been a communications engineer, poet, science writer—and Minister for Development in Zaire in the late thirties. I viewed some of his speeches, impassioned pleas for "the use of knowledge in the service of freedom"; he'd called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public ownership of communications resources, and a universal right of access to scientific information. As well as championing the obvious pragmatism of "liberation biology" (though Zaire had never gone renegade and used unlicensed crops), he'd spoken of the long-term need for African nations to participate in pure research in every area of basic science—an extraordinary stand at a time when such activities were deeply unpopular in the wealthiest countries on the planet, and unthinkable in terms of his own government's immediate priorities.

Muteba had had his eccentricities, his three biographers concurred, with a leaning toward Nietzschean metaphysics, fringe cosmology, and dramatic conspiracy theories—including the old one that "El Nido de Ladrones," the bioengineered haven built by drug runners on the Peruvian-Colombian border, had been H-bombed in 2035 not because the modified forest was out of control and threatening to overrun the whole Amazon basin, but because some kind of "dangerously liberating" neuroactive virus had been invented there. The act had been an obscenity, thousands of people had died—and the public outrage it attracted had quite possibly helped to save Stateless from a similar fate—but I thought the more prosaic explanation was far more likely to be true.

Learned commentators from every part of the continent stated that Muteba's legacy lived on, and that proud technoliberateurs were active across the face of Africa, and beyond. I found it difficult to pin down his direct intellectual descendants, though; hundreds of academic and political groups, and tens of thousands of individuals, cited Muteba as a source of inspiration—and many people who'd spoken out against PACDF in net debates had explicitly labeled themselves technoliberateurs—but each seemed to have adapted the philosophy to a slightly different agenda. I had no doubt that every one of them would have been horrified at the thought of Violet Mosala coming to harm—but I was no wiser as to who might have taken it upon themselves to watch over her.

Around seven, I headed downstairs. Sarah Knight still hadn't returned my call—and I could hardly blame her for snubbing me. I thought again about offering to hand back the project, but I told myself that I'd left it too late, and she'd probably committed herself to another assignment. The truth was, the more the complications surrounding Mosala mocked the fantasy I'd held of retreating into the "inconsequential" abstractions of TOEs, the harder it became to imagine walking away. If this was the reality behind the mirage, I had an obligation to face it.

I was heading toward the main restaurant when I spotted Indrani Lee coming down one of the corridors which led into the lobby. She was with a small group, but they were splitting up—with volleys of rejoinders and afterthoughts, as if they'd just emerged from a long, hectic meeting and couldn't bear each other's company any longer, but couldn't quite bring themselves to end the discussion, either. I approached; she saw me and raised a hand in greeting.

I said, "I missed you on the connecting flight. How are you settling in?"