Still clutching my notepad, I shook her hand. She glanced at the dead machine. "It won't be damaged—but you understand, this is off the record." She had a West Coast US accent, and unashamedly unnatural milk-white skin, smooth as polished marble. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty.
I followed her into the house, down a plushly carpeted hallway, and into the living room. There were half a dozen wall-hangings: large, abstract and colorful. They looked to me like Brazilian Mock Primitive—the work of a school of fashionable Irish artists—but I had no way of knowing whether or not they were the "genuine" article: self-consciously exploitative "remixes" of twenties Saõ Paulo ghetto art, currently valued at a hundred thousand times the price of the real thing from Brazil. The four-meter wall-screen certainly wasn't cheap, though, and nor was the hidden device which had turned my notepad into a brick. I didn't even contemplate trying to invoke Witness; I was just glad I'd transmitted the morning's footage to my editing console at home, before leaving the hotel.
We seemed to be alone in the house. Conroy said, "Take a seat, please. Can I offer you anything?" She moved toward a small beverage dispenser in a corner of the room. I glanced at the machine, and declined. It was a twenty-thousand-dollar synthesizer model—essentially a scaled-up pharm; it could have served anything from orange juice to a cocktail of neuroactive amines. Its presence on Stateless surprised me—I hadn't been allowed to bring my own out-of-date pharm here—but not having memorized the schedules to the UN resolution, I wasn't sure what technology was prohibited universally, and what was banned only from Australian exports.
Conroy sat opposite me, composed, but thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, "Akili Kuwale is a very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful person, but ve's something of a loose cannon." She smiled disarmingly. "I can't imagine what impression you have of us, after ve led you on with all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense." She glanced at my notepad again, meaningfully. "I suppose our insistence on strict privacy doesn't help matters, either—but there's nothing sinister about that, I assure you. You must appreciate the power of the media to take a group of people, and their ideas, and distort the representation of both to suit… any number of agendas." I started to reply—to concede the point, actually—but she cut me off. "I'm not trying to libel your profession, but we've seen it happen so many times, to other groups, that you shouldn't be surprised if we treat it as an inevitable consequence of going public.
"So we've made the difficult choice, for the sake of autonomy, to refuse to be represented by outsiders at all. We don't wish to be portrayed to the world at large: fairly or unfairly, sympathetically or otherwise. And if we have no public image whatsoever, the problem of distortion vanishes. We are who we are."
I said, "And yet, you've asked me here."
Conroy nodded, regretfully. "Wasting your time, and risking making things even worse. But what choice did we have? Akili stirred your curiosity, and we could hardly expect you to let the matter drop. So… I'm willing to discuss our ideas with you directly rather than leaving you to track down and piece together a lot of unreliable hearsay from third parties. But it must, all, be off the record."
I shifted in my seat. "You don't want me drawing any more attention to you by asking questions of the wrong people—so you'll answer them yourself, just to shut me up?"
I'd expected this blunt appraisal to be met with wounded denials and a barrage of euphemisms but Conroy replied calmly, "That's right."
Indrani Lee must have taken my suggestion at face value:
I said, "Why are you willing to trust me? What's to stop me from using everything you say?"
Conroy spread her hands. "Nothing. But why would you want to do that? I've viewed your previous work; it's clear that quasi-scientific groups like us don't interest you. You're here to cover Violet Mosala at the Einstein Conference—which must be a challenging enough subject, without any detours and distractions. It may be impossible to leave Mystical Renaissance or Humble Science! out of the picture—they're forcing themselves into the frame at every opportunity. But we're not. And with no images of us—unless you care to fake them—what would you put in your documentary? A five-minute interview with yourself, recounting this meeting?"
