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Surely he would have read the whole story?"
"Violet dropped the charges. She's an idiot, but that's the kind of thing she
does. So there was no court appearance, no official version of events. But
someone in the police must have leaked-"
Mosala entered the room, and we exchanged greetings. She glanced curiously at
De Groot, who was still so close to me that it must have been obvious that
we'd been doing our best to avoid being overheard.
1 moved to fill the silence. "How's your mother?"
"She's fine. She's in the middle of negotiating a major deal with Thought
Craft, though, so she's not getting much sleep." Wendy Mosala ran one of
Africa's largest software houses; she'd built it up herself over thirty years,
from a one-person operation. "She's bidding for a license for the
Kaspar clonelets, two years in advance of release, and if it all pans out. .
." She caught herself. "All of which is strictly confidential, okay?"
"Of course." Kaspar was the next generation of pseudo-intelligent software,
currently being coaxed out of a prolonged infancy in Toronto. Unlike Sisyphus
and its numerous cousins-which had been created fully-fledged, instantly
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"adult" by design-Kaspar was going through a learning phase, more
anthropomorphically styled than anything previously attempted. Personally, I
found it a little disquieting . . . and I wasn't sure that I wanted a
clonelet-a pared-down copy of the original-
sitting in my notepad, enslaved to some menial task, if the full software had
spent a year singing nursery rhymes and playing with blocks.
De Groot left us. Mosala slumped into a chair opposite me, spot-lit by the
sunshine flooding through the pane above. The call from home seemed to have
lifted her spirits, but in the harsh light she looked tired.
I said, "Are you ready to start?"
She nodded, and smiled half-heartedly. "The sooner we start, the sooner it's
over."
I invoked Witness. The shaft of sunlight would drift visibly in the course of
the interview, but at the editing stage everything could be stripped back to
reflectance values, and recomputed with a fixed set of rather more flattering
light sources.
I said, "Was it your mother who first inspired you to take an interest in
science?"
Mosala scowled, and said in disgusted tones, "I don't know! Was it your mother
who inspired you to file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt
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file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Egan/Egan,%20Greg%20-%20Distress.txt come up with that
kind of pathetic-"
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She broke off, managing to look contrite and resentful at the same time. "I'm
sorry. Can we start again?"
"No need. Don't worry about continuity; it's not your problem. Just keep on
talking. And if you're halfway through an answer and you change your mind-just
stop, and start afresh."
"Okay." She closed her eyes, and tilted her face wearily into the sunlight.
"My mother. My childhood. My role models." She opened her eyes and pleaded,
"Can't we just take all that bullshit as read, and get on to the TOE?"
I said patiently, "I know it's bullshit, you know it's bullshit-but if the
network executives don't see the required quota of formative childhood
influences . . . they'll screen you at three a.m. after a last-minute program
change, having promoted the timeslot as a special on drug-
resistant skin diseases." SeeNet (who claimed the right to speak for all their
viewers, of course)
had a strict checklist for profiles: so many minutes on childhood, so many on
politics, so many on current relationships, etcetera-a slick paint-by-numbers
guide to commodifying human beings ... as well as a template for deluding
yourself into thinking that you'd explained them. A sort of externalized
version of Lament's area.
Mosala said, "Three a.m.? You're serious, aren't you?" She thought it over.
"Okay. If that's what it comes down to ... I can play along."
"So tell me about your mother." I resisted the urge to say: Feel free to
answer more or less at random, so long as you don't contradict yourself.
She improvised fluently, churning out my life as a soundbite without a trace
of detectable irony.
"My mother gave me an education. By which I don't mean school. She plugged me
into the nets, she had me using an adult's knowledge miner by the time I was
seven or eight. She opened up . . . the whole planet to me. I was lucky: we
could afford it, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But she didn't steer
me toward science. She gave me the keys to this giant playground, and let me
loose. I might just as easily have headed toward music, art, history . . .
anything. I wasn't pushed in any direction. I was just set free."
"And your father?"
"My father was in the police force. He was killed when I was four."
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"That must have been traumatic. But ... do you think that early loss might
have given you the drive, the independence . . . ?"
Mosala flashed me a look more of pity than anger. "My father was shot in the
head by a sniper at a political rally, where he was helping to protect twenty
thousand people whose views he found completely
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repugnant. And-this is now off the record, by the way, whatever it means for
your timeslot-he was someone I loved, and who I still love;
he was not an assembly of missing gears in my psychodynamic clock-work. He was
not an absence to be compensated for."
I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over
several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview
material with reminiscences from childhood friends . . . stock footage of Cape
Town schools in the thirties . . . whatever.
"You've said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were
ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life-for
purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But . . . when do you
think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When
did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?"
Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. "About two years later, I
suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi."
She hadn't mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I'd seen- and it
was lucky I'd stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have
looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?
"So you were influenced by technoliberationi"
"Of course." She frowned slightly, bemused-as if I'd just asked her if she'd
ever heard of Albert [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]