Most of calculus and higher trigonometry, and virtually all of symbolic logic, were closed books to Ada. She simply wasn’t interested; her heart was in geometry and the properties of space. Already she was trifling with five dimensions, four having proved too simple. Like Newton, much of the time she was “sailing strange seas of thought—alone.”
But today, she was back in ordinary three-space, thanks to the present that “Uncle” Bradley had just sent her. Thirty years after its first appearance, Rubik’s Cube had made a comeback—in a far more deadly mutation.
Because it was a purely mechanical device, the original cube had one weakness, for which its addicts were sincerely thankful. Unlike all their neighbors, the six center squares on each face were fixed. The other forty-eight squares could orbit around them, to create a possible 43252 00327 44898 56000 distinct patterns.
The Mark II had no such limitations; all the fifty-four squares were capable of movement, so there were no fixed centers to give reference points to its maddened manipulators. Only the development of microchips and liquid crystal displays had made such a prodigy possible; nothing really moved, but the multicolored squares could be dragged around the face of the cube merely by touching them with a fingertip.
Relaxing in her little boat with Lady, engrossed with her new toy, Ada had been slow to notice the darkening sky. The storm was almost upon her before she started the electric motor and headed for shelter. That there could be any danger never occurred to her; after all, Lake Mandelbrot was only three feet deep. But she disliked getting wet—and Lady hated it.
By the time she had reached the lake’s first western lobe, the roar of the gale was almost deafening. Ada was thrilled; this was really exciting! But Lady was terrified, and tried to hide herself under the seat.
Heading down the Spike, between the avenue of cypresses, she was partly sheltered from the full fury of the gale. But for the first time, she became alarmed; the great trees on either side were swaying back and forth like reeds.
She was only a dozen meters from the safety of the boathouse, far into the Utter West of the M-Set and nearing the infinity border post at minus 1.999, when Patrick O’Brian’s fears about the transplanted cypress trees were tragically fulfilled.
35
ARTIFACT
One of the most moving archaeological discoveries ever made took place in Israel in 1976, during a series of excavations carried out by scientists from the Hebrew University and the French Center for Prehistoric Research in Jerusalem.
At a 10,000-year-old campsite, they uncovered the skeleton of a child, one hand pressed against its cheek. In that hand is another tiny skeleton: that of a puppy about five months old.
This is the earliest example we know of man and dog sharing the same grave. There must be many, many later ones.
(From Friends of Man by Roger Caras: Simon & Schuster, 2001.)
You may be interested to know,” said Dr. Jafferjee with that clinical detachment which Donald found annoying (though how else could psychiatrists stay sane?) “that Edith’s case isn’t unique. Ever since the M-Set was discovered in 1980, people have managed to become obsessed with it. Usually they are computer hackers, whose grip on reality is often rather tenuous. There are no less than sixty-three examples of Mandelmania now in the data banks.”
“And is there any cure?”
Dr. Jafferjee frowned. “Cure” was a word he seldom used. “Adjustment” was the term he preferred.
“Let’s say that in eighty percent of the cases, the subject has been able to resume an—ah—normal life, sometimes with the help of medication or electronic implants. Quite an encouraging figure.”
Except, thought Donald, for the twenty percent. Which category does Edith belong to?
For the first week after the tragedy, she had been unnaturally calm; after the funeral, some of their mutual friends had been shocked by her apparent lack of emotion. But Donald knew how badly she had been wounded, and was not surprised when she began to behave irrationally. When she started to wander around the castle at night, searching through the empty rooms and dank passageways that had never been renovated, he realized that it was time to get medical advice.
Nevertheless, he kept putting it off, hoping that Edith would make the normal recovery from the first stages of grief. Indeed, this seemed to be happening. Then Patrick O’Brian died.
Edith’s relationship with the old gardener had always been a prickly one, but they had respected each other and shared a mutual love for Ada. The child’s death had been as devastating a blow to Pat as to her parents; he also blamed himself for the tragedy. If only he had refused to transplant those cypresses—if only . . .
Pat began drinking heavily again, and was now seldom sober. One cold night, after the landlord of the Black Swan had gently ejected him, he managed to lose his way in the village where he had spent his entire life, and was found frozen to death in the morning. Father McMullen considered that the verdict should have been suicide rather than misadventure; but if it was a sin to give Pat a Christian burial, he would argue that out with God in due course. As, also, the matter of the tiny bundle that Ada held cradled in her arms.
The day after the second funeral, Donald had found Edith sitting in front of a high-resolution monitor, studying one of the infinite miniature versions of the set. She would not speak to him, and presently he realized, to his horror, that she was searching for Ada.
• • •
In later years, Donald Craig would often wonder about the relationship that had developed between himself and Jason Bradley. Though they had met only half a dozen times, and then almost always on business, he had felt that bond of mutual sympathy that sometimes grows between two men, and can be almost as strong as a sexual one, even when it has absolutely no erotic content.
Perhaps Donald reminded Bradley of his lost partner Ted Collier, of whom he often spoke. In any event, they enjoyed each other’s company, and met even when it was not strictly necessary. Though Kato and the Nippon-Turner syndicate might well have been suspicious, Bradley never compromised his ISA neutrality. Still less did Craig try to exploit it; they might exchange personal secrets, but not professional confidences. Donald never learned what role, if any, Bradley had played in the authority’s decision to ban hydrazine.
After Ada’s funeral—which Bradley had flown halfway around the world to attend—they had an even closer link. Both had lost a wife and child; though the circumstances were different, the effects were much the same. They became even more intimate, sharing secrets and vulnerabilities that neither had revealed to any other person.
Later, Donald wondered why he did not think of the idea himself; perhaps he was so close to it that he couldn’t see the picture for the scan lines.
The fallen cypresses had been cleared away, and the two men were walking by the side of Lake Mandelbrot—for the last time, as it turned out, for both of them—when Bradley outlined the scenario. “It’s not my idea,” he explained, rather apologetically. “I got it from a psychologist friend.”
It was a long time before Donald discovered who the “friend” was, but he saw the possibilities at once.
“Do you really think it will work?” he asked.
“That’s something you’ll have to discuss with Edith’s psychiatrist. Even if it is a good idea, he may not be willing to go along with it. The NIH syndrome, you know.”
“National Institutes of Health?”
“No—Not Invented Here.”
Donald laughed, without much humor.
“You’re right. But first, I must see if I can do my part. It won’t be easy.”
That had been an understatement; it was the most difficult task he had ever undertaken in his life. Often he had to stop work, blinded by tears.
And then, in their own mysterious way, the buried circuits of his subconscious triggered a memory that enabled him to continue. Somewhere, years ago, he had come across the story of a surgeon in a third world country who ran an eye-bank which r
estored sight to poor people. To make a graft possible corneas had to be removed from the donor within minutes of death.
That surgeon must have had a steady hand, as he sliced into his own mother’s eyes. I can do no less, Donald told himself grimly, as he went back to the editing table where he and Edith had spent so many hours together.
• • •
Dr. Jafferjee had proved surprisingly receptive. He had asked in a mildly ironic but quite sympathetic manner: “Where did you get the idea? Some pop-psych video-drama?”
“I know it sounds like it. But it seems worth a try—if you approve.”
“You’ve already made the disk?”
“Capsule. I’d like to run it now—I see you’ve got a hybrid viewer in your outer office.”
“Yes. It will even show VHS tapes! I’ll call Dolores—I rely on her a good deal.” He hesitated, and looked thoughtfully at Donald as if he was going to add something. Instead, he pressed a switch and said softly into the clinic’s paging system: “Nurse Dolores—will you please come to my office? Thank you.”
• • •
Edith Craig is still somewhere inside that skull, thought Donald as he sat with Dr. Jafferjee and Nurse Dolores, watching the figure sitting stiffly at the big monitor. Can I smash the invisible yet unyielding barrier that grief has erected, and bring her back to the world of reality?
The familiar black, beetle-shaped image floated on the screen, radiating tendrils that connected it to the rest of the Mandelbrot universe. There was no way of even guessing at the scale, but Donald had already noted the coordinates that defined the size of this particular version. If one could imagine the whole set, stretching out beyond this monitor, it was already larger than the Cosmos that even the Hubble Space Telescope had yet revealed.
“Are you ready?” asked Dr. Jafferjee.
Donald nodded. Nurse Dolores, sitting immediately behind Edith, glanced toward their camera to indicate that she had heard him.
“Then go ahead.”
Donald pressed the EXECUTE key, and the subroutine took over.
The ebon surface of the stimulated Lake Mandelbrot seemed to tremble. Edith gave a sudden start of surprise.
“Good!” whispered Dr. Jafferjee. “She’s reacting!”
The waters parted. Donald turned away; he could not bear to watch again this latest triumph of his skills. Yet he could still see Ada’s image as her voice said gently: “I love you, mother—but you cannot find me here. I exist only in your memories—and I shall always be there. Goodbye. . . .”
Dolores caught Edith’s falling body, as the last syllable died away into the irrevocable past.
36
THE LAST LUNCH
It was a charming idea, though not everyone agreed that it really worked. The decor for the interior of the world’s only deep-diving tourist submarine had been borrowed straight from Disney’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Passengers who boarded the Piccard (port of registry, Geneva) found themselves in a plush, though rather oddly proportioned, mid-Victorian drawing room. This was supposed to provide instant reassurance, and divert all thoughts from the several hundred tons pressing on each of the little windows which gave a rather restricted view of the outside world.
The greatest problems that Piccard ’s builders had had to face were not engineering, but legal ones. Only Lloyd’s of London would insure the hull; no one would insure the passengers, who tended to be VIPs with astronomical credit ratings. So before every dive, notarized waivers of liability were collected, as discreetly as possible.
The ritual was only slightly more unsettling than the cabin steward’s cheerful litany of possible disasters that passengers on transocean flights had endured for decades. NO SMOKING signs, of course, were no longer necessary; nor did Piccard have seat belts and life jackets—which would have been about as useful as parachutes on commercial airliners. Its numerous built-in safety features were unobtrusive and automatic. If worst came to worst, the independent two-man crew capsule would separate from the passenger unit, and each would make a free ascent to the surface, ultrasonic beacons pinging frantically.
This particular dive was the last one of the season: it was getting late in the year, and Piccard would soon be airlifted back to calmer seas in the southern hemisphere. Although at the depths the submarine operated, winter and summer made no more difference than day and night, bad weather on the surface could make passengers very, very unhappy.
During the thirty-minute free-fall to the wreck site, Piccard ’s distinguished guests watched a short video showing the current status of operations, and a map of the planned dive. There was nothing else to see during the descent into darkness, except for the occasional luminous fish attracted to this strange invader of its domain.
Then, abruptly, it seemed that a ghostly dawn was spreading far below. All but the faint red emergency lights in Piccard were switched off, as Titanic’s prow loomed up ahead.
Almost everyone who saw her now was struck by the same thought: She must have looked much like this, in the Harland and Wolff Shipyard, a hundred years ago. Once again she was surrounded by an elaborate framework of steel scaffolding, while workers swarmed over her. The workers, however, were no longer human.
Visibility was excellent, and the pilot maneuvered Piccard so that the passengers on both sides of the cabin could get the best possible view through the narrow portholes. He was extemely careful to avoid the busy robots, who ignored the submarine completely. It was no part of the universe they had been trained to deal with.
“If you look out on the right,” said the tour guide—a young Woods Hole graduate, making a little money in his vacation—“you’ll see the ‘down’ cable, stretching up to Explorer. And there’s a module on the way right now, with its counterweight. Looks like a two-ton unit—
“And there’s a robot going to meet it—now the module’s unhooked—you see it’s got neutral buoyancy, so it can be moved around easily. The robot will carry it over to its attachment point on the lifting cradle, and hook it on. Then the two-ton counterweight that brought it down will be shuttled over to the ‘up’ cable, and sent back to Explorer to be reused. After that’s been done ten thousand times, they can lift Titanic. This section of her, anyway.”
“Sounds a very roundabout way of doing things,” commented one of the VIPs. “Why can’t they just use compressed air?”
The guide had heard this a dozen times, but had learned to answer all such questions politely. (The pay was good, and so were the fringe benefits.)
“It’s possible, ma’am, but much too expensive. The pressure here is enormous. I imagine you’re all familiar with the standard scuba bottles—they’re usually rated at two hundred atmospheres. Well, if you opened one of these down here, the air wouldn’t come out. The water would rush in—and fill half the bottle!”
Perhaps he’d overdone it; some of the passengers were looking a little worried. So he continued hastily, hoping to divert their thoughts.
“We do use some compressed air for trimming and fine control. And in the final stages of the ascent, it will play a major role.
“Now, the skipper is going to fly us toward the stern, along the promenade deck. Then he’ll do a reverse run, so you’ll all have an equally good view. I won’t do any more talking for a while—”
Very slowly, Piccard moved the length of the great shadowy hulk. Much of it was in darkness, but some open hatches spilled dramatic fans of light where robots were at work in the interior, fixing buoyancy modules wherever lifting forces could be tolerated.
No one spoke a word as the weed-festooned walls of steel glided by. It was still very hard to grasp the scale of the wreck—still, after a hundred years, one of the largest passenger ships ever built. And the most luxurious, if only for reasons of pure economics. Titanic had marked the end of an era; after the war that was coming, no one would ever again be able to afford such opulence. Nor, perhaps, would anyone care to risk it, lest such arrogance once again pr
ovoke the envy of the gods.
The mountain of steel faded into the distance; for a while, the nimbus of light surrounding it was still faintly visible. Then there was only the barren seabed drifting below Piccard, appearing and disappearing in the twin ovals of its forward lights.
Though it was barren, it was not featureless; it was pitted and gouged, and crisscrossed with trenches and the scars of deep-sea dredges.
“This is the debris field,” said the guide, breaking his silence at last. “It was covered with pieces of the ship—crockery, furniture, kitchen utensils, you name it. They were all collected while Lloyd’s and the Canadian government were still arguing in the World Court. When the ruling came, it was too late—”
“What’s that?” one of the passengers suddenly asked. She had caught a glimpse of movement through her little window.
“Where— Let me see— Oh, that’s J.J.”
“Who?”
“Jason Junior. ISA—sorry, International Seabed Authority’s—latest toy. It’s being tested out—it’s an automatic surveying robot. They hope to have a small fleet of them, so that all the seabeds can be mapped down to one-meter resolution. Then we’ll know the ocean as well as we know the Moon. . . .”
Another oasis of light was appearing ahead, and presently resolved itself into a spectacle that was still hard to believe, no matter how many times one had seen it in photos or video displays.
Nothing of the stern portion of the wreck was now visible: it was all buried deep inside the huge, irregular block of ice sitting on the seabed. Protruding out of the ice were dozens of girders, to many of which half-inflated balloons had been attached by cables of varying length.
“It’s a very tricky job,” the young guide said, with obvious admiration. “The big problem is to stop the ice from breaking off and floating up by itself. So there’s a lot of internal structure that you can’t see. As well as a kind of roof up there on top.”