COSM
Page 27
She listened, his points striking resonances in her she had not voiced to anyone. Well, this was what dads were for: saying the unsayable when you needed it.
She was enough of an outdoorswoman to feel that nature seemed far more beautiful than called for by evolution. Jays and hawks and pelicans and yellow-rumped warblers darted and wheeled outside her window every day, dazzling in their grace. It would be hugely satisfying to believe that all such splendor was here for our appreciation. But the God of beauty also had to own up to cruelty, ugliness, and death. And that God had certainly gone to much trouble to conceal any overt concern for humans.
“Sure,” she said. “Scientists hardly ever discuss religion. Most aren’t even interested enough to own up to being practicing atheists.”
“And comments by some of your colleagues have made it pretty clear that they think of religion as a mildly interesting tribal ritual.”
“Ummm, something to keep in the closet to be trotted out for weddings and funerals,” she said, thinking of Brad’s family.
Yet there had been real comfort in that awkward service, she now realized. More than one got with religious liberals, who were an odd bunch indeed, saying that they believed because it made them happy or at least contented. They calmly accepted that people could swallow mutually contradictory “truths” so long as the beliefs worked to benefit the holders. This piety without content was not even wrong, in the physics sense, because it didn’t really care about the truth, not even as a goal. She suspected that most people didn’t think God and heaven and all the rest of it was important, because they could not really admit that they did not believe any of it.
“Still, Dad, we can’t compromise science.”
He listened dutifully while she went through the standard counterargument: how the conservatives did the real damage: holy wars, oppression, all born of a deep longing for certainty. Science lived on uncertainty, the idea that a fresh experiment could unseat a revered theory. “Part of growing up, for me, was realizing that men and women were not playing a starring role in a grand cosmic drama. Physics—”
“And now you’ve disproved that,” he said mildly.
“Huh?”
“You’ve shown that a bright woman can make a whole universe. That uproots a lot of beliefs.” He grinned, springing the trap. “Including yours.”
6
The worst part of being black lay in having your attention jerked back to it. No media piece mentioned the Cosm without bringing up her race. All very politely, they made their point that a bright woman had apparently made a universe, and did we mention that she was black?
Not that this was new. Anything you did, she had long ago learned, from simply asking a question, to Rollerblading to rock music on your way to the mall, somehow manifested differently. She had played reasonably good basketball in high school, profiting from her beefy height, only to find her classmates pigeonholing her as vaguely inferior. Black athletes had skills with no real function in the modern world, beyond passing entertainment, so in their eyes she was what a psych text termed the “Freudian primitive,” just another proof that blacks were good at things that didn’t matter much in the bigger consequential world. That she was the best in high school math and physics and aced exams had come as rather a shock even to her friends.
All the way up through the academic world she had spent a lot of energy fending off the blandly patronizing efforts to enter her in what she termed the Oppression Sweepstakes. Now that she had done something worth noting, blackness attached itself to her like a lamprey. The speed of the knee-jerk electronic world compressed everything, especially fame. She got appeals to speak to groups, letters proudly announcing that she had been selected for awards, inquiries about whether she would accept fellowships. Alicia gave her secretary a form letter to answer all these.
“But a form letter?” the shocked secretary asked, eyes wide. Alicia just grinned and went back to work.
Luckily, and with some relief, she found that she could go to Max with her worries. They talked while she worked with Zak in the lab, the cramped quarters always astir now with the taking of more data, reams and spools and slabs of it.
“Sure,” Max said offhand, “there are plenty of archbishops wringing their hands, mumbling philosophers and New Age gab pouring out in the media, but so what?”
She laughed. He said New Age as one word, “newage,” rhyming with “sewage.”
“I… wonder what long-term effect this is going to have.”
“Not our department, m’girl. We just explore.”
“And then just let others move in, put up their Fast Faith Franchises?”
He gave her a learned piece he had run across in a leading national magazine, titled “Creation by Amateurs.” She immediately riposted, “Who’re the professionals?” And then read it. There were the usual anxieties, starkly revealing the uneasiness that ordinary intellectuals had with science.
After all, she shared some of them herself. She always thought of herself as a seat-of-the-pants gal, and that physics was similarly grounded. But to theorists nature was a text to be read.
Descartes felt that it took God Himself to ensure that the world men saw was real, not illusion. Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth.
She digested this, then turned the same arguments on her own style. What about experimenters? In the end their detectors shielded them from error and, in turn, shielded nature from human contamination. Nature was out there, its laws commanded by mathematics.
Theorists, experimenters, they were all in the same existential boat. All their work pursued a world outside human space and time, eternal. Laws that were laws, damn it.
And now she and Zak and Max—yes, and Brookhaven, blundering in—had upset all that. Universes could be made by nasty little primates that picked their noses, farted, and did not pick the laws that governed the universe they had made.
“Who did choose the laws?” she asked Max.
Max shrugged, giving her a wobbly smile. But she could see that the questions, mounting higher all the while, bothered him, too.
“I’ve got a real surprise for you,” Onell said breathlessly.
“I’m hard to surprise these days,” Alicia said, slumping into a chair in the chairman’s office. She was spending all day in the lab, eating pizza with Zak, puzzling with Max, even sleeping on the floor some nights. And still jumpy from the kidnapping, alas.
“This will do the trick,” Onell said happily. “With the lawsuits and all—”
“They’ve called them off?”
“Uh, no.”
“Rats.” She had been talking to Bernie Ross and now she knew how lawyers made so much money.
“The White House just called. The President wants to come and see your, uh, sphere.”
She sat without speaking and realized that she had no reaction. None. Was she that tired? “I, uh, don’t have the time.”
“What? This is—”
“I know, the President.”
“It’s quite an honor, Alicia. The chancellor is ecstatic. After all the bad publicity, he feels this puts a sort of seal of approval on UCI’s role in the matter of your, ah—”
“I see. It couldn’t be that the President is just curious about the Cosm and wants to have a look?”
“Well, we feel it is a great honor—”
“Yes, of course.” Already she had a feeling of inevitability about it all.
“And, after all, if you had followed my advice, let the media people take the pictures they wanted—”
“And lose data.”
“Only a few hours, is that so much?”
“Now that it means a million years of cosmic development lost, yes.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Never mind. I’ll go along with it, okay?”
“But nobody else.”
“What?”
“Nobody else comes in the lab.”
“But surely this means that the principal reporters and those who cover the President, the White House, they will want—”
“Nope. Just him.”
For reasons she could not fathom, she became more popular among her own community. Criticism had waned a bit. Brookhaven had stopped taking “off the record” potshots at her; they were busy enough managing their own sphere, announcing to the press that they “had inaugurated the study of ‘cosmo-metrics’ in a rigorous manner.” The ugly term cosmo-metrics sank immediately, and now even the Brookhaven press people referred to their sphere as a Cosm—though the name, leaked by someone at UCI to the national media, still had not appeared in the formal scientific literature. The Net was another matter entirely; she never eavesdropped there anymore, where there were hundreds of theoretical papers alone.
Others, far from the fray, saw that huge possibilities were opening. Over the last decade funding for physics had gotten more and more applied, as the U.S. and European budget problems steadily worsened. But in which areas should federal funding place their bets? The approved technique was to convene a panel of senior experts to pick the most promising areas. Older scientists tended to not see much farther down the paths of the future than their own careers would plausibly carry them and so favored the quicker payoffs. Fundamental physics inevitably suffered, though invariably the bureaucrats described this as “sharpening” their efforts. Alicia reflected that knifes also are sharpened, but by making them narrower. Some areas seemed to have been sharpened into oblivion.
The Cosm was undoubtedly fundamental and had no plausible application. This did not prevent newspaper articles wondering about the possibility of tapping resources from other universes. Her fellow nuclear and particle physicists were overjoyed at the sudden possibility of studying quantum gravity using objects the size of basketballs, as Max had predicted.
Their about-face she discovered first by a card, slipped under the observatory door, carrying a T.S. Eliot quotation: “The Nobel is a ticket to one’s funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.”
“Ummm,” she murmured to Max. “Somebody being subtle.”
“I’ll bet it’s from a colleague who’s nominated you to the Swedish Academy.”
She blinked. “There are nominations?”
“The Academy doesn’t like their nominators to mention it to anyone, especially the nominees. This is a quiet way of letting you know.”
“This is entirely premature. We published one letter, haven’t even sorted our data—”
“Sure, you won’t get it anytime soon. But you’re in line.”
“Nonsense.”
UCI had its own Nobelists, but Alicia had never thought about the selection process itself. The academic world was choked with people who should’ve gotten a Nobel but wouldn’t. The whole Nobel system distorted perceptions of science, she thought, turning it into an annual horse race. Unlike the arts, where giants of unique style could dominate, science was built up mostly by the small persistent efforts of the many. Scientific giants proposed new theories of gravity or evolution, but they stood on a firm ground provided by those who measured the constants, worked out the detailed implications, or scanned the myriad special cases of the natural world, all in search of the telltale clue that existing ideas were not quite adequate. And this army of patient laborers worked because they had curiosity and a sense of wonder and just plain liked solving puzzles—not because they wanted to win a prize at the end of it all.
Zak came over, smiled at the card. “Hey, right.” She reflected that Zak was just the sort of patient laborer who made science work, far more than types such as herself. He had great loyalty to the scientific worldview and to Alicia. She had to admit that she did not honestly feel that she deserved such unstinting help.
She shook her head impatiently. This was all too fast, too downright off-the-wall. “I don’t think they’d give it to somebody who accidentally—”
“Remember, the Nobel is biased toward discovery, not mere explanation.”
“Without your ‘mere explanation,’ Zak and I would have gotten nowhere.”
“There’s the ‘genius of the moment’ in accidents, too,” Max said gently.
“Genius does what it must. Talent does what it can. Me, I’m a drudge.”
Max just chuckled.
7
A presidential visit was a logistic lummox that amazed those who saw it for the first time at ground level. Hotel managers found their inns remade overnight into workable White Houses. Beat police found themselves drafted into an army large enough to take Guatemala. UCI parking lots were transformed into sound stages for the networks.
Secret Service staff trickled into town. Would the expected crowd be big enough? Diverse enough? White House staff liked UCI’s large Asian presence, the highest percentage in the country, even though Asians weren’t an “official” minority, and fretted about not having enough black and Hispanic faces in the crowd for the daily TV photo-op. The Secret Service liked UCI’s easy terrain and simple perimeters. Advance teams started arriving in waves, all coordinated by the White House Communications Agency. Cost was no object. After all, Air Force One cost forty thousand dollars an hour to fly. Bomb-sniffing dogs prowled the physical sciences complex and, of course, her lab. “Crowd-builders” bloomed in the parking lot, movable walls that shaped the spectators into a big-looking backdrop in case not enough students showed up; classes had not started yet.
Technicians rewired a wing of the Four Seasons, where the President would spend the night after a political dinner. An outsized gray van pulled into the physical sciences complex parking lot, packed with secure telephone lines and festooned with microwave dishes. Barriers and press platforms went up overnight. The John Wayne Airport was shut down for Air Force One’s arrival. Agents scoured the campus and approach route, securing manhole covers, showing around pictures of shadowy men perhaps seen in the vicinity, introducing themselves politely and wondering if anything odd had happened in the last few days.
The right picture was everything. The President peering seriously at the Cosm, then speaking to students and scientists gathered like children at his feet. Worth maybe thirty to forty-five seconds on national television, all four networks plus CNN, so go for a few striking images.
On the big day Alicia stood with the array of notables, just outside the observatory. Well-corralled spectators were growing restless; they had been instructed to arrive two hours ago and the sun was bleaching away their good mood. She kept smiling and sweating in her best marine suit, as selected by UCI publicity advisors.
Basic TV Age thinking seemed brisk and heartless to those who took such events at face value, as simple chances to see a President and hear a message. Usually the crowd saw mostly the rear ends of reporters, cops, and cameramen. Logistical magic worked for the lens, not the eye.
The Secret Service men, at least those Alicia could spot, wore the cliché dark suits that seemed to be sausage-tight casings for bodies of slab brawn. They dealt only with the higher UCI figures, nodding to her as if to a figurine. Stage directions: “Ma’am, the President will come in this way, you’ll greet him, we’ll go on into the cars and then up to your laboratory, fifteen minutes there, then the press, then”—a memorized phrase, delivered at maximum speed—“I’m-afraid-that’s-all-we-have-time-for-sorry.”
The local police were out in full panoply, masses riding on their hips: holsters, blackjacks, phones, billy clubs in black, handcuffs, ammo, citation books, cameras. A knot of reporters and TV crewmen sat or milled restlessly in jeans, rough shirts, clodhopper shoes, and velvet zipper jackets with splashy logos on the back. Then the limos pulled up and the moment
had arrived.
The President seemed somehow smaller than he should. He coasted through the crowd like a homecoming float, his passive grandeur defined by the onlookers. Taller politicians fared better at the polls than short ones, but Alicia was surprised to find him shorter than her five-eleven. Amid the whine of rewind motors in cameras and gimlet lens eyes peering like extra appendages from the TV crews, they all exchanged handshakes and homilies.
Among the UCI hierarchy, his presence brought a visible tremble, like trees feeling the first brush of the hurricane, as power far greater than theirs coasted by, oblivious. In their everyday lives they could coax and reward faculty, who in turn presided over students, but this… Alicia saw in the chancellor’s throat a swallow of something—awe? fright?—at the passing of more raw power than any of them had ever felt, potent pressure like a massive weather pattern shifting, blunt and lordly.
“Great work you’ve done here,” the President said to her as she ushered him into the pathway cleared among her gear.
“Our work is still at a preliminary stage,” Alicia said carefully.
“I thought maybe I’d visit the Long Island one, but it might be dangerous, my people said. And you were the first, right?”
“Yes, sir. Here it is.”
She and Zak had hauled the U-magnet out, with Max helping with the grunt labor, to reveal the Cosm to its best advantage. They cut the lights and the President, with two Secret Service men in the background, stood transfixed as his eyes adjusted and the glowing sphere seemed to swell out of the dark. He made appreciative sounds and asked the usual questions. He seemed to think the Cosm was an entire universe, just one he could, if he liked, hold in his hands. It took a while to get over the fact that they were looking through a three-dimensional window at a real enormous universe that lived in another space-time. She was surprised that he had been so little briefed. True, this was just one of five stops today, but—