Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  It was hard to read at my usual speed. For one thing I had forgotten the near-illegible nature of Arthur’s personal notes. I could follow everything, after so many years of practice, but Otto Braun must have had a terrible time. Despite his command of English, some of the terse technical notes and equations would be unintelligible to one of his background. Otto was an engineer. It would be astonishing if his knowledge extended to modern theoretical physics.

  And yet in some ways Otto Braun would have found the material easier going than I did. I could not make myself read fast, for the words of those old notebooks whispered in my brain like a strange echo of false memory. Arthur and I had been in the same place at the same time, experiencing similar events, and many of the things that he felt worth recording had made an equal impression on me. We had discussed many of them. This was my own Cambridge years, my own life, seen from a different vantage point and through a lens that imposed a subtle distortion on shapes and colors.

  And then it changed. The final divergence began.

  It was in December, eight days before Christmas, that I caught a first hint of something different and repugnant. Immediately following a note on quantized red shifts came a small newspaper clipping. It appeared without comment, and it reported the arrest of a Manchester man for the torture, murder, and dismemberment of his own twin daughters. He had told the police that the six-year-olds had “deserved all they got.”

  That was the first evidence of a dark obsession. In successive months and years, Arthur Shaw’s ledgers told of his increasing preoccupation with death; and it was never the natural, near-friendly death of old age and a long, fulfilled life, but always the savage deaths of small children. Death unnatural, murder most foul. The clippings spoke of starvation, beating, mutilation, and torture. In every case Arthur had defined the source, without providing any other comment. He must have combed the newspapers in his search, for I, reading those same papers in those same editions, had not noticed the articles.

  It got worse. Nine years ago it had been one clipping every few pages. By the time he went to live in Bonn the stories of brutal death occupied more than half the journals, and his sources of material had become world-wide.

  And yet the Arthur that I knew still existed. It was bewildering and frightening to recognize the cool, analytical voice of Arthur Shaw, interspersed with the bloody deeds of human monsters. The poetry quotes and the comments on the weather and current events were still there, but now they shared space with a catalog of unspeakable acts.

  Four years ago, just before he came to Bonn, another change occurred. It was as though the author of the written entries had suddenly become aware of the thing that was making the newspaper clippings. When Arthur discovered that the other side of him was there, he began to comment on the horror of the events that he was recording. He was shocked, revolted, and terrified by them.

  And yet the clippings continued, along with the lecture notes, the concerts attended, the careful record of letters written; and there were the first hints of something else, something that made me quiver.

  I read on, to midnight and beyond until the night sky paled. Now at last I am permitted the statement denied to me earlier: The next morning I was still studying Arthur’s notebooks.

  Otto Braun came into the office, looked at me, and nodded grimly.

  “I am sorry, Professor Turnbull. It seemed to me that nothing I could say would be the same as allowing you to read for yourself.” He came across to the desk. “The security officer says you were up all night. Have you eaten breakfast?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought not.” He looked at my hands, which were perceptibly shaking. “You must have rest.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “You will. But first you need food. Come with me. I have arranged for us to have a private dining-room.”

  On the way to the guest quarters I went to the bathroom. I saw myself in the mirror there. No wonder Otto Braun was worried. I looked terrible, pale and unshaven, with purple-black rings under my eyes.

  In the cafeteria Braun loaded a tray with scrambled eggs, speckwurst, croissants and hot coffee, and led me to a nook off the main room. He watched like a worried parent to make sure that I was eating, before he would pour coffee for himself.

  “Let me begin with the most important question,” he said. “Are you convinced that Arthur Shaw took his own life?”

  “I feel sure of it. He could not live with what one part of him was becoming. The final entry in his journal says as much. And it explains the way he chose to die.”

  Enough is enough, Arthur had written. I can’t escape from myself. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Better to return to the womb, and never be born…

  “He wanted peace, and to hide away from everything,” I went on. “When you know that, the black plastic bag makes more sense.”

  “And you agree with my decision?” Braun’s chubby face was anxious. “To keep the notebooks away from his parents.”

  “It was what he would have wanted. They were supposed to be destroyed, and one of his final entries proves it. He said, ‘I have done one braver thing’”

  His brow wrinkled, and he put down his cup. “I saw that. But I did not understand it. He did not say what he had done.”

  “That’s because it’s part of a quotation, from a poem by John Donne. ‘I have done one braver thing, Than all the worthies did, And yet a braver thence doth spring, And that, to keep it hid.’ He wanted what he had been doing to remain secret. It was enormously important to him.”

  “That is a great relief. I hoped that it was so, but I could not be sure. Do you agree with me, we can now destroy those notebooks?”

  I paused. “Maybe that is not the best answer. It will leave questions in the mind of Marion Shaw, because she is quite sure that the books must exist. Suppose that you turn them over to my custody? If I tell Marion that I have them, and want to keep them as something of Arthur’s, I’m sure she will approve. And of course I will never let her see them.”

  “Ah.” Braun gave a gusty sigh of satisfaction. “That is a most excellent suggestion. Even now, I would feel uneasy about destroying them. I must admit, Professor Turnbull, that I had doubts as to my own wisdom when I agreed to allow you to come here and examine Dr. Shaw’s writings. But everything has turned out for the best, has it not? If you are not proposing to eat those eggs…”

  Everything for the best, thought Otto Braun, and probably in the best of all possible worlds.

  We had made the decision. The rest was details. Over the next twelve hours, he and I wrote the script.

  I would handle Marion and Roland Shaw. I was to confirm that Arthur’s death had been suicide, while his mind was unbalanced by overwork. If they talked to Braun again about his earlier discomfort in talking to them, it was because he felt he had failed them. He had not done enough to help, he would say, when Arthur so obviously needed him. (No lie there; that’s exactly how Otto felt).

  And the journals? I would tell the Shaw’s of Arthur’s final wish, that they be destroyed. Again, no lie; and I would assure them that I would honor that intent.

  I went home. I did it, exactly as we had planned. The only intolerable moment came when Marion Shaw put her arms around me, and actually thanked me for what I had done.

  Because, of course, neither she nor Otto Braun nor anyone else in the world knew what I had done.

  When I read the journals and saw Arthur’s mind fluttering towards insanity, I was horrified. But it was not only the revelation of madness that left me the next morning white-faced and quivering. It was excitement derived from the other content of the ledgers, material interwoven with the cool comments on personal affairs and the blood-obsessed newspaper clippings.

  Otto Braun, in his relief at seeing his own problems disappear, had grabbed at my explanation of Arthur’s final journal entries, with
out seeing that it was wholly illogical. “I have done one braver thing,” quoted Arthur. But that was surely not referring to the newspaper clippings and his own squalid obsessions. He was appalled by them, and said so. What was the “brave thing” that he had done?

  I knew. It was in the notebooks.

  For four years, since Arthur’s departure from Cambridge, I had concentrated on the single problem of a unified theory of quantized spacetime. I made everything else in my life of secondary importance, working myself harder than ever before, to the absolute limit of my powers. At the back of my mind was always Arthur’s comment: this was the most important problem in modern physics.

  It was the best work I had ever done. I suspect that it is easily the best work that I will ever do.

  What I had not known, or even vaguely suspected, was that Arthur Shaw had begun to work on the same problem after he went to Bonn.

  I found that out as I went through his work ledgers. How can I describe the feeling, when in the middle of the night in Arthur’s old office I came across scribbled thoughts and conjectures that I had believed to belong in my head alone? They were mixed in hodge-podge with everything else, side-by-side with the soccer scores, the day’s high temperature, and the horror stories of child molestation, mutilation, and murder. To Otto Braun or anyone else, those marginal scribbles would have been random nonsensical jottings. But I recognized that integral, and that flux quantization condition, and that invariant.

  How can I describe the feeling?

  I cannot. But I am not the first to suffer it. Thomas Kydd and Ben Jonson must have been filled with the same awe in the 1590’s, when Shakespeare carried the English language to undreamed-of heights. Hofkapellmeister Salieri knew it, to his despair, when Mozart and his God-touched work came on the scene at the court of Vienna. Edmund Halley surely felt it, sitting in Newton’s rooms at Trinity College in 1684, and learning that the immortal Isaac had discovered laws and invented techniques that would make the whole System of the World calculable; and old Legendre was overwhelmed by it, when the Disquisitiones came into his hands and he marveled at the supernatural mathematical powers of the young Gauss.

  When half-gods go, the gods arrive. I had struggled with the problem of spacetime quantization, as I said, with every working neuron of my brain. Arthur Shaw went so far beyond me that it took all my intellect to mark his path. “It were all one that I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, he is so above me.” But I could see what he was doing, and I recognized what I had long suspected. Arthur was something that I would never be. He was a true genius.

  I am not a genius, but I am very talented. I could follow where I could not lead. From the hints, scribbled theorems, and conjectures in Arthur Shaw’s notebooks I assembled the whole; not perhaps as the gorgeous tapestry of thought that Arthur had woven in his mind, but enough to make a complete theory with profound practical implications.

  That grand design was the “braver thing” that he knew he had done, an intellectual feat that placed him with the immortals.

  It was also, paradoxically, the cause of his death.

  Some scientific developments are “in the air” at a particular moment; if one person does not propose them, another will. But other creative acts lie so far outside the mainstream of thought that they seem destined for a single individual. If Einstein had not created the general theory of relativity, it is quite likely that it would not exist today. Arthur Shaw knew what he had wrought. His approach was totally novel, and he was convinced that without his work an adequate theory might be centuries in the future.

  I did not believe that; but I might have, if I had not been stumbling purblind along the same road. The important point, however, is that Arthur did believe it.

  What should he do? He had made a wonderful discovery. But when he looked inside himself, he saw in that interior mirror only the glassy essence of the angry ape. He had in his grasp the wondrous spell that would send humanity to the stars—but he regarded us as a bloody-handed, bloody-minded humanity, raging out of control through the universe.

  His duty as he saw it was clear. He must do the braver thing, and destroy both his ideas and himself.

  What did I do?

  I think it is obvious.

  Arthur’s work had always been marred by obscurity. Or rather, to be fair to him, in his mind the important thing was that he understand an idea, not that he be required to explain it to someone of lesser ability.

  It took months of effort on my part to convert Arthur’s awkward notation and sketchy proofs to a form that could withstand rigorous scrutiny. At that point, the work felt like my own; the re-creation of his half-stated thoughts was often indistinguishable from painful invention.

  Finally I was ready to publish. By that time Arthur’s ledgers had been, true to my promise, long-since destroyed, for whatever else happened in the world, I did not want Marion Shaw to see those notebooks or suspect anything of their contents.

  I published. I could have submitted the work as the posthumous papers of Arthur Sandford Shaw…except that someone would certainly have asked to see the original material.

  I published. I could have assigned joint authorship, as Shaw and Turnbull…except that Arthur had never presented a line on the subject, and the historians would have probed and probed to learn what his contribution had been,

  I published—as Giles Turnbull. Three papers expounded what the world now knows as the Turnbull Concession Theory. Arthur Shaw was not mentioned. It is not easy to justify that, even to myself. I clung to one thought: Arthur had wanted his ideas suppressed, but that was a consequence of his own state of mind. It was surely better to give the ideas to the world, and risk their abuse in human hands. That, I said to myself, was the braver thing.

  I published. And because there were already eight earlier papers of mine in the literature, exploring the same problem, acceptance of the new theory was quick, and my role in it was never in doubt.

  Or almost never. In the past four years, at scattered meetings around the world, I have seen in perhaps half a dozen glances the cloaked hint of a question. The world of physics holds a handful of living giants. They see each other clearly, towering above the rest of us, and when someone whom they have assessed as one of the pygmies shoots up to stand tall, not at their height but even well above them, there is at least a suspicion….

  There is a braver thing.

  Last night I telephoned my father. He listened quietly to everything that I had to tell him, then he replied, “Of course I won’t say a word about that to Marion Shaw. And neither will you.” And at the end, he said what he had not said when the Nobel announcement was made: “I’m proud of you, Giles.”

  At the cocktail party before tonight’s dinner, one of the members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was tactless enough to tell me that he and his colleagues found the speeches delivered by the Nobel laureates uniformly boring. It’s always the same, he said, all they ever do is recapitulate the reason that the award had been made to them in the first place.

  I’m sure he is right. But perhaps tomorrow I can be an exception to that rule.

  This is a birthday present for Bob Porter.

  —Charles Sheffield, February 17, 1989

  afterword: a braver thing

  In 1988 I wrote a story called “The Double Spiral Staircase.” It can be found later in this collection, and I am giving nothing away when I say that it concerns a great discovery, and an attempt at its suppression. I sent it off to Analog magazine, but I didn’t feel completely happy with it. I wondered if perhaps I had told the story from the wrong character’s point of view. So I sat down to re-tell it in the first person.

  In the re-telling, everything changed: mood, pacing, length, style. What emerged was “A Braver Thing” To me it was at heart the same story, but I could find no one who agreed. Friends looked at the two, and shook their co
llective heads. The two stories, they said, had nothing to do with each other. I read “A Braver Thing” again, and disagreed. It was the same story. I liked it, too, although I decided that it was no longer science fiction. It was fiction about science. I thought it was probably unsalable.

  I sent it off anyway, to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s magazine. He, showing why he is a successful editor and I am not, bought it, and it became a Hugo finalist for 1991.

  Meanwhile, Stan Schmidt of Analog had written back to me. The problem was not in the point of view, as I had thought, but in the ending. I changed that at his suggestion, and he bought the story. It seemed to me that I had in some sense sold the same story to two magazines. But no one has ever complained.

  One other thing ought to be said about this story. There is a big lump of autobiography here. In it, however elliptically, I approached for the first time the 1977 death of my first wife, Sarah. It was almost certainly her final illness that led me to write fiction at all, after never having considered that before as even a remote possibility. But I could not write about Sarah for another eleven years. And I could not write directly about her for three more years, until last winter the story “Georgia On My Mind” appeared on my computer almost without my knowing it.

  .

  ——————————————————————————————————

  story: the grand tour

  Tomas Lili had won the Stage, square if not fair, and now he was wearing the biggest, sweatiest grin you have ever seen. Tomorrow he would also wear the yellow jersey on the next-to-last Stage of the Tour.

  Ernie Muldoon had come second. In one monstrous last effort of deceleration, I had almost squeaked in front of him at the docking, and hit the buffer right on the maximum allowable speed of five kilometers an hour. We had been given the same time, and now we were collapsed over our handlebars. I couldn’t tell about Ernie, but I felt as though I were dying. For the last two hours I had been pedaling with a growing cramp in my left thigh, and for the final ten minutes it was as though I had been working the whole bike one-legged.