The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  “There are no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.

  “What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.

  “There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.”

  I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.

  “If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”

  Dr. Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.

  “Did they give you a room with a semi-naked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me 1282, but the room numbers only go up to seventy-five.”

  “I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,” I said.

  The most serious difficulty quantum theory faces today is not the inherent limitation of measurement capability or the EPR paradox. It is the lack of a paradigm. Quantum theory has no working model, no metaphor that properly defines it.

  —EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

  I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor who couldn’t remember where he’d stored my suitcase, and unpacked.

  My clothes, which had been permanent press all the way from MIT, underwent a complete wave function collapse the moment I opened my suitcase, and came out looking like Schrödinger’s almost-dead cat.

  By the time I had called housekeeping for an iron, taken a bath, given up on the iron, and steamed a dress in the shower, I had missed the “Mixer with Munchies” and was half an hour late for Dr. Onofrio’s opening remarks.

  I opened the door to the ballroom as quietly as I could and slid inside. I had hoped they would be late getting started, but a man I didn’t recognize was already introducing the speaker. “—and an inspiration to all of us in the field.”

  I dived for the nearest chair and sat down.

  “Hi,” David said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”

  “Not at the wax museum,” I whispered.

  “You should have been,” he whispered back. “It was great. They had John Wayne, Elvis, and Tiffany the model-slash-actress with the brain of a pea-slash-amoeba.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”

  “What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.

  “Shh,” David said.

  Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached, and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”

  She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.

  “Before I go any farther,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”

  Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.

  —EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

  “You knew we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we got out to the lobby.

  When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”

  “Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.

  “If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It’s shaped like a stack of LPs.”

  “I want to go to the opening remarks.”

  “The beacon on top blinks out ‘Hollywood’ in Morse code.”

  I went over to the front desk.

  “Can I help you?” the clerk behind the desk said. “My name is Natalie, and I’m an—”

  “Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?” I said.

  “They’re in the ballroom.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t have any dinner,” David said. “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone. There’s this great place that has the ice cream cone Ryan O’Neal bought for Tatum in Paper Moon.”

  “A channeler’s in the ballroom,” I told Natalie. “I’m looking for the ICQP.”

  She fiddled with the computer. “I’m sorry. I don’t show a reservation for them.”

  “How about Grauman’s Chinese?” David said. “You want reality? You want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?”

  He grabbed my hands. “Come with me,” he said seriously.

  In St. Louis I had suffered a wave function collapse a lot like what had happened to my clothes when I opened the suitcase. I had ended up on a riverboat halfway to New Orleans that time. It happened again, and the next thing I knew I was walking around the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, eating an ice cream cone and trying to fit my feet in Myrna Loy’s footprints.

  She must have been a midget or had her feet bound as a child. So, apparently, had Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Lamour, and Wallace Beery. The only footprints I came close to fitting were Donald Duck’s.

  “I see this as a map of the microcosm,” David said, sweeping his hand over the slightly irregular pavement of printed and signed cement squares. “See, there are all these tracks. We know something’s been here, and the prints are pretty much the same, only every once in a while you’ve got this”—he knelt down and pointed at the print of John Wayne’s clenched fist—“and over here”—he walked toward the box office and pointed to the print of Betty Grable’s leg. “And we can figure out the signatures, but what is this reference to ‘Sid’ on all these squares? And what does this mean?”

  He pointed at Red Skelton’s square. It said, “Thanks Sid We Dood It.”

  “You keep thinking you’ve found a pattern,” David said, crossing over to the other side, “but Van Johnson’s square is kind of sandwiched in here at an angle between Esther Williams and Cantinflas, and who the hell is May Robson? And why are all these squares over here empty?”

  He had managed to maneuver me over behind the display of Academy Award winners. It was an accordionlike wrought-iron screen. I was in the fold between 1944 and 1945.

  “And as if that isn’t enough, you suddenly realize you’re standing in the courtyard. You’re not even in the theater.”

  “And that’s what you think is happening in quantum theory?” I said weakly. I was backed up into Bing Crosby, who had won for Best Actor in Going My Way. “You think we’re not in the theater yet?”

  “I think we know as much about quantum theory as we can figure out about May Robson from her footprints,” he said, putting his hand up to Ingrid Bergman’s cheek (Best Actress, Gaslight) and blocking my escape. “I don’t think we understand anything about quantum theory, not tunneling, not complementarity.” He leaned toward me. “Not passion.”

  The best movie of 1945 was The Lost Weekend. “Dr. Gedanken understands it,” I said, disentangling myself from the Academy Award winners and David. “Did you know he’s putting together a new research team for a big project on understanding quantum theory?”

  “Yes,” David said. “Want to see a movie?”

  “There’s a seminar on chaos at nine,” I said, stepping over the Marx Brothers. “I have to get back.”
<
br />   “If it’s chaos you want, you should stay right here,” he said, stopping to look at Irene Dunne’s handprints. “We could see the movie and then go have dinner. There’s this place near Hollywood and Vine that has the mashed potatoes Richard Dreyfuss made into Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters.”

  “I want to meet Dr. Gedanken,” I said, making it safely to the sidewalk. I looked back at David.

  He had gone back to the other side of the courtyard and was looking at Roy Rogers’s signature. “Are you kidding? He doesn’t understand it any better than we do.”

  “Well, at least he’s trying.”

  “So am I. The problem is, how can one neutron interfere with itself, and why are there only two of Trigger’s hoofprints here?”

  “It’s eight fifty-five,” I said. “I am going to the chaos seminar.”

  “If you can find it,” he said, getting down on one knee to look at the signature.

  “I’ll find it,” I said grimly.

  He stood up and grinned at me, his hands in his pockets. “It’s a great movie,” he said.

  It was happening again. I turned and practically ran across the street.

  “Benji IX is showing,” he shouted after me. “He accidentally exchanges bodies with a Siamese cat.”

  Thursday, 9–10 P.M. “The Science of Chaos.” I. Durcheinander, University of Leipzig. A seminar on the structure of chaos. Principles of chaos will be discussed, including the butterfly effect, fractals, and insolid billowing. Clara Bow Room.

  I couldn’t find the chaos seminar. The Clara Bow Room, where it was supposed to be, was empty. A meeting of vegetarians was next door in the Fatty Arbuckle Room, and all the other conference rooms were locked. The channeler was still in the ballroom. “Come!” she commanded when I opened the door. “Understanding awaits!”

  I went upstairs to bed.

  I had forgotten to call Darlene. She would have left for Denver already, but I called her answering machine and told it the room number in case she picked up her messages. In the morning I would have to tell the front desk to give her a key. I went to bed.

  I didn’t sleep well. The air conditioner went off during the night, which meant I didn’t have to steam my suit when I got up the next morning. I got dressed and went downstairs.

  The programming started at nine o’clock with Abey Fields’s Wonderful World workshop in the Mary Pickford Room, a breakfast buffet in the ballroom, and a slide presentation on “Delayed Choice Experiments” in Cecil B. DeMille A on the mezzanine level.

  The breakfast buffet sounded wonderful, even though it always turns out to be urn coffee and donuts. I hadn’t had anything but an ice cream cone since noon the day before, but if David were around, he would be somewhere close to the food, and I wanted to steer clear of him. Last night it had been Grauman’s Chinese. Today I was likely to end up at Knott’s Berry Farm. I wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he was charming.

  It was pitch-dark inside Cecil B. DeMille A. Even the slide on the screen up front appeared to be black. “As you can see,” Dr. Lvov said, “the laser pulse is already in motion before the experimenter sets up the wave or particle detector.”

  He clicked to the next slide, which was dark gray. “We used a Mach-Zender interferometer with two mirrors and a particle detector. For the first series of tries we allowed the experimenter to decide which apparatus he would use by whatever method he wished. For the second series, we used that most primitive of randomizers—”

  He clicked again, to a white slide with black polka dots that gave off enough light for me to be able to spot an empty chair on the aisle ten rows up. I hurried to get to it before the slide changed, and sat down.

  “—a pair of dice. Alley’s experiments had shown us that when the particle detector was in place, the light was detected as a particle, and when the wave detector was in place, the light showed wavelike behavior, no matter when the choice of apparatus was made.”

  “Hi,” David said. “You’ve missed five black slides, two gray ones, and a white with black polka dots.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “In our two series, we hoped to ascertain whether the consciousness of the decision affected the outcome.” Dr. Lvov clicked to another black slide. “As you can see, the graph shows no effective difference between the tries in which the experimenter chose the detection apparatus and those in which the apparatus was randomly chosen.”

  “You want to go get some breakfast?” David whispered.

  “I already ate,” I whispered back, and waited for my stomach to growl and give me away. It did.

  “There’s a great place down near Hollywood and Vine that has the waffles Katharine Hepburn made for Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “And after breakfast, we could go to Frederick’s of Hollywood and see the bra museum.”

  “Will you please be quiet? I can’t hear.”

  “Or see,” he said, but he subsided more or less for the remaining ninety-two black, gray, and polka-dotted slides.

  Dr. Lvov turned on the lights and blinked smilingly at the audience. “Consciousness had no discernible effect on the results of the experiment. As one of my lab assistants put it, ‘The little devil knows what you’re going to do before you know it yourself.’ ”

  This was apparently supposed to be a joke, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I opened my program and tried to find something to go to that David wouldn’t be caught dead at.

  “Are you two going to breakfast?” Dr. Thibodeaux asked.

  “Yes,” David said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Dr. Hotard and I wished to eat somewhere that is vraiment Hollywood.”

  “David knows just the place,” I said. “He’s been telling me about this great place where they have the grapefruit James Cagney shoved in Mae Clarke’s face in Public Enemy.”

  Dr. Hotard hurried up, carrying a camera and four guidebooks. “And then perhaps you would show us Grauman’s Chinese Theatre?” he asked David.

  “Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

  “And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a chapeau.”

  They dragged him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr. Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.

  “He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a paper plate in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other.

  “Did you get that at the breakfast buffet?” I asked.

  “Yes. It was the last one. And they ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t in Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.

  “No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.

  “You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut into her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”

  Friday, 9–10 P.M. “The Eureka Experiment: A Slide Presentation.” J. Lvov, Eureka College. Descriptions, results, and conclusions of Lvov’s delayed conscious/randomized choice experiments. Cecil B. DeMille A.

  Dr. Whedbee eventually came in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.

  “Here,” Dr. Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal basin boundaries adjusted.”

  She whacked the side of the projector.

  There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit the projector again. The light came on.
<
br />   “I learned that in the chaos seminar last night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”

  “I believe I’m ready to begin,” Dr. Whedbee said.

  Dr. Takumi and I sat down.

  “Information is the transmission of meaning,” Dr. Whedbee said. He wrote “meaning” or possibly “information” on the screen with a green Magic Marker. “When information is randomized, meaning cannot be transmitted, and we have a state of entropy.” He wrote it under “meaning” with a red Magic Marker. His handwriting appeared to be completely illegible.

  “States of entropy vary from low entropy, such as the mild static on your car radio, to high entropy, a state of complete disorder, of randomness and confusion, in which no information at all is being communicated.”

  Oh, my God, I thought. I forgot to tell the hotel about Darlene.

  The next time Dr. Whedbee bent over to inscribe hieroglyphics on the screen, I sneaked out and went down to the desk, hoping Tiffany hadn’t come on duty yet.

  She had. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m in room 663,” I said. “I’m sharing a room with Dr. Darlene Mendoza. She’s coming in this morning, and she’ll be needing a key.”

  “For what?” Tiffany said.

  “To get into the room. I may be in one of the lectures when she gets here.”

  “Why doesn’t she have a key?”

  “Because she isn’t here yet.”

  “I thought you said she was sharing a room with you.”

  “She will be sharing a room with me. Room 663. Her name is Darlene Mendoza.”

  “And your name?” she asked, hands poised over the computer.

  “Ruth Baringer.”

  “We don’t show a reservation for you.”

  We have made impressive advances in quantum physics in the ninety years since Planck’s constant, but they have by and large been advances in technology, not theory. We can only make advances in theory when we have a model we can visualize.

  —EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS