Universe 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  Severeign interjected swiftly yet spontaneously. “Yes, I’ve noticed that, sir. Major keys make me feel ‘appy, minor keys sad—no, pleasantly melancholy…”

  “Autosuggestion! The superstitions of the Pythagoreans became endless—the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis (a psychosis, all right!), reincarnation, immortality, you name it. They even refused to eat beans—”

  “They were wrong there. Beans cassolette—”

  “Exactly! In the end, Plato picked up their ideas and carried them to still sillier lengths. Wanted to outlaw music in minor scales—like repealing the law of gravity! He also asserted that not only numbers, but all ideas were more real than things—”

  “But excuse me, sir—I seem to recall hearing my brother talk about real numbers…”

  “Sheer semantics, madam! Real numbers are merely the most primitive and obvious ones in the parlor game we call mathematics. Q.E.D.”

  And with that, he let out a deep breath and subsided, his arms folded across his chest.

  She said, “You have quite overwhelmed me, sir. Henceforth I shall call seven only my favorite number… if I may do that?”

  “Of course you may. God (excuse the word) forbid I ever try to dictate to you, madam.”

  With that, silence descended, but before it could become uncomfortable, Math’s remote control purred discreetly in his pocket and prodded him in the thigh. He busied himself fetching the coffee on a silver tray in hemispheres of white eggshell china, whose purity of form Severeign duly admired.

  They made a charming couple together, looking surprisingly alike, quite like brother and sister, the chief differences being his more prominent forehead, large strong hands, and forearms a little thick with the muscles that powered the deft fingers. All of which made him seem like a prototype of man among the animals, a slight and feeble being except for hands and brain—manipulation and thought.

  He took his coffee to his distant chair. The silence returned and did become uncomfortable. But he remained tongue-tied, lost in bitter reflections. Here the girl of his dreams (why not admit it?) had turned up, and instead of charming her with courtesies and witticisms, he had merely become to a double degree his unpleasant, critical, didactic, quarrelsome, rejecting, lonely self, perversely shrinking from all chances of warm contact. Better find out her brother’s last name and send her on her way. Still, he made a last effort.

  “How may I entertain you, madam?” he asked lugubriously.

  “Any way you wish, sir,” she answered meekly.

  Which made it worse, for his mind instantly became an unbearable blank. He concentrated hopelessly on the toes of his red slippers.

  “There is something we could do,” he heard her say tentatively. “We could play a game… if you’d care to. Not chess or go or any sort of mathematical game—there I couldn’t possibly give you enough competition—but something more suited to my scatter brain, yet which would, I trust, have enough complications to amuse you. The Word Game…”

  Once more Math was filled with wild delight, unconscious of the wear and tear inflicted on his system by these instantaneous swoops and soarings of mood. This incredibly perfect girl had just proposed they do the thing he loved to do more than anything else, and at which he invariably showed at his dazzling best. Play a game, any game!

  “Word Game?” he asked cautiously, almost suspiciously. “What’s that?”

  “It’s terribly simple. You pick a category, say Musicians with names beginning with B, and then you—”

  “Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Bartók, C.P.E. Bach (J.S.’ son),” he rattled off.

  “Exactly! Oh, I can see you’ll be much too good for me. When we play, however, you can only give one answer at one time and then wait for me to give another—else you’d win before I ever got started.”

  “Not at all, madam. I’m mostly weak on words,” he assured her, lying in his teeth.

  She smiled and continued, “And when one player can’t give another word or name in a reasonable time, the other wins. And now, since I suggested the Game, I insist that in honor of you, and my brother, but without making it at all mathematical really, we play a subvariety called the Numbers Game.”

  “Numbers Game?”

  She explained, “We pick a small cardinal number, say between one and twelve, inclusive, and alternately name groups of persons or things traditionally associated with it. Suppose we picked four (we won’t); then the right answers would be things like the Four Gospels, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—”

  “Or of Notre Dame. How about units of time and vectors? Do they count as things?”

  She nodded. “The four seasons, the four major points of the compass. Yes. And now, sir, what number shall we choose?”

  He smiled fondly at her. She really was lovely—a jewel, a jewel green as her eyes. He said like a courtier, “What other, madam, than your favorite?”

  “Seven. So be it. Lead off, sir.”

  “Very well.” He had been going to insist politely that she take first turn, but already gamesmanship was vying with courtesy, and the first rule of gamesmanship is, Snatch Any Advantage You Can.

  He started briskly, “The seven crucial—” and instantly stopped, clamping his lips.

  “Go on, sir,” she prompted. “ ‘Crucial’ sounds interesting. You’ve got me guessing.”

  He pressed his lips still more tightly together, and blushed—at any rate, he felt his cheeks grow hot. Damn his treacherous, navel-fixated subconscious mind! Somehow it had at the last moment darted to the emerald gleams he’d fancied seeing in the hall, and he’d been within a hairsbreadth of uttering, “The seven crucial points of a girl.”

  “Yes… ?” she encouraged.

  Very gingerly he parted his lips and said, his voice involuntarily going low, “The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness—”

  “My, that’s a stern beginning,” she interjected. “I wonder what the crucial sins are?”

  “—Envy, Sloth,” he continued remorselessly.

  “Those are the cold ones,” she announced. “Now for the hot.”

  “Anger—” he began, and only then realized where he was going to end—and cursed the show-off impulse that had made him start to enumerate them. He forced himself to say, “Gluttony, and—” He shied then and was disastrously overtaken for the first time in months by his old stammer. “Lul-lul-lul-lul-lul—” he trilled like some idiot bird.

  “Lust,” she cooed, making the word into another sort of bird call, delicately throaty. Then she said, “The seven days of the week.”

  Math’s mind again became a blank, through which he hurled himself like a mad rat against one featureless white wall after another, until at last he saw a single dingy star. He stammered out, “The Seven Sisters, meaning the seven antitrust laws enacted in 1913 by New Jersey while Woodrow Wilson was Governor.”

  “You begin, sir,” she said with a delighted chuckle, “by scraping the bottom of your barrel, a remarkable feat. But I suppose that being a mathematician you get at the bottom of the barrel while it’s still full by way of the fourth dimension.”

  “The fourth dimension is no hocus-pocus, madam, but only time,” he reproved, irked by her wit and by her having helped him out when he first stuttered. “Your seven?”

  “Oh. I could repeat yours, giving another meaning, but why not the Seven Seas?”

  Instantly he saw a fantastic ship with a great eye at the bow sailing on them. “The seven voyages of Sinbad.”

  “The Seven Hills of Rome.”

  “The seven colors of the spectrum,” he said at once, beginning to feel less fearful of going word-blind. “Though I can’t imagine why Newton saw indigo and blue as different prismatic colors. Perhaps he wanted them to come out seven for some mystical reason—he had his Pythagorean weaknesses.”

  “The seven tones of the scale, as discovered by Pythagoras,” she answered sweetly.

  “Seven-card stud,” he said, somewhat gruffly.

 
; “Seven-up, very popular before poker.”

  “This one will give you one automatically,” he said stingily. “However, a seventh son.”

  “And I’m to say the seventh son of a seventh son? But I cannot accept yours, sir. I said cardinal, not ordinal numbers. No sevenths, sir, if you please.”

  “I’ll rephrase it then. Of seven sons, the last.”

  “Not allowed. I fear you quibble, sir.” Her eyes widened, as if at her own temerity.

  “Oh, very well. The Seven Against Thebes.”

  “The Epigoni, their sons.”

  “I didn’t know there were seven of them,” he objected.

  “But there should be seven, for the sake of symmetry,” she said wistfully.

  “Allowed,” he said, proud of his superior generosity in the face of a feminine whim. “The Seven Bishops.”

  “Dear Sancroft, Ken, and Company,” she murmured. “The Seven Dials. In London. Does that make you think of time travel?”

  “No, big newspaper offices. The Seven Keys to Baldpate, a book.”

  “The Seven Samurai, a Kurosawa film.”

  “The Seventh Seal, a Bergman film!” He was really snapping them out now, but—

  “Oh, oh. No sevenths—remember, sir?”

  “A silly rule—I should have objected at the start. The seven liberal arts, being the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) added to the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).”

  “Delightful,” she said. “The seven planets—”

  “No, madam! There are nine.”

  “I was about to say,” she ventured in a small, defenseless voice, “—of the ancients. The ones out to Saturn and then the sun and moon.”

  “Back to Pythagoras again!” he said with a quite unreasonable nastiness, glaring over her head. “Besides, that would make eight planets.”

  “The ancients didn’t count the Earth as one.” Her voice was even tinier.

  He burst out with, “Earth not a planet, fourth dimension, time travel, indigo not blue, no ordinals allowed, the ancients—madam, your mind is a sink of superstitions!” When she did not deny it, he went on, “And now I’ll give you the master answer: all groups of persons or things belong to the class of the largest successive prime among the odd numbers—your seven, madam!”

  She did not speak. He heard a sound like a mouse with a bad cold, and looking at her, saw that she was dabbing a tiny handkerchief at her nose and cheeks. “I don’t think I want to play the Game any more,” she said indistinctly. “You’re making it too mathematical.”

  How like a woman, he thought, banging his hand against his thigh. He felt the remote control and, on a savage impulse, jabbed another button. The TV came on. “Perhaps your mind needs a rest,” he said unsympathetically. “See, we open the imbecile valve.”

  The TV channel was occupied by one of those murderous chases in a detective series (subvariety: military police procedural) where the automobiles became the real protagonists, dark passionate monsters with wills of their own to pursue and flee, or perhaps turn on their pursuer, while the drivers become grimacing puppets whose hands are dragged around by the steering wheels.

  Math didn’t know if his guest was watching the screen, and he told himself he didn’t care—to suppress the bitter realization that instead of cultivating the lovely girl chance had tossed his way, he was browbeating her.

  Then the chase entered a multistory garage, and he was lost in a topology problem on the order of: “Given three entrances, two exits, n two-way ramps, and so many stories, what is the longest journey a car can make without crossing its path?” When Math had been a small child—even before he had learned to speak—his consciousness had for long periods been solely a limitless field, or even volume filled with points of light, which he could endlessly count and manipulate. Rather like the random patterns we see in darkness, only he could marshal them endlessly in all sorts of fascinating arrays, and wink them into or out of existence at will. Later he learned that at such times he had gone into a sort of baby-trance, so long and deep that his parents had become worried and consulted psychologists. But then words had begun to replace fields and sets of points in his mind, his baby-trances had become infrequent and finally vanished altogether, so that he was no longer able to enter the mental realm where he was in direct contact with the stuff of mathematics. Thinking about topological problems, such as that of the multilevel garage, was the closest he could get to it now. He had come from that realm “trailing clouds of glory,” but with the years they had faded. Yet it was there, he sometimes believed, that he had done all his really creative work in mathematics, the work that had enabled him to invent a new algebra at the age of eleven. And it was there he had earlier tonight prayed the Great Mathematician to return him when he had been in a mood of black despair—which, he realized with mild surprise, he could no longer clearly recall, at least in its intensity.

  He had solved his garage problem and was setting up another when, “License plates, license plates!” he heard Severeign cry out in the tones of one who shouts, “Onionsauce, onionsauce!” at baffled rabbits.

  Her elfin face, which Math had assumed to be still tearful, was radiant.

  “What about license plates?” he asked gruffly.

  She jabbed a finger at the TV, where in the solemn finale of the detective show, the camera had just cut to the hero’s thoroughly wrecked vehicle while he looked on from under bandages, and while the sound track gave out with taps. “Cars have them!”

  “Yes, I know, but where does that lead?”

  “Almost all of them have seven digits!” she announced triumphantly. “So do phone numbers!”

  “You mean, you want to go on with the Game?” Math asked with an eagerness that startled him.

  Part of her radiance faded. “I don’t know. The Game is really dreadful. Once started, you can’t get your mind off it until you perish of exhaustion of ideas.”

  “But you want nevertheless to continue?”

  “I’m afraid we must. Sorry I got the megrims back there. And now I’ve gone and wasted an answer by giving two together. The second counts for yours. Oh well, my fault.”

  “Not at all, madam. I will balance it out by giving two at once too. The seven fat years and the seven lean years.”

  “Anyone would have got the second of those once you gave the first,” she observed, saucily rabbiting her nose at him. “The number of deacons chosen by the Apostles in Acts. Nicanor’s my favorite. Dear Nicky,” she sighed, fluttering her eyelashes.

  “Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Math proclaimed.

  “You’re not enumerating?”

  He shook his head. “Might get too ambiguous.”

  She flashed him a smile. Then her face slowly grew blank—with thought, he thought at first, but then with eyes half closed she murmured, “Sleepy.”

  “You want to rest?” he asked. Then, daringly, “Why not stretch out?”

  She did not seem to hear. Her head drooped down. “Dopey too,” she said somewhat indistinctly.

  “Should I step up the air conditioning?” he asked. A wild fear struck him. “I assure you, madam, I didn’t put anything in your coffee.”

  “And Grumpy!” she said triumphantly, sitting up. “Snow White’s seven dwarfs!”

  He laughed and answered, “The Seven Hunters, which are the Flannan Islands in the Hebrides.”

  “The Seven Sisters, a hybrid climbing rose, related to the rambler,” she said.

  “The seven common spectral types of stars—B-A-F-G-K-M… and O,” he added a touch guiltily because O wasn’t really a common type, and he’d never heard of this particular Seven (or Six, for that matter). She gave him a calculating look. Must be something else she’s thinking of, he assured himself. Women don’t know much astronomy except maybe the ancient sort, rubbed off from astrology.

  She said, “The seven rays of the spectrum: radio, high frequency, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X, and gamma.” And she looked
at him so bright-eyed that he decided she’d begun to fake a little too.

  “And cosmic?” he asked sweetly.

  “I thought those were particles,” she said innocently.