by Liz Ziemska
Ninety-seven people were executed that day in Tulle. The remaining prisoners, some three hundred souls, were sent to Dachau. Only one hundred returned.
My parents survived, of course you know that. Father had faith in me and my mathematical abilities. Mother had faith in Father, so they remained close to home, as they said they would. Madame Popova stayed with them, even after her beloved Pomeranian went missing. My fractal protected them, as I had hoped it would. They were the lucky ones.
But of the dozens of people in our neighborhood who touched my life, Madame Derrasse, Vincent the butcher, and all the other people I knew by sight but not by name: I had nearly destroyed them. They left their houses, walked out of our little ghetto of a neighborhood, and were never able to find their way home again. Instead of protecting them, my fractal had extruded them, like a funnel, out of a place of safety into a massacre. That was my doing. The fact that they had survived, every single one of them, only confirms that G-d is merciful. He did not punish the neighbors for my hubris.
One person close to me did not survive that day.
By all official accounts, it was his fault. Emile Vallat had run out to welcome the Germans, to show them the Resistance snipers who were hiding on the roof of the schoolhouse, warn them of the danger, but they shot him anyway, right through the heart, the first casualty of the massacre. His mother had to wait until after all the shooting was over to drag his body out of the street. It was his doing, they said, he had it coming to him, the little collaborator. The bullet took him out as surely as a falcon plucks a dove out of the air in midflight.
*
Many years after Aliette and I moved to America, I took a job at the IBM research facility in Yorktown. They had developed a supercomputer that could calculate equations faster than a thousand Emile Vallats strung together with copper wire. I approached one of the technicians and asked him to run Z=Z2+c through one hundred thousand iterations, an operation that would have taken over a month had I been able to perform it without errors. By lunchtime of the following day, he brought this image to my office:
A “Mandelbulb,” is what my colleagues called it. It was a joke, but the name stuck. In my heart, I called it cauliflower.
I asked the technician to run the same equation over one hundred million iterations, an operation that would have taken me twelve lifetimes had I performed it without breaks for sleeping, eating, breathing. The following Monday he brought me this:
It was what I suspected all along. Everywhere you looked, the same Mandelbulb pattern repeated itself, each tiny part identical to the whole, spinning according to the proportions of the Archimedean spiral into the inner distance, into infinity, into D, the Hausdorff dimension.
Such a simple equation, Z=Z2+c, with infinite iterations. One set of rules, many variations. Almost like free will itself. It’s the Mandelbrot set, which is an appropriate burden for me to bear for the arrogance of my youth. Some people believe it is the thumbprint of G-d, but I prefer to think of it as a geometrical depiction of an eternally existing self-reproducing chaotic and inflationary universe.
*
Had I been able to construct one of these universes during World War II, I could have hidden all of France. Had Emile Vallat and I been able to mend our differences and pool our calculating abilities to make a larger, more dense fractal, we could have at least saved Tulle.
Perhaps hidden inside one of those Mandelbulbs there’s a version of Tulle in which Emile is allowed to grow up, mature, understand the world, set aside his hatred of others, and use his mathematical abilities for the betterment of mankind.
These days I leave the sefirot to the rabbis and the politics to the politicians. The math stays on the blackboard, the computer screen, the page. I no longer try to entangle monstrous mathematics with nature. That event horizon falls under the jurisdiction of G-d, who gets to decide who lives and dies. Me? I’m just an ordinary man.
About the Author
Photograph by Mette Lampcov
LIZ ZIEMSKA is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and The Pushcart Prize XLI and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
BEGIN READING
Warsaw
Paris
Tulle
The Book of Monsters
The Hausdorff Dimension
Life Under the German Occupation
My Keplerian Moment
G-d, Mathematician
Garments of Concealment
The Fractalist
The Tulle Massacre
In Memoriam
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MANDELBROT THE MAGNIFICENT
Copyright © 2017 by Liz Ziemska
All rights reserved.
Art on page 120 courtesy of Wolfgang Beyer
Cover by Will Staehle
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
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ISBN 978-0-7653-9804-8 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9805-5 (trade paperback)
First Edition: November 2017
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