“If Only…” appeared in the ongoing Futures sequence in Nature. It is a satire on rejecting science. Would the world be a better place if that were so?
“DOCTOR,” SAID SACHA, “Can you give me your assurance that this injection won’t harm my children?”
“Well, there’s always some risk, Ms Melham. I do have a leaflet that explains everything…”
Sacha placed a finger on the table.
“I don’t need a leaflet, Doctor. I simply want your assurance that this injection will cause Willow and Gregory no harm…”
Doctor James Ferriday gazed at the finger.
“As I said, there is always a small risk, but if you look, you will see that this is less than the probability of…”
Sacha held up her hand.
“Please, Doctor. Don’t try and confuse the issue.”
“I’m not trying to confuse the issue, I’m simply presenting you with the facts…”
Sacha rose to her feet.
“Well, I think I’ve heard enough. Willow, Gregory, put your coats back on. Thank you, Doctor, we’ll be … what’s that?”
James’s screen flashed red and green.
“Oh dear,” he said, reading the yellow writing scrolling across the monitor. “I think you should take a seat.”
Sacha did so. Her son slipped his hand into hers.
“What’s the matter, mummy?”
“Nothing, dear. Is everything OK, Doctor?”
“I’m sorry, Ms Melham…” he began, and then more kindly. “I’m sorry, Sacha, but you’ve crossed the threshold. I’m afraid to say, you’re not allowed science any more.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re not allowed science any more,” repeated James.
Sacha’s lips moved as she tried to process what he had said.
“You’re saying that you’re refusing my children treatment?”
“No,” said James. “Quite the opposite. You and your children will always be entitled to the best medical care. It’s just that you, Sacha, no longer have a say in it. I shall administer the vaccination immediately.”
“What?” Sacha sat up, eyes burning with indignation. “How dare you? I, and my husband, are the only ones who say how my family is run.”
“Well, yes,” said James. “But you no longer have a say in things where science is involved. You’re not allowed science any more.”
“I never heard anything so ridiculous! Who decided that?”
“The Universe.”
“The Universe? Why should the Universe say I’m not allowed science any more?”
“Because you haven’t paid science enough attention. You’ve had the opportunity to read the facts and the education to be able to analyse them, yet you have consistently chosen not to.”
“The education?” exclaimed Sacha. “Hah! My science education was terrible. None of my teachers could explain anything properly.”
“Really?” said James. “That would certainly be grounds for appeal…”
He pressed a couple of buttons. Tables of figures appeared on the screen.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry … it turns out that your teachers were all really rather excellent. You went to a very good public school, after all. If you look at your teachers’ results you will see they added significant value to their pupils’ attainment.”
Sacha pouted.
“Well, they didn’t like me.”
“Possibly…”
He pressed a couple more buttons.
“What?” said Sacha, hearing his sharp intake of breath.
“Look at this,” said James, scrolling down a long table. “Times and dates of occasions when you’ve proudly admitted to not being good at maths.”
“What’s the matter with that? I’m not.”
“It’s not the lack of ability, Sacha, it’s the fact that you’re proud of it. You’d never be proud of being illiterate. Why do you think your innumeracy is a cause for celebration?”
“Because … Well…”
“That’s why you’re not allowed science any more.”
“This is outrageous!” snarled Sacha. “How can this happen?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” said James. “Magic.”
“Magic?” said Sacha, her eyes suddenly shining. “You mean there’s really such a thing?”
“Of course not. But I can’t explain to you how it’s really done because you’re not allowed science any more.”
Sacha fumbled for her handbag.
“I’m calling the BBC” she said. “I’m a producer there, you know. I’ll report you.”
“Report me to who you like,” said James. “The story will never get out. All your cameras and microphones and things work on science.”
Sacha gazed at him.
“Who gave you the right to control my life?”
“You’ve got it the wrong way round. You gave the right to control your life away. You’re the one who chose to ignore the way the world works.”
“Hah!” said Sacha. “The way the world works! Bloody scientists. You think the world is all numbers and machines and levers. You don’t understand anything about the soul or spirit.”
“Of course I do,” said James. “I’ve been happily married for 20 years. I have two children that I love. I play the piano, I enjoy reading. It’s just that I have additional ways of looking at things.”
Sacha stood up.
“Willow, Gregory. We’re going home,” she glared at James. “That is if I’m still allowed to drive? You don’t have something against women drivers as well do you, Doctor?”
“This is nothing to do with you being female, Ms Melham,” said James, calmly. “This is purely about your attitude to science. Now, before you go, I’ll administer the injection to the three of you.”
“You will not! I will not allow it.”
“I told you, you have no choice.”
“Why? Because I disagree with you?”
For this first time, James’s anger showed itself.
“No!” he snapped. “You don’t get it! You’re allowed to disagree with me, I want you to disagree with me! I’d love to engage in reasoned debate with you. But until you take the trouble to understand what you’re talking about, you’re not allowed science any more. Now, roll up your sleeve.”
Sacha muttered something under her breath.
“What’s in the injection?” said James. “You know, you start asking questions like that, you might get science back…”
THE WOMAN WHO SHOOK THE WORLD TREE
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and writes both fantasy and science fiction, at long and short lengths, for which he has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards. His eighth novel, Dancing with Bears, was published in 2011. His eighth fiction collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, appeared in 2008, and he continues to publish several stories each year, often more than one good enough to be reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. He is currently at work on Chasing the Phoenix, a novel in which post-utopian con men Darger and Surplus accidentally conquer China.
“The Woman Who Shook the World Tree” appeared at Tor.com as part of the Palencar Project, a series of stories based on a painting. Swanwick says, “The first thought I had on seeing the illustration was, I know why her head is turned away. All the story flowed naturally from that insight. The greatest pleasure I had in writing this was putting myself in the head of a physicist as brilliant as Lise Meitner and imagining, briefly, that I could follow her thoughts.”
SHE WAS NOT a pretty child. Nor did her appearance improve with age. “You’d better get yourself a good education,” her mother would say, laughing. “Because you’re sure not going to get by on your looks.” Perhaps for this reason, perhaps not, her father demonstrated no discernible fondness for her. So, from a very early age, Mariella Coudy channeled all her energies inward, into the life of the mind.
It took some time for first
her parents and then the doctors and psychiatrists they hired to realize that her dark moods, long silences, blank stares, and sudden non sequiturs were symptomatic not of a mental disorder but of her extreme brilliance. At age seven she invented what was only recognized three years later as her own, admittedly rudimentary, version of calculus. “I wanted to know how to calculate the volume defined by an irregular curve,” she said when a startled mathematician from the local university deciphered her symbols, “and nobody would tell me.” A tutor brought her swiftly up to postgraduate level and then was peremptorily dismissed by the child as no longer having anything to teach her. At age eleven, after thinking long and hard about what would happen if two black holes collided, she submitted a handwritten page of equations to Applied Physics Letters, prompting a very long phone call from its editor.
Not long thereafter, when she was still months shy of twelve years old, some very respectful people from Stanford offered her a full scholarship, room and board, and full-time supervision by a woman who made a living mentoring precocious young women. By that time, her parents were only too happy to be free of her undeniably spooky presence.
At Stanford, she made no friends but otherwise thrived. By age sixteen she had a PhD in physics. By age eighteen she had two more—one in mathematics and the other in applied deterministics, a discipline of her own devising. The Institute for Advanced Study offered her a fellowship, which she accepted and which was periodically renewed.
Twelve years went by without her doing anything of any particular note.
* * *
THEN ONE DAY, immediately after she had given a poorly received talk titled “A Preliminary Refutation of the Chronon,” a handsome young man fresh out of grad school came to her office and said, “Dr. Coudy, my name is Richard Zhang and I want to work with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I heard what you had to say today and I believe that your theories are going to change the way we think about everything.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, why should I let you work with me?”
The young man grinned with the cocky assurance of a prized and pampered wunderkind and said, “I’m the only one who actually heard what you were saying. You were speaking to one of the smartest, most open-minded audiences in the world, and they rejected your conclusions out of hand. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You need a bench man who can devise a convincing experiment and settle the matter once and for all. I may not be able to generate your insights but I can follow them. I’m a wizard with lab equipment. And I’m persistent.”
Mariella Coudy doubted that last statement very much. In her experience, nobody had a fraction of the persistence she herself possessed. She’d once heard it said that few people had the patience to look at a painting for the length of time it took to eat an apple, and she knew for a fact that almost nobody could think about even the most complex equation for more than three days straight without growing weary of it.
She silently studied Zhang for as long as it would take to eat an apple. At first he tipped his head slightly, smiling in puzzlement. But then he realized that it was some sort of test and grew very still. Occasionally he blinked. But otherwise he did nothing.
Finally, Mariella said, “How do you propose to test my ideas?”
“Well, first…” Richard Zhang talked for a very long time.
“That won’t work,” she said when he was done. “But it’s on the right track.”
* * *
IT TOOK A year to devise the experiment, debug it, and make it work. Almost fourteen months of marathon discussions of physics and math, chalkboard duels, and passionate excursions up side issues that ultimately led nowhere, punctuated by experiments that failed heartbreakingly and then, on examination, proved in one way or another to be fundamentally flawed in their conception. Occasionally, during that time, Richard gave brief talks on their work and, because he met all questions with courteous elucidation and never once replied to an objection with a derisive snort, a blast of laughter, or a long, angry stare, a sense began to spread across the campus that Dr. Coudy might actually be on to something. The first talk drew four auditors. The last filled a lecture hall.
Finally, there came the night when Richard clamped a 500-milliwatt laser onto the steel top of a laser table with vibration-suppressing legs, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready. Goggles on?”
Mariella slid her protective goggles down over her eyes.
Richard aimed a 532-nanometer beam of green laser light through a beam splitter and into a mated pair of Pockels cells. The light emerging from one went directly to the target, a white sheet of paper taped to the wall. The light from the other disappeared through a slit in the kludge of apparatus at the far side of the table. Where it emerged, Richard had set up a small mirror to bounce it to the target alongside the first green circle. He adjusted the mirror’s tweaking screws, so that the two circles overlapped, creating an interference pattern.
Then he flipped the manual control on one of the cells, changing the applied voltage and rotating the plane of polarization of the beam. The interference pattern disappeared.
He flipped the control back. The interference pattern was restored.
Finally, Richard slaved the two Pockels cells to a randomizer, which would periodically vary the voltage each received—but, because it had only the one output, always the same to both and at the exact same time. He turned it on. The purpose of the randomizer was to entirely remove human volition from the process.
“Got anything memorable to say for the history books?” Richard asked.
Mariella shook her head. “Just run it.”
He turned on the mechanism. Nothing hummed or made grinding noises. Reality did not distort. There was a decided lack of lightning.
They waited.
The randomizer went click. One of the overlapping circles on the target disappeared. The other remained.
And then the first one reappeared. Two superimposed circles creating a single interference pattern.
Richard let out his breath explosively. But Mariella touched him lightly on the arm and said, “No. There are too many other possible explanations for that phenomenon. We need to run the other half of the experiment before we can begin celebrating.”
Richard nodded rapidly and turned off the laser. One circle of light disappeared immediately, the other shortly thereafter. His fingers danced over the equipment. Then, methodically, he checked every piece of it again, three times. Mariella watched, unmoving. This was his realm, not hers, and there was nothing she could do to hurry things along. But for the first time she could remember, she felt impatient and anxious to get on with it.
When everything was ready, the laser was turned on again. Twin splotches of green overlapped.
Richard switched on the apparatus. One light blinked off briefly, and then on again. (Richard’s mouth opened. Mariella raised a finger to silence him.) The randomizer made no noise.
The interference pattern disappeared. Three seconds later, the randomizer went click. And three seconds after that, the interference pattern was restored again.
“Yes!” Richard ripped off his goggles and seized Mariella, lifting her up into the air and spinning her around a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
Then he kissed her.
She should have slapped him. She should have told him off. She should have thought of her position and of what people would say. Richard was six years younger than her and, what was even more of a consideration, every bit as good-looking as she was not. Nothing good could possibly come of this. She should have looked to her dignity. But what she did was to push up her goggles and kiss him back.
When finally they had to stop for air, Mariella pulled her head away from his and, more than a little stunned, managed to focus on him. He was smiling at her. His face was flushed. He was so, so very handsome. And then Richard said the most shocking thing she had ever heard in her life: “Oh, God, I’ve been wanti
ng to do that for the longest time.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, AFTER they’d gone to Mariella’s apartment and done things she’d known all her life she would never do, and then babbled about the experiment at each other, and agreed that the title of the paper should be “The abolition of time as a meaningful concept,” and then went through the cycle all over again, and her lips were actually sore from all the kissing they did, and Richard had finally, out of exhaustion no doubt, fallen asleep naked alongside her … after all that, Mariella held the pillow tightly over her face and wept silently into it because for the first time in her life she was absolutely, completely happy, and because she knew it wouldn’t last and that come morning Richard would regain his senses and leave her forever.
But in the morning Richard did not leave. Instead, he rummaged in her refrigerator and found the makings of huevos rancheros and cooked her breakfast. Then they went to the lab. Richard took pictures of everything with a little digital camera (“This is historic—they’ll want to preserve everything exactly the way it is”) while she wrote a preliminary draft of the paper on a yellow pad. When she was done, he had her sign it on the bottom and wrote his name after hers.
Mariella Coudy and Richard M. Zhang. Together in eternity.
Mariella and Richard spent the next several weeks in a blissful mix of physics and romance. He bought her roses. She corrected his math. They both sent out preprints of their paper, she to everybody whose opinion she thought worth having, and he to everyone else. No matter how many times they changed and laundered them, it seemed the bed sheets were always sweat-stained and rumpled.
One night, seemingly out of nowhere, Richard said “I love you,” and without stopping to think, Mariella replied, “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have a mirror. I know what I look like.”
Richard cradled her face in his hands and studied it seriously. “You’re not beautiful,” he said—and something deep inside her cried out in pain. “But I’m glad you’re not. When I look at your face, my heart leaps up in joy. If you looked like”—he named a movie star—“I could never be sure it wasn’t just infatuation. But this way I know for sure. It’s you I love. This person, this body, this beautiful brain. You, here, right now, you.” He smiled that smile she loved so much. “Q.E.D.”
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