The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The Boston lab was just one of Hansen’s locations, but we had the largest storage facility, which meant that much of the surplus lab equipment ended up shipped to us. We opened boxes. We sorted through supplies. If we needed anything for our research, we signed for it, and it was ours. It was the opposite of academia, where every piece of equipment had to be expensed and justified and begged for.

  Most mornings I spent with Satish. I helped him with his gate arrays. He talked of his children while he worked. Lunch I spent on basketball. Sometimes after basketball, I’d drop by Point Machine’s lab to see what he was up to. He worked with organics, searching for chemical alternatives that wouldn’t cause birth defects in amphibians. He tested water samples for cadmium, mercury, arsenic. Point Machine was a kind of shaman. He studied the gene expression patterns of amphioxus; he read the future in deformities.

  “Unless something is done,” he said. “A generation from now, most amphibians will be extinct.” He had aquariums filled with frogs – frogs with too many legs, with tails, with no arms. Monsters.

  Next to his lab was the office of a woman named Joy. Sometimes Joy would hear us talking and stop by, hand sliding along the wall – tall, and beautiful, and blind. Did acoustical research of some kind. She had long hair and high cheekbones – eyes so clear and blue and perfect that I didn’t even realize at first.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I get that a lot.” She never wore dark glasses, never used a white cane. “Detached retinas,” she explained. “I was three.”

  In the afternoons, I tried to work.

  Alone in my office, I stared at the marker board. The great white expanse of it. I picked up the marker, closed my eyes, wrote from memory.

  When I looked at what I’d written, I threw the marker across the room.

  James came by later that night. He stood in the doorway, cup of coffee in his hand. He saw the papers scattered across the floor. “It’s good to see you working on something,” he said.

  “It’s not work.”

  “It’ll come,” he said.

  “No, I don’t think it will.”

  “It just takes time.”

  “Time is what I’m wasting here. Your time. This lab’s time.” Honesty welled up. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  “It’s fine, Eric,” he said. “We have researchers on staff who don’t have a third of your citings. You belong here.”

  “It’s not like before. I’m not like before.”

  James looked at me. That sad look back again. His voice was soft when he spoke. “R&D is a tax writeoff. At least finish out your contract. That gives you another two months. After that, we can write you up a letter of recommendation.”

  That night in my hotel room, I stared at the phone, sipped the vodka. I imagined calling Mary, dialing the number. My sister, so like me, yet not like me. I imagined her voice on the other end.

  Hello? Hello?

  This numbness inside of me, strange gravity, the slow accretion of things I could have said, not to worry, things are fine; but instead I say nothing, letting the phone slide away, and hours later find myself at the railing outside, coming out of another stupor, soaked to the skin, watching the rain. Thunder advances from the east, from across the water, and I stand in the dark, waiting for life to be good again.

  There is this: the slow dissolution of perspective. I see myself outside myself, an angular shape cast in sodium lights – eyes gray like storm clouds, gray like gunmetal. Because once you’ve learned something, you can’t unlearn it. Darwin once said that the serious study of math endows you with an extra sense, but what do you do when that sense contradicts your other senses?

  My arm flexes and the vodka bottle flies end over end into the darkness – the glimmer of it, the shatter of it, glass and asphalt and shards of rain. There is nothing else until there is nothing else.

  The lab.

  Satish said, “Yesterday in my car I was talking to my daughter, five years old, and she says, ‘Daddy, please don’t talk.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I am praying. I need you to be quiet.’ So I asked her what she is praying about, and she said, ‘My friend borrowed my glitter ChapStick and I am praying she remembers to bring it back.’ ”

  Satish was trying not to smile. We were in his office, eating lunch across his desk.

  He continued. “I told her, well, maybe she is like me and she forgets. But my daughter says, ‘No, it has been more than one week now.’ ”

  This amused Satish greatly – the talk of ChapStick, and the prayers of children. We finished our lunches.

  “You eat the same thing every day,” I observed.

  “I like rice,” he said.

  “But every day?”

  “You insult me. I am a simple man trying to save for my daughter’s college.” Satish spread his hands in mock outrage. “Do you think I am born with golden spoon?”

  In the fourth week, I told him I wasn’t going to be hired after my probationary period.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  His face grew serious. “You are certain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In that case, do not worry.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Sometimes the boat just gets sink, my friend.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Did you just tell me that you win some and you lose some?”

  Satish considered this. “Yes,” he said. “That is correct, except I did not mention the win part.”

  During my fifth week at the lab, I found the box from Docent. It started as an e-mail from Bob, the shipping guy, saying there were some crates I might be interested in. Crates labeled “Physics,” sitting in the loading dock.

  I went down to receiving and looked at the boxes. Got out the crowbar and opened them.

  Three of the boxes were of no interest; they held only weights, scales, and glassware. But the fourth box was different. I stared into the fourth box for a long time.

  I closed the box again and hammered the lid down with the edge of the crowbar. I went to Bob’s office and tracked down the shipping information. A company called Ingram had been bought by Docent a few years ago – and now Docent had been bought by Hansen. The box had been in storage the whole time.

  I had the box taken to my office. Later that day, I signed for lab space, Room 271.

  I was drawing on my marker board when Satish walked into my office.

  “What is that?” he said, gesturing to what I’d written.

  “It is my project.”

  “You have a project now?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is good.” He smiled and shook my hand. “Congratulations, my friend. How did this wonderful thing happen?”

  “It’s not going to change anything. Just busywork to give me something to do.”

  “What is it?”

  “You ever hear of the Feynman double-slit?” I asked.

  “Physics? That is not my area, but I have heard of Young’s double-slit.”

  “It’s the same thing, almost; only instead of light, they used a stream of electrons.” I patted the box on the table. “And a detector. The detector is key. The detector makes all the difference.”

  Satish looked at the box. “The detector is in there?”

  “Yeah, I found it in a crate today, along with a thermionic gun.”

  “A gun?”

  “A thermionic gun. An electron gun. Obviously part of a replication trial.”

  “You are going to use this gun?”

  I nodded. “Feynman once said, ‘Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can be explained by saying, You remember the case of the experiment with two holes? It’s the same thing.’ ”

  “Why are you going to do this project?”

  “I want to see what Feynman saw.”

  Autumn comes quick to the East Coast. It is a different animal out here, where the trees take on every color of the spectrum, and the wind has teeth. As a boy, before the moves and the special
schools, I’d spent an autumn evening camped out in the woods behind my grandparents’ house. Lying on my back, staring up at the leaves as they drifted past my field of vision.

  It was the smell that brought it back so strong – the smell of fall, as I walked to the parking lot. Joy stood near the roadway, waiting for her cab.

  The wind gusted, making the trees dance. She turned her collar against the wind, oblivious to the autumn beauty around her. For a moment, I felt pity for that. To live in New England and not see the leaves.

  I climbed into my rental. I idled. No cab passed through the gates. No cab followed the winding drive. I was about to pull away, but at the last second spun the wheel and pulled up to the turnaround.

  “Is there a problem with your ride?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure. I think there might be.”

  “Do you need a lift home?”

  “I’ll be okay.” She paused. Then, “You don’t mind?”

  “It’s fine, seriously.”

  She climbed in and shut the door. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drive.”

  “I wasn’t doing much anyway.”

  “Left at the gate,” she said.

  She guided me by stops. She didn’t know the street names, but she counted the intersections, guiding me to the highway, blind leading the blind. The miles rolled by.

  Boston. A city that hasn’t forgotten itself. A city outside of time. Crumbling cobblestones and modern concrete. Road names that existed before the Redcoats invaded. It is easy to lose yourself, to imagine yourself lost, while winding through the hilly streets.

  Outside the city proper, there is stone everywhere, and trees – soft pine and colorful deciduous. I saw a map in my head, Cape Cod jutting into the Atlantic. The cape is a curl of land positioned so perfectly to protect Boston that it seems a thing designed. If not by man, then by God. God wanted a city where Boston sits.

  The houses, I know, are expensive beyond all reason. It is a place that defies farming. Scratch the earth, and a rock will leap out and hit you. People build stone walls around their properties so they’ll have someplace to put the stones.

  At her apartment, I pulled to a stop, walked her to her door, like this was a date. Standing next to her, she was almost as tall as me – maybe 5’11”, too thin, and we were at the door, her empty blue eyes focused on something far away until she looked at me, looked, and I could swear for a moment that she saw me.

  Then her eyes glided past my shoulder, focused again on some dim horizon.

  “I’m renting now,” she said. “Once my probationary period is over, I’ll probably buy a condo closer to work.”

  “I didn’t realize you were new to Hansen, too.”

  “I actually hired in the week after you. I’m hoping to stay on.”

  “Then I’m sure you will.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “At least my research is cheap. It is only me and my ears. Can I entice you in for coffee?”

  “I should be going, but another time perhaps.”

  “I understand.” She extended her hand. “Another time then. Thank you for the ride.”

  I turned to go, but her voice stopped me. “James said you were brilliant.”

  I turned. “He told you that?”

  “Not me. I talk with his secretary, and James has spoken about you a lot, apparently – your days in college. But I have a question before you go. Something I was wondering.”

  “Okay.”

  She brought her hand up to my cheek. “Why are the brilliant ones always so screwed-up?”

  I said nothing, looking into those eyes.

  “You need to be careful,” she said. “The alcohol. I can smell it on you some mornings. If I can smell it, so can others.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “No. Somehow I don’t think you will.”

  The lab.

  Satish stood in front of the diagram I’d drawn on my white board.

  I watched him studying it. “What is this?” he asked.

  “The wave-particle duality of light.”

  “And these lines?”

  “This is the wave part,” I said, pointing at the diagram. “Fire a photon stream through two adjacent slits, and the waves create an image on the phosphorescent screen behind the slits. The frequencies of the waves zero-sum each other at certain intervals, and a characteristic interference pattern is captured on the screen. Do you see?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “But if you put a detector at the two slits . . .” I began drawing another picture under the first. “Then it changes everything. When the detectors are in place, light stops behaving like a wave and starts acting like a particle series.”

  I continued. “So instead of an interference pattern, you get two distinct clusters of phosphorescence where the particles pass through the slits and contact the screen.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” Satish said. “This is familiar. I believe there was a chapter on this in grad school.”

  “In grad school, I taught this. And I watched the students’ faces. The ones who understood what it meant – who truly understood – always looked troubled by it. I could see it in their expressions, the pain of believing something which can’t be true.”

  “This is a famous experiment. You are planning to replicate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? It has already been replicated many times; no journal will publish.”

  “I know. I’ve read papers on the phenomena; I’ve given class lectures on the details; I understand it mathematically. Hell, most of my earlier research is based on the assumptions that came out of this experiment. But I’ve never actually seen it with my eyes. That’s why.”

  “It is science.” Satish shrugged. “You don’t need to see it.”

  “I think I do,” I said. “Need to. Just once.”

  The next few weeks passed in a blur. Satish helped me with my project, and I helped him with his. We worked mornings in his lab. Evenings we spent in Room 271, setting up. The phosphorescent plate was a problem – then the alignment of the thermionic gun. In a way, it felt like we were partners, almost, Satish and I. And it was a good feeling. After working so long by myself, it was good to be able to talk to someone.

  We traded stories to pass the time. Satish talked of his problems. They were the problems good men sometimes have when they’ve lived good lives. He talked about helping his daughter with her homework, and worrying about paying for her college. He talked of his family backhome – saying it fast that way, backhome, so you heard the proper noun; and he talked of the fields, and the bugs, and the monsoon, and the ruined crops. “It is going to be a bad year for sugar cane,” he told me, as if we were farmers instead of researchers. He talked about his mother’s advancing years. He talked of his brothers, and his sisters, and his nieces and nephews; and I came to understand the weight of responsibility he felt.

  Bending over the gate arrays, soldering tool in hand, he told me, “I talk too much, you must be sick of my voice.”

  “Not at all.”

  “You have been a big help me with my work. How can I ever repay you, my friend?”

  “Money is fine,” I told him. “I prefer large bills.”

  I wanted to tell him of my life. I wanted to tell him of my work at QSR, and that some things you learn, you wish you could unlearn. I wanted to tell him that memory has gravity, and madness a color; that all guns have names, and it is the same name. I wanted to tell him I understood about his tobacco; that I’d been married once, and it hadn’t worked out; that I used to talk softly to my father’s grave; that it was a long time since I’d really been okay.

  Instead of telling him these things, I talked about the experiment. That I could do. Always could do.

  “It started a half-century ago as a thought experiment,” I told him. “To prove the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Physicists felt quantum mechanics couldn’t be the whole story, because the math takes too many liberties with reality.
There was still that impossible contradiction: the photoelectric effect required light be particulate; Young’s results showed it to be a wave. Only later, of course, when the technology finally caught up to the theory, it turned out the experimental results followed the math. The math says you can either know the position of an electron, or the momentum, but never both. The math, it turned out, wasn’t metaphor at all. The math was dead serious. The math wasn’t screwing around.”

  Satish nodded like he understood.

  Later, working on his gate arrays, he traded his story for mine.

  “There once was a guru who brought four princes into the forest,” he told me. “They were hunting birds.”

  “Birds,” I said.

  “Yes, and up in the trees, they see one, a beautiful bird with bright feathers. The first prince said, ‘I will shoot the bird,’ and he pulled back on his arrow and shot into the trees. But the arrow missed. Then the second prince tried to shoot, and he, too, missed. Then the third prince. Finally the fourth prince shot high into the trees, and this time the arrow struck and the beautiful bird fell dead. The guru looked at the first three princes and said, ‘Where were you aiming?’

  “ ‘At the bird.’

  “ ‘At the bird.’

  “ ‘At the bird.’

  “ ‘The guru looked at the fourth prince, ‘And you?’

  “ ‘At the bird’s eye.’ ”

  Once the equipment was set up, the alignment was the last hurdle to be cleared. The electron gun had to be aimed so the electron was just as likely to go through either slit. The equipment filled most of the room – an assortment of electronics and screens and wires.

  In the mornings, in the hotel room, I talked to the mirror, made promises to gunmetal eyes. And by some miracle did not drink.

  One day became two. Two became three. Three became five. Then I hadn’t had a drink in a week.

  At the lab, the work continued. When the last piece of equipment was positioned, I stood back and surveyed the whole setup, heart beating in my chest, standing at the edge of some great universal truth. I was about to be witness to something few people in the history of the world had ever seen.