The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I see why you didn’t want Mr. and Mrs. Shaw to know this. Let me assure you that they won’t learn it from me.” I felt nauseated. Now that I knew how Arthur had died, I would have rather remained ignorant.

  He raised dark eyebrows. “But they do know, Professor Turnbull. Naturally, they insisted on seeing the coroner’s report on the manner of his death, and I was in no position to keep such information from them. Mrs. Shaw’s suspicion of me arose from a quite different incident. It came when she asked me to return Dr. Shaw’s journals to her.”

  “And you refused.”

  “Not exactly. I denied their existence. Maybe that was a mistake, but I do not pretend to be infallible. If you judge after examination that the books should be released to Dr. Shaw’s parents, I will permit it to happen.” Otto Braun stood up and went across to the grey metal file cabinet. He patted the side of it. “These contain Arthur Shaw’s complete journals. On the day of his death, he took them all and placed them in one of the red trash containers in the corridor, from which they would go to the shredder and incinerator. I should explain that at ANF we have many commercial secrets, and we are careful not to allow our competitors to benefit from our garbage. Dr. Shaw surely believed that his notebooks would be destroyed that night.”

  He pulled open a file drawer, and I saw the familiar spiral twelve-by-sixteen ledgers that Arthur had favored since childhood.

  “As you see, they were not burned or shredded,” Braun went on. “In the past we’ve had occasional accidents, in which valuable papers were placed by oversight into the red containers. So our cleaning staff—all trusted employees—are instructed to check with me if they see anything that looks like a mistake. An alert employee retrieved all these notebooks and brought them to my office, asking approval to destroy them.”

  It seemed to me that Marion Shaw had been right on at least one thing. For if after examining Arthur’s ledgers, Otto Braun had not let them be destroyed, they must contain material of value to ANF.

  I said this to him, and he shook his head. “The notebooks had to be kept, in case they were needed as evidence for the investigation of death by suicide. They were, in fact, one of the reasons why I am convinced that Dr. Shaw took his own life. Otherwise I would have burned them. Every piece of work that Dr. Shaw did relevant to ANF activities was separately recorded in our ANF work logs. His own notebooks…” He paused. “Beyond that, I should not go. You will draw your own conclusions.”

  He moved away from the cabinet, and steered me with him towards the door. “It is six o’clock, Professor, and I must attend our weekly staff meeting. With your permission, I will show you to your room and then leave you. We can meet tomorrow morning. Let me warn you. You were his friend; be prepared for a shock.”

  He would make no other comment as we walked to the well-furnished suite that had been prepared for me, other than to say again, as he was leaving, “It is better if you draw your own conclusions. Be ready for a disturbing evening.”

  * * *

  The next morning I was still studying Arthur’s notebooks.

  * * *

  It is astonishing how, even after five years, my mind reaches for that thought. When I relive my three days in Bonn I feel recollection rushing on, faster and faster, until I reach the point where Otto Braun left me alone in my room. And then memory leaps out towards the next morning, trying to clear the dark chasm of that night.

  I cannot permit that luxury now.

  It took about three minutes to settle my things in the guest suite at the ANF laboratory. Then I went to the cafeteria, gulped down a sandwich and two cups of tea, and hurried back to Arthur’s office. The grey file cabinet held twenty-seven ledgers; many more than I expected, since Arthur normally filled only two or three a year.

  In front of the ledgers was a heavy packet wrapped in white plastic. I opened that first, and almost laughed aloud at the incongruity of the contents, side-by-side with Arthur’s work records. He had enjoyed experimental science, but the idea of car or bicycle repair was totally repugnant to him. This packet held an array of screwdrivers, heavy steel wire, and needle-nosed and broad-nosed pliers, all shiny and brand-new.

  I replaced the gleaming tool kit and turned to the ledgers. If they were equally out of character …

  It was tempting to begin with the records from the last few days of his life. I resisted that urge. One of the lessons that he had taught me in adolescence was an organized approach to problems, and now I could not afford to miss anything even marginally significant to his death. The ledgers were neatly numbered in red ink on the top right-hand corner of the stiff cover, twenty-two through forty-eight. It was about six-thirty in the evening when I picked up Volume Twenty-two and opened it to the first page.

  That gave me my first surprise. I had expected to see only the notebooks for the four years that Arthur had been employed by ANF Gesellschaft. Instead, the date at the head of the first entry was early April, seven and a half years ago. This was a notebook from Arthur’s final undergraduate year at Cambridge. Why had he brought with him such old ledgers, rather than leaving them at his parents’ house?

  The opening entry was unremarkable, and even familiar. At that time, as I well remembered, Arthur’s obsession had been quantized theories of gravity. He was still coming to grips with the problem, and his note said nothing profound. I skimmed it and read on. Successive entries were strictly chronological. Mixed in with mathematics, physics, and science references was everything else that had caught his fancy—scraps of quoted poetry (he was in a world-weary Housman phase), newspaper clippings, comments on the weather, lecture notes, cricket scores, and philosophical questions.

  It was hard to read at my usual speed. For one thing I had forgotten the near-illegible nature of Arthur’s personal notes. I could follow everything, after so many years of practice, but Otto Braun must have had a terrible time. Despite his command of English, some of the terse technical notes and equations would be unintelligible to one of his background. Otto was an engineer. It would be astonishing if his knowledge extended to modern theoretical physics.

  And yet in some ways Otto Braun would have found the material easier going than I did. I could not make myself read fast, for the words of those old notebooks whispered in my brain like a strange echo of false memory. Arthur and I had been in the same place at the same time, experiencing similar events, and many of the things that he felt worth recording had made an equal impression on me. We had discussed many of them. This was my own Cambridge years, my own life, seen from a different vantage point and through a lens that imposed a subtle distortion on shapes and colors.

  And then it changed. The final divergence began.

  It was in December, eight days before Christmas, that I caught a first hint of something different and repugnant. Immediately following a note on quantized red shifts came a small newspaper clipping. It appeared without comment, and it reported the arrest of a Manchester man for the torture, murder and dismemberment of his own twin daughters. He had told the police that the six-year-olds had “deserved all they got.”

  That was the first evidence of a dark obsession. In successive months and years, Arthur Shaw’s ledgers told of his increasing preoccupation with death; and it was never the natural, near-friendly death of old age and a long, fulfilled life, but always the savage deaths of small children. Death unnatural, murder most foul. The clippings spoke of starvation, beating, mutilation, and torture. In every case Arthur had defined the source, without providing any other comment. He must have combed the newspapers in his search, for I, reading those same papers in those same editions, had not noticed the articles.

  It got worse. Nine years ago it had been one clipping every few pages. By the time he went to live in Bonn the stories of brutal death occupied more than half the journals, and his sources of material had become world-wide.

  And yet the Arthur that I knew still existed. It was bewildering and frightening to recognize the cool, analytical voice of Arthur Shaw, inte
rspersed with the bloody deeds of human monsters. The poetry quotes and the comments on the weather and current events were still there, but now they shared space with a catalog of unspeakable acts.

  Four years ago, just before he came to Bonn, another change occurred. It was as though the author of the written entries had suddenly become aware of the thing that was making the newspaper clippings. When Arthur discovered that the other side of him was there, he began to comment on the horror of the events that he was recording. He was shocked, revolted, and terrified by them.

  And yet the clippings continued, along with the lecture notes, the concerts attended, the careful record of letters written; and there were the first hints of something else, something that made me quiver.

  I read on, to midnight and beyond until the night sky paled. Now at last I am permitted the statement denied to me earlier: The next morning I was still studying Arthur’s notebooks.

  Otto Braun came into the office, looked at me, and nodded grimly.

  “I am sorry, Professor Turnbull. It seemed to me that nothing I could say would be the same as allowing you to read for yourself.” He came across to the desk. “The security officer says you were up all night. Have you eaten breakfast?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought not.” He looked at my hands, which were perceptibly shaking. “You must have rest.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “You will. But first you need food. Come with me. I have arranged for us to have a private dining-room.”

  On the way to the guest quarters I went to the bathroom. I saw myself in the mirror there. No wonder Otto Braun was worried. I looked terrible, pale and unshaven, with purple-black rings under my eyes.

  In the cafeteria Braun loaded a tray with scrambled eggs, speckwurst, croissants, and hot coffee, and led me to a nook off the main room. He watched like a worried parent to make sure that I was eating, before he would pour coffee for himself.

  “Let me begin with the most important question,” he said. “Are you convinced that Arthur Shaw took his own life?”

  “I feel sure of it. He could not live with what one part of him was becoming. The final entry in his journal says as much. And it explains the way he chose to die.”

  Enough is enough, Arthur had written. I can’t escape from myself. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Better to return to the womb, and never be born …

  “He wanted peace, and to hide away from everything,” I went on. “When you know that, the black plastic bag makes more sense.”

  “And you agree with my decision?” Braun’s chubby face was anxious. “To keep the notebooks away from his parents.”

  “It was what he would have wanted. They were supposed to be destroyed, and one of his final entries proves it. He said, ‘I have done one braver thing.’”

  His brow wrinkled, and he put down his cup. “I saw that. But I did not understand it. He did not say what he had done.”

  “That’s because it’s part of a quotation, from a poem by John Donne. ‘I have done one braver thing, Than all the worthies did, And yet a braver thence doth spring, And that, to keep it hid.’ He wanted what he had been doing to remain secret. It was enormously important to him.”

  “That is a great relief. I hoped that it was so, but I could not be sure. Do you agree with me, we can now destroy those notebooks?”

  I paused. “Maybe that is not the best answer. It will leave questions in the mind of Marion Shaw, because she is quite sure that the books must exist. Suppose that you turn them over to my custody? If I tell Marion that I have them, and want to keep them as something of Arthur’s, I’m sure she will approve. And of course I will never let her see them.”

  “Ah.” Braun gave a gusty sigh of satisfaction. “That is a most excellent suggestion. Even now, I would feel uneasy about destroying them. I must admit, Professor Turnbull, that I had doubts as to my own wisdom when I agreed to allow you to come here and examine Dr. Shaw’s writings. But everything has turned out for the best, has it not? If you are not proposing to eat those eggs…”

  * * *

  Everything for the best, thought Otto Braun, and probably in the best of all possible worlds.

  We had made the decision. The rest was details. Over the next twelve hours, he and I wrote the script.

  I would handle Marion and Roland Shaw. I was to confirm that Arthur’s death had been suicide, while his mind was unbalanced by overwork. If they talked to Braun again about his earlier discomfort in talking to them, it was because he felt he had failed them. He had not done enough to help, he would say, when Arthur so obviously needed him. (No lie there; that’s exactly how Otto felt.)

  And the journals? I would tell the Shaws of Arthur’s final wish, that they be destroyed. Again, no lie; and I would assure them that I would honor that intent.

  I went home. I did it, exactly as we had planned. The only intolerable moment came when Marion Shaw put her arms around me, and actually thanked me for what I had done.

  Because, of course, neither she nor Otto Braun nor anyone else in the world knew what I had done.

  When I read the journals and saw Arthur’s mind fluttering towards insanity, I was horrified. But it was not only the revelation of madness that left me the next morning white-faced and quivering. It was excitement derived from the other content of the ledgers, material interwoven with the cool comments on personal affairs and the blood-obsessed newspaper clippings.

  Otto Braun, in his relief at seeing his own problems disappear, had grabbed at my explanation of Arthur’s final journal entries, without seeing that it was wholly illogical. “I have done one braver thing,” quoted Arthur. But that was surely not referring to the newspaper clippings and his own squalid obsessions. He was appalled by them, and said so. What was the “brave thing” that he had done?

  I knew. It was in the notebooks.

  For four years, since Arthur’s departure from Cambridge, I had concentrated on the single problem of a unified theory of quantized space-time. I made everything else in my life of secondary importance, working myself harder than ever before, to the absolute limit of my powers. At the back of my mind was always Arthur’s comment: this was the most important problem in modern physics.

  It was the best work I had ever done. I suspect that it is easily the best work that I will ever do.

  What I had not known, or even vaguely suspected, was that Arthur Shaw had begun to work on the same problem after he went to Bonn.

  I found that out as I went through his work ledgers. How can I describe the feeling, when in the middle of the night in Arthur’s old office I came across scribbled thoughts and conjectures that I had believed to belong in my head alone? They were mixed in hodge-podge with everything else, side-by-side with the soccer scores, the day’s high temperature, and the horror stories of child molestation, mutilation, and murder. To Otto Braun or anyone else, those marginal scribbles would have been random nonsensical jottings. But I recognized that integral, and that flux quantization condition, and that invariant.

  How can I describe the feeling?

  I cannot. But I am not the first to suffer it. Thomas Kydd and Ben Jonson must have been filled with the same awe in the 1590s, when Shakespeare carried the English language to undreamed-of heights. Hofkapellmeister Salieri knew it, to his despair, when Mozart and his God-touched work came on the scene at the court of Vienna. Edmund Halley surely felt it, sitting in Newton’s rooms at Trinity College in 1684, and learning that the immortal Isaac had discovered laws and invented techniques that would make the whole System of the World calculable; and old Legendre was overwhelmed by it, when the Disquisitiones came into his hands and he marveled at the supernatural mathematical powers of the young Gauss.

  When half-gods go, the gods arrive. I had struggled with the problem of space-time quantization, as I said, with every working neuron of my brain. Arthur Shaw went so far beyond me that it took all my intellect to mark his path. “It were all one that I should love a bright
particular star, and think to wed it, he is so above me.” But I could see what he was doing, and I recognized what I had long suspected. Arthur was something that I would never be. He was a true genius.

  I am not a genius, but I am very talented. I could follow where I could not lead. From the hints, scribbled theorems, and conjectures in Arthur Shaw’s notebooks I assembled the whole; not perhaps as the gorgeous tapestry of thought that Arthur had woven in his mind, but enough to make a complete theory with profound practical implications.

  That grand design was the “braver thing” that he knew he had done, an intellectual feat that placed him with the immortals.

  It was also, paradoxically, the cause of his death.

  Some scientific developments are “in the air” at a particular moment; if one person does not propose them, another will. But other creative acts lie so far outside the mainstream of thought that they seem destined for a single individual. If Einstein had not created the theory of general relativity, it is quite likely that it would not exist today. Arthur Shaw knew what he had wrought. His approach was totally novel, and he was convinced that without his work an adequate theory might be centuries in the future.

  I did not believe that; but I might have, if I had not been stumbling purblind along the same road. The important point, however, is that Arthur did believe it.

  What should he do? He had made a wonderful discovery. But when he looked inside himself, he saw in that interior mirror only the glassy essence of the angry ape. He had in his grasp the wondrous spell that would send humanity to the stars—but he regarded us as a bloody-handed, bloody-minded humanity, raging out of control through the universe.

  His duty as he saw it was clear. He must do the braver thing, and destroy both his ideas and himself.