Dante's Equation Part 4

"I'm glad you approve."

"You should learn more about Kobinski, as much as you can."

"Naturally." "Since he died in Auschwitz, you should visit Yad Vashem." Aharon grunted. "I have better things to do thanthat ." "Where will you start then?" She turned on her side to face him. "I start by studying these arrays, which is what I'm trying to do." He focused again on the second page, a frown between his brows.

"What do you do with the arrays?" she asked, more tentative now. She sat up to look over his shoulder again. "Hannah!" Her face darkened into her rebellious pout. "So looking at some Hebrew on a page, only a man can do this?" "Do we need to have this discussion right now?"Thisdiscussion, the one in which Hannah pointed out that some Orthodox now embraced women studying Torah. Aharon knew this. He knew there were nomitzvah that specifically prohibited it. But to him, this was simply not his idea of women-nor of Torah study. "You're searching for words, aren't you? I could help." "No." "But I'm much better at crosswords and word searches than you."

"This isn't an amus.e.m.e.nt; this is wors.h.i.+p!"

They knew each other well. His tone meant that this was final and she was not to question it. She didn't. She slipped back onto the pillow.

"How about I do a little background research for you? Try to find out more about Rabbi Kobinski?"

He closed his book, glowered at her. "Three children, one still in diapers, and you don't have enough to do? You want some suggestions? Because this place is not exactly the Palace of Solomon." She had rolled away from him; now she rolled back, dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng. "No, Rabbi Handalman, it isnot the Palace of Solomon! You want to know what it is? It's a tiny two-bedroom apartment filled with three children-half the size of the house we had in New York, when it was just you and I! I would like to seeyou keep it perfect all the time." Tears threatened, but she was too angry for them. "You know, I have a brain, Aharon. Maybe even as fine a brain as you. In school they thought I would be somebody!"

"A rabbi's wife, the mother of three beautiful children, is a n.o.body?" They glared at each other. Aharon had more bitter words at the ready, like poison arrows strung in a bow. He could see on her face, too, that she had things to say on her part. But they had been married long enough-they knew better. Then, unexpectedly, he thought of his mother. His anger evaporated, replaced by a stab of worry.

But Hannah was not his mother. She was not depressed, only a little restless, surely. He sighed and put his binder on the floor.

"Hannaleh."He put his hand over hers on her stomach. They looked at each other for some time, as wrestlers might gauge an opponent. Then he kissed her. He had been too inattentive of late. He was always caught up in his work, staying late at the office to avoid the worst noise of the children in the evenings and tired or distracted after they were in bed.This, this was all she was asking for, a little attention. Hannah clung to him as if she could claim his spirit by sheer force of will. And for a few minutes, she did.

It was a shame, but Hannah was not alone in her advice. Aharon called on one of the synagogues that catered to Eastern European Jews, but the rabbi had never heard of Kobinski. "If he died in Auschwitz, why don't you try Yad Vashem? They have a better contact list of Eastern European survivors than I do."

"It's amemorial ," Aharon said dismissively.

"They've been collecting a lot of data. So try it. You'll see."

He had looked for Kobinski's book,The Book of Mercy, but no one had ever heard of it, not even the rare bookseller in the Jewish Quarter. Aharon's contact at the Hebrew University lectured on Jewish history and occasionally on kabbalah. He'd never heard of Kobinski, either, but he had a brainstorm: "Why don't you go visit Yad Vashem? You might get a lot out of it." It was all Aharon could do not to conk the man on the head with the briefcase he held in his hand.

Now, alone in his office, Aharon stared at the open binder on his desk. The wordAuschwitz, so consistent in most of the Kobinski arrays, lay hidden among the words like bits of barbed wire.

Get a lot out of it! As if the Holocaust weren't already so deep in his blood that his very corpuscles cringed at the word? Did he need to see those things? Those pictures? Those heaps of shoes and eyegla.s.ses? Did he need to have it pounded into him any more?

He had once left in the middle of aBeit Midrash at his synagogue-a visiting rabbi from the States, of course; they always knew how to say exactly what n.o.body wanted to hear. He'd walked out because the rabbi was talking about the Question of the Holocaust. "The Question of the Holocaust"! A poor excuse for a lack of faith! Did a man stand in front of the Originator of all the universe and say, "Excuse me, but I don't think I can approve of what you did"? Did G.o.d needour permission to arrange history the way He thought best?

Aharon was getting upset. His stomach was spreading burning fingers up into his esophagus, a clear warning sign. He chewed chalky antacid tablets and, when they didn't help, put on his coat. He would go out for a walk, anything to avoid thinking abouther .

The old city was crowded with rush hour in Jerusalem, 6:00P .M. and everyone in the streets. Synagogues, mosques, and churches held early-evening services and the wall was thick with men saying prayers. He would pray also, but not while he was in this mood. The walk did him little good. As his shoes clicked on the ancient stones his mind wandered to her anyway.

Rosa had been her name, and sometimes he could still hear her morbid liturgy-my brothers, my sisters, my papa, Mama, Uncle Sol and Aunt Rivka, the blond baby next door. . . and on and on and on, as if she had to say the names out of some macabre duty, as if handing crumbs of bread to ghosts.

His father saying, "It's over! Let it go, for the love of Heaven!"

And Rosa, his mother, for the millionth time, "We should have broughtsomebody out."

His father, who hadn't trusted so much as the auto mechanic down the street up until the day he died, had certainly never trusted the Germans. Way back in Berlin in 1929 he'd said, "That's it; I'm leaving." He had given his young bride a choice: "Come with me or stay here and be a widow-I'm never coming back." She had gone with him.

They had not, as Aharon's mother so often reminded his father, taken anyone with them-not her four younger siblings, not her aging grandmother, no one. "Well," said Father, "on a hunch you upset everyone's life? Did I know for certain what was going to happen? Was I a rich man, I could afford to take your entire family to America? Did I not scrimp and save a month foryour pa.s.sage?"

Mother: "I wish you hadn't! I wish I had taken my place with the rest of them!"

During the war years, Aharon's father made a living as a kosher butcher in New York. Rosa had to be hospitalized several times during those years as reports of the worst trickled in. They'd sent money to her family; it disappeared into a black hole. When the war ended and they saw the newsreels . . .

In 1952, Father moved them to upstate New York. He told Aharon often enough, "I thought a change of pace would be good for your mother." The way he said it, with that let-down tone, showed he had been mistaken. But it must have worked, for a time. In 1965, Aharon, only son, only child, was born, fruit of a soured womb.

In 1978, Rosa succeeded in killing herself.

His parents had never evenseen the Holocaust, yet it ruined their lives. This was what happened when you couldn't forget. And here was Kobinski, threatening to drag that all up again.

Why couldn't the man have died somewhere else, anywhere but Auschwitz?

2.3. Jill Talcott

MAY SEATTLE.

There was a video camera rigged up on a tripod nearby. It was a grandiose gesture and Jill tried to underplay it. But Nate had seen enough of her ambitious streak to smell a Historical Moment a mile away. He dropped his hands from the keyboard and rubbed them against his thighs like an athlete shaking out his legs between sprints. "I finished downloading the results from Quey. Wanna wait until morning to see how we did?"

He might have been a lover deep into heavy foreplay, pausing to ask his girl, "Should we wait?" It was tempting in its sheer masochism.

Jill looked at her watch. It was 3:00A .M. "No, I'd never be able to get to sleep. Besides, it's kind of dramatic-middle of the night." Jill felt uncharacteristically girlish. Her small fingers kept twisting themselves together and she had to keep pulling them apart.

"Well . . . if you're sure." He was teasing now.

"Everything's in? No numbers transposed? No dropped data?"

"Just that power surge when I was transferring the files."

Her heart stopped beating. "What!" "Kidding." She glared at him. Nate nibbled away a smile. "Seriously, all I have to do is push this wee b.u.t.ton here and my program will compare the numbers your equation generated on Quey with the carbon atom data. We'll know

if your equation was able to predict real-life behavior in about ten seconds." Ten seconds. That's what it boiled down to after seven years of plotting and effort. She was hyperventilating.

She paced around behind the camera and checked it again. She messed with her hair, put on some Chap Stick. At the sight of the clear balm, Nate made a shocked face, as if to say,This must be important if you deign to put on any cosmetic whatsoever . She ignored him.

"Ready?" she asked.

Nate raised one eyebrow warily, moved the cursor over the b.u.t.ton on the screen that would run the comparison. "Ready." "Wait!" She turned on the camera, squared her shoulders. Stepping in front of the lens, she gave a short introduction: date, time, and the nature of the experiment. She adjusted the camera to look at the computer screen, taking her time to focus it in for a good close-up. Then she sat primly in the chair beside Nate.

"Proceed, Mr. Andros," she said, for the record. Nate clicked the b.u.t.ton. After a few seconds, two columns of data appeared on the screen with a box that said: Correlation in data above the error factor by 31% With the uncaring blink of those spiteful words, Jill's heart sank through her legs to puddle somewhere on the floor. Her equation hadn't worked. She couldn't believe it. She had been convinced-convinced. . .

She cursed vibrantly, then remembered the camera and turned it off. She stood in the narrow aisle, looking at her shoes and breathing hard.A scientist observed results coolly, impersonally, she reminded herself.You don't get angry at data.

"d.a.m.n!" Nate exclaimed. "I really thought it was gonna fly."

Jill was too wrapped up in her own frustration to care about his. She sat down at the computer again. "Bring up the grisly remains."

He expanded the boxes that contained the complete set of numbers.

"Your velocity predictions are off by thirty percent," he commented. "Position, twenty-eight percent."

"I see it," Jill muttered.

After several minutes she sat back, pressing icy fingers to her forehead. It would take a long time to pore over the results, not a task to be undertaken tonight. And she could already see that it wouldn't tell them what theyreallyneeded to know. It wouldn't tell them where she'd gone wrong.

She felt like crying. Stupid, stupid data.

Nate glanced at her sympathetically. "Even a small error in the equation could cause this, if it was in the right place."

"No. Position, velocity-those are in completely different ends of the equation. The whole underlying theory has to be wrong. I don't know why I should be surprised. We knew the energy pool model wasc.r.a.p ."

Nate looked uncomfortable. "But that's what an interference patterndoes , Jill. I mean, Dr. Talcott. It makes everything completely interconnected. One little change in a ripple over here means a cascading response on the other side of the-"

"Just . . .leave it."

She was angry and disappointed and snappish. Nate started to say something, then closed his mouth. He looked hurt at her taking it out on him.

"It's late," Jill said. "I'm going home."

The next morning she couldn't face a day of cla.s.ses or Nate, so she called in sick. Seven years of work were down the tube, and she had no idea how to start again. She lounged around at home for half the day, her mind a miserable blank. She tried to do some stretching exercises, but her body was so used to being utterly ignored that it wouldn't cooperate.

Jill Talcott's physique was small but not particularly fit. The same could be said of her house. The tiny 1920s bungalow was situated in an urban Seattle neighborhood called Wallingford that had once been low-income housing but now came with heavy mortgages as well as no closet s.p.a.ce. Her neighbors were high-salaried technocrats, couples, and young families. Jill lived alone. Not even pets disturbed the domestic order. The great scientists filled one narrow bookcase in the living room, and a ten-inch TV gave her the national news if she became conscious enough to show an interest, which was roughly never. The house was orderly, if not cozy; functional, unadorned, like its owner. And thanks to flawed insulation, it was frequently cold.

After lunch she drove to a beach on Lake Was.h.i.+ngton. It was a weekday, and she had the place to herself. Looking at the water, she thought about the energy pool model of the universe, all those particles making ripples in the gigantic pond of s.p.a.ce-time. Dr. Ansel used to say that the refusal to accept the theory represented fear in the scientific community. Physicists knew that if it were taken seriously they'd never be able to pin anything down again. All their wonderful divisions and categorizations would dissolve like ice cubes in warm water. Chaos theory mathematicians might nod their heads in sympathy at the thought, but physicists turned green in the gills.

Shehad rejected Ansel, too. She'd resigned as his graduate student once she'd figured out how off the beaten track his work was. He and his wife had been kind to her, a rube from the sticks, but ultimately Jill had considered him a hindrance to her career, didn't want the sly looks and chuckles of his peers to rub off on her. Bye-bye, Dr. Ansel. So why, then, had she returned to his theory, like Oedipus, who ran away from his fate only to fall right into its lap? She didn't miss the irony. What would Ansel think if he knew of her equation? Would he laugh? Would he think her a two-faced b.i.t.c.h?

He wouldn't be the first.

Jill Talcott had been born and raised in the South-not the South of the Clintons or of Thomas Wolfe but of Loretta Lynn and black lung disease. Her childhood in the seventies had boasted dirty, puffy polyester clothing that never wore out, making the most lurid hand-me-downs live forever.

Her mother's family had not been wealthy, but they'd had a piano, new clothes for school, pot roast on Sundays. That was the story Jill's mother told. She talked wistfully about that world. No white picket fences for Jill's mother, not even chipped ones. Her downfall had been a man, what else? Jill's father, slim and wiry. He'd aged to old leather, but he'd been irresistible when young, so the story went, with a pencil-thin mustache, slicked back blond hair, and flashy clothes. He was a gambler, always out for the easy buck. He had a great deal of charm, but Jill learned early on to discount it, for his promises were pretty puffs of air and nothing more. Jill's mother worked as a waitress, worked harder at home trying to hide the money from his grasp. They lived in a rented shack. There was no pot roast, no new clothes for school, only what Jill's mother pulled from the charity box. And there never was, never would be, a piano.

As a child, Jill had no outward gifts to balance this deficit of poverty. She was a runt with an unremarkable face and mousy hair badly cut. Early on she decided that the best way to deal with the mockery of her peers was not to care what anyone thought. Then she learned she was gifted in certain subjects-math, for instance, and chemistry. Her teacher cautiously suggested that Jillmight be able to earn a college scholars.h.i.+p. She grasped that lifeline and never looked back, hadn't seen her parents since she started college, never answered her mother's letters-tales of woe every one.

Two things Jill vowed never to do: place money on a bet and let a man into her life. Because once you hooked up with someone, by definition you could no longer call your life your own. By definition his liabilities became your liabilities. And once you'd taken a wrong turn like that you paid dearly. Even in this age of divorce, you would pay.

All her energy was focused on her career. Perhaps it was because the very idea-that Jill Talcott from Pittsville, Tennessee, mightbe somebody -was so absurd. Like her father, she always did have a soft spot for the long shot.

Are the people and events in our lives like pebbles?Jill wondered, watching the lake.Do they spread out the ripples of their impact, changing us in ways we could not even guess? It was not a happy thought and certainly, she admonished herself, not a very scientific one.

Frowning, she gathered pebbles on the beach and began tossing them into the water. On the surface of the lake they left rippling patterns. She toyed around idly for a few minutes, then got absorbed by it. She made piles, arranging the pebbles by size. She watched the ripples her pebbles made with ardent interest, watched multiple ripples intersect.

Crest, trough, crest, trough. Where two waves meet they form an interference pattern: crest + crest = higher crest, trough + trough = deeper trough, crest + trough canceled each other out, creating a shorter crest or shallower trough. And that new pattern went out to intersect and merge with the next and the next and the next and the next.

Two hours later, Jill was still at the beach. The wind had picked up, and the lake was getting choppy. Jill, grimy with sand and dirt, her piles of pebbles denuded, stood on the beach with very small pebbles in her hand. She tossed them in, then got down on all fours to look across the surface of the water, watched the waves intersect, ripple out, fade away.

It was getting difficult to see the ripples because of the water's rising chop. She squinted-had the queerest sense that there was something she was not quite grasping.

Then shedid see it, so obvious it blindsided her.The lake has a wave pattern of its own.

The idea floored her: the simplicity of it, the beauty of it, the way it s.h.i.+fted her entire worldview. It was one of those moments that a scientist might get, at best, once or twice in a lifetime, and her eyes teared up with the power of it.

The lake's surface was a repeating choppy wave. Yes, the pebble waves interfered with one another, but they werealso interfered with by the stronger wave of the lake itself .

She sat back on her heels, hands clutching at the sand beneath her. They'd been counting on the fact that the carbon atom data had been runin a vacuum . But of course, the particle accelerator was a "vacuum" only in the sense that there were no otherparticles in the accelerator-in other words,no other pebbles . But there wa.s.s.p.a.ce in the accelerator, s.p.a.ce-time, the stuff of the universe. In other words, thelakehad been there.

Was s.p.a.ce-time a mirror-smooth surface, as she'd unwittingly a.s.sumed? Or did it have a wave of its own, like the surface of Lake Was.h.i.+ngton?

What was the wave pattern of s.p.a.ce-time itself?

"Listen to me," cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. "Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front-"

-G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908

3.1. Calder Farris

Mark Avery left four phone messages before Calder finally made himself respond. He didn't want to visit Avery, a man rotting away with cancer, a man who'd once been the closest thing to a friend that Calder Farris had ever had. A nine-hour sigmoidoscopy would have been more inviting than a visit with old Mark now. But on the last message Avery had sounded like he was at death's door and said he had things, important things, to pa.s.s on.

h.e.l.l and G.o.dd.a.m.n. Calder phoned and arranged a time with Avery's wife, Cherry, to come visit.

He pulled up outside the small officer's bungalow where Captain Avery and his family lived, dread turning to resentment, resentment sparking anger so black he ground his teeth. He made his way up the walkway, kicking a plastic PlaySkool scooter out of the way. At the door he smoothed his black trench coat in an effort to gain control before he rang the bell.

Cherry answered. Calder eyed her warily. He took his gla.s.ses off, but she didn't even blink. Cherry had never been intimidated by his eyes, funnily enough. In fact, she seemed to know he used them deliberately and to find that pathetically amusing.

Calder couldn't stand her.