Broken symmetries, p.1
Broken Symmetries, page 1
Broken Symmetries
Paul Preuss
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1983 by Paul Preuss
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Excerpts from An Introduction to Haiku, by Harold G. Henderson. Copyright © Harold G. Henderson, 1958.
Excerpts from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, with English translations by C. F. MacIntyre. Copyright © C. F. MacIntyre, 1961.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com
First Diversion Books edition June 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-883-5
Also by Paul Preuss
Starfire
Human Error
Secret Passages
For Karen
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to David Crommie and Karen Crommie, John Douglas, Joyce Frommer and Diana Price, Rebecca Kurland, Lee Mendelson, Bill Neil, Mark Preuss, Jerry Rasmussen, Michael Rogers and Janet Hopson, Michael Rosenthal, Rob Semper, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro for help with research, location scouting, translations, and other valuable but unclassifiable assistance.
For wise editorial advice, thanks to Charles N. Brown, David Hartwell, and Marta Randall.
Special thanks to staff members and researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, especially to the generous staff of Berkeley’s 88-inch cyclotron and its director, Robert Stokstad.
Errors of fact and interpretation are, of course, my own.
The physics in this story is intended only to seem plausible, not to be predictive. Inside quarks don’t exist, nor do I-particles, and there is no TERAC on Oahu or anywhere else. The characters and events are likewise wholly fictitious.
Since they could not actually create souls, after having evoked the souls of demons and angels, they introduced these into their idols by holy and divine rites, so that the idols had the power of doing good and evil.
—“HERMES TRISMEGISTUS,”
The Perfect Word
I ask myself just what scientists think they are up to.
—HIDEKI YUKAWA,
Creativity and Intuition
1
Three secretaries stared at him, prepared for anything. He crossed the carpet between their desks wordlessly, intent only on reaching his office door. The youngest, prettiest woman rose nervously: “Dr. Slater, Dr. Edovich asked me to remind you of the party this evening…”
He nodded, avoiding her eyes. He’d never learned her name; he didn’t want to, for she reminded him too much of Kathleen. He scooped a thick manifold of new computer printout from the corner of her desk as he went past—then he was inside his office, safely out of sight and hearing.
Briefly he imagined the glances they exchanged behind his back, the appalled and knowing looks; a week ago he’d left the pretty one in tears with some unfeeling remark, and Brownie Lasky, whose office was next door, had gently reproved him. He hadn’t meant to make her unhappy. He just wanted to be left alone. Completely alone.
In fact, Peter Slater’s mood was better than usual this fine spring morning. He’d slept well, a rare thing, and gotten up a half-hour late, filled with vague optimism. He looked forward to the day’s work. He laid the new data on top of the stack on his desk and went to the window, opening the curtains to the morning sun. Pressing his fingertips gently to the cool glass, he stared down on blue green vistas from his eighth-floor window. Thirteen miles away, beyond Pearl Harbor, a silvery jetliner descended toward Honolulu International Airport. Within moments he had drifted into reverie.
Six weeks earlier Peter Slater had been shown to this office at Hawaii’s Teravolt Accelerator Center for the first time. Its luxury was unsettling. Spacious, furnished with bleached oak and chrome and rough-woven wool in the latest style of the nineties, equipped with well-stocked shelves of reference works and its own state-of-the-art minicomputer, it posed a startling contrast to the cramped, cluttered working quarters he’d shared at the mathematics department at Berkeley. Soon he’d be spoiled for other potential employers, and he suspected this was precisely the intention of TERAC’s administration. Slater was a man who appreciated good taste in material things.
Perhaps best of all was the view from Tomonaga Hall. Beyond the landscaped interior of the accelerator’s main ring, broad pineapple and cane fields gently sloped toward a smear of suburbs; in the distance beyond them glittered the windows of downtown Honolulu. The purple silhouette of Diamond Head floated in the farthest background, like a cruise ship at anchor. The ocean lay blue and calm under the midmorning sun; lazy fat cumulus clouds drifted in the windless sky. Away to the south a cane field was burning, sending a column of gray brown smoke a mile into the air, where the warm rising moisture gave birth to a benign mushroom cap of cloudy vapor.
But though Peter Slater appreciated the panoramic view, he did not really see it. He didn’t even see the airplane landing in the distance, the bright moving speck that had snagged his staring gaze. He didn’t see the workmen directly below his window who were erecting a wide wooden platform on the broad green lawns, and setting up towers to hold television cameras, and poles from which to hang loudspeakers. Slater had forgotten all about the big invitational dedication ceremonies to begin on Monday, had forgotten that he’d agreed to play some part in the formalities. He was lost in a profound daydream of the sort that had become more and more seductive in past weeks, and the tranquil scene outside his window served merely as an aid to his concentration, just as a single chrysanthemum in a vase might serve as a suitable point of departure for a monk’s meditative trance. The brain persists in the childish urge to show itself pictures, even when the mind is otherwise occupied.
Slater’s distraction was of that class of creative narcolepsies that one’s colleagues may recollect in their memoirs, fondly or otherwise, as the mark and affliction of young genius. The suspicion that Peter Slater was such a one, though his genius was far from proving itself beyond doubt, allowed him much forgiveness within the society of particles-and-fields physicists, a society rich in eccentricity. No one minded that he’d played the recluse since coming to TERAC, hardly bothering to introduce himself to his new associates unless he urgently needed to talk physics with one or another of them. His fearsome theoretical reputation helped keep the gregarious at bay, his chilling hauteur intimidated mere celebrity-collectors, and those who dealt in gossip quickly spread the word, more or less accurately, that he was recovering from a painful divorce, and was entitled to lick his wounds in private. Slater was oblivious to them all.
Years ago Peter Slater had learned to uncouple his thought processes from visualization. Without that peculiar skill he still would have been an extraordinary child, a preternaturally bright high school student who loved chess and was teaching himself Mandarin and Japanese so that he could read and write poetry in those languages, but who’d flunked Algebra II out of sheer inattention. But somewhere between his junior and senior year, not really overnight but so quickly that it seemed so, he’d emerged as a prodigy, producing a pair of papers at the frontier of set theory. Part of that profound transition in modes of thought had occurred to him as a mere trick during a chess game with a friend, when instead of trying to picture the elements of the strategy he was pursuing, he’d tried to “hear” them instead, as if they were the melodic lines of a fugue, each composed of individual notes woven into chordal patterns. Researchers had long known that human chess masters, and masters of other board games like go, relied upon their unconscious store of recognizable patterns to guide their play—unlike the winning computer chess programs of the day, which won through linear extrapolation and vast number-crunching power. Peter wondered what it would be like not to see the patterns as an arrangement of differently valued tokens in a two-dimensional matrix, but to hear them all at once like symphonic chords—as if pawns were strings, castles brass, knights percussion, bishops woodwinds, the king some showy but fragile instrument like a harp, and the queen a piece of immense range and depth, a piano. If he hadn’t already been winning the game he was playing when he had the idea, he might have suppressed it—for he hated to lose at anything, and he would never have taken the chance of letting his concentration slip. But he tried it—and it seemed to work, or at least not to get in the way (he borrowed a chord from a Vaughn Williams piece that was playing on the tape deck at the moment, to see how it would resolve, and the solution was powerful, if not elegant; later he found Bach a much more fruitful source of examples)—and he started habitually to coax his mind into the rich but quirky path.
Once his obsession with sound symbols almost drove him mad. His first doctorate was taken in astrophysics, under Hawking at Cambridge; there one evening, during one of those intense and extended discourses bright young men are apt to pursue on the Nature of Mind, an English friend who sought his approval quoted Lewis Thomas to him: “If you want, as an experiment, to hear the whole mind working, all at once, put on the St. Matthew Passion and turn the volume up all the way.”
Slater’s English friend thought i t an amusing conceit. He never dreamed Peter would set out to test the hypothesis. Slater abandoned his proper reading while questing fruitlessly for an isomorphic mapping of the structure of thought onto music. Weeks later, exhausted, confined to the infirmary with a raging fever and lungs teeming with pneumonia, he woke up in the middle of the night laughing. He was saved. He’d gotten the joke. Bach had tricked Thomas and the others who’d entertained similar notions, for only Bach could mimic the music of the neurons, through the elegant expedient of coaxing sensual beauty from abstraction. This was not the mind working, this was the mind alternating between opposite poles. Beethoven could not do it, nor even Mozart, not for long.
Nevertheless the compelling analogy stayed with Peter. He haunted the common rooms of the colleges along the Backs, playing pieces for the Well-Tempered Clavier on various ill-tuned pianos as the soft English evenings turned to cool spring nights, and he would mentally wrestle with, say, the quantum thermodynamics of black holes. One or two quite original papers resulted from this odd habit.
On Oahu, some years later, he was still at it. Where Kekulē had dreamed before the fire of a snake biting its own tail, and wakened to apprehend the ring shape of the benzene molecule, where Pauling, sick with the flu and shivering in his room, had entertained himself with folding a piece of paper doll-fashion and thus deciphered the alpha-helix structure of collagen protein, so Peter Slater dreamed of endlessly rising baroque canons, and woke to propose new arrangements of quarks and leptons. So far, however, none of Slater’s schemes had proved to have anything like the practical importance of decoded benzene—or any necessary relationship to reality at all.
But he dreamed on. On this tropical spring day, while his unseeing eyes stared out at the contours of TERAC and the bright island beyond, Peter Slater was hearing concertos, whole symphonies, joyful progressions of staggered chords, intricately woven melodies.
And somewhere in the midst of them, a persistent sour note.
2
The flight attendant collected the agricultural inspection forms, and a moment later Anne-Marie remembered the two apples in her shoulder bag she hadn’t eaten and hadn’t declared. It amused her to think she was smuggling apples into paradise.
She could see nothing of the islands through the window as yet, except for a telltale mass of blue white cumulus clouds throwing indigo shadows on the sea ahead of the plane. She felt Gardner Hey’s eyes on her and knew that if she turned quickly she would find the chubby reporter trying to peer down the front of her dress. She wished she hadn’t worn the thin, brightly printed sun dress. Hey’s low-grade lechery wasn’t entirely unprovoked, for she was deliberately dressed to kill, even to the point of overdoing the make-up. Nerves. Anticipation. Never had the interior of an airplane looked so exciting; even the fact that the connecting flight was two hours late leaving Los Angeles had made the whole trip that much more adventurous to her, who hadn’t been away from home in five years. The quite ordinary tourists who filled the cramped interior of the DC-10 took on an air of romance, or at least of fresh hope.
After five hours in the air a sense of proportion had returned—the young lovers across the aisle had proceeded to become mildly squiffed on Mai Tais, and their increasingly loud conversation had made it plain that their relationship, while by no means Platonic, owed more to their mutual interest in scoring exportable quantities of Maui Wowee than it did to tender esteem—but Anne-Marie wasn’t disappointed. This was freedom, if of a limited sort, and the fact that it was real—that her seat was hard and narrow, and that she had to go the bathroom yet again, and that Gardner Hey had turned out to be rather homely and uncouth despite her secret hopes to the contrary—all this merely served to persuade her that she was a live creature again, that the world was a vivid and bustling and unpredictable place, once more filled with the possibility of adventure.
Restlessly Anne-Marie shifted her long tanned legs in the cramped space in front of her seat. She briefly considered making another trip to the toilet, but she decided she could wait until they reached the airport. It couldn’t be long now. She sighed, gave Hey plenty of warning by first returning her gaze to the book in her lap—Hermetic Hieroglyphs, Their Meaning for Today, by Carla Mawson, Ph.D.—then looked up at him sharply. Hey was staring straight ahead, worrying the fuzz of one long sideburn with the nail-bitten fingers of his right hand, trying to appear lost in thought.
“How’s the view, Gardner?” she asked sweetly. He seemed harmless, even if he was a bit of an oinker. He’d tried to do all the right things, opening doors and grabbing at her luggage and scurrying around to get between her and the curb, and while he was inept at what he apparently understood to be the social graces, Anne-Marie was truly grateful to him for his part in arranging her first real photo assignment in years.
“Hmm?” Hey was playing the innocent. “Oh, can you see anything yet?”
“Not me,” she said dryly. At that moment the smooth whine of the DC-10’s engines subtly altered in pitch, and the big plane began to lose altitude. “I’m surprised at myself,” she said. “I’m actually getting excited all over again.”
“Really? Hawaii’s about as exotic as Hoboken. With ferns.”
“I don’t think so. But the only time I was ever here was on my honeymoon.” She caught herself twisting her rings; the diamonds were just big enough to assert wealth without overstepping the bounds of good taste. How like Charlie.
No wonder he’d been irritable when he’d taken her to the San Diego airport this morning: it wasn’t that she was going away, for the thought that she might leave him would never enter his bourgeois noggin. He saw it the other way around, saw her as a symbol and representation of himself, a woman whose task it was to be intelligent, cultured, attractive in a, well, girdled way; an excellent hostess, of course, and not least a competent mother, competent to produce genetically superior children and competent to provide them with the rich environment they required to flower into flawless specimens of investment-bankerhood some day. But headed for Hawaii with cameras in hand, Anne-Marie must have exuded a sexuality that struck Charlie as extravagant, loose-kneed, bikini-briefed, braless—rich, all right, but bordering on the vulgar. It bothered Charlie to think his wife might be mistaken for a member of the wrong class.
“Hawaii honeymoon, eh?” Hey scratched at his pink tummy between the buttons of his thrift-store aloha shirt. “Life’s been good to you, hasn’t it?”
“Because my husband always plays by the rules,” said Anne-Marie, glancing at Hey. “I don’t.”
Her little boy was four now, innocent and demanding, and she could not imagine abandoning him; neither could she imagine wresting custody of Carlos from Charlie and the lawyers his family money would buy. For now she was merely grateful for the separate vacation, the working vacation of the next few days. It made no difference to her that Science Weekly, Gardner Hey’s paper, was a cheap newsletter that used no color, paid only space rate for what photographs it did buy, and doled out minimal travel expenses—it didn’t matter that she would lose money on the assignment. With Charlie’s money she could have traveled first class. More valuable to her than money was the fact of a legitimate job, one that might lead to other photography jobs which paid decently, that might in turn lead, in the dim future, to some kind of independent career.
Perhaps her dream of freedom was silly. Still, photography was the only skill she had, not counting the ability to look and sound good behind a reception desk, say, or in a cocktail lounge.
Unconsciously she’d been working at the rings on her finger, twisting them over her knuckle; she was surprised to find them lying free in her right hand. Surreptitiously she slipped them into the pocket of her skirt before Hey saw what she was doing. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why the simple, natural act should make her feel guilty, why she thought it needed hiding.
