The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  Andrew took the book from his great-grandpapa. “Why chaos?” he said.

  “Because,” Marcus said, “you’ll have to master chaos theory to solve the mystery of the ineffable marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity.”

  “Ineffable?” said Andrew. “Like your marriage to great-grandmomma Sarah?”

  “Good point but not quite,” Marcus said. “Just as one infinite set can be larger than another, one unfathomable phenomenon can be more ineffable than another.”

  Notwithstanding the levity, Marcus detected Andrew’s interest in physics even though he said nothing in response. “When you have time, read the book. It was written by a friend of mine, a retired professor of theoretical physics at Cal Tech a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.”

  “Thanks, great-grandpapa,” Andrew said, looking at the dust jacket that featured an artist’s rendition of colliding black holes. The book was titled The Warped Side of the Universe. “I’ll read it after finals.”

  That was a month earlier. Andrew took his last final exam the day before. And now Sarah is elaborating on her advice, suggesting something specific, recommending a destination during his year-of-discovery travels. The planet Jupiter. “The physics of hurricanes is well understood,” she says. “This we know because Marcus explains it whenever anyone will listen.” They share a laugh.

  Marcus calls out, “Poppycock.”

  Sarah says, “Explain poppycock. What’s that? Plant genitalia?”

  Andrew smiles but Sarah laughs until she’s out of breath, bringing Andrew and Marcus to laughter.

  When her laughter subsides, Sarah says, “Great-grandpapa was onto something when he studied hurricanes. He got the atmospherics right, but what he missed was the metaphysics. The mystical powers of these storms.”

  Marcus makes a show of huffing his way through the portal separating Sarah’s study from his.

  “Will you knock it off—” He loses his train of thought when he sees Sarah and Andrew poring over his charts of the solar system spread across her desk, charts with calculations he’d carefully recorded in the margins, charts he’d compiled over decades. “Those are mine,” he says. “I’ll not have them used for the ridiculous.”

  Sarah points to the largest planet on one of the charts. “Jupiter will be here at the end of the summer. The most magnificent hurricanes in the solar system are there. Visit them then.”

  “Why wait until the end of summer?” Andrew says.

  “What’s to come of that?” says Marcus, taking his charts. “Jupiter reveals your destiny? Pull leeze.”

  “Because,” Sarah says, “that’s when the Great Red Spot will be closest to Jupiter’s southern equatorial zone and you want to achieve orbit around Jupiter’s equator.”

  “It won’t make any difference when he goes,” Marcus says, storming out of Sarah’s study with his solar-system charts. “Metaphysical forces imbued in the Great Red Spot. Good grief.” He turns in the doorway, to give the impression of expressing an afterthought and says to Andrew, “At least it will give you an experience to write about when you’re older.”

  Hurricane Andrew spread death and destruction across the southern Florida peninsula. But it was a lamb compared to the hurricanes that rage incessantly 360 million miles, 40 light minutes from Earth in Jupiter’s exosphere, the layer of its atmosphere farthest from its superheated-fluid metallic hydrogen and helium core. The Jovian high-pressure hurricanes whip methane, hydrogen sulfur, and ammonia gas into anticyclonic jets of winds swirling at speeds of more than four hundred miles per hour over spans of time exceeding three hundred years and have diameters three times greater than Earth’s.

  Imagine: a hurricane three times the size of the earth. If hurricanes have meta-forces, it makes sense to study those storms on the surface of Jupiter.

  The summer doesn’t go well for Andrew. A few weeks after graduation, he’s camping with his lifelong friend, Billie Bower. Billie is hiking, as he never was able to master travel in hidden reality, and Andrew, who remains behind, is traveling in hidden reality, when he is rousted by two Fish and Wildlife officers, a man and a woman.

  “You stoned?” the woman demands while the other officer ransacks their belongings.

  “We have a camping permit,” Andrew says.

  “What’s this?” the man says, holding up a baggie of blue tablets.

  Andrew knows nothing of the contents of the baggie taken from Billie’s bedroll. But he remains silent.

  “Are they yours?” the man asks, removing handcuffs from his belt.

  Of course, they aren’t. Andrew has no interest in drugs, no need or use for them. In recent years he’s admonished Billie about using drugs, hugging him on one occasion, saying: please, please stop. I’d be lost without you in my life. But as he says nothing to the National Park Rangers, he’s arrested and turned over to the local police. And the contents of the baggie? Thirty tablets of LSD.

  Billie Bower takes no responsibility for the drugs, and Andrew, adhering to their bond of silence, has his summer of planned travel and exploration begin inauspiciously with incarceration, court appearances, a plea of no contest, a felony conviction, and a court-ordered drug-diversion program for a young man of sterling rectitude who’s never taken illegal drugs and never will.

  At summer’s end, with his legal problems behind him – or so he thinks – traveling in hidden reality with his power animal, Eagle, he projects his consciousness into an orbit of Jupiter’s equator intersecting the paths of Io and Europa, two of Gallio’s Jovian moons. Close by, Eagle flaps his powerful wings.

  Four light years away, two black holes traveling near the speed of light collide, warping the fabric of spacetime by causing it to spiral into a time warp, a tunnel in space, a shortcut through which photons carrying information can travel, in effect, faster than the speed of light from the orbit of one star into the backyard of our solar system. Time travel that turns back the clock ticking off each moment of human life, time travel that turns light back in time.

  As it forms, the nascent time warp traps negative-energy-vacuum fluctuations – virtual particles with a negative electrical charge – together with light that emanated from the sun two days before Andrew’s orbit of Jupiter.

  It isn’t until later, when Andrew tells his great-grandpapa in detail about his Jupiter journey, that Marcus theorizes, correctly, that negative-energy-vacuum fluctuations swallowed by the time warp held it open just long enough for the light within it to travel back in the direction from which it came, back in time, back two days short of four years – as Marcus’s calculations later show – after that light was reflected from Earth into the arena of the collision of the black holes.

  Within seconds, the negative-energy-vacuum fluctuations dissipate to rejoin counterpart twin virtual particles, positive-energy-vacuum fluctuations, in nearby space, causing the time warp to destabilize and collapse. Light trapped in the time warp is released on the opposite side of the solar system near Uranus, light that had traveled almost four years after it left the solar system returns to the solar system two days before it left, carrying information about the future, although Andrew doesn’t discover the actual date until two days later.

  In the opposite way that a magnifying glass will focus a beam of light, the time warp causes the light traversing it to defocus. The powerful gravity of the sun, acting like a convex lens, causes the defocused light to resolve, to converge upon its emergence from the time warp as it speeds across the solar system toward Jupiter.

  Five hours later, the light beams from the future now returning to the sun come within the gravitational pull of Jupiter, where Andrew is observing molecular clouds of methane, ammonia, and chlorine gasses racing in colorful bands of high-speed jet streams in opposite directions around the planet in zonal bands parallel to its equator. Jupiter’s gravity, acting as a gravitational lens as the sun’s gravity had, again bends the light from the future, fine tuning and further focusing it and projecting it onto the surface
of its fourth largest and second closest moon, Europa, a frozen lake of ice – smooth, flat, and white like the supersized screen of an IMAX theater– and it’s there, playing out in the flickering light, like scenes from an old-time black-and-white movie, that Andrew sees something that causes him to experience a near-crippling blow to his solar plexus: scenes of a man he recognizes, a man he’s recently met – bucked teeth, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail – raping his momma.

  Furiously, Eagle beats his wings, flying swiftly toward Europa. But before the great bird can reach noxious images, they are gone.

  Obviously, this tragedy hasn’t happened. Not yet, and not if he can stop it.

  What do these images of horror have to do with his destiny, his birth? He has no idea. And so he immediately returns to ordinary reality and sets out to find his great-grandmomma.

  The Loxahatchee River, river of turtles in Muscogee – from its embayment in the Jupiter Inlet that empties into the Atlantic to its sources seven-and-a-half miles upstream as the osprey flies – meanders through mangrove swamps, pine uplands and scrub, hardwood hammocks and sawgrass beds, carving a shape like an Arabic letter or a Sanskrit numeral in the marshlands of Palm Beach and Martin Counties.

  Taking care not to violate the curfew imposed by the terms of his probation, Andrew set out for the mouth of the Loxahatchee soon after returning to ordinary reality from his orbit around Jupiter and he’s arrived shortly before the last glimmer of dusk fades from the western skies. He’s brought his canoe and provisions he’ll need for a two- or-three-day camping trip in the wilderness.

  On a night well-lit by a full moon, he launches his canoe. Hours later, not far from the site where Seminole warriors stopped advances of the United States Army during the 1837-38 battles of the Loxahatchee, where the river is no more than fifteen feet wide and no more than five miles from the Atlantic, he pulls his canoe onto the river bank, keeping his distance from an American crocodile plying the dark waters. He’s trying to find Sarah and Marcus.

  Every year at summer’s end, for as long as he can remember, his great-grandmomma has left her home in Tallahassee and returned for three weeks to the land where she was raised. A remote place off the electric-power grid with no cellphone reception. She travels with acolytes, women only, and they live on chickees, studying shamanism and tribal medicine and Seminole culture. During some years, great-grandpapa Marcus or grandmomma Betty Mae have also traveled to the retreat with Sarah. Marcus has taken the trip with Sarah this year. Betty Mae is at a conference in Geneva, and Andrew wasn’t able to reach her before he had to leave Miami for Jupiter, Florida. And so he doesn’t know exactly where Sarah and Marcus are. He only knows that to reach the site of Sarah’s yearly retreat, she travels up the Loxahatchee on her journey to her ancestral home south of Lake Okeechobee.

  The evening sky twinkles with stars; Venus and Jupiter are visible to the naked eye. The moon is full, the sky cloudless. The soprano hoots of a Great Horned Owl sound nearby. A peregrine falcon, usually a diurnal bird of prey, crashes into a ring-necked duck on the river bank, then flaps its wings, carrying its meal over treetops into the dark heart of the wetlands. An occurrence of the food chain’s eternal return.

  Is history somehow to blame for what he saw on Europa? Blame history for the future? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Hegelian dialectics: as great-grandmomma Betty Mae would say.

  What must he do to change the future, interrupt its plans? His great-grandmomma sent him into Jupiter’s orbit, and so it must be she who knows the answer. But he hasn’t spoken to her since his arrest, and he hopes she isn’t too angry with him to speak to him now.

  He’s banked the canoe so he can carry it upstream a ways, past a barrier of rapids. When the canoe is out of the water, in a pine ridge near the riverbank, a woman appears atop an American saddlebred, a golden stallion with a black mane and tail. She is about fifty and wears buckskin leggings, a purple-and-red-patterned Seminole dress tied at her waist, hemmed with white fringed lace that covers the buckskin at her mid-calf. Her hair falls to her shoulders in gray braids held in place by a twisted leather headband. Her hand rests on a holstered semiautomatic rifle, a Winchester .308.

  “Hunting?” she says in Muscogee, in a smoker’s raspy voice.

  He answers in Muscogee. “And you are?”

  “Poaching?” she says.

  “You’re Fish and Game?” he says.

  She doesn’t answer, so he slips into his backpack, preparing to portage the canoe.

  She dismounts, holding her rifle.

  She isn’t going to shoot him. He’s seen himself unharmed in the near future. Small consolation. Escape into the woods. If she follows him, he’ll circle back, take her horse. He darts, but she’s quicker. She trips him, and he falls. Slowly, he turns on to his back to face her.

  “What’s your name?” she says.

  “Andrew Good-Eagle Godfrey.”

  She extends a hand, helps him to his feet. “Pleased to meet you Andrew Good-Eagle.”

  “Good-Eagle is my middle name,” he says, studying her.

  “Come with me,” she says, retrieving the rifle she dropped, mounting her horse.

  He doesn’t move. “What’s What do you want?” he says.

  “Are you indeed free of God, God free?” she says. “You are not God free. Get rid of that name. It dishonors you. Now come. Andrew Good-Eagle,” she says, this time sternly. “I’m Castillo, one of Sarah’s acolytes. Andrew Good-Eagle is the name of her great-grandson. That’s you, right? You must be looking for Sarah. I’ll take you to her.”

  The savory aroma of rabbit stew steams from a large pot filled on a cooking chickee, awakening Andrew’s hunger. But he refuses food, saying he’ll eat after his conversation with Sarah and Marcus, who sit with him on their own chickee nearby. Their shadows dance in light cast by campfires. On other chickees, preparations are made for the Green Corn Dance that will be held that fall. They are in a restored, ancient Seminole village in a generic-undeveloped wilderness of southeast Florida, its perimeter patrolled by armed women on horseback.

  Rapid. Explicit. Distinct. That’s how the images appeared, that’s how he describes them, the scenes he saw on Europa assaulting him like a runaway freight train hurtling at full speed on a collision course with grievous harm. Or worse. There was nothing to hold on to. The images were there, and then they were gone. The culprit is a man, mid-twenties, blond ponytail, buck teeth: Jan van Keet. At first Andrew was in a place he didn’t recognize, looking at an ornate punch bowl filled with diamonds. Then he was watching van Keet raping his momma.

  Andrew tells the story, feeling as if he’s in a trance. When he momentarily stops to catch his breath, Sarah and Marcus immediately quarrel, and their disagreements quickly become acrid.

  Sarah says, “It’s the future—”

  “That,” Marcus says, rising and then stomping around on their chickee, “is impossible!”

  “Are you saying that it’s impossible to see the future?” says Sarah, who also gets to her feet.

  Marcus says, “Extra-terrestrial light cannot display a scene like a video camera.”

  “Maybe not in ordinary reality,” Sarah says, taking a menacing step toward Marcus. “But Andrew wasn’t in ordinary reality.”

  “Good grief,” Marcus says. “The equations of general relativity—”

  “Stop!” says Andrew. “It has to be the future because it hasn’t happened yet. I met this man, van Keet, three weeks ago. He’s a friend of my friend Billie Bower.”

  Marcus says, “It could have been an optical illusion, a dream.”

  “It wasn’t murky or vague or nuanced like a dream,” Andrew says.

  “I remember Billie,” Sarah says. “A Seminole, a big boy.”

  “Billie and van Keet met me at momma’s condo on their way to a hunting trip,” Andrew says. “They invited me along. So I took momma’s Glock, the one that belonged to her father. We had a good time. Billie was working for van Keet. Van Keet
gave me a job.”

  Sarah offers Andrew tea, but he declines. She sits next to him on the floor of the chickee.

  “Is van Keet going to do this? Because if he is, I’ll kill him now,” Andrew says.

  Sarah’s chickee, the entire compound glows in purple light. The women on the other chickees stop talking, stop what they’re doing, stare at Sarah, Marcus, and Andrew.

  Eagle beats his mighty wings, sending currents of cool air that envelop Andrew.

  When the purple light fades, Marcus says, “Although we can’t see the future, we can predict it. Everything is based on probabilities. But most of the time, when the laws of physics are applied, the probability of predicting what will happen is so close to 100% that we have no hesitation to base a prediction on the result of cause and effect. Do you remember Newton’s second and third laws of motion?”

  “Not really,” says Andrew.

  “It’s like this,” Marcus says. “If you hit a baseball with a baseball bat, you can determine its acceleration. And if you know the rate of acceleration, you can find the amount of force used to hit the ball. This is because you know the mass of the ball. You following this?”

  “No,” says Andrew.

  “It’s poppycock,” Sarah says. She giggles.

  Marcus ignores her. “Once I know the variables, using differential equations I can calculate in any given moment where the ball will be in the next moment; I’ll see where the ball will be in the future.”

  “I wouldn’t recognize a differential equation if I saw one,” Andrew says.

  “If you want to lead an examined life, you have to understand reality. And to do that—”

  “Marcus!” Sarah says. “Cut the calculus lecture.” She says to Andrew, “All you need to know is that your great-grandpapa Bolëk saw the future and so have other shamans over the millennia, and he told me about it. And they couldn’t change the future.”