by Dan Simmons
The Piper Cheyenne droned on into midafternoon. Sal and Vanni Fucci spoke of business, confident that the civilian in the backseat would never repeat any of the conversation. Ernie had tried moving to the back bench to play cards with Bert, but Sal Empori had snapped at him, ordering him back to the seat across from Bremen. Ernie brooded, tried reading part of a sex novel, and then dozed off. Eventually Bert Cappi joined him in light sleep, dreaming that he was screwing one of the showgirls in Don Leoni’s new casino.
Bremen was tempted to doze off himself. He had raided as much of the pilot’s professional memory as he was able to find. Sal and Vanni Fucci’s conversation was dying off, replaced only by the engine sounds and occasional radio rasp as they passed from one FAA flight control center to another. But instead of going to sleep, Bremen decided to stay alive.
He glanced down and saw only clouds, but knew from the pilot’s thoughts that they were somewhere east of Springfield, Missouri. Ernie was snoring softly. Bert twitched in his sleep.
Bremen silently unbuckled his seat belt and closed his eyes for five seconds. Yes, Jerry. Yes.
He acted without further thought, moving more quickly and gracefully than he had ever managed before, rising, pivoting, sliding onto the back bench, and lifting Bert Cappi’s automatic out of the gangster’s hand in a single motion.
Then Bremen had his back pressed into the corner where the rear bulkhead met the fuselage and he was swiveling the weapon, first at the startled Bert, then at the snorting, awakening Ernie, and then at all of them as Sal Empori and Vanni Fucci both reached for their weapons.
“You do it,” said Bremen, his voice flat, “and I’ll kill everyone.”
The small aircraft was filled with shouts and curses until the pilot shouted the others down. “We’re pressurized, for fuck’s sake!” screamed Jesus Vigil. “If anybody shoots, it’s gonna be fucking bad news.”
“Put down the fucking gun, motherfucker!” screamed Vanni Fucci, his hand still only halfway toward his belt.
“Stop, you fucks! Fucking freeze!” Sal Empori shouted at Bert and Ernie. Bert’s hands had been rising as if he was going to strangle the civilian. Ernie’s right hand was already inside his silk sport coat.
For a second there was silence and no motion except for the jerky but not panicked swiveling of Bremen’s gun arm. He could hear their thoughts crashing around him like a storm-driven surf. His own heartbeat was so loud that he was afraid that he could not hear anything else. But he heard it when the pilot spoke again.
“Hey, take it easy, pal. Let’s talk about this.” Shallow dive. The pendejo won’t notice. Another three thousand feet and we won’t need the pressurization. Keep Empori and Fucci between the front and the civilian so stray shots won’t hit me or the controls. Another two thousand feet. “Just take it easy, buddy. No one’s gonna do anything to you.” Fuckin’ pendejo’s gonna tell me to land somewhere, I’ll say okay, and then the boys’ll take him out.
Bremen said nothing.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Vanni Fucci, glancing at Bert and glaring the idiot into immobility. “Don’t get fucking excited, okay? We’ll talk about this. Just put the fucking gun down so it don’t go off, okay?” His fingers moved onto the butt of the .38 in his belt.
Bert Cappi was almost strangling on his own bile, he was so angry. If this fucking civilian survived the next few seconds, he was going to personally cut the motherfucker’s balls off before he killed him.
“Just stay fucking calm!” screamed Sal Empori. “We’ll land somewhere and … Ernie, fuck! No!”
Ernie got his hand on his pistol.
Vanni Fucci cursed and pulled his own weapon. The pilot hunkered down and dived the aircraft toward thicker air.
Bert Cappi snarled something and lunged.
Jeremy Bremen began firing.
EYES
During the months of Gail’s illness, Jeremy abandons almost all mathematics except for his teaching and an investigation into the theory of chaos. The teaching keeps him sane. The research into chaos math changes forever his view of the universe.
Jeremy has heard of chaos math before Jacob Goldmann’s research data forces him to learn about it in depth, but as with most mathematicians Jeremy finds the concept of a mathematical system without formulae, predictability, or boundaries a contradiction in terms. It is messy. It is not math as he knows it. Jeremy is reassured that Henri Poincaré, the great nineteenth-century mathematician who helped stumble across chaos math while creating the study of topology, detested the idea of chaos in the realm of numbers just as much as Jeremy does today.
But Jacob Goldmann’s data leaves no choice but to follow the search for holographic wavefront analysis of the mind into the jungles of chaos math. So, after the long days of Gail’s chemotherapy and between the depressing hospital visits, Jeremy reads the few books available on the subject of chaos math and then goes on to the abstracts and papers, many of them translated from the French and German. As the winter days grow shorter and then grudgingly longer and while Gail’s illness grows relentlessly more serious, Jeremy reads the work of Abraham and Marsden, Barenblatt, Iooss, and Joseph; he studies the theories of Arun and Heinz, the biological work of Levin, the fractal work of Mandelbrot, Stewart, Peitgen, and Richter. After a long day of being with Gail, holding her hand while the medical procedures rack her body with pain and indignity, Jeremy comes home to lose himself in papers such as “Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields” by Guckenheimer and Holmes.
Slowly his understanding grows. Slowly his mastery of chaos mathematics meshes with his more standard Schrödinger wave analyses of holographic perception. Slowly Jeremy’s view of the universe changes.
He discovers that one of the birthplaces of modern chaos math is in our failure to predict weather. Even with Cray X-MP supercomputers crunching numbers at a rate of eight hundred million calculations per second, weather prediction is a flop. In half an hour the Cray X-MP can accurately predict tomorrow’s weather for all of the northern hemisphere. In a day of frenzied activity the supercomputer can manage ten days’ worth of predictions for the northern hemisphere.
But the predictions begin to stray after about four days and any prediction a week into the future tends to be pure guesswork … even for the Cray X-MP crunching variables at the rate of sixty million crunches per minute. Meteorologists, artificial-intelligence experts, and mathematicians have all been irritated by this failure. It should not be there. That same computer is able to predict the motion of the stars billions of years into the future. Why then, they ask, is weather—even with its large but definitely finite set of variables—so difficult to predict?
To find out, Jeremy must do research on Edward Lorenz and chaos.
In the early 1960s a natural mathematician turned meteorologist named Edward Lorenz began using one of the primitive computers of the day, a Royal McBee LGP-300, to plot variables discovered by B. Saltzman in the equations that “control” simple convection, the rising of hot air. Lorenz discovered three variables in Saltzman’s equation that actually worked, threw away the rest, and set his tube-and-wire Royal McBee LGP-300 humming and buzzing to solve the equations at the sedate rate of about one iteration per second. The result was …
… chaos.
From the same variables, with the same equations, using the same data, the apparently simple short-term predictions degenerated into contradictory madness.
Lorenz checked his math, ran linear stability analyses, chewed his nails, and began again.
Madness. Chaos.
Lorenz had discovered the “Lorenz attractor,” wherein the trajectories of equations cycle around two lobes in apparently random fashion. Out of Lorenz’s chaos came a very precise pattern: a sort of Poincaré section that led to Lorenz’s understanding of what he called the “butterfly effect” in weather prediction. Simply put, Lorenz’s butterfly effect says that the flapping of a single butterfly’s wings in China will produce a tiny but inevi
table change in the world’s atmosphere. That small variable of change accretes with other tiny variables until the weather is … different. Unpredictable.
Quiet chaos.
Jeremy instantly sees the import of Lorenz’s work and all the more recent chaos research in terms of Jacob’s data.
According to Jeremy’s analysis of that data, what the human mind perceives through the once-removed and distorted lens of its senses is little more than the incessant collapsing of probability waves. The universe, according to the Goldmann data, is best described as a standing wavefront made up of these churning ripples of probability chaos. The human mind—nothing more than another standing wavefront according to Jeremy’s own research, a sort of superhologram made up of millions of complete but lesser holograms—observes these phenomena, collapses the probability waves into an ordered series of events (“Wave or particle,” Jeremy had explained to Gail on the train back from Boston that time, “the observer seems to make the universe decide through the mere act of observation.…”), and goes on with its business.
Jeremy is at a loss for a paradigm for this ongoing structuring of the unstructurable until he stumbles upon an article talking about the complex mathematics that had been used to analyze the attitude of the orbit of Saturn’s moon Hyperion after the Voyager flyby. Hyperion’s orbit is Keplerian and Newtonian enough to be predicted accurately by linear mathematics now and for many decades to come. But its attitude, the directions in which its three axes point, is what might be politely described as a fucking mess.
Hyperion is tumbling and the tumbling simply cannot be predicted. Its attitude is controlled not by random influences of gravity and by Newtonian laws that could be plotted if the programmer were smart enough, the program clever enough, and the computer big enough, but by a dynamical chaos that follows a logic and illogic all its own. It is Lorenz’s butterfly effect played out in the silent vacuum of Saturn space with lumpy little Hyperion as its confused and tumbling victim.
But even in such uncharted oceans of chaos, Jeremy discovers, there can be small islands of linear reason.
Jeremy follows the Hyperion trail to the work of Andrei Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold, and Jurgen Moser. These mathematicians and dynamics experts have formulated the KAM theorem (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser, that is) to explain the existence of classical quasi-periodic motions within this hurricane of chaotic trajectories. The diagram resulting from the KAM theorem results in a disturbing plot that shows an almost organic structure of these classical and plottable trajectories existing like sheaths of wire or plastic, windings within windings, wherein resonance islands of order lay embedded within folds of dynamic chaos.
American mathematicians have given this model the name VAK, short for “Vague Attractor of Kolmogorov.” Jeremy remembers that Vak is also the name of the goddess of vibration in the Rig-Veda.
On the night Gail first enters the hospital not for tests but to stay … to stay until recovered sufficiently to return home, the doctors say, but both she and Jeremy know that there will be no real return … Jeremy sits alone in his second-floor study and gazes at the Vague Attractor of Kolmogorov.
Regular quasiperiodic trajectories winding above secondary sheathings of resonances, tertiary sheathings budding in the form of more delicate multiple resonances, chaotic trajectories lashing through the organism like tangled wires.
And Jeremy sees the model for his analysis of the holographic neurological interpretation of the set of collapsing probability waves that is the universe.
He sees the beginnings of the model for the human mind … and for the talent that he and Gail share … and for the universe that has hurt her so.
And above it all the butterfly effect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human’s life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffeted by butterfly wings that bring death in the form of a tumor … or, in Jacob’s case, in the form of a bullet to the brain.
Jeremy realizes his life’s ambition that evening, of discovering a profoundly new direction of mathematical reasoning and research—not for status or further academic honors, for those have been forgotten—but to advance the lighted circle of knowledge a little farther into the encroaching darkness. Islands of resonance within the chaotic sea.
But even in seeing the path of research he can take, he abandons it, tossing the abstracts and studies aside, wiping away the preliminary equations on his chalkboard. That night he stands at the window and stares out at nothing, weeping softly to himself, unable to stop, filled with neither anger nor despair, but with something infinitely more lethal as the emptiness enfolds him from within.
We Are the Stuffed Men
“Mr. Bremen? Mr. Bremen, can you hear me?”
Once, as a child of about eight, Bremen had dived into a friend’s swimming pool and, instead of rising to the surface, had simply and effortlessly sunk to the bottom ten feet beneath the surface. He had lain there for a moment, feeling the rough cement against his spine and watching the ceiling of light so far above. Even as he felt his lungs tiring and watched the glory of bubbles rising around him, even as he realized that he could hold his breath no longer and would have to inhale water in a few seconds, he was loath to rise to that surface, achingly reluctant to return to that suddenly alien environment of air and light and noise. So Bremen had stayed there, stubbornly resisting recall until he could resist no longer, and then he had floated slowly to that surface, savoring the last few seconds of aquatic light and muffled noise and the silver flurry of bubbles around him.
He rose slowly now, resisting the pull back to the light.
“Mr. Bremen? Can you hear me?”
Bremen could hear him. He opened his eyes, shut them quickly at the onslaught of whiteness and light, and then, wincing, peered out from between heavy eyelids.
“Mr. Bremen? I’m Lieutenant Burchill, St. Louis Police Department.”
Bremen nodded, tried to nod. His head hurt and seemed to be restrained in some way. He was in bed. White sheets. Pastel walls. The bedside trays and plastic paraphernalia of a hospital room. From his peripheral vision he could see a curtain drawn to his left, the closed doorway to his right. Another man in a gray suit stood behind the seated police lieutenant. Lieutenant Burchill was a heavyset, sallow-skinned man in his early fifties. Bremen thought that he looked a bit like Morey Amsterdam, the saggy-faced comic on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. The silent man behind him was younger, but his expression held the same occupational mixture of fatigue and cynicism.
“Mr. Bremen,” said Burchill, “can you hear me all right?”
Bremen could hear him all right, although everything still had a once-removed, underwater quality to it. And Bremen could see himself through Lieutenant Burchill’s eyes: wan and swaddled looking amid his blankets and bandages, left arm in a cast, his head wrapped in bandages, more bandages visible beneath the thin hospital gown, his eyes swollen and raccoon-ringed from draining blood, and fresh stitches visible beneath gauze on his chin and cheek. An IV dripped clear fluid into his left arm.
Bremen closed his eyes and tried to shut out Burchill’s vision.
“Mr. Bremen, tell us what happened.” The lieutenant’s voice was not gentle. Suspicion. Disbelief that this little twerp could have shot those five wise guys and landed the aircraft by himself Curiosity about what the FBI computer said about this citizen—a college math prof, for Chrissakes—and interest in the dead wife, the arson, and this clown’s connection with New Jersey’s Don Leoni and his bad boys.
Bremen cleared his throat and tried to speak. His voice was little better than a rasp. “Whermi?”
Lieutenant Burchill’s expression did not change. “What was that?”
Bremen cleared his throat again. “Where am I?”
“You’re in St. Louis General Hospital.” Burchill paused a second and added, “Missouri.”
Bremen tried to nod and regretted it. He tried to speak again wit
hout moving his jaw.
“I didn’t catch that,” said the lieutenant.
“Injuries?” repeated Bremen.
“Well, the doctor’ll be in to see you, but from what I hear, you’ve got a broken arm and some bruises. Nothing life threatening.”
The younger homicide detective, a sergeant named Kearny, was thinking, Four cracked ribs, a bullet graze over one of those ribs, a concussion, and internal stuff … this idiot is lucky to be alive.
“It’s been about eighteen hours since the crash, Mr. Bremen. Do you remember the crash?” said Burchill.
Bremen shook his head.
“Nothing about it?”
“I remember talking to the tower about the landing gear,” said Bremen. “Then the right engine started making weird noises and … and that’s all I remember.”
Burchill stared. This asshole’s probably lying, but who the hell knows? Somebody put a .45 slug right through the fuselage into the engine.
Bremen felt the pain begin to slide in like a long, slow tide that felt no hurry to recede. Even his mindtouch and the hospital neurobabble shimmered in the wake of it. “The plane crashed, then?” he said.
Burchill continued staring. “Are you a pilot, Mr. Bremen?”
Bremen shook his head again and almost threw up from the pain.