Research is fascinating. But done by someone else, it’s also a very tedious process. My attention wandered the room, its materials, alien no more than a second.
Only the lone cube, at the center of the room, rising from the floor, with incense burning on its surface, refused to yield its secret immediately.
What is inside?
The mere thought brought me in. There was no light, and yet I could sense the presence of walls, set at wild angles. They didn’t reflect in any way the outer shape of this place.
But I didn’t have to wonder about its function. A single tone played, its echo growing into a continuous, complex chord. And from that, pressure waves of sound converted to electromagnetic energy, accessed as needed by the different devices of the house.
I watched Korbous for hours, trying to unravel a mystery that would explain my own, fascinated by the way knowledge kept popping into my head about this different time period. This new path of time.
I wonder if it wasn’t then that I started to appreciate what I had become.
“Your wife and I missed you at lunch. I guess you missed lunch altogether, didn’t you?”
We both jumped, one of us real, the other an immaterial presence still learning to control its bodiless movements.
The voice emanated from the walls. Anis turned slightly toward a curve in the wall. Sound came from there, and a face was appearing, fuzzy, and slightly out of synch with the voice. I stepped inside. And saw that the inside of the wall was hollow, but with wood and more complex material built into a complex maze that led to different, smaller chimes. The walls, powered by a central polyhedron.
Wavecatchers.
Sound programmed, or filtered, I’m not sure, what came in and out. Machinery changed the nature of the waves. Sound waves were turned into electromagnetic waves and traveled through a relay as light, carrying the two phones’ signatures.
Where does the light go . . . ?
The speed of a thought. Amazing, isn’t it? I think I will like experimenting with that. . . . And how we can sense without touch or sight, solids that we can stand upon or pass through . . . but that’s . . . well, that’s not my story, is it?
“Nisea asked me to check on you. She had to go back to the Academia, but as soon as she dispatches her students, she’ll come and feed you.” The voice wasn’t out of synch anymore; a dimple added humor to its warmth. “I thought I should warn you!”
This time, my questing thoughts had tethered me to a woman named Myrib. Myrib Zrirey, her full name was.
I walked away from her, curious again.
Her room, unlike the scientist’s, was full of colors and clutter. Only the same bare polyhedron at the center reminded me of Anis’.
Differences and underlying similarities caught my attention.
Here, there was a roof, but small colonnades held it at least ten centimeters above the end of the walls. It was larger than the room itself; the corners caved in, slightly. Floating closer, I saw smaller water balls used as chimes.
The work itself was beautiful to behold.
This was, I discovered, an artist’s home. There was peace and quiet. It was easy to forget what I was and wasn’t.
All afternoon, she worked on a new kind of wave field, designed to generate a lighter gravity for small objects.
Wave fields were created by combining compatible waves, each building upon the other in a feedbacklike reaction. They didn’t travel, but kept interlacing until they became impermeable to a third kind of wave that sometimes created a specific state around them.
Myrib didn’t understand the reactions, nor did she care. She understood, barely, the complex harmonies that made it possible, and while she played them in the background, she gave the result a superb, aesthetic form.
She believed that the world never had enough beauty and that by revealing some, she helped people see it everywhere.
She didn’t only paint wave field equations or symphonies, I discovered. She sculpted wavecatcher ghosts, as she called them.
That returned me to myself.
Electronic relays were scattered between houses, catching electromagnetic signals translating them into electrical impulses and storing their representations in chips not unlike those I repaired as a kid, then sending them back to wavecatchers.
Except that, from time to time, unsent waves were caught, and got past the signal recognition filters. It had happened once during Myrib’s chat with Anis.
When my thoughts brought me from his place to hers.
Most people erased those, or recalibrated or sent for a tech. Myrib unplugged a small red memory cube, no larger than a single die, from under the belly of her phone, and replaced it with a clean white one. She had asked Anis to make them specifically to catch ghosts.
She played it afterward on a sensitive plate where sound became image. On the other side of the plate, using touch and sound, she enhanced and transformed the image.
She never recognized the slightly slanted eyes in the dark thin face, made somber by its mien and framed by unruly dark hair.
I did. I had seen the face for years, in the mirror.
Memories, feelings, flooded back. Fears and grief.
And a sudden hatred for the mysterious artifact that had deprived me of mirrors forever.
The thought brought me back to Korbous’ side, but years later, as he gave a lecture in an amphitheater.
So I traveled through the ages, following my octofuss, until its mystery unraveled.
As fate, or whatever, would have it, it happened on May 4, 2103. Because of me.
By that time, EM waveforms had been mastered, mathematical music was taught in school, called mathic, and inspired no wonder anymore. Because humankind had set foot in space, with veils that caught no wind, but waves of a special kind.
But I didn’t care about the recently discovered aquantic waves, didn’t marvel at those particles that weren’t packed together, but truer to older calculations, could emit infinite warmth, on a line so thin it was almost nonexistent—the ultimate power source if created inside a wave field that could contain it, or harvested in its natural environment of interstellar space.
Wonder at that came later, with you.
Then, nothing mattered to me. At least to my disembodied self who watched, with a sinking feeling of doom, his own doppelganger.
He was an antiquarian, too. The similarity ended there. Even his voice, quieter, more sure than mine. His brown hair hadn’t grown dark, nor had it faded with maturity. Maybe he dyed it. He didn’t seem to need glasses or contact lenses, never stumbled, never seemed to say anything inappropriate. He understood science.
And he wasn’t working alone.
I couldn’t help but think he had more right to an existence than I.
“Today,” my doppelganger claimed in his adult, alien voice. “We will prove our theory.”
Around him, people applauded.
In the center of the room, my octofuss lay.
“The Saturnine Enigma has been lent to us for one day. One hour will suffice to prove, as Anis Korbous theoretically proved more than a century ago, that sound waves can be transformed into electromagnetic waves in such a way that this hyperoctahedron, if activated with adequate mathic input, can reproduce it as easily as my cat does a ball of fur.”
This elicited laughter all around. The sound of it was muffled, though.
I glanced around. The room, I discovered, was wave field-proofed. Soundproofed, light-proofed walls. Knowledge came to me again, unbidden and welcome: more and more people chose to do this, for privacy. “And, using Anis Korbous’ algorithm,” my doppelganger concluded, “let us hear his first lecture on the subject, the one he wrote, but refused to record in any other way, so that one day, that is today, Humankind might learn, literally, from the past!”
He put a complex instrument before the cube, programmed with mathic equations derived from the Korbous Formula.
Its circuitry looked familiar, but only to me since
this time line never created its close cousin: the mobile phone.
Beside it, my octofuss started to vibrate in a sickening, unforgettable way.
So this is real.
As I heard, for the second time, the long tedious lecture, the thought turned round and round in my head. This is real.
This time, my thoughts took me nowhere.
When everyone had left the room, I tried an experiment of my own.
I had, by now, enough practice with my new self to sense the object’s edges with insubstantial fingers that trace their way to each meeting point.
Softly, I asked, “Octofuss, Octofuss, tell me who isn’t real anymore. . . .”
And it answered, “Crotona!”
I froze. The cube, shrouded in its mysterious vibrations, went on, “Who are you?”
Could I change it all back?
Go back to my life—or stay in this one, whatever it was?
I stood there for a long time, until the voice died out and my chance to change it all back had passed.
I had no regret; I had made my choice. Who knew what other terrible consequences my trying to change time would create?
This time it wouldn’t be by accident, I knew what I was doing. This time, I would have been responsible.
But more than that. I had already become what I now was. Undoing it would be trying to move backward.
Moving forward is the only way in which life makes any sense.
Life, or whatever state of existence passes for it.
We are neither sitting nor standing. We are, I reflect, both answer and proof. Intangible, but no less real.
“You look at peace,” she informs me, with a ghost of a smile.
I laugh at the thought.
I have lost everything, even myself. It feels wrong to feel good about it. But . . .
“Do you realize how many answers I thought I’d never learn are now part of my life?”
“Like what? Me?”
There’s mischief now in her eyes, not the broken truth I saw when she finished her own tale of how, as one of the few “historical figures” to fall off time, she only met with questions at best, critical rejection, or adoration from every other time orphan she met. She must have felt even more adrift than I. . . .
I tease her, gently,
“You? Don’t forget, you’re not the only one anymore who heard voices.” I wink. “I was thinking of ghosts. And the time travel grandfather paradox. We’re living answers. . . .”
“Who said you were alive?”
I extend my translucent hand. Beneath the palm of hers, I still see the stars, and part of the hulk of the station the future has built. Yet, it’s flesh that I feel entwining with mine.
“You did, Joan.”
I can’t believe she is blushing.
But I no longer need to believe in order to live.
Revision Point
In the sixth century BCE, Pythagoras founded a school in Croton to study geometry, music, philosophy, as part of the same mysterious whole that is our universe. Harmonies like the octave were studied as another expression of mathematics—or the reverse. Indeed, Pythagoras held that everything was numbers given form, and that to understand them was to bridge the gap between humans and the divine.
We are told that polyhedra were just such a bridge, because they symbolized numbers, elements, and the link between them.
Legends also tell us Pythagoras was able to be at two places at once, that he managed miracles.
Legends . . . for little is known for certain about him or his school. His followers were sworn to secrecy, and the price for breaking that vow was death. Much like Socrates, his contribution to history left little trace . . . little written trace, that is.
But when his school was finally destroyed and his followers hunted down, Pythagoras had already accomplished what he believed to be the duty of a philosopher: to change the world. If not in the political field, as he would have wished, in the mathematical. We know what we remember of his work, theorems, real and unreal numbers. What we forget, we can only dream of . . . and hope that one day an archaeological discovery might add one more piece to the puzzle.
J.N.
THE EXECUTIONER’S APPRENTICE
by Kay Kenyon
WHEN the obsidian blade fell upon the king’s neck, tears streamed down Pacal’s face.
Altun Ha performed the execution himself, in full regalia. As he straightened from delivering the blow, blood droplets fell from his mask of quetzal feathers. Amid the pounding of Tunkul drums, an apprentice came forward to take custody of the blade, and others adjusted King Bahlum Kuk’s body for proper drainage into the blood reservoir.
Pacal stood with the other Temple apprentices in a steep row from the bottom stair to the summit, witnessing the king’s sacrifice, his atonement for defeat in battle against the Eastern army. From the pyramid’s summit, Pacal looked out over the tree canopy, imagining enemy warriors stomping the jungle to the ground. But they were still far away, and they were not giants. Indeed, their religion proved how small they were.
The hard sun dried Pacal’s tears—a good thing, because he didn’t want Master Altun Ha to think him weak. As the solemn odor of blood soaked the air, Pacal sucked in a deep breath. With his investiture in eight days, he would wield the black knife for the first time, sanctifying once more the people, and the city of Tikal with the immemorial ritual.
Well, actually, he would rid the populace of another violent criminal. Looking out over the thousands gathered in the plaza below, Pacal knew that many of them saw Temple sacrifice in just those terms: as societal cleansing. Knowing each citizen’s genotype did allow some purging of villainy. As Tikal’s population geneticists read the citizens’ genomes, the sequencers would search for the genetic variations associated with violence, and those with the V-gene fell to the obsidian blade. But of course, the Temple’s ceremonies meant more than mere justice.
He watched as apprentices carried Bahlum Kuk’s body through the portal of the Temple, the doorway framed by stone snake jaws, symbolizing the threshold between the Middleworld and the Underworld, over which Heaven arched. Through these three worlds the Tree of Life rose, symbolically linking the domains.
Pacal was a modern student, trained in single nucleotide polymorphism analysis. But his cultural roots went deep, and he felt their tug. The sacred blood metaphorically nourished the three worlds, bringing prosperity to all. The king’s sacrifice was especially noble since he was no criminal, but the city’s highest symbol. Blood was the purifying sacrifice, and had been for a hundred twenty-year cycles of Mayan progress. Pacal looked at his bare toes and fingers, a sum of twenty, the logical basis of Mayan numbers. The numbers of the Eastern tribe were based upon half the number of human digits—another sure sign that their culture was inferior.
Poking through the jungle canopy was the summit of a neighboring Temple—by its presence helping to sanctify the landscape, physically linking geography and ritual. In this profound moment, Pacal felt tears accumulate again, but blinked them away as Altun Ha strode past, his face beaked and feathered, pocked here and there with the king’s blood.
Pacal followed his master into the robing room, deep and cool in the pyramid recesses, where he helped Altun Ha remove the feathered cape and regalia of office.
As Altun Ha removed the quetzal mask, Pacal could see a lingering trace of ecstasy on the old man’s face. Altun Ha and Bahlum Kuk had long been friends, but the master spoke with only the slightest quaver in his voice: “He was a good king,” he said. Such was the professionalism Altun Ha could command.
“A good king,” Pacal repeated in hushed tones.
The king’s sacrifice proved that.
Nighttime was a good time for sex. So Pacal had been told by those who’d lain with women. Nighttime was the intoxicating reign of Xibalba, when the dark underworld rotated above the earth. It was also the time when thugs lurked in waiting to slit throats and steal the clothes off your corpse. So this night
, to find Pacal a woman, his friends accompanied him well armed and in a group.
They sped along the branching canals in a power boat, with his friend Chel at the helm, dodging other traffic with ease, flying the pendant of the Temple, and commandeering the lanes by right of their Order. Overhead, Jupiter lay in alignment with Chicchan’s star, a fine configuration for first sex. It was nearly the same alignment that would, in six days, smile on Pacal’s investiture. He was eager to begin his purification rituals instead of carousing with friends, but it was a tradition that no executioner be a virgin, and Pacal was one who followed tradition.
Arriving in the grotto, Chel and the others found their girlfriends, leaving Pacal with a voluptuous older woman. The night’s magic settled over him as she poured their wine. Then a slim hand snatched the cup from the woman, and Pacal turned to face a beautiful girl with hair cut evenly at chin level.
She cocked her head to dismiss the other woman, and handed Pacal the wine. “I thought you’d be taller,” she said. It was a rude thing to say, but her eyes smiled over the edge of the cup she was draining.
“I am taller when I do my duty.” He meant when he stood on the Temple stairs, but her mocking grin informed him what she interpreted as “duty.”
“I also thought you grew feathers from your face. Glad to see you don’t.” One side of her mouth curled up. “I’m Kina.”
He drank quickly, trying to think of a retort, or how to escape this arrogant girl who mocked his Order.
Laughter rose and fell in the grotto like the chatter of birds. He noted Kina’s dark beauty, and her half smile. He wondered which side of her smile was meant for him. She resolved that question, taking him by the hand, and leading him into the forest.
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