Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  ‘She’s…’ Alex tried to find the right words. ‘In an altered state of consciousness,’ he said. ‘Thinking so hard, so lost in thought, she’s lost all awareness of her surroundings or even of herself. I’ve seen it before – sometimes it only lasts for a few seconds. But while it does last, you could shout in her face, grab her, even shake her, and she would have no idea that you are there.’

  ‘Like – a seizure?’ There was deep concern in Min’s voice, now. ‘Should we be calling for medics?’

  ‘No,’ Alex said, with a reassuring little grin. ‘This is just what happens when her mind has kicked into gears beyond any normal human functioning. She is in wave space, Min. Like a ship in a superlight bubble, isolated from physical reality. She is visualising the cosmos, experiencing it, in ways beyond our understanding.’ They arrived at the engineering deck as he spoke, and walked through the pressure airlock into Mid Hall.

  Commander Onwudiwe was apparently on the alert, coming hurrying to meet them like a polite but determined guard dog.

  ‘You mustn’t disturb her!’ he said. ‘I don’t care what cadet rules say – there has to be some leeway for genius like hers, and right now she’s flying!’

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Alex said, with a smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of disturbing her – and I doubt if anything short of a stun grenade would do that, anyway. But I have seen this before, I know how tired and emotional she will be when she comes out of it, and I am just going to sit there quietly, ready to take care of her. All right?’ As the engineer still looked a little dubious, Alex offered, ‘ You can bring us some tea.’

  It amused him, as they made their way through the gantries, to see that the engineer had posted a rating at one of the companionways to prevent anyone getting any closer to Kate than that. The rating, of course, stood aside for the captain and skipper, venturing no more than a ‘morning’.

  As they approached the work station, it became apparent why Lt Transon had found the cadet’s behaviour so disturbing. She looked as if she was in some kind of hallucinatory trance, the odd, disjointed little movements of her hands apparently involuntary. The first reaction of most people, Alex knew, finding somebody like that, would be to call for a medic.

  Alex, having looked thoughtfully at her, moved to sit on the steps at the top of the companionway.

  ‘You needn’t stay.’ Min sat down next to Alex, talking to the Lt who’d trailed after them as if unsure what else to do. ‘Log this as ‘excused classes.’

  ‘Thank you, skipper,’ the Lt was grateful, both to have the problem taken out of his hands and to be told how to record it. So he took himself off, rather pointedly ignoring the engineer who was coming the other way with a fistful of mugs.

  ‘Those must be some pretty big thoughts,’ Min observed, with a glance over her shoulder to where the cadet could be half-seen, still staring ecstatically and gesturing in the air. ‘You know, I always thought that kind of ‘genius in rapture’ thing only happened in movies.’ She said.

  ‘It’s rare,’ Alex said. ‘They tell me it can happen both to artists, and to mathematicians – an inspired, transcendent state, intuitive, visionary – if she is thinking at all, in any terms we understand, she is thinking in equations. But I doubt she’s even doing that – she’s just seeing, experiencing, understanding patterns, patterns of such extraordinary complexity that it’s quite possible nobody else has ever visualised or understood them. She will want, very much, to tell us about it when she comes out of that, but don’t be surprised if she appears completely incoherent, trying to put things into words, or even into math, that there are no words or terms adequate to describe. She may either be very excited, or exhausted, or both.’

  He took the mug of tea Janus Onwudiwe was offering, and smiled thanks. ‘The first time I saw her do this,’ he said, ‘was when I asked her to help us find a lifepod which had fired off into Ridge space. Normal search patterns couldn’t find it, two people on it and we knew that they were running out of time. So I asked Kate – she was a civilian at the time, sixteen years old, with us to install and trial the Naos system. I asked if she could use her understanding of wave space to narrow down a search area, and within a few minutes of focussing on charts she was doing this…’ he gestured with his hands, ‘and lost to the universe for about twenty minutes. And when she came out of it she put a pen on the chart, ping, and told us there, right there. I never did understand how she worked it out and I doubt I ever will, but they were right where she said they would be.’ He smiled. ‘With half an hour of life support left when we got to them.’

  ‘The Jolly Roger rescue,’ Min said, and Janus nodded too to show that he had heard about it. And what spacer hadn’t? The odds of the Jolly Roger’s being rescued had been calculated at 3.5 million to one. Even now, there were many people who didn’t believe that a teenage mathematician had told them where to look, preferring to believe instead that they had undisclosed, possibly even alien technology.

  ‘She came down here just after six,’ Janus told them. ‘I hadn’t been here long myself, just popped in for a cuppa.’

  That was a lie. He had in fact been in engineering since about two in the morning, sleeping in a watch chair on the control deck. This was a habit even the tolerant Min and her Exec tried to discourage, asking that Janus at least try to sleep in his quarters in the wardroom.

  ‘She said, ‘Got an idea!’ as she went by,’ the engineer said. ‘I sent a rigger over with some tea a few minutes later and he came back saying she’d gone ‘all peculiar’ so I went to see and found her like…’ he glanced over at the workstation, and there was an awed look on his face. ‘I knew what it was. They told me it happens sometimes but I knew anyway, you can see it, feel it, her mind is just…’ he gestured helplessly. ‘Flying! And I wasn’t,’ he added, with a return to an obstinate note, ‘going to let anyone disturb her. She wants to be an officer-engineer, yes, of course, and that’s great, and you have to respect the commitment to doing the whole cadet thing, however much of a daft waste of her time so much of it is. But when it comes to this, a moment of pure inspiration, it would be criminal to drag her out of it for bloody cadet parade, and breakfast!’ He looked challengingly from one to the other, ‘And you’re not going to tell me, are you, that a serving officer can’t be allowed to switch off from their duties and responsibilities like this?’

  ‘No,’ Min said, as Alex looked to her for a response to that. ‘No – it’s unusual, of course. But I don’t know many skippers who’d reject her as an engineer on the basis that she may occasionally need some time out for inspired transcendent thinking. Me, I’d just have a contingency plan, a relief officer taking over.’

  Alex smiled agreement.

  They were there for another forty minutes or so, chatting companionably amongst themselves, before a voice exclaimed behind them, ‘Garrrch!’

  As they turned their heads, they saw that Kate had drawn a symbol on a screen in front of her. It looked mathematical – the sideways 8 of infinity, with an asterisk-type star at the point where the lines crossed. It looked like quite a simple thing to have needed such intensity of thought to produce, but Kate herself was gazing at it with awe now that she had got it down.

  ‘What is that?’ Janus was wondering aloud, rather than asking her, but his voice seemed to break the spell which held her, bringing Kate back to a sense of her surroundings.

  ‘It’s…’ she started, ‘it doesn’t have a name, it’s everything, the pulse – pulsar, pulsid? Pulseric, maybe.’ She was starting to laugh. ‘We can call it Fred!’ she said. ‘Fred the cosmologic determinator!’ She was looking at them, eyes sparkling, and focussed on Alex. ‘I’ve got it!’ she declared, triumphant.

  Over the course of the next eight minutes they learned that her idea had something to do with her observations of the detonation of the Ignite missile. Also, at various points, that the doughnut was completely inverted, that they had the dimensional map all wrong, that D9 was zer
o, that D17 was infinite and she could prove it, that the Petrasky Curve was a great steaming highway, that someone called Jocastus was an idiot and that the Song had been there the whole time.

  ‘Are you telling me…’ Janus Onwudiwe was the only one of them making any kind of sense of this, incredulity rising in him, ‘Are you telling me that you know why cores sing to one another?’

  Kate looked at him for a moment, gave several rapid nods and choked back sudden tears.

  ‘I saw it!’ she gulped. ‘I saw it… and it’s beautiful!’

  ‘Oh my God.’ The mystery of why mix cores resonated into synch when they were hooked into pairs had been frustrating scientists since before the first starship had been launched from Chartsey, and had continued to do so ever since. There had, indeed, been lengthy debate over whether it was right to build the first superlight ship at all, given that it was an observed but not understood phenomenon. The debate had been cut short after forty years or so by investors declaring that if they waited till they understood what they were doing they would never get around to doing it at all. So the ship had been launched, and every starship since had had mix cores hooked into pairs with telemetry enabling them to synchronise. And still, two thousand years later, nobody knew how or why they did it.

  Until today, when Katrin Naos had looked into the cosmos and seen it in a way that no-one else ever had.

  ‘My God!’ Janus cried out, and in his jubilation, caught hold of Kate as she jumped up, too, the two of them jigging about in uncontainable excitement. ‘My God!’ Janus yelled, and Kate gave a wild cry of victory, an eagle-scream which modulated into riotous laughter.

  ‘All right.’ Alex took charge, kindly but firmly, getting Kate back into her chair and giving Min a significant look. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘you might take Mr Onwudiwe for a quiet cup of tea…’

  Min did as he asked, leading the engineer away with no regard for his protests that he had to ask Kate, he had to know.

  ‘Three deep breaths,’ Alex instructed, and Kate obeyed, focussing her attention on him and steadying herself. The moment the third breath was exhaled, though, she was talking again. And now, she was talking math, finding words inadequate, speaking in equations, mathematical expressions, describing multi-dimensional geometry and transitional energies. Alex recognised perhaps a quarter of it and had no idea, really, what she was talking about. But he sat there looking attentive, waiting patiently, knowing that she had to get this out of herself or burst.

  After thirty minutes or so, she drew more of a breath than was needed to keep herself talking, appealing to Alex, ‘So you see?’

  ‘No,’ Alex admitted, and really felt for her in that moment as he saw her disappointment. How lonely it must be, at times like this, to realise you were the only person who understood something that was so important to you. ‘But that doesn’t matter,’ Alex said. ‘You see it – and others will, eventually.’

  That made her smile, but she was becoming aware, then, that he was there, in engineering – something she’d accepted without thought or question till then, and only now occurred to her that he must have been there waiting for her to come out of her Think.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and with that, it occurred to her also to look at the time. ‘Oh!’ a shocked exclamation. ‘Have I missed parade?’

  Alex made a little choking sound. ‘Oh,’ he said, deadpan, ‘I think we will excuse you this time.’ And as he still looked a little uncertain, he smiled. ‘No trouble,’ he promised. ‘But you are, please, to follow my orders, Cadet.’

  ‘Sir,’ she said, with an answering grin, ‘yes, sir!’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Go back to quarters, take a long shower, relaxation exercises – be the tree. Then go have breakfast. No rushing. Chew properly. Then, and only then, you can go to your classroom – no classes today, use it as your study – and make a start on writing down what you mean by ‘Fred, the cosmologic determinator’.’ He indicated the symbol on her screen and she grinned.

  ‘Sir, yes, sir!’ She said, and then, a heartfelt, ‘Thank you!’ Then she was on her feet, snapping a salute, ‘Going to be the tree now, sir!’

  She flew off, still so high on the endorphins of discovery that she was quite unaware that she was running.

  ‘The tree?’ Min queried, having been on her way back and close enough to hear this strange assurance from the cadet.

  ‘Heron joke,’ Alex told her. ‘Our medic teaches a centering visualisation where you imagine yourself as a tree, firmly anchored, steady and strong. ‘Be the tree’ is a joke, but in fact it’s very helpful. Anyway, she’ll be fine now – she’s going to have breakfast and work in the classroom, all right?’

  ‘Good,’ Min agreed. ‘And speaking of breakfast, we hadn’t finished ours…’

  It had been cleared away long ago, but a rigger brought them fresh drinks, neither of them really wanting more food. Min, Alex realised, just wanted to sit there for a few minutes with him and process what had happened.

  ‘Did that… did what I think just happened there, actually happen?’ She asked him. ‘Did one of the greatest mysteries in science just get solved, right here, this morning, on my ship?’

  ‘Very probably, yes,’ said Alex. ‘But I wouldn’t get too worked up about it, Min.’ As she stared at him, he grinned. ‘It will be years,’ he predicted, ‘before anybody else understands it. And generations, perhaps, before there’s any kind of consensus on whether she is right or not. My money would be that she is, purely on the basis of my belief that she is one of the truly great minds. But only history, as they say, can make that judgement. Others have been the great minds of their age only to fizzle into obscurity as their ideas are superseded.’

  ‘But… right here, today?’ Min said. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Not just like that,’ Alex replied. ‘Kate Naos came aboard the Heron, oh, fifteen months ago, now, having had her first inkling of this idea a good four or five months before that. That was why she was sent out to the Heron, because the Second and the Academy recognised that she was onto something so significant it warranted ditching all the normal rules to send her out to us. She has been thinking about it and working on it ever since, on the Heron, and then here. So that’s a good couple of years of thinking, and Kate, I am sure, is thinking about this all the time, regardless of what else she might be doing. And as with any discovery, there’ll be some prompt, some little thing that triggers a sudden leap in understanding.’

  ‘Yes – they say the discovery of superlight fuel,’ Min said, ‘the theoretical discovery – was made because Terez was sitting in his garden looking at the pattern on a snail’s shell. Never quite understood why that was significant, and frankly never believed it, either – seems like the kind of story you make up for the media, to me. But I do get what you mean. And from what Kate said – from the very little of what she said that I could understand – I gathered that there was something about the Ignite detonation which put her on the track?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Alex said. ‘I know she was very excited by it at the time – but then, everyone was. Anyway, yes, it seems that a new cosmological theorem was born on the Assegai this morning. And you should take some credit for that, too.’

  ‘Me?’ She was astounded.

  ‘Genius does not work in isolation – at least, Kate certainly doesn’t.’ Alex pointed out. ‘She could have any ivory tower of her choosing, every university in the League would give her any facility and funding she wants, making no demands on her for teaching or publishing or anything, just give her a lab and a research grant and leave her to do what she likes. She is, after all, the mathematician who solved the Petrasky Curve – itself one of the longest standing conundrums in wave space physics – when she was ten years old. But Kate has chosen to train as an officer-engineer, which is no kind of whim, really isn’t. In order to do her best thinking she needs to be around engines, she needs straightforward practical tasks, and she needs to be around people, both to bounce ideas off and to
keep her centred in normality. Many people find a cadet of such extraordinary ability difficult to cope with. And her situation, I understand, had become all but untenable at the Academy. But you took her in, Min, when they asked if she could come to you, with everything else that you had going on, you said yes, accepted her, made provision for her, saw to it that she had everything she needed to succeed in her cadet training and give full attention to her research. You, and everyone here who’s made her feel welcome and safe, you’ve enabled that creative thinking, culminating in her insight, this morning. And that combination of nurture, environment, and just the right stimulus in the Ignite detonation – who knows if that would have come together, otherwise?’

  ‘That,’ said Min, ‘is an awesome thought. And terrible, too. How many great discoveries, I wonder, have not been made because people weren’t in the right circumstances at the right time?’

  ‘Or because some idiot interrupted them right when they were on the verge of a breakthrough,’ Alex agreed. ‘It’s a chancy thing. But a great privilege to witness, and to be even a small part of.’ He raised his coffee cup to clink against hers. ‘To Fred,’ he said, ‘The cosmologic determinator.’

  ‘To Fred,’ Min said, and sipped, though she was looking uncertain as she put down her mug. ‘She isn’t really going to call it that, is she?’

  ‘No, that’s a joke,’ Alex assured her. ‘I’m sure she’ll come up with a suitably academic name.’

  He was right – by the end of the day, the symbol she’d drawn was identified in her notes as Pulsus – indicating, as far as anyone could make out, her theorem that the entire cosmos was a pulse, like the beat of a heart, but a pulse which was at one and the same time a wave form and a point of singularity. Janus, struggling to understand, did ask her how long each ‘pulse’ was, only to get a bewildered look and the answer, ‘Infinite, obviously!’

  It would, indeed, be years before even the League’s top wave space physicists got to grips with the Pulsus Theorem.