I stopped so fast I fell uphill, arms disappearing in powder. I swam my way to kneeling.
Like with the spruce on Shangri-La, a well with no snow surrounded this trunk, and from it a thin trail led away toward City Center. I peered up and spied a brown-gray lump in its high branches.
I rolled over and looked down Gold Bowl, gulping air. I pictured Dad and closed my eyes to clarify his image. I rose and started gliding away, forcing myself not to look back. I longed to straightline and reach for speed, but I forced myself to make precise turns.
I popped out onto the road leading to Gold Bowl’s base, joining people who’d funneled down from other runs. At the road’s end, we clogged into the lift’s full maze, a twenty-minute wait. Powder days on Saturdays were the kiss of death because every idiot from Denver + every gung-ho local + regular tourists = gridlock. I maneuvered through bodies to the singles line. Normally, I’d grumble the whole time I waited in lines. This time, I hardly noticed.
My head spun with speculation about that spruce. That must have been why Súmáí was at the cabin so much. How many Upward Dog spruces were there? Was there a grid connecting the whole mountain? How about all of Crystal Village? How about Colorado? Or the planet, maybe, if other species of trees could work? Maybe they just needed to be Upward Dog–shaped with tear stains. What happened where forests were clear-cut, like the Amazon? I couldn’t get my head around the scope of it all. I glanced at the few hundred bodies surrounding me. If they suspected what I was thinking, I’d be committed to an asylum.
Before I knew it, I’d merged with three skiers and headed into the trough to load the chair. We sat down and took off. The dorks I sat with brought down the safety bar without warning, banging the back of my helmet.
“Sorry,” a guy said.
It jolted me from my trance, and I glanced back and saw the lift’s line bulging out of the maze. No coming back here today.
“So where are you from?” A woman sat beside me. Her feet rested primly on the safety bar’s footrest, her white mittens in prayer position on the bar.
Chatters. Great. “Here,” I said.
“That must be wonderful,” she said.
I shrugged. A cigarette would help sort my thoughts.
“What do you do?” she said.
“Do?”
“Do you work?” she said,
“I’m in school.” Were all humans programmed to ask the same dumb questions?
“High school?” said a guy beside the woman. I could see only his rental skis. According to their sticker, his name was Ken.
“Uh-huh.” The way I said it was a conversation stopper, and the woman turned away from me to address the guys. I scanned the bowl for more Upward Dog spruce. If one was close to Emerald West, then Súmáí wouldn’t have had far to drag the food he’d taken from there. What was he up to anyway?
Ahead and to our chairlift’s right, two ski patrol knelt on either side of a guy below an X made from skis stuck in the snow. Like SOS, it was the universal skiing sign for help.
The injured skier sat, one leg out straight and shaking his head. He’d probably torn his knee ligaments, the most common injury on powder days. The chair neared, and the ski patrolmen became Crispy and Wash. Wash saw me out of the corner of his eye, gave a thumbs-up, and said, “See you at dinner.”
The hurt guy looked at him.
Wash chin-pointed toward me. “Our kid.”
Crispy waved.
The woman, Ken, and the guy at the chair’s end eyed me.
I faced the view until they looked away. I squinted, trying to make out tiny waves, little M-theory strings, something revealing in the air that stretched across the bowl. The word “Nobel” grabbed my attention. The woman’s white mitten waved like she was embarrassed.
“Honestly, Karen.” Ken pronounced her name funny, like he was from the South, but he didn’t have an accent. “A particle physicist working with human cells? This is groundbreaking work. Don’t give up on it.”
“The possibilities created by entanglement are mind-boggling,” the guy on the end said.
Karen clapped her mittens together twice gently. “Yes, well, some would say I’m a crackpot, applying spooky action to humans.”
Before I knew it, I said, “You’re working with spooky action?”
Their helmeted heads turned to me, Ken leaning forward to see me around Karen. She pressed back to view me fully. “Yes. You’re familiar with quantum theory?”
I wanted to shout, Hell yes! Instead, I said, “Do you think entanglement could stretch across the multiverse?”
Through Karen’s yellow-lensed goggles, I saw her assess me. “My research has been with people within our own universe.”
I tried to sound nonchalant. “And?”
“And I don’t have conclusive proof yet.”
“But something makes you keep researching?”
Karen exchanged glances with the two guys. “Yes.”
I blew out my breath and sat back.
“You have experience with this?” Ken said, a taunt in his words.
I wanted to slug him, but I said to Karen, “Have you proven whatever you’re doing mathematically?”
“We’re close.”
“Where do you work?” I said.
“MIT.”
My body’s temperature shot up fifty degrees as I remembered that vision of Mom and me on the recreation path. That me had been headed to MIT. “Is any of your research online? Are any of your papers published?”
“There was one in Science Daily.”
“When?”
“About a year ago.”
“Is it recorded?”
“Recorded?”
“Like, I could listen to it?”
“No.” Karen tilted her head. “How about you give me your email and I’ll send you the link?”
I turned to her. She was tiny, and her eyes crinkled at the outside corners like rays. “You’d do that?” I said.
“Sure.”
I spelled out my email, careful to get the letters right.
“Sovern? That’s your name?”
I nodded.
“That’s a great name. Mine’s Cairn.” She spelled it out. “Like the rock markers on a hiking trail.” We neared the lift’s summit.
“My mom named me,” I said.
“My dad,” Cairn said.
The lift grew loud as we entered the lifthouse. I’m not sure what made me do it, but I leaned in. “Will you send me your equation?”
As I rose and slid away, Cairn’s mouth hung open. She concentrated on navigating from the chair and stopped by using her poles, gangly as a fawn learning to walk. Ken and the other guy had moved about ten feet away, and they stood there impatient to get moving. Cairn gathered her composure and eyed me. “It’s very advanced math.”
“I’ll keep it secret. I just want to see it.”
“You’re asking to see my life’s work.”
I let out a huge sigh. “My mom—” I looked away. “What are the chances of me ending up on that chairlift with you, now of all times?” When I looked back, Cairn was scrutinizing me through those goggles.
“Now is important?” she asked.
“Math is … ” How could I express that I needed for math to rule the world? That if math ruled the world, maybe fate didn’t? “Math is … well … it won’t leave me alone. I don’t know all the fancy terms advanced people in colleges use, but I … I just understand it. For me, math has no words. It just makes the world make sense. And I have experience with entanglement.”
“Experience?”
“Personal experience.”
“You’ve—”
“I’m not crazy!”
She pursed her lips and studied me for what felt like forever. “Okay,” she said. “We’re stuck, and I gues
s it couldn’t hurt.” She glanced over her shoulder, but Ken and the other guy were long gone. “Nice to meet you, Sovern.”
Cairn poled away, the backs of her skis fanning into a beginner’s wedge as she headed down Sunset Ridge. She’d come up from the bottom of Gold Bowl, all expert terrain, and since she’d survived that, Cairn = one tough lady + willing to take risks. And no doubt I was a risk.
Bookmark:
The Arrow of Time
Arthur Eddington
In our world, an arm never un-breaks.
A body never un-ages. Events always move forward—an “asymmetry”—though the mathematical laws of physics work equally
well going forward or backward in time.
28
I gave up on snowboarding in the crowds and started toward the cabin. Big John skated across the teeming area, carrying an armful of red bamboo poles, headed, no doubt, to mark hazards.
“Congratulations, Sov!” he called.
I held up my liberated arm and waved, but my head was grappling with the idea of scientists like Cairn existing, researching human applications of quantum theory. Testing them. Maybe what I had experienced wouldn’t be considered so insane after all.
In the cabin, I hung my parka by the door and settled, snow pants rustling, on the couch. I stared at the wadded scrap of paper with Shelley’s number. You could change the world. I rested my elbows on my knees and scrubbed my face with my hands. My phone pinged with a text. Gage: TWO FITTED AGAIN? MOVE? I re-read it: TWO FISTED AGAIN? MOVIE?
I was still so pissed that he’d talked to Dad, but it was a sweet thing to do, and Dad had almost seemed to want me to date him. I did enjoy Star Trek, and it would distract my mind. Maybe it would keep me from going to that spruce on Always.
K, I texted back. TIME?
SHE RESPONDS! GONDOLA BASE. SEVEN.
K.
I leaned back, and my memory saw Cairn assessing me. Shelley’s number on the table seemed to whisper You could change the world. I picked it up, walked to the kitchen, and dropped it in the trash can at the end of the counter. But I made it only three steps before I turned back and retrieved it. I went to the bedroom and stowed it in my wooden box.
I paced the bedroom’s short length, tugging out my amulet bag to rub its beaded surface. Was Súmáí’s quill from the same porcupine? Did that animal travel through universes, or exist in them all at once? I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time, trying to make sense of it all.
I blew out my breath, shuffled to the kitchen, and grabbed a bag of chips. I thought of Gage insisting on carrying my grocery bag with these chips. He’d been so pale.
I settled at the table, powered up my laptop, and pinched open the bag. I had a few emails from teachers about assignments. One had arrived from Cairn. Already. I opened it.
Hi Sovern,
It was a pleasure to meet you today. Here is the link to the article in Science Daily. Also, attached is the mathematical formulation that’s been stumping us. Though I know you said you don’t understand fancy terms, all its parts are explained in the introductory material. I’d love to know what you think! And please remember that this work is confidential.
All best,
Cairn Hart
After five reads to get the words right, I figured out that the Science Daily article talked about her risky yet ground-breaking research into spooky action using particles taken from one woman’s cell. In Bio, I’d learned that there were countless particles in a cell, but I’d never really considered that fact beyond having to memorize it for a test. Cairn had placed these particles on the east and west coasts of the continent—one at MIT in Boston, and one at Stanford in California. When a particle in Boston was shot with polarized light, the angle and slant of the wave it emitted was measured by a laser. Meanwhile, at the exact same instant, the particle at Stanford set off a wave that was its exact opposite. Cairn hadn’t been able to reproduce the results from her experiment, and now she was searching for mathematical proof.
I opened the attachment, and Cairn’s equation filled my screen. I’d never seen a problem this advanced, and it took me a long time to read through the introduction before I even got to the equation. There’s this place I get with math, where an equation’s patterns take over and the numbers become things beyond their names. It’s heavenly.
After about an hour, I sensed a glitch in the equation’s symmetry. I imagined smoothing the glitch, reasoned out how to express that in numbers, and emailed Cairn back, suggesting an equation derived from hers. I knew it wasn’t the solution, and that I could be totally wrong, but what could it hurt? I’d never see her again anyway.
I powered off my computer, Cairn’s research whirling in my head. She was a real person who’d actually succeeded in having two particles show connection across space and time. Could my traveling to Mom in different universes stem from spooky action? Could Súmáí showing up in my universe be due to entanglement?
I’d sensed and seen in Cairn’s math that her equation’s flaw lay in trying to deal only with the present. I was coming to realize that past, present, and future might all exist at once, while also reaching across universes. That it was all a whirling entity. I thought of the equations we’d last done in Calculus that had added another dimension. My equation would incorporate dimension on dimension on dimension.
A true genius. Perhaps I could change the world. First though, I needed answers.
Before I realized I was doing it, I’d tugged on my parka. Who’d I been kidding? I’d kept my snow pants on for a reason. I’d always been headed to that new Upward Dog spruce.
I didn’t retrace my weaving snowboard track. Instead, I snowshoed the most direct route on Always till I needed to veer left.
The spruce towered before me. Afternoon sun lit a brown-gray lump in its upper branches. My pulse, already hammering from snowshoeing, amplified. I moved to the trunk. Sure enough, beneath the new snow, the area leading into its well was tamped down. Súmáí, no doubt. How long had he been doing this? I thought of his warning to me. The way he’d held up his two fingers and gestured an explosion. If spooky action could stretch between two people, maybe he’d started all this. Maybe I’d been drawn to that first spruce on the anniversary of Mom’s death by something he’d done. I thought back to that snow whirlwind ejecting me straight right, as if I’d been on a recoiling rubber band.
I took a wide breath and scanned the powder field, my tracks from earlier the only human sign. I turned downhill and could see part of the chairlift, the confetti bodies trailing out of the maze. Answers. I needed answers.
Peering at the porcupine, I said, “I need to find Súmáí,” and prayed I’d end up with the Súmáí I knew. I unzipped my parka, drew out my amulet bag, and gripped it. I pressed my other palm to the spruce.
Loud birds. Splash of Indian paintbrush. Singeing sunlight.
Once I’d adjusted to it being summer, Gold Bowl appeared the same as always. Except, no. There weren’t any signs or ropes marking the runs on its distant, treeless boundary. Instead, it was covered with majestic old spruce. The glades and open areas Crystal Mountain was so famous for were a fraction of the size they were in my world. I looked left, where all my life one of the charred, swirling trunks that jabbed up throughout the bowls had stood. A huge living spruce stood there now. I turned toward Gold Bowl’s base and gasped.
Tepees. Maybe fifteen.
Sorry, Lindholm, I thought. Tepees, not wickiups.
A creek, icebound and silent in my world, flowed just beyond the chair’s maze, and nobody paid it any attention. Here, it determined the tepees’ location like a vein.
“Súmáí?”
When I’d pressed my palm to a spruce before, whoever I’d been thinking of had appeared.
“Súmáí!”
Well, I’d wait. I slid my palm down the bark and sat. With two working a
rms now, I was able to unstrap my snowshoes. I crossed my legs, tugged off my hat, and nudged down my parka till it hung around the forearm of my hand pressed against the spruce.
I’d never had time to really take in the other universes I’d visited. It occurred to me that my visits had been in spring, summer, and fall, but never in snow. Had I done that? Then I noticed the quiet. On Crystal Mountain during the day, a constant hum of lifts, snowmobiles, and people skiing or boarding enveloped it. Here, it sounded like evenings or summers at the cabin. Except even stiller. I peered up, and the clouds seemed the same. After a minute, I realized there was no plane noise falling from the sky. No tire hum rising from asphalt down the valley.
Where was Súmáí? This world seemed like his, but maybe it was another. Believe. I had to believe. I imagined his face from the night he’d helped Dad and me, its worried expression.
Why hadn’t Súmáí been back since then? A crow landed in a tree nearby and squawked. I leaned my head against the spruce’s trunk. At least the sun was warm.
Snuffling. A mewlish bark. I bolted straight. Had I been dreaming? I looked around, felt my palm against the spruce, and got my bearings. That bark came again on my left. I knew that sound: a bear cub.
I scrambled to my feet and orbited to the spruce’s far side, trying to make myself narrow, just as a mother bear appeared through the pines. She grunted and lifted her nose to the air. Bears, I knew, had terrible sight but incredible noses. Sure enough, she caught my scent and sniffed once, twice. My Gore-Tex clothes and my body, filled with brownies and chips, must have smelled foreign. She focused on my spruce. She lowered her head and rocked from foot to foot, mouth slightly open, fangs bared.
Sorry, Dad, I thought, and guilt almost collapsed me to my knees.
The bear circled—ten yards out—to gain a better view. Her cub barked from high in a tree. I reminded myself I could pull my palm away, be gone in an instant, and I calmed enough to consider how this bear was protecting that cub the way Mom had protected me. I pressed both hands to the spruce, continuing to maneuver so it was between us. My boots crunched needles.
Life at the Speed of Us Page 15