Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Give us everything you’ve got,’ Mike was saying, his face beginning to rotate and distort. Ringer could feel himself trembling; he wondered if these two men would suddenly turn out to be another hallucination. Then they came back into focus.

  ‘Tell us what these non-collapsible wave functions of yours might do to the vacuum array,’ Mike continued. ‘Obviously we aren’t specialists, but we’re intelligent, educated men, just like yourself. I majored in business administration.’

  ‘I did international politics,’ Dave added.

  ‘So you see, we’re perfectly able to deal with logical reasoning. And we want to hear the facts, John.’

  Ringer hoped mental concentration would be enough to save him from another swooning fit. ‘You’ve heard of a prism, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sure,’ they both agreed.

  ‘What we call white is really a mixture of every possible colour. A prism bends each wavelength by a different amount, splitting them up.’ Ringer’s head ached, but he was determined to get to the end of this meeting without fainting. ‘Like light, matter is associated with waves. Their mixture is not one of colour, but of possibilities.’

  His interrogators, becoming stationary as he regained control of his eyes, stared blankly at him.

  ‘We realize you aren’t feeling too good today,’ said Mike. ‘So let’s make this as short as we can.’

  ‘Think of the vacuum array as a kind of prism,’ Ringer said, his dizziness abating. ‘And think of the quantum wave function as being like white light containing every possibility, each of which is a different colour. You have a red life, say; this is the one that has happened, and is happening. But there’s also a blue one, a green one – even infrared and ultraviolet lives you could have led. The mirrors of the vacuum array, if the energy were to tip high enough – perhaps very high indeed – might make us all … technicolour.’

  Dave nodded pensively. Mike said, ‘Is this how we’ll be able to talk to God? And what about telepathy? You know, we’re putting a lot of funding into speculative science. The ideas may be long shots, but the potential reward is simply too great to ignore. Levitation, time travel; the Rosier Corporation keeps an open mind about everything.’ He tapped the table with the point of his finger. ‘That’s why we’re so much better than all these government agencies who insist an idea has to be already proved before they’ll even give it a chance.’

  Dave intervened. ‘John, will vacuum array technology provide a means of sending thoughts from one person to another?’

  Mike clapped his hands together. ‘Instantaneous transfer of information! The ultimate communication network. Just think of it: no infrastructure! Pure head-to-head dial-up. Can we do it?’

  What they were proposing was infinitely more barmy than anything Ringer had heard from Don; yet he found himself agreeing with them. ‘Since consciousness is indivisible,’ he said, ‘no thought is truly unique to ourselves. We’re all effectively hitching a ride on the quantum computation of the universal wave function. So yes, I don’t see any reason, in principle, why telepathy shouldn’t be possible.’

  ‘That’s great!’ said Mike. ‘You know, John, we could have a very attractive package lined up for you, if you’d be willing to let us develop these ideas further.’

  ‘You do appreciate,’ Dave continued, ‘that the Rosier Corporation is devoted to the furthering of human knowledge by means of research conducted in the widest possible range of topics. By agreeing to become a consultant with us on the quantum telepathy project, you would naturally have to forgo any work in other areas of telepathy research which might impinge on the Corporation’s interests.’

  Ringer had very little idea what they were talking about. It sounded like they were hiring him, but a renewed bout of dizziness interrupted his attempt to keep up. Then he heard Mike’s voice again.

  ‘One final thing we need to know. Is there any danger in this prism effect you mention?’

  Ringer had feared multiple versions of the same event, spread across time and space like spectral colours cast upon a wall. He had feared that people’s lives would be reduced to accidents of frequency; that their thoughts would no longer be their own. Yet he had recalculated, and convinced himself of his own mistake. The machine was already running somewhere, and the world was safe. None of the great horrors had come to pass.

  ‘There is no danger,’ he said.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Mike. ‘It’s good to know I won’t bump into myself on the way out of here.’

  Mike and Dave laughed; Ringer laughed too. He had the vague intimation of an important matter left neglected; like the worry that haunts a person who has forgotten to bring his keys, or who left the bath running when he stepped out of the front door. There was nothing to be afraid of. Why, then, was Ringer afraid?

  Mike grew serious. ‘I hear you’re scheduled to give a talk tonight in one of the villages near here.’

  Ringer had almost forgotten about it, but Mike clearly thought it worth mentioning.

  ‘Obviously you’ll want to call that off,’ he said. ‘Given your state of health. And in any case, you realize negotiations here are quite delicate. We wouldn’t want anybody going public before the time is right.’ He and Dave stood up in unison. ‘Good to speak with you,’ said Mike, extending his hand. It was only when Ringer grasped it that he discovered how weak he had become.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said falteringly.

  ‘Until we meet again,’ Dave added, patting Ringer’s back as he ushered him out of the conference room. Then he closed the door, and as Ringer stood alone in the corridor, he found himself reaching out for the wall so as to steady himself. Everything was swaying, as if he were in the bowels of an ocean liner at the mercy of a rolling swell. Where was the library he had been in earlier? He should go there again, sit down, regain his strength.

  No other soul was in sight, neither Don nor the receptionist, as Ringer rounded the corner and scrutinized the phalanx of indistinguishable doors, wondering which to choose and finally selecting one, neither knocking or even pausing before he grasped the handle and opened.

  It was a room in a hospital. There was a steel-framed bed, a polished floor, a look of clinical detachment appropriate to a place where lives begin and end in anonymity. The hallucination did not frighten him; he was prepared to study it closely, feeling almost calm as he took in what he knew must be a view of the forbidden interior of Burgh House. It was a premonition of what lay ahead; and together with what Don and the men from the Corporation had said, and the pages he had found in the library that were still in his pocket, it told Ringer everything.

  The vacuum array was already running, and there was marvellous danger in it. Spheres of fright were ready to encompass the world and show to its astonished gaze the sort of vision Ringer now beheld. He was perceiving a phenomenon denied by reason, yet as vivid to his senses as the spectrum that once told Newton he was right, and all others wrong. Logic, Ringer realized, is mere monochrome. The world of authentic existence is a piercing white noise, a blinding all-colour.

  The paradox was there before him; a superposition of life and death. It was himself he saw, lying on the cold floor beside the bed, with Laura who was also lifeless. Two figures wrapped in hospital gowns, slumped in what looked almost like an embrace.

  He was seeing Helen’s double, and his own. His life’s book had cracked ajar to reveal a looping narrative, a jumbled story. This was the only sense he could make of it: his other self was a fiction, and so, by the sublime symmetry that guides all science, he too must be a fiction.

  This room was really a library, he reminded himself. Its shelves were infinite, containing every possibility, arranged in alphabetical order without regard to truth. He need only reach out, take the first volume he found, and open it at random.

  FROM PROFESSOR FAUST

  by Heinrich Behring*

  Schrödinger went to the Villa Herzen’s dining room, where Dr Schwarzkopf had promised to join him. The tables were laid in
readiness but the place was still empty – it being a little early – save for a young woman sitting alone, with neither food nor drink to occupy her, at a small table near the window. Schrödinger made a bow towards her, but she ignored him, continuing instead to stare into space with a steadiness that soon unnerved him, so that he decided to sit well out of her line of sight. He had already selected a location from which her face was reduced to an easily inspected profile, when a waitress appeared, in a black dress and white apron, and invited him to be seated. Half glancing at his strange fellow diner, Schrödinger asked the waitress for some white wine; she began suggesting bottles, and noticed her customer’s unease. Leaning towards him, the waitress – a plump, healthy-looking girl – whispered, ‘Don’t worry about her, she’s always like that,’ then straightened. Schrödinger thanked her, made his order, and watched the plain, cheerful waitress retreat before turning his attention once more to the stranger. Like Schrödinger, who had so foolishly left his reading matter on the train, she didn’t even have a book for company, instead maintaining her vacant gaze as if in a state of catatonia. When he finally saw her blink, it almost made him start.

  The waitress reappeared, but not with Schrödinger’s wine. Her tray bore a glass bowl, which the waitress took to the other table, placing the bowl before the curiously lifeless guest, whose stone-like demeanour somehow added to an intriguing physical attractiveness. She made no response to the waitress, who glanced towards Schrödinger as she turned, offering him the resigned look of someone participating, through occupational necessity, in a disagreeable ritual. Once more the waitress vacated the dining room, and Schrödinger saw the stranger move at last, lifting a spoon with which to begin her meal.

  At first he couldn’t tell what was in the bowl; but a few spoonfuls, drawn out with mechanical precision by his fellow diner, quickly replaced his curiosity with incredulity. She was eating raw eggs. Whole yolks rose on her spoon, dripping clear trails of egg white before she pushed them into her mouth, scarcely moving her jaw as she allowed the cold slime to slip down her slender throat. Half a dozen of them perhaps, cracked straight into the bowl as if to make a cake, and served instead to the mesmerized guest who hadn’t even added a dash of salt, or felt the need to stir them with a fork.

  The waitress was coming back now with a trolley on which Schrödinger’s bottle of white wine stood open in an ice bucket. She poured it for him, standing so as to obstruct any view of the strange feast at the other table. Whispering again, she said to him, ‘Best not look.’ When she moved aside, the meal of eggs was already finished; the young woman touched her mouth with a napkin, then resumed her former motionless state. The departing waitress left the empty bowl where it stood, and Schrödinger watched the diner pause a moment, then stand to leave.

  Rising and turning, the young woman could now be studied in greater detail by Schrödinger, who had lost any inhibition he felt about staring at her. Fine featured and of pale complexion, her blue eyes might have been beautiful if only they were alive. Her dark hair deserved the care and attention of a skilled coiffeuse, but instead had been hacked, it appeared, with shears, since its rough style was almost peasant-like, and hardly fitted the elegance with which she walked, solemnly and purposefully, towards the door. Schrödinger watched her, admiring the curve of her figure, until she vanished from view like an evaporating cloud, leaving him with the sense of having seen something wonderful yet absurd – Maya and Brahman combined.

  As soon as the waitress returned, he decided, he would ask her all about the strange young woman; however, the next person to appear, entering the room and searching it with his probing gaze before quickly finding his goal, was the Villa Herzen’s new psychoanalyst, Dr Hinze.

  ‘Ah, here you are already, professor,’ said Hinze, approaching and accepting Schrödinger’s invitation to sit down. ‘Doctor and Frau Schwarzkopf will join us a little later. I see you are enjoying an aperitif.’ He nodded towards the wine in its ice bucket; Schrödinger took the bottle and poured some of the straw-coloured liquid into the empty glass that stood at Hinze’s elbow, then the doctor raised it in a toast. ‘To the coming year, professor. Let us hope it holds good fortune.’

  They both took a sip, then fell silent. For Schrödinger, a man on whom fame had thus far refused to fall, the future looked uncertain; and from the manner in which Hinze made his toast, it seemed he too felt much the same. Schrödinger filled the gap by asking Hinze about his time in Zürich. They spoke of favourite haunts, sought common acquaintances, and found several which nonetheless failed to animate their conversation. There were few professional or academic connections for them to identify, since Hinze had been associated with the medical school, not the physical sciences faculty.

  ‘You must surely prefer the fresh air here to the atmosphere at the Burghölzli,’ Schrödinger said to him.

  ‘Of course,’ Hinze agreed. ‘The hospital was stimulating, but exhausting. It was wonderful to work under old Professor Bleuler – but when my intellectual progress reached a certain stage, I realized that in order to advance further I must take myself to the mountains. Like Nietzsche in the Engadine, no?’

  Schrödinger put down his glass. ‘And have you had your great insight yet?’

  Hinze rubbed his hands with some embarrassment. ‘Not quite. But I think I’m almost there.’

  The two had more in common than Schrödinger had supposed. ‘I have also come here to try and solve a problem. It concerns waves.’

  Hinze’s expression was one of admiring incomprehension. ‘Long live physics! That’s what Nietzsche proclaims in The Gay Science. Though perhaps with some irony.’

  Schrödinger said, ‘You clearly admire the great philosopher.’

  They had at last found a topic that Hinze could warm to, as if Nietzsche were the only mutual acquaintance in whom the doctor had any interest. ‘My affair with Nietzsche has been long and difficult,’ he explained grandly. ‘It began when I read Zarathustra at the age of fifteen, not long after Nietzsche died. What knowledge could be so deep and terrible, I wondered, that the search for it could render a man completely insane?’

  ‘I believe it was syphilis that caused Nietzsche’s madness,’ Schrödinger said.

  Hinze shook his head. ‘That version of events, which Paul Möbius has proposed, is far too simplistic. Even before the crisis came, Nietzsche was showing symptoms quite unlike tertiary syphilis. I once met a psychiatrist who knows a great deal about the case, and he told me of an incident that occurred when Nietzsche was only twenty years old.’

  Hinze sat back, as if retelling a favourite anecdote. ‘It was New Year’s Eve, and Nietzsche – a theology student in Bonn – was alone in his lodgings. He had dreams of becoming a novelist, or perhaps a composer. He had rented a piano, and spent so much time shut up alone playing it, that the other students thought him crazy. Well, we know that creative minds grow best in isolation; so there he was, looking through musical scores, wondering what to play for himself while the year drew to a close.’

  At that very moment, Schrödinger heard the sounds of a piano. He gave a start, and Hinze laughed. ‘A dramatic coincidence indeed,’ the doctor said. ‘Look behind you.’

  Schrödinger turned and saw, through an open door-way at the far end of the dining room, a salon in which part of a grand piano was visible, black and solid as a hearse.

  ‘Brahms, I think,’ said Hinze, catching the music. ‘Do you play, professor?’

  Schrödinger shook his head. ‘My wife does, and she once persuaded me to get one of those things in the house, but the racket made it impossible for me to concentrate. I got rid of it.’

  ‘How curious,’ Hinze observed. ‘Physicists are so often musically gifted. Such as Einstein with his fiddle. Though I suppose that could be as much a Jewish trait as a scientific one.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Schrödinger grumbled, ‘it’s true that the physics community is full of amateur musicians. Planck, I’m told, used to play duets with Joseph Joachim.’ Schrödinge
r felt envy rising in his throat. Einstein had been lured from Zürich by an offer to join Planck’s far more prestigious Berlin group. ‘But perhaps we should return to Nietzsche.’

  ‘Of course,’ Hinze agreed. ‘He looks through the scores, wondering what to play. Some Brahms perhaps? No. Or … let’s see … what will we have now?’ The pianist in the other room had fallen silent again; and as Hinze listened, a new piece began, slow and delicate, with trills and ornaments that enabled Schrödinger to guess its antiquity.

  ‘A little Bach?’ said Hinze. ‘No, my friend, not these tones. Nietzsche mixed himself a hot punch, then decided he must play Schumann. A significant choice, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Schrödinger.

  Hinze now looked like a schoolteacher whose pupil has failed to fathom a multiplication table. ‘Was it not Schumann, after all, who died in an asylum near that very town of Bonn, only eight years earlier? Schumann, who became detached from reason, just as Nietzsche would one day become equally detached?’

  ‘Sounds to me like another dramatic coincidence,’ Schrödinger said.

  ‘Dramatic?’ Hinze retorted. ‘Or else perhaps psychic? There are many kinds of coincidence, professor. Nietzsche chose Schumann: the requiem from Manfred. Think of Byron’s poem, on which the opera is based. Think of its Alpine spirit, its metaphysical scale; its first moment of inspiration, when Byron heard Faust read at Villa Diodati, then began to write about a similarly Promethean character. For Nietzsche, Manfred was an Übermensch. Already it was as if the young student knew that seventeen years later, walking in the Engadine mountains, he would receive the vision of another Übermensch: Zarathustra. And he knew that like Schumann, he would pay for his vision. In this single incident, recorded in his diary, Nietzsche’s whole future lies mapped like the notes of a score.’

  Schrödinger was unconvinced; and the music next door only added to his irritation, having by now grown fast and loud, like the sound of someone being kicked down a flight of stairs.