Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The plateau before her looked like it was going to make planetfall somewhere in South America. She glanced along the great rock, now almost beside her. Time stopped as she stared in disbelief.

  “Those are people down there!” she said aloud, at last, not trusting the cameras alone to catch the sight. “Pointing and—waving!”

  She sped past and was gone. The board felt lighter now—almost too light. Nearly all the shielding must have burnt off. The tiles glowed red hot and more, and the board was still burning. She hoped she had already passed nearest Earth on her trajectory and prayed that even now she was skipping back out of the atmosphere. In an instant she would know.

  To her relief she saw the trajectory plotter moving back toward green. Yes! She had caught the curl of the skywave, ridden it, then slipped right out the back door!

  Brandi could exult only for a moment, though. The last of the ablative shielding burnt off and the astronav system shorted out. She was on her own.

  Her augments were still operative. Making a long slow zigzag, she dropped dying fire behind her as she climbed away from Earth’s atmosphere, slingshotting further and further from the gleaming blue-white planet below.

  Voice-activating her emergency radio beacon, she was relieved to find it worked flawlessly, rough treatment not withstanding. She sighed, then surveyed her board. Flambe was scorched pretty badly and her tanks were bone dry, but the deflection tiles were largely in tact. The big board was still usable. Nothing to do now but wait to be picked up by the nearest rescue craft.

  She looked back at the Earth. No light of doomsday impact shone anywhere, nor any sign at all of the light-ensphered plateau she had blazed past just moments before.

  “Cowabunga,” she said tiredly.

  * * * *

  By a northern sea, under a leaden sky, a woman of a certain age had become obsessed with waves and mazes. The woman, whose name was Mei-Ling Magnus, had taken refuge in the town of Fionnphort on the isle of Mull. Fionnphort stood across a narrow ocean channel from her initial local interest, the sheep-haunted isle of Iona and its monastery, the foundations of which had stood in one form or another for a millennium and a half. Mei-Ling already knew enough, however, of the rigors of monastic life not to want to partake of them again. Besides, on contemplative Iona, accommodations were more expensive and less plentiful than in Fionnphort.

  She wasn’t sure the ancient monks would have approved. It was, in fact, a question about which she could make a reasonably informed guess since, before she made her way to these isles, Mei-Ling had studied up on the history of Iona. The Celtic Christian monastery had been founded under Columba in 563, and King Oswald of Northumbria had appointed Ionans to found the even more renowned monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. Iona had long been a place of holding out, first against the absorption of Celtic Christianity into Roman Catholicism, then against the displacement of Catholicism by Protestantism.

  What had she been holding out against in deciding to stay here? In deciding to live among the sheep and sea-pinks, the wild yellow irises, the short gray summers and the winter gales with their horizontal rain? Walking along Mull’s craggy shoreline, Mei-Ling glanced occasionally across the water, over toward the monastery where it stood in the foreground with the citadel hill of Dun’I behind it. In focusing on the rainwater streaming down the monastery’s Celtic crosses which she so admired, with their circles quartered like targeting sights to be trained upon the divine, all carved over with mazes of spirals—in seeing them day after day, what had she not been seeing?

  Mei-Ling shook her head to clear it. Certainly there were days when her melancholy and that of her surroundings matched perfectly, but one could only play at being the pale, dark-haired, wind-ravished romantic heroine for so long, especially once the cloudy grays had begun to condense and stream in her own hair. The only explanation she could find for her feeling of “rightness” here was that this was a preterite place, a gap in the tapestry of the twenty-first century world.

  Or of the sixth century world, for that matter. Wasn’t that why the monks had first come to Iona? To lead lives of prayer and contemplation apart from the bustle of mundane existence? Not so much to get away from it all but rather to get inside their own souls, to be in the world but not of it. Mountains, deserts, islands—monks and hermits and mystics had always gone there, as if soul grew purest in unpeopled places, bloomed best in deserted lands.

  She thought of the illuminated Lindisfarne gospels, of the monk Eadfrith’s elaborately knotted ornamentations of the texts. Eadfrith’s beautiful textual illuminations contained intentional small gaps, breaks in the pattern, “imperfections”—like the intentional small flaws in Persian carpets and prayer rugs. Despite the differences in time, place, creed, and medium, the reason for “dropped knots” in Persia and dropped ornamentations in Lindisfarne was the same: A work both perfectly complete and perfectly consistent would be an act of cosmic hubris on the part of the artist, taking to oneself a privilege reserved for the divine.

  Had Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem been twentieth century science’s way of saying the same thing? Dogma and ritual transmogrify into theory and practice. Priestly robes become lab coats. Everything happens twice—first as theology, then as technology....

  Despite the associative leaps in her thoughts, her body plodded steadily along on autopilot. It knew where she was headed. Up the hill north and west of the most outlying bed-and-breakfast in Fionnphort. To and down through the old quarry. Through the yard of the cottage at the end of road, to the small embayment in the channel between Hull and Iona. To and across the low-tide sandbar that led to a still smaller island between the islands, little more than a large rock outcropping, really, just grass and sea pinks struggling in the cracks, slimed over by the occasional big slug.

  She didn’t walk to the little bay for the slugs, though. Rather it was for the color of the water against the sand there. A deep, rich aquamarine in all lights, seaweed waving thickly at its edges. On still days, a small white boat anchored in that water seemed to float in the air above a crystalline meadow, a pale bird pausing in a strange sky just above otherworldly trees. She had never met the boat’s owner, though she appreciated that person’s aesthetic sense, whoever the sailor might be.

  When she reached the yard of the cottage overlooking the little bay, she stopped dead in her thoughts. As she watched, she saw an older man remove a short shovel from the boat. He began digging a shallow, winding trench across the sandbar.

  Did he own the cottage too? She wondered, embarrassed. She had been cutting through the cottage’s yard to get to the sandbar several times each week for several months—and she had never once asked anyone’s permission. Maybe she should just turn around and go back the way she’d come....

  Too late. He’d seen her. Nothing to do now but walk on down and tough it out.

  She waved hello and introduced herself. She shook hands awkwardly with the man, who was tall and thin and stooped over—rather in the shape of a question mark—as he shook her hand with his long, thin-fingered grasp. His hair was so gray as to seem almost pure white, while his eye-glasses were old-fashioned looking enough to truly merit the term “spectacles.” He wore a pinkish sweater that had probably once been red, above a pair of white jeans. His face was deeply lined and weathered, with heavy brows still shockingly dark in contrast to his hair.

  The old man did not give his name. He was an odd-looking sort, but seemed pleasant enough. She thought he perhaps went back to his digging just a shade too quickly.

  “What’s that you’re working on?” Mei-Ling asked, hoping her question didn’t annoy him. Fortunately, he seemed obscurely relieved by it.

  “Oh, just a little experiment of mine,” he said, finishing as much of the snaking trench as he apparently wanted to at the moment, before turning to her. “Ever hear of a soliton? A standing wave?”

  His lightly accented south-of-England English was quite a bit more c
omprehensible to her American ear than the Glaswegian dialect spoken by so many of the people associated with the monastery on Iona..

  “Like a tidal bore?” Mei-Ling guessed. She had heard the terms somewhere but couldn’t remember them exactly. She did remember an image of a very coherent wave moving up a river in Canada, though. “Like the one at the Bay of Fundy?”

  “That’s correct,” he said, a bit pedantically, “but really a standing wave isn’t ‘like’ a tidal bore—a tidal bore is like a standing wave. A tidal bore is a particular type of standing wave.”

  “And you have them here?” Mei-Ling asked, a bit suspicious, having never seen a wave of the Canadian type in all the months she’d been here.

  “Nothing like the Bay of Fundy,” he said, glancing down with a shy smile, “but they occur here. I use this trench to remind myself.”

  He looked at the water, then at his watch.

  “Yes,” he said with a nod. “It’s just about time. If you would, take this shovel to the south end of the trench there and open the trench to the water on that side of the bar. I’ll open the north end here.”

  Mei-Ling took the shovel and continued the south end of the trench through to the water, trying to dig it to the same depth as the old man had already dug the rest. The question-mark man was on his knees at the north end, clearing away sand down to the water at his part of the bar. Since she had the shovel, though, Mei-Ling worked faster than he did and water began to flow in from the south end until it filled the channel. In a moment the old man had opened up the north end too.

  After the little canal had settled down a bit, a peculiar thing began to happen. Though there were no readily discernible wave crests in the sheltered cove at the moment, the water in the trench piled itself into small, regular waves a few inches high. Discrete and very coherent, the miniature tidal bore moved down the winding trench again and again, like peristalsis in a python or anaconda.

  “Quite a bit different from breaking ocean waves, you see?” the old man said enthusiastically, brushing sand from his knees. “I’ve seen slow motion footage of breaking waves and they don’t look like this. Uncanny how much surf in slow motion looks like those paintings by that Japanese fellow. Can’t recall his name at the moment. The one who did all those paintings of Mt Fuji. He must have been quite the observer of waves.”

  “Hokusai, you mean?” Mei-Ling ventured.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” the old man said, surprised and pleased that she’d been able to come up with the name. “I didn’t expect you to have any more connection to that tradition than I do. Your name, ‘Mei-Ling,’ is—what? Chinese?”

  Mei-Ling nodded, glancing down at the sand and water before her.

  “Though ‘Magnus’ isn’t, of course,” she said. “I was part of the wave of girl-babies adopted out of mainland China by Western couples around the turn of the millennium. Fallout from Chinese population control policies. Necessary science in collision with cultural tradition.”

  “Yes,” the old man said, glancing again at the waves, thoughtful. “I wonder what Hokusai would make of these. Always from the north, never from the south. Can’t really say why. A problem worthy of John Scott Russell himself.”

  “Who is—?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “Was,” the old man corrected, crouching down to watch the waves move through the small, twisting channel they’d made. “A Scottish engineer. In August of 1834 he happened to be riding along on horseback beside an Edinburgh canal, next to a horse-drawn barge that was being pulled up the canal. The horse and the barge it was pulling came to a stop, but the water in the canal didn’t. It formed an odd solitary swell in the Union Canal that just kept moving along. Russell chased that wave for miles, but the channel surge refused to disorganize itself. As he followed it, I guess you could say Russell in some ways became part of its system—phase-locked, wave-coupled. Entranced.”

  The old man stopped, seeming to become entranced himself with the motion of the waves in the little channel.

  “And?” Mei-Ling prodded, after a moment. “What happened?”

  “Russell lost the wave,” the old man said, standing up from his crouch. “In the windings of the canal. The wave never lost him, though, in a way. Waves of this sort became a life-long concern of his. He called them ‘solitary waves’—what we now call solitons. Built a wave tank in his garden, worked with barges on the canal. Discovered a number of things about their nature.”

  Then he fell silent again—a tendency toward the laconic that Mei-Ling found a bit annoying.

  “Such as?”

  The old man glanced at her for a moment, then allowed his eyes to follow another wave in the little canal.

  “When a tall, thin example of a standing wave catches up with a shorter, fatter variant of the same,” he said, digging absently at the sand with the toe of his shoe, “the two waves merge and coalesce completely into one. Eventually, the two waves emerge intact, the tall thin one racing ahead, the short fat one falling behind. Seems they remember their former organization through a species of nonlinear memory. Russell used his solitary waves to correctly calculate the depth of the atmosphere, too. Even dreamed of one day using them to determine the size of the universe.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  “Perhaps I should,” he said thoughtfully. “He was an ancestor of mine.”

  * * * *

  Over the next several weeks Mei-Ling struck up a quiet, tentative sort of friendship with the old man. She saw him a number of times and learned as much about him as his taciturn style would allow her to learn. He was even less forthcoming about his life than about solitons, which turned out to be more than just an obsession of his.

  Despite his reticence, she was able to gather that his name was Robert Stringfield, and that he was a retired physicist, professor emeritus at the University in York. A widower, he had jointly owned the nearby cottage with his late wife. Some decades previously he had been part of the team that had arguably “proved” that particles were an illusion. The universe, Stringfield claimed, was in fact all waves. Particles were ‘covariant solitons’ which only appeared to be discrete and particulate because the act of measurement itself excerpted a subsystem of the larger universal system. Observers read a chunk of the standing wave as something free-standing and discrete. She didn’t fully understand all the physics, but Mei-Ling had no doubt it was something he remained passionate about.

  He had other interests and theories as well. About slugs, for instance.

  “I suppose you’ve noted that they’re blackish-brown in color,” he said as he pointed at one of the creatures one afternoon, “and that they look like nothing so much as slowly-mobile pieces of sheep dung?”

  “There are a lot of sheep hereabouts,” Mei-Ling admitted.

  “Yes,” Stringfield said with a nod. “Though there may be very little sheep shite in pastoral poetry, there is plenty on Mull and Iona. I wonder sometimes if, over the centuries, the slugs haven’t developed their current hue as a form of protective coloration. Looking like that might help them blend into the background. Make them appear less appetizing to potential predators, too. Keep meaning to check and see if there are any scientific articles on these Scottish ‘toord’ slugs. Natural selection in action, that sort of thing.”

  She could never tell if he was being serious or “having her on.” He had such a deadpan delivery about everything.

  The Light, when it came, built upon the interest in waves that Stringfield had started in her, then added something of its own. She came out of the remming moment of the Light with the image in her mind of a wave moving through a maze. No ordinary wave, though: one of Russell’s solitary waves. No ordinary maze either, she suspected. She dusted off her terminal link and went searching in the global infosphere for information on mazes and labyrinths.

  Eventually she found what she was looking for: a Baltic-German maze design with two entrances and a spiral center, like a Classical labyrinth in which the central cro
ss had been “opened out”. It roughly resembled the double-entranced Great Hare Island maze in the Solovecke Archipelago of the Russian White Sea. Or the destroyed maze at Kaufbeuren, Germany. Or perhaps an abstract rendering of a cross-section through the convolutions of a human brain.

  Too much time on my hands, she thought, chastising herself a bit as she continued her maze-touring of the infosphere. She soon became one of the few people aware of the link between the Greek key meander pattern and the Classical labyrinth. She joined infosphere salons and chatted about the way certain wave patterns described historical events, an idea which had come to her while she was looking at a history of Britain’s monasteries. She also began to develop her own theory on the remarkable resemblance between the shape of the solar year, the apparent motion of the sun, the meander pattern—as well as the daily path of the sun, and the turnings and returnings of the opened out medieval Christian labyrinth design.

  Way too much time on her hands.

  Mei-Ling began to sketch out plans for a design of her own making. To the basic Baltic-German design she added hinged, two-sided door flaps—one for each entrance of the maze. Whenever a standing wave tripped down the initially vertical element of the flap, it would flip up the other, initially horizontal, part of the flap. Vertical would become horizontal, sealing off that entrance from further wave incursion through that opening.

  She complicated the design further by connecting the action of the door flaps in both entrances. As soon as a wave pressed down the initially vertical part of the door flap in either entrance, it would flip up the initially horizontal part in both entrances, thus sealing off the entire apparatus from any further wave action from outside. Once the standing wave had run the maze, it would open the door flap at the opposite entrance. That would trip both door flaps back to their original position, from which the maze might interact again with the surrounding sea. Working on it took an entire day, but she finally got the design right.