The Weaver Fish

by Robert Edeson

  You’re here to talk about the book.

  THE BOOK, AND ITS AUTHOR.

  What would you like to know about the book?

  WELL, THERE’S NOT MUCH RELIABLE PREPUBLICATION MATERIAL AVAILABLE, BUT I GATHER THAT YOU MAKE A CASE, BASED ON YOUR AERONAUTICAL EXPERTISE, THAT AIRLINE PASSENGERS COULD SAVE THEMSELVES IN A MIDAIR CATASTROPHE BY PILOTING AIRCRAFT FRAGMENTS, PARTICULARLY A WING, SAFELY BACK TO EARTH. IS THAT THE ESSENCE OF YOUR BOOK?

  It is. What you need to understand is that every piece of debris is a potential airfoil, some good, some bad. The wing, of course, is a natural. That’s the piece to hang on to.

  WHAT ABOUT THE TEMPERATURE, THE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND SO FORTH AT THOSE ALTITUDES?

  Right. The physiology. There are issues. You need some preparation. I deal with all that in the book. At length, I might say. Look, I’m not claiming it’ll work every time. It depends on a lot of variables, rotational moments at separation, intrinsic damage to the wing, engine power, lots of variables. But we should be designing our airplanes with these contingencies built-in.

  SO THAT A WING CAN FLY ON ITS OWN?

  Sure. That would happen already. Just go through the math in my book. You’ll see that, once separated, the wing takes possession, so to speak, of its own eigenvalues. It flies, solo.

  EIGENVALUES?

  They’re just numbers—solutions to what we call a characteristic equation. Their location in the complex plane determines the stability of an object in flight.

  Planes have them. You have them, I have them.

  I KNOW.

  Reckles looked at me with what was surely respect, either for the depth of my understanding or the magnitude of my lie.

  Anyway, on the wing, the only control you have is moving mass.

  BY SHIFTING YOUR WEIGHT?

  Sure. Jettisoning some freight as well.

  YOU MEAN OTHER PASSENGERS?

  Start with the lightweights, women and children. Build up a feel for the change. It’s subtle. But remember, managing the mass distribution, that’s critical.

  I tried to glare the message: I am a woman. I think it worked, because he invited my interests into the explanation.

  What was your last flight? What plane?

  A 7T7.

  Right. You need Row 13, 14. Window seat, stay belted. First sign of trouble, borrow a necktie from the nearest businessman and strap your ankles to the bar under your seat. Believe it or not, you’re only two locking screws, a titanium rivet plate and three strong welds from the principal wing strut. You can fly home. All the other seats—they’re just sitting pretty on some damn thin fuselage lining. Tinfoil rating.

  From where I was sitting I guessed I could see perhaps two hundred computer screens. Triple, say, that estimate for units obscured from view and I was in the midst of a major enterprise.

  TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR COMPANY.

  Sure. Martin and I set up eight years ago in an internet café in the Albuquerque badlands. We got hounded every day for blocking the terminals. Now I own thousands of screens and the café’s gone under. Funny, isn’t it?

  I agreed it was funny, but I hadn’t encountered the name Martin in my pre-reading.

  MARTIN?

  Martin Reckleson. Co-founder. We were room-mates at

  MIT.

  Reckles, Reckleson. I wasn’t getting less confused.

  RECKLES, RECKLESON. THEY ALMOST SOUND RELATED.

  Yeah. Not kinship of course. Related by common interests. Aerodynamics and sisters. I married his and he married mine. That was a nice symmetry.

  He looked momentarily lost—I’m sure it was sadness—and glanced again at the screen behind.

  We nearly called ourselves Reckles ’N’ Reckleson, but somehow Flight Control got registered.

  There was another pause.

  Martin’s passed on now, of course.

  Passed on, I later discovered, meant being thrust across the lab at high subsonic speed when a wind tunnel malfunctioned.

  Left half his interest to the Sisters over on Charity Fields. Now we work three quarters for a living and a quarter for God, and I can tell you, it shows in the results. Anyway, as I was saying, we started off just two guys with running costs of fifteen dollars an hour at the café. Now we employ about one hundred fifty engineers, dozens of math grads, material science folk, machinists, technicians, you name it. Over at the tunnels—they’re down the way—

  He gestured over the same shoulder as if the facility were within reach, or at least within sight.

  —there’d be another forty anytime we run tests.

  I was genuinely impressed, and said so. I was then invited to visit the wind tunnels (they operate a supersonic one as well) set up in an old Proving Ground laboratory, but my schedule prohibited this.

  HOW DID YOUR COMPANY GROW SO LARGE? WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST BREAK?

  Actually, we started off in roofs, not planes.

  I was so surprised, I uttered redundantly:

  ROOFS?

  Yeah. It’s not so surprising. There was this big shopping mall chain across the South with its own branded gas stations. Called Wingsters, funnily enough. They’re gone now. Anyway, some executive thought it would be a good idea to put this fancy distinctive roof over the gas station lots. They used a kid out of design school who came up with this great-looking gull wing-type shape. Anywhere flat, you could see it for miles. Great promotion, great commercially. They built two hundred before one took off in a windstorm. Flew like a kite then flipped upside down onto the food hall.

  NOT GOOD FOR BUSINESS.

  Yeah, custom was crushed. Then about a week later a tornado took seven in one day. The company panicked. They were ordered to take them down and couldn’t comply fast enough. That shape, visible for miles remember, suddenly became advertising poison. Well, Martin and I were thinking, they just need to understand their shape better, its aerodynamics. We drove to the nearest mall and photographed the roof from all angles—I can tell you we got some bad-tempered hustle for that—then came back to our room and reconstructed the form. I did the computations and Martin made models that he tested in a tunnel rigged up from a cola carton and a bedroom fan. We figured out a pretty simple mod that basically inverted the lift—forced it down in wind rather than up. Forty-eight hours later we took a proposal to Wingsters. If the mod failed, we would pay. If it worked, they’d pay. That’s when we registered our company and put some patent papers together.

  Well, we started on the mall down in South Stormfield and what should happen? Tornado struck the next Sunday, flattened the whole area matchstick style minus one thing left standing. Our roof. Overnight, we were famous—small-town famous, that is. Wingsters couldn’t pay us enough, for the patent, for consultancy, for supervising the rebuilds, for public relations appearances, reassuring folk and explaining a bit how it all worked. So the roof got back its magic, people even congregated there in storms for safety. Only now it didn’t just advertise Wingsters. It was good publicity for Flight Control as well.

  SO THAT’S WHEN THE AERONAUTICAL BUSINESS STARTED?

  Not so fast. We did submarines first.

  Again, I was so surprised that I barely repressed an inane ‘Submarines?’ But Reckles stayed quiet, evidently needing a prompt. I capitulated.

  SUBMARINES?

  SURE.

  AND AERONAUTICS?

  Sure. Think of a submarine as flying under water. You have buoyancy, power, lift, drag, stubby wings even; currents like wind, vortices. It’s fluid dynamics. Same physics. The Navy did all their development with simulation, tank testing and ocean trials. Not bad, but we showed them extra value from wind tunnel studies. No one had thought of it before.

  SUBMARINES. IN A WIND TUNNEL?

  You’d be surprised what goes into a wind tunnel, Miss.

  GETTING BACK TO YOUR BOOK, DR RECKLES, SOME OF THE PREVIEW COMMENTARY HAS QUESTIONED ... BEEN ANALYTICAL ABOUT ... ITS VERACITY. ITS SERIOUSNESS. ITS WRYNESS. WHETHER IT’S FICTION, EVEN. IS IT A S
ERIOUS BOOK?

  Very serious. Look, that misunderstanding, that confusion, probably arises from the book being a bit technical for the average reader, but I’m not apologizing for that. It’s a guide for survival. Survival.

  I was silenced by the unexpected emphasis here, almost an impassioning. Then he added:

  Remember, the average reader would pretty much equate to the average airline passenger.

  I was further silenced, examining what I thought were non sequitur properties of this assertion. And somehow, in that state of absorption, I became inexplicably and, I knew, unwisely, emboldened.

  SO YOU REALLY SEE SOMEONE RIDING THIS WING DOWN 30,000 FEET FROM A DISINTEGRATING JETLINER, HALF THE TIME FROZEN, OXYGEN STARVED, DECOMPRESSED AND BLACKED OUT, THEN GLIDING SMOOTHLY INTO SOME ABANDONED PARKING LOT AND WALKING TO THE NEAREST PAYPHONE TO CALL A CAB?

  I really see it. You just need the knowledge, the science. Survival science, and the good math, that’s what my book is about.

  Well, I had come here to discover what the book was about, and now this man with the multi-channel mind and the green-eyed gaze had told me. It was the good math. With, I suspect, a bit of the good Lord too.

  I thought then about the building I had entered. About inside and outside, and the containment of opposites by a millimetre of paradox. About extremes of altitude and two forces of insistent violation, each of the other, stopped dead in a thin wall of metal. I said:

  DR RECKLES, KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW, ABOUT AIRCRAFT AND EIGENVALUES AND TINFOIL, DO YOU ENJOY FLYING?

  Sure I do.

  WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE PLANE?

  Well, I’d have to say the newest, fastest, highest, toughest one there is.

  AND THAT WOULD BE?

  He tilted his head slightly, directing my attention once more over his shoulder to the busy CAD screen behind.

  And that would be on the drawing board, Honey. There’s where I like to fly.

  * * *

  Anna Camenes was Founding Editor of Altimeter magazine. She flies Row 14.

  4

  SUBSCRIPTION OFFER

  AVIATION REVIEWS

  Subscribe now!

  Coming Next Summer:

  SPECIAL EDITION ON HYPERSONIC PROPULSION

  Principles of Hypersonic Combustion

  Nanosecond-Resolution Flame Imaging

  Baffle Boy: Deflector Breakthrough from a Kentucky Garden Shed

  Coolant Chemistry is a Hot Topic

  Chamber of Horrors: Flame-Out at MACH 7

  Passing Out Parade: G-Force and the Air Force

  Cracks in the Union: Keplerian Arc Welding Exposed as Fraudulent

  Unintended Orbit: Down-to-Earth Tips from the Experts

  PLUS All the regular features.

  PLUS Award-winning contributor Anna Camenes.

  PLUS Comment by new Executive Editor Penelope Hyffen-Dascher PhD.

  PLUS Scram: a smartphone game for aeronauts.

  Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to the world’s foremost aviation science journal.

  Special Offer (Personal Subscription only)

  1 Year $95.00ˆ

  2 Years $175.00ˆ

  Subscribe online at http://www.aviationreviews.com or phone 1-800-JOYSTICK and follow prompts.

  Offer ends June 30. ˆPlus State and Federal taxes.

  SPECIAL OFFER! ****KEEP YOUR HAT ON!****

  Take out a 2 year subscription before end May and we will ship you a genuine Reckles® Texan hat! Uses special aerodynamic ‘NegLift’ patent brim design! Proven in wind tunnels! This hat won’t blow off even in a tornado! Used by leading twister-chasers, mine ore blasters, skydivers, and more! Suitable for swimming! Go chic scuba diving! Cowboys: walk, ride, hogtie, sleep in the unlosable hat! Approved for space travel! One size fits all!

  (Advise head circumference when subscribing.)

  5

  OBITUARY

  The Norwegian-British logician, linguist and dream theorist Edvard Tøssentern is unaccounted for, and presumed to have died when the research balloon Abel disappeared during a severe storm over the South China Sea.

  A man who seemed to inhabit fully three or four careers at the one time, he contributed to applied logic, led both theoretical and field research programmes in linguistics, and became simultaneously revered and reviled for demolishing the bogus foundations of dream analysis, finally closing the chapter on a century of Freudian and Jungian psychologies.

  In logic, Tøssentern was best known for the invention of structures called inductive graphs, which serve to formalize the transitivity of a very general class of epistemic relations. They have proved to be a powerful tool of symbolic reasoning with particular utility in causation analysis. In certain circles, and this delighted him, the technique has gained a reputation as the enemy of political rhetoric—many a suspect argument being fatally dispatched by its application. Recently, using a probabilistic formulation, Tøssentern had increased the generality of inductive graph methods, with intriguing implications for game theory, machine intelligence and automated translation.

  In the early 1990s, Tøssentern headed a campaign which resulted in the formation of the Cambridge-based Language Diversity Initiative. This is now a major programme with conservation operations throughout the world. Tøssentern personally brought to public notice the forgotten linguistics of the Ferendes (Friendship Islands), and the intimate connection between daily language and the folklore of the mysterious weaver fish. This, in fact, became a subject of special interest to him, and he was known to be editing the collected papers of Thomas MacAkerman, who first described the weaver fish and its curious place in language in 1816. Following the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004, when seafloor seismic shocks and disturbances to benthic ecology were conducted well beyond the Ferendes, Tøssentern became aware of unsubstantiated claims to weaver fish sightings. It was his desire to investigate these reports that drew him back to the South China Sea, and to the small LDI research station whence he disappeared.

  Of all his contributions to intellectual life, however, probably the most far-reaching was a new theory of dreams. Interestingly, though he was foremost a scientist and published normally in the refereed literature, Tøssentern viewed this work as belonging to belles-lettres as much as to scientific discourse. For the matters in question, he valued the informed judgement of a greater interested audience more than fanciful theorizing and the flawed empirical methodologies available to dream research. There was as well, he observed ruefully, an almost unassailable academic bias in favour of theories that powered the psychoanalytic industry.

  As was often the case, Tøssentern began his enquiries with a simple question and a surprising proposition. Observing the proportion of animal life spent sleeping, he asked: Why has this state of extreme vulnerability (to predation) so prospered in natural selection? And: Dreaming is not incidental to sleep, but its very purpose. The puzzle of sleep thereby became the puzzle of dreaming, and why this activity should be so evolutionarily advantageous.

  In essence, Tøssentern proposed that the dream was instructional: a highly evolved but pre-lingual, pictorial mechanism by which knowledge benefiting survival was communicated from one generation to the next, so that, for example, what we term instinctual behaviour in animals is learned from exemplary imagery in the dream. In the sleeping animal, we observe the autonomic and motor rehearsals for complex survival behaviours. In the case of human dreaming, its utility is subsumed by the development of language; the normative codes of socialization, survival and reproductive behaviour are instructed verbally. Therefore, in humans, the machinery subserving the translation of wakeful experience into dream, its reproduction during sleep, and its inheritance, is in a state of advancing atrophy. This degeneracy, and the lack of a natural grammar of visual scene description, explain the fragmentation and apparent irrationality that typify our dreams. The characteristic amnesia for dreams is illusory, but also fundamental; it serves to disambiguate the lesson world from the lived world. Tøssentern beli
eved that the obsession with symbolism in dream analysis was a mistake. The content of a dream was a portrayal of reality distorted by information loss and neural processing error, and its interpretation was consequently a problem of image restoration. In any event, much of the ancestral content (the earliest of which is characteristically nonverbal and non-graphical) no longer analogized coherently into a rapidly evolved human culture, and was further contaminated by recent, personal (and, of course, defective) dream invention.

  With one idea, Tøssentern provided a new ontology and a theory of phenomenology and semantic content for dreaming. He viewed symbolic theories as interesting but over-determined; they should be reconceptualized only as attempts to translate pre-lingual, disordered imagery into language, and be cleansed accordingly—particularly of mysticism. Using arguments that we cannot reproduce here, he also systematically dismissed other contemporary neuropsychological and neurocognitive theories, being especially (though politely) contemptuous of the idea that dreams are not actually or vestigially purposive but are epiphenomenal to a nightly clearing of memory, or even more fatuously, result from random nerve firing.

  Edvard Oliver Montague Tøssentern was born mid-Atlantic, aboard MV Okeanos en route to New York, on the night of 28 February, 1953. His mother, Henrietta (née Montague), was travelling to join her husband Henrik Tøssentern, who had sailed three months earlier to take up a professorship in mathematical logic. She was accompanied by thirteen-year-old Lucy from her previous marriage to the cellist Pierre Tiese, a union that was dissolved amicably in 1942. Edvard was to become deeply attached to his stepsister, and her scandalous death in the Oriel Gardens affair of 1963 caused him permanent grief.