The Soul Continuum

by Simon West-Bulford

  I feel a pang of guilt. Edith is always so forthright, so confident—she’s had to be to get anywhere in the scientific community—but now this latest incident seems to have wounded her. Part of me regrets that the good working relationship we had has been spoiled, but I cannot ignore what she did. Even so, the fact that she stands there so conflicted has me at odds, and I cough again. An embarrassed noise this time.

  “Yes,” I say, “well, you will have the opportunity once more, Edith.”

  She looks up at me again and I offer a quick smile and a nod.

  “I assume Withering briefed you yesterday?” I say.

  She also manages a quick, polite smile. “He didn’t say much about it, but he did tell me it would be more work with flame emission spectroscopy.”

  “So he didn’t tell you what we will be analyzing?”

  “No, but yesterday you mentioned the stone?”

  “Correct. You’re in for quite a surprise when you see it.”

  She juts her head forward a little and widens her eyes. Our awkwardness momentarily forgotten, I pull the metal box out from my waistcoat pocket and hand it to her. She takes it, but before she lifts the lid, I place a hand on her arm.

  “Be careful.”

  I don’t know why I said that to her, but as I hold her arm, my fingers grasping tighter than I intend, I feel another wave of nausea. A sense of unease in connection with the stone fidgets within me just as it did the night before, but I quickly subdue it and release her.

  “Clifford?” she says, looking briefly at her arm where I gripped her, then up at me. “Are you all right? You’re not having another turn, are you?”

  “No, no.” I frown back at her, then let out a noise that sounds like a nervous sigh. “Sorry.”

  She continues to hold my gaze. “Sorry for what? What is this?” She looks at the tin in her palm.

  “If I knew that, we wouldn’t need to analyze it, would we?”

  “You said last night that it glows.” She continues to look at the tin and I wonder if she feels the same uncanny foreboding. Cautiously, she lifts the lid.

  The indigo pulse lights her face. “Oh, heavens! I wasn’t expecting it to be so obvious.”

  “Astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “Where did Withering get it?”

  “He wouldn’t say. He said it might taint the experiment if I knew.”

  She squints at me in suspicion.

  “I know, I know,” I say, lifting my hands, “I wasn’t convinced either, but I got the distinct impression he didn’t want me to pry. And, no, it’s not radioactive. At least not according to him.”

  “Are you quite sure about that?” she says, replacing the lid. “You haven’t been feeling well, and don’t you think it’s something of a coincidence that Withering had a queer turn, too?”

  “Perhaps, but he did seem very well informed and quite convinced.”

  “But if he doesn’t know what it is, how would he know it’s not radioactive?”

  The question stumps me. “Well,” I start uncertainly, “Withering might not be the most amiable of people, but I hardly think he would place us in any kind of danger unless he was absolutely sure. He’s no fool.”

  She considers the tin again. “I’m really not sure about this.”

  “You think we should refuse?”

  Edith sighs loudly. She knows, just as well as I, that Withering can be a beast when people cross him. And this stone, whatever it is, is too intriguing to ignore. “I suppose we could take some precautions and use some shielding,” she suggests. “And I would advise you to go back to him today and find out why he is so certain it isn’t dangerous. I’m sure he won’t object to a simple query.”

  “Perhaps.” I take the tin from her and set it on the closest table. “Shall we make a start, then?”

  “Happy to.”

  “Good.” I clap my hands and rub them together vigorously to overcome the trepidation, then look around my laboratory. “We’ll have to make our own spectroscope if we want to use shielding. I’ll see if I can find a suitable container while you pull together the rest of the equipment. Clear on what we need?”

  “Of course.”

  I find some lead plates in a crate in the corner together with a handful of bracket clamps and work on screwing the sides together while Edith clears one of the desks, boxing up the items into a spare crate.

  “May I ask you something?” I say. “And please don’t be offended.”

  She connects a Bunsen burner to the gas supply and stoops to bring her eyes level with the funnel as she tests a flame. “Ask away.”

  I stop midway through screwing the third bracket in place and look at her. “What would you do in my place?”

  “Pardon me?” She looks at me through the flame, her expression blank.

  “If I had taken your work and presented it as a paper and—”

  “Oh!” Edith rises slowly and turns the Bunsen off as if it is an act of finality. “I wondered when we would get this out in the open.” Her nostrils flare as she sucks at her bottom lip—a look of mild frustration again. “I assume this is about your claims of plagiarism that Professor Withering spoke to me about yesterday?”

  I maintain eye contact, surprised but more than a little annoyed. If anyone should be offended, it is I, but the flush she tried to hide earlier that I thought may have been contrition now seems to be revealed as indignation.

  “Miss Levaux, I especially requested you as my—”

  “How dare you ‘Miss Levaux’ me!” The French accent suddenly becomes more pronounced, embellished with the harsh volume of retaliatory accusation, and I think the awkward atmosphere that was brewing earlier this morning has just boiled over into something I might later regret.

  “We’ve been on first-name terms for over a year.” She has her forefinger raised now. “And for your information, you were perfectly happy giving me permission to write my paper based on your findings.”

  “I what?” I am unable to prevent my mouth from hanging open. How dare I? How dare she!

  She lowers her finger and fixes me with a glare that oscillates between icy rage and wounded tears before drawing a deep, shuddering breath and returning her attention to the desk. She slams a prism down and then pulls out a dark oblong plate, fixing it in place two hand widths away from the prism. “I can only assume you drifted off into one of your daydreams again,” she says, adjusting the angle of the plate as if it is a troublesome child resisting a face wipe. “It’s plain you don’t remember, but a month into the experiments, when you were trying to catch up on the assignments you were supposed to be working on, I asked whether you were planning to submit our experiment as a paper. Do you remember that?”

  “I . . .”

  “No, of course you don’t! And I suppose you don’t recall how I offered to type it up for you to save time?”

  “I vaguely—”

  “Or how you told me to take the credit because I had done most of the work and catalogued the spectrums far more precisely than you would have? Do you remember insisting when I refused, and do you remember how elated and thankful I was?”

  An image of Edith beaming from ear to ear as she clasped her hands to her mouth slipped unwanted into my mind. I remember her excitement but not what caused it. Only now as I stand and think do the memories slink forward.

  “You ask me what I would do in your place?” she says, hands on hips. “I now ask the same thing.”

  It seems I have been a complete ass. She refuses to look away now, and I am captured by her gaze, which has settled into a cold glare. I want to somehow defend my actions but am utterly bankrupt. “Well,” I say. My mouth is dry and I am unable to avoid swallowing awkwardly. “I’m rather thirsty. Would you like tea?”

  She shakes her head almost imperceptibly, now looking to the side in bewilderment, and I know she thinks I am a hopeless case who cannot be reasoned with. At this moment, I think she is quite correct.

  “Yes, tea would be nice,”
she says flatly and goes back to stooping over the equipment.

  FIVE

  The atmosphere is still uncomfortable an hour later when we finalize the setup of the spectroscope. Rain lashes against the window, drowning out Edith’s words when she speaks, and each time I ask her to repeat whatever it was she said, she sighs and pushes past me to get the item she needs. She is actually enjoying this moment, I think, and she has every reason to look down at me from her moral high ground. I am more than a little ashamed of my actions, and I feel even more cowardly at not being able to acknowledge my failings.

  “Are we ready?” I ask.

  “We are,” she says and forces a smile.

  “Very good. Just to make certain, let’s begin with our baseline. Can you bring me the tin in the top drawer over there, please?” I nod to the cabinet on the opposite side of the room. “I’d like the potassium sample, please. It should be pure enough to give us the reading we need.”

  She goes to the drawer, rummages through the contents. “You really should get more organized, Clifford. An untidy laboratory reveals an untidy mind.”

  “I suppose it is a little like my mind,” I concede. “There is far too much going on inside it, and I am constantly having to push things aside in haste to make room for some new thing I must retain.”

  She pulls a tin out of the drawer, squints at the label, then brings it to me.

  “Sometimes I forget where I put things.” I tap the side of my head. “Important things. And when I lose them, I get into trouble when I forget I even have them.” I keep the tin in my hand and hold her gaze for a moment. “Do you understand?”

  She stares back, her expression flat. “An apology?”

  I look at the tin rather than at her, then open it. “Tongs please.”

  She brings me the tongs and I select a large chunk from the tin. “I admit to my mistake, yes, but it would have been nice for you to have told me when you actually did submit the paper, and perhaps you should have mentioned me in there somewhere.”

  “Apologies should never be accompanied by buts.”

  “Then I apologize unreservedly.”

  She suppresses a smile. “There,” she says. “Was that so distressing?”

  “No, but—”

  “Ah!” She raises a finger, and I suddenly feel like a small boy who has been denied a second slice of cake. “I think we should leave it there and move on, no?”

  Of that I am sure. It will be hard enough for me to regain any respect she may once have had for me, and my own self-respect and confidence has taken a rather hard knock.

  Edith switches the Bunsen back on and the flame jets upward. I place the potassium sample in the little cradle above it and place the lead container around it to cover the lilac flame it creates. There is a lens and a thin slit on one side of the box to allow the light through, and a grill at the top lets the heat escape. The light filtering through the slit passes into the prism, splitting it into its composite colors, then carries on through another lens and onto an absorption plate.

  Presently, Edith removes the plate and I turn the Bunsen off. “How is it looking?” I ask.

  She looks at the colored strands stained into the plate and compares the image with the potassium pattern we have in our catalogue record.

  “As far as I can see, it’s identical.”

  “Good. Nothing we didn’t expect. Let’s move on to our mysterious stone, shall we?”

  She opens the tin, and I take the stone, holding it for a moment in my palm. It still feels wrong. Utterly wrong. It isn’t just the steady pulse emanating from it; it is the gut-twisting instinct that this piece of rock should not even exist. My stomach produces another small somersault when I remember the shadow man in the gentlemen’s club. Without dwelling on the stone any longer than I have to, I use the tongs to place it in the cradle, and Edith adjusts the Bunsen flame. I want to squint at that moment, as if expecting the stone to suddenly explode at the presence of heat, but it does nothing unusual. A flame emerges from the stone, and it flares outward in a bright yellow plume.

  “That’s consistent with lapis lazuli,” Edith says.

  “It appears so, but let’s see what the spectrum emissions tell us.”

  I place the casing around it, and Edith fixes a new absorption plate at the far end to catch the refracted light. We wait a few moments, saying nothing, watching the different colored strands as they appear.

  “Recognize it yet?” I ask.

  Edith shakes her head and begins flicking through the catalogued charts, her head bobbing up and down as she compares each page. “Ah! Here,” she says. “This looks like it could be it.”

  I look at the image her finger is tapping on and then look at the plate. It is very similar. “Lazurite,” I say.

  “Yes. It doesn’t help us much, though, does it? We still don’t know . . .”

  My eyes are still on the catalogue when she trails off, and I look first at her confused expression and then at the plate.

  “Did you see it?” she says.

  “No, what was it?”

  “Keep watching,” she says. “I may have imagined it.”

  “Well, what do you think you saw?”

  She starts chewing the inside of her mouth, not answering, so I continue to watch the static lines of reds and blues, waiting for whatever it is she thinks she saw. Then, just as I blink, I think I see it too.

  “There!” she says, almost shouting. “Did you see that? Did you?”

  “I’m not sure.” I continue watching. “It looked like . . .”

  “Like a complete change in the spectrum, no?”

  It happens again. Only for a fraction of a second, but the sight of it causes me to snatch my breath sharply. “Yes,” I whisper. “The colors disappeared and there was . . . it looked like an equal distribution of yellow lines.”

  “Then I am not seeing things,” she says.

  “I think you are seeing things, Edith,” I say, “but I think those things are real. We’ve found something here.”

  “But what? This isn’t possible, is it?”

  I continue staring at the image. What I want to say is that the stone is not possible either. It shouldn’t be here, but it is. Again the lines shift and change, but this time they stay changed. A completely different spectrum shines on the plate: multiple interlaced green strands fading into yellow to the left and to indigo on the right. The image holds for a second more, then reverts to the original lazurite spectrum. My skin crawls with icy pinpricks as I try to reconcile what I am seeing. She is quite correct: this is not possible.

  Edith shakes her head, mouth open. “Shall we remove the box?”

  I nod and lift the shielding from the Bunsen and cradle. “To hell with the shielding,” I say and find an alternative slit panel, setting it in front of the lens. This way we can see if anything happens to the burning stone as it shines through.

  A few more seconds pass and again the pattern changes.

  “No change in the stone or the flame,” she says.

  “Not possible,” I insist. “This cannot be.”

  “Well, we are looking at it.” She smiles, then grasps my arm. “You know what this means.”

  “I have absolutely no idea. I would say it must be an impurity but—”

  “No!” She grips my arm tighter. “This is a discovery. A real discovery.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.” Though of course, I know she is right. “There are a few things we should rule out first.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, as I was saying, there could be impurities in the—”

  “Oh, what nonsense. Even if there were impurities in the stone, it wouldn’t cause behavior like this. You would still see a constant spectrographic image.”

  “Well . . .”

  Her eyebrows are raised in expectation and she’s sucking her bottom lip again. She waits a few moments, then slowly cranes her head forward—a mocking but friendly gesture that tells me she knows I cann
ot think of anything other than the unthinkable.

  “We’re witnessing changes at a molecular level?” I say.

  “My thought too,” she says. “But the stone.”

  “It isn’t changing. If there really was a change at a molecular level, then surely we would see a change in the rock, even if it was small. If not the rock, definitely the flame, but that isn’t what we’re seeing.”

  “Confusing, isn’t it?”

  I turn off the Bunsen. “That’s an understatement.”

  “Should we tell Withering?”

  “Usually I would wait until the paper is written, but this does seem to be rather a significant find, and all he really wanted was an analysis to find out what it is, which I think we’ve confirmed as lapis lazuli. It’s just the doubt around this behavior.” I stare at the glowing stone in its cradle, now smoldering slightly from the flame. “But yes, we should ask Withering’s opinion. He may know of a phenomenon that accounts for it.”

  Edith offers me a skeptical look because she knows this is not just a simple anomaly. This is a major discovery—we just don’t understand what it means yet. She has the air of excitement, her face glowing, and I smile back as we share a long moment that may one day be considered momentous. She suddenly grasps my hand and presses the back of it to her lips, holding it there for several seconds before letting it go, obviously embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that I am a little giddy.”

  She focuses for a moment longer on my eyes, perhaps expectantly, but I return the sentiment only with the gentlest incline of my head and a reserved smile to let her know that her apology is accepted. Edith blinks hard several times as if wincing at the pain of embarrassment, and then with a quick smile but no eye contact, she hurries from the laboratory without another word.

  I might have reacted to her with greater enthusiasm, but the stone has sapped all warmth from me. My insides squirm like an eel when I look at it. I cannot help but feel we have uncovered something forbidden, something dark and sickening, and to make my fears tangible, the nausea and lightheadedness make their return with renewed vigor.