8b
Among Carl’s friends were a pair of women who were each other’s best friend, Marlene and Anne. Years ago, when Marlene had considered suicide, she hadn’t turned to Anne for support: she had turned to Carl. He and Marlene had sat up all night on a few occasions, talking or sharing silence. Carl knew that Anne had always harbored a bit of envy for what he had shared with Marlene, that she had always wondered what advantage he held that allowed him to get so close to her. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy.
Carl had offered comfort in similar situations more than once in his lifetime. He had been glad he could help, certainly, but more than that, it had felt right to sit in the other seat, and play the other part. He had always had reason to consider compassion a basic part of his character, until now. He had valued that, felt that he was nothing if not empathic. But now he’d run up against something he’d never encountered before, and it rendered all his usual instincts null and void. If someone had told him on Renee’s birthday that he would feel this way in two months’ time, he would have dismissed the idea instantly. Certainly such a thing could happen over years; Carl knew what time could do. But two months?
After six years of marriage, he had fallen out of love with her. Carl detested himself for the thought, but the fact was that she had changed, and now he neither understood her nor knew how to feel for her. Renee’s intellectual and emotional lives were inextricably linked, so that the latter had moved beyond his reach.
His reflex reaction of forgiveness cut in, reasoning that you couldn’t ask a person to remain supportive through any crisis. If a man’s wife were suddenly afflicted with mental illness, it would be a sin for him to leave her, but a forgivable one. To stay would mean accepting a different kind of relationship, something which not everyone was cut out for, and Carl never condemned a person in such a situation. But there was always the unspoken question: What would I do? And his answer had always been, I would stay. Hypocrite.
Worst of all, he had been there. He had been absorbed in his own pain, he had tried the endurance of others, and someone had nursed him through it all. His leaving Renee was inevitable, but it would be a sin he couldn’t forgive.
* * * *
9
Albert Einstein once said, “Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.”
* * * *
9a = 9b
Carl was in the kitchen, stringing snow pea pods for dinner, when Renee came in. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.” They sat down at the table. She looked studiedly out the window: her habit when beginning a serious conversation. He suddenly dreaded what she was about to say. He hadn’t planned to tell her that he was leaving until she’d fully recovered, after a couple of months. Now was too soon.
“I know it hasn’t been obvious--”
No, he prayed, don’t say it. Please don’t.
“--but I’m really grateful to have you here with me.”
Pierced, Carl closed his eyes, but thankfully Renee was still looking out the window. It was going to be so, so difficult.
She was still talking. “The things that have been going on in my head--” She paused. “It was like nothing I’d ever imagined. If it had been any normal kind of depression, I know you would have understood, and we could have handled it.”
Carl nodded.
“But what happened, it was almost as if I were a theologian proving that there was no God. Not just fearing it, but knowing it for a fact. Does that sound absurd?”
“No.”
“It’s a feeling I can’t convey to you. It was something that I believed deeply, implicitly, and it’s not true, and I’m the one who demonstrated it.”
He opened his mouth to say that he knew exactly what she meant, that he had felt the same things as she. But he stopped himself: for this was an empathy that separated rather than united them, and he couldn’t tell her that.
<
* * * *
Matter’s End
GREGORY BENFORD
When Dr. Samuel Johnson felt himself getting tied up in an argument over Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal, he kicked a large stone and answered, “I refute it thus.” Just what that action assured him of is not very obvious, but apparently he found it comforting.
--Sir Arthur Eddington
I
ndia came to him first as a breeze like soured buttermilk, rich yet tainted. A door banged somewhere, sending gusts sweeping through the Bangalore airport, slicing through the 4 A.M. silences.
Since the Free State of Bombay had left India, Bangalore had become an international airport. Yet the damp caress seemed to erase the sterile signatures that made all big airports alike, even giving a stippled texture to the cool enamel glow of the fluorescents.
The moist air clasped Robert Clay like a stranger’s sweaty palm. The ripe, fleshy aroma of a continent enfolded him, swarming up his nostrils and soaking his lungs with sullen spice. He put down his carry-on bag and showed the immigration clerk his passport. The man gave him a piercing, ferocious stare--then mutely slammed a rubber stamp onto the pages and handed it back.
A hand snagged him as he headed toward baggage claim.
“Professor Clay?” The face was dark olive with intelligent eyes riding above sharp cheekbones. A sudden white grin flashed as Clay nodded. “Ah, good. I am Dr. Sudarshan Patil. Please come this way.”
Dr. Patil’s tone was polite, but his hands impatiently pulled Clay away from the sluggish lines, through a battered wooden side door. The heavy-lidded immigration guards were carefully looking in other directions, hands held behind their backs. Apparently they had been paid off and would ignore this odd exit. Clay was still groggy from trying to sleep on the flight from London. He shook his head as Patil led him into the gloom of a baggage storeroom.
“Your clothes,” Patil said abruptly. “What?”
“They mark you as a Westerner. Quickly!”
Patil’s hands, light as birds in the quilted soft light, were already plucking at his coat, his shirt. Clay was taken aback at this abruptness. He hesitated, then struggled out of the dirty garments, pulling his loose slacks down over his shoes. He handed his bundled clothes to Patil, who snatched them away without a word.
“You’re welcome,” Clay said. Patil took no notice, just thrust a wad of tan cotton at him. The man’s eyes jumped at each distant sound in the storage room, darting, suspecting every pile of dusty bags.
Clay struggled into the pants and rough shirt. They looked dingy in the wan yellow glow of a single distant fluorescent tube.
“Not the reception I’d expected,” Clay said, straightening the baggy pants and pulling at the rough drawstring.
“These are not good times for scientists in my country, Dr. Clay,” Patil said bitingly. His voice carried that odd lilt that echoed both the Raj and Cambridge.
“Who’re you afraid of?”
“Those who hate Westerners and their science.”
“They said in Washington--”
“We are about great matters, Professor Clay. Please cooperate, please.” Patil’s lean face showed its bones starkly, as though energies pressed outward. Promontories of bunched muscle stretched a mottled canvas skin. He started toward a far door without another word, carrying Clay’s overnight bag and jacket.
“Say, where’re we--”
Patil swung open a sheet-metal door and beckoned. Clay slipped through it and into the moist wealth of night. His feet scraped on a dirty sidewalk beside a black tar road. The door hinge squealed behind them, attracting the attention of a knot of men beneath a vibrant yellow streetlight nearby.
The bleached fluorescence of the airport terminal was now a continent away. Beneath a line of quarter-ton trucks huddled figures slept. In the astringent street-
lamp glow he saw a decrepit green Korean Tochat van parked at the curb.
“In!” Patil whispered.
The men under the streetlight started walking toward them, calling out hoarse questions.
Clay yanked open the van’s sliding door and crawled into the second row of seats. A fog of unknown pungent smells engulfed him. The driver, a short man, hunched over the wheel. Patil sprang into the front seat and the van ground away, its low gear whining.
Shouts. A stone thumped against the van roof. Pebbles rattled at the back. They accelerated, the engine clattering. A figure loomed up from the shifting shadows and flung muck against the window near Clay’s face. He jerked back at the slap of it. “Damn!”
They plowed through a wide puddle of dirty rainwater. The engine sputtered and for a moment Clay was sure it would die. He looked out the rear window and saw vague forms running after them. Then the engine surged again and they shot away.
They went two blocks through hectic traffic. Clay tried to get a clear look at India outside, but all he could see in the starkly shadowed street were the crisscrossings of three-wheeled taxis and human-drawn rickshaws. He got an impression of incessant activity, even in this desolate hour. Vehicles leaped out of the murk as headlights swept across them and then vanished utterly into the moist shadows again.
They suddenly swerved around a corner beneath spreading, gloomy trees. The van jolted into deep potholes and jerked to a stop. “Out!” Patil called.
Clay could barely make out a second van at the curb ahead. It was blue and caked with mud, but even in the dim light would not be confused with their green one. A rotting fetid reek filled his nose as he got out the side door, as if masses of overripe vegetation loomed in the shadows. Patil tugged him into the second van. In a few seconds they went surging out through a narrow, brick-lined alley. “Look, what--”
“Please, quiet,” Patil said primly. “I am watching carefully now to be certain that we are not being followed.”
They wound through a shantytown warren for several minutes. Their headlights picked up startled eyes that blinked from what Clay at first had taken to be bundles of rags lying against the shacks. They seemed impossibly small even to be children. Huddled against decaying tin lean-tos, the dim forms often did not stir even as the van splashed dirt) water on them from potholes.
Clay began, “Look, I understand the need for--”
“I apologize for our rude methods, Dr. Clay,” Patil said. He gestured at the driver. “May I introduce Dr. Singh?”
Singh was similarly gaunt and intent, but with bushy hair and a thin, pointed nose. He jerked his head aside to peer at Clay, nodded twice like a puppet on strings, and then quickly stared back at the narrow lane ahead. Singh kept the van at a steady growl, abruptly yanking it around corners. A wooden cart lurched out of their way, its driver swearing in a strident singsong.
“Welcome to India,” Singh said with reedy solemnity. “I am afraid circumstances are not the best.”
“Uh, right. You two are heads of the project, they told me at the NSF.”
“Yes,” Patil said archly, “the project which officially no longer exists and unofficially is a brilliant success. It is amusing!”
“Yeah,” Clay said cautiously, “we’ll see.”
“Oh, you will see,” Singh said excitedly. “We have the events! More all the time.”
Patil said precisely, “We would not have suggested that your National Science Foundation send an observer to confirm our findings unless we believed them to be of the highest importance.”
“You’ve seen proton decay?”
Patil beamed. “Without doubt.”
“Damn.”
“Exactly.”
“What mode?”
“The straightforward pion and positron decay products.”
Clay smiled, reserving judgment. Something about Patil’s almost prissy precision made him wonder if this small, beleaguered team of Indian physicists might actually have brought it off. An immense long shot, of course, but possible. There were much bigger groups of particle physicists in Europe and the U.S. who had tried to detect proton decay using underground swimming pools of pure water. Those experiments had enjoyed all the benefits of the latest electronics. Clay had worked on the big American project in a Utah salt mine, before lean budgets and lack of results closed it down. It would be galling if this lone, underfunded Indian scheme had finally done it. Nobody at the NSF believed the story coming out of India.
Patil smiled at Clay’s silence, a brilliant slash of white in the murk. Their headlights picked out small panes of glass stuck seemingly at random in nearby hovels, reflecting quick glints of yellow back into the van. The night seemed misty; their headlights forked ahead. Clay thought a soft rain had started outside, but then he saw that thousands of tiny insects darted into their headlights. Occasionally big ones smacked against the windshield.
Patil carefully changed the subject. “I... believe you will pass unnoticed, for the most part.”
“I look Indian?”
“I hope you will not take offense if I remark that you do not. We requested an Indian, but your NSF said they did not have anyone qualified.”
“Right. Nobody who could hop on a plane, anyway.” Or would, he added to himself.
“I understand. You are a compromise. If you will put this on...” Patil handed Clay a floppy khaki hat. “It will cover your curly hair. Luckily, your nose is rather more narrow than I had expected when the NSF cable announced they were sending a Negro.”
“Got a lot of white genes in it, this nose,” Clay said evenly.
“Please, do not think I am being racist. I simply wished to diminish the chances of you being recognized as a Westerner in the countryside.”
“Think I can pass?”
“At a distance, yes.”
“Be tougher at the site?”
“Yes. There are ‘celebrants,’ as they term themselves, at the mine.”
“How’ll we get in?”
“A ruse we have devised.”
“Like that getaway back there? That was pretty slick.”
Singh sent them jouncing along a rutted lane. Withered trees leaned against the pale stucco two-story buildings that lined the lane like children’s blocks lined up not quite correctly. “Men in customs, they would give word to people outside. If you had gone through with the others, a different reception party would have been waiting for you.”
“I see. But what about my bags?”
Patil had been peering forward at the gloomy jumble of buildings. His head jerked around to glare at Clay. “You were not to bring more than your carry-on bag!”
“Look, I can’t get by on that. Chrissake, that’d give me just one change of clothes--”
“You left bags there?”
“Well, yeah, I had just one--”
Clay stopped when he saw the look on the two men’s faces.
Patil said with strained clarity, “Your bags, they had identification tags?”
“Sure, airlines make you--”
“They will bring attention to you. There will be inquiries. The devotees will hear of it, inevitably, and know you have entered the country.” Clay licked his lips. “Hell, I didn’t think it was so important.”
The two lean Indians glanced at each other, their faces taking on a narrowing, leaden cast. “Dr. Clay,” Patil said stiffly, “the ‘celebrants’ believe, as do many, that Westerners deliberately destroyed our crops with their biotechnology.”
“Japanese companies’ biologists did that, I thought,” Clay said diplomatically.
“Perhaps. Those who disturb us at the Kolar gold mine make no fine distinctions between biologists and physicists. They believe that we are disturbing the very bowels of the earth, helping to further the destruction, bringing on the very end of the world itself. Surely you can see that in India, the mother country of religious philosophy, such matters are important.”
“But your work, hell, it’s not a matt
er of life or death or anything.”
“On the contrary, the decay of the proton is precisely an issue of death.”
Clay settled back in his seat, puzzled, watching the silky night stream by, cloaking vague forms in its shadowed mysteries.
Clay insisted on the telephone call. A wan winter sun had already crawled partway up the sky before he awoke, and the two Indian physicists wanted to leave immediately. They had stopped while still in Bangalore, holing up in the cramped apartment of one of Patil’s graduate students. As Clay took his first sip of tea, two other students had turned up with his bag, retrieved at a cost he never knew.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 29