We published in Nature. People wanted to believe that someone working things out for themselves could revolutionize cosmology with a single set of equations. Of all of us, Doubting Thomas was the genius. Tsinghua University in Beijing offered him a Professorship and he left us. Citations for our article avalanched; Google could not keep up. People needed to know why everything was shifting, needing to explain both the climate-change debacle and the end of miracles.
Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it. Science undid itself, in an endless cycle.
Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work. Who knows, maybe we will get faster-than-light travel after all?
Thomas still writes to me about his work, though it is the intellectual property of Tsinghua. He is now able to calculate how long it takes for observation to change things. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun is so rooted in the universe that it will take four thousand years to wear it out. What kind of paradigm will replace it? The Earth and the Sun and all the stars secretly overlap? Outside the four dimensions they all occupy the same single mathematical point?
So many things exist only as metaphors and numbers. Atoms will take only fifty more years to disappear, taking with them quarks and muons and all the other particles. What the Large Hadron Collider will most accelerate is their demise.
Thomas has calculated how long it will take for observation to wear out even his observation. Then, he says, the universe will once again be stable. History melts down and is restored.
My fiancée is a simple country girl who wants a Prof for a husband. I know where that leads. To Mamamimi. Perhaps no bad thing. I hardly know the girl. She wears long dresses instead of jeans and has a pretty smile. My mother’s family knows her.
The singing at the church has started, growing with the heat and sunlight. My beautiful suit wax-printed in blue and gold arches reflects the sunlight. Its cotton will be cool, cooler than all that lumpy knitwear from Indonesia.
We have two weddings; one new, one old. So I go through it all twice: next week, the church and the big white dress. I will have to mime love and happiness; the photographs will be used for those framed tributes: “Patrick and Leticia: True Love Is Forever.” Matthew and Andrew will be here with their families for the first time in years and I find it hurts to have brothers who care nothing for me.
I hear my father saying that my country wife had best be grateful for all that I give her. I hear him telling her to leave if she is not happy. This time, though, he speaks with my own voice.
Will I slap the walls all night or just my own face? Will I go mad and dance for workmen in a woman’s dress? Will I make stews so fiery that only I can eat them? I look down at my body, visible through the white linen, the body I have made perfect to compensate for my imperfect brain.
Shall I have a little baby with a creased forehead? Will he wear my father’s dusty cap? Will he sleepwalk, weep at night, or laugh for no reason? If I call him a family name, will he live his grandfather’s life again? What poison will I pass on?
I try to imagine all my wedding guests and how their faces would fall if I simply walked away, or strode out like Raphael to crow with delight, “No wedding! I’m not getting married, no way José!” I smile; I can hear him say it; I can see how he would strut.
I can also hear him say, What else is someone like you going to do except get married? You are too quiet and homely. A publication in Nature is not going to cook your food for you. It’s not going to get you laid.
I think of my future son. His Christian name will be Raphael but his personal name will be Ese, which means Wiped Out. It means that God will wipe out the past with all its expectations.
If witchcraft once worked and science is wearing out, then it seems to me that God loves our freedom more than stable truth. If I have a son who is free from the past, then I know God loves me too.
So I can envisage Ese, my firstborn. He’s wearing shorts and running with a kite behind him, happy, clean, and free, and we the Shawos live on the hill once more.
I think of Mamamimi kneeling down to look into my face and saying, “Patrick, you are a fine young boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you.” I remember my father, sane for a while, resting a hand on the small of my back and saying, “You are becoming distinguished.” He was proud of me.
Most of all I think of Raphael speaking his mind to Matthew, to Grandma, even to Father, but never to me. He is passing on his books to me in twilight, and I give him tea, and he says, as if surprised, That’s nice. Thank you. His shiny face glows with love.
I have to trust that I can pass on love as well.
EXCERPT FROM AMONG OTHERS
Jo Walton
The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around. We’d measured it on the mileometer. It looked like something from the depths of hell, black and looming with chimneys of flame, reflected in a dark pool that killed any bird or animal that drank from it. The smell was beyond description. We always wound up the car windows as tight as tight when we had to pass it, and tried to hold our breath, but Grampar said nobody could hold their breath that long, and he was right. There was sulphur in that smell, which was a hell chemical as everyone knew, and other, worse things, hot unnamable metals and rotten eggs.
My sister and I called it Mordor, and we’d never been there on our own before. We were ten years old. Even so, big as we were, as soon as we got off the bus and started looking at it we started holding hands.
It was dusk, and as we approached the factory loomed blacker and more terrible than ever. Six of the chimneys were alight, four belched out noxious smokes.
“Surely it is a device of the Enemy,” I murmured.
Mor didn’t want to play. “Do you really think this will work?”
“The fairies were sure of it,” I said, as reassuringly as possible.
“I know, but sometimes I don’t know how much they understand about the real world.”
“Their world is real,” I protested. “Just in a different way. At a different angle.”
“Yes.” She was still staring at the Phurnacite, which was getting bigger and scarier as we approached. “But I don’t know how much they understand about the angle of the every day world. And this is definitely in that world. The trees are dead. There isn’t a fairy for miles.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I said.
We came to the wire, three straggly strands, only the top one barbed. A sign on it read “No Unauthorised Admittance. Beware Guard Dogs.” The gate was far around the other side, out of sight.
“Are there dogs?” she asked. Mor was afraid of dogs, and dogs knew it. Perfectly nice dogs who would play with me would rouse their hackles at her. My mother said it was a method people could use to tell us apart. It would have worked, too, but typically of her, it was both terrifyingly evil and just a little crazily impractical.
“No,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“It would ruin everything if we go back now, after having gone to all this trouble and come this far. Besides, it’s a quest, and you can’t give up on a quest because you’re afraid of dogs. I don’t know what the fairies would say. Think of all the things people on quests have to put up with.” I knew this wasn’t working. I squinted forward into the deepening dusk as I spoke. Her grip on my hand had tightened. “Besides, dogs are animals. Even trained guard dogs would try to drink the water, and then they’d die. If there really were dogs, there would be at least a few dog bodies at the side of the pool, and I don’t see any. They’re bluffing.”