The image of Ada appeared before his eyes, the cello between her parted legs. "All things are numbers," Pythagoras had said. For him ten was the sacred number, which you could count on your fingers, like the Ten Commandments and the ten dimensions in the superstring theory. Ten was the "mother of the universe," and from long-forgotten boyhood reading he suddenly remembered Pythagoras's mystical tetractys, the four-foldness, the symbolic depiction of the formula "one, two, three, four," with which his pupils swore the oath:
As a true Greek, thought Max, Pythagoras of course rejected complete infinities, although in his famous thesis he had encountered irrational numbers — but Max himself needed them in order to interpret the observations of the VLBI, that is, the origin of the world: the Big Bang as infinite music! Suddenly he lifted up his head and opened his eyes. Because the light dazzled him, he got up unsteadily, turned off the lamp, and sank back into the chair.
Was it possible that the mathematics already existed for this? When Einstein needed a non-Euclidian, four-dimensional geometry for his curved space-time, it turned out to have been created decades before by Gauss and Riemann. If the world was first and last a realized infinity, then he himself might be able to turn to Cantor, the founder of set theory. Cantor! The singer! As a student he had occupied himself for a while with Cantor's shocking theory of transfinite cardinal numbers, the infinite number of complete infinite numbers, but that had been a long time ago. He remembered the vertigo that had overcome him on his visit to the Orphic Schola Cantorum: its alephs,
his Absolutely Infinite
.
He must immediately immerse himself in it again, but at the same time watch his step, because it had also driven Cantor mad. Because he was interested in the man who had ventured into such regions, he had read a biography of him, which he remembered better than the mathematics. Cantor was regularly admitted to the asylum; originally he had wanted to become a musician, a violinist, but on his own testimony, God Himself had called him and revealed his theory.
As for Pythagoras, mathematics for him was also metaphysics: all numbers were things. He was paranoid and suffered from severe depressions, was interested in theosophy, freemasonry, the teachings of the Rosicrucians, and wrote a pamphlet in which he demonstrated that Christ was the natural son of Joseph of Arimathea, while he also gave lectures about Bacon and demonstrated irrefutably that Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare. .
In the dark shed Max now had his eyes wide open. Again and again he brought the empty glass mechanically to his lips and put it back again; it was as though in the darkness the mists of alcohol cleared, but at the same time he knew that this was not the case. He suddenly saw an enervating drawing from a still more distant past, while he remembered immediately where it came from; from the translation of a popular book by Gamov, One, Two, Three.. Infinity, which he had read when he was seventeen and which had played a part in his decision to become an astronomer. Gamov, he had later learned, had first made the Big Bang theory scientifically acceptable and in 1948 had predicted its echo, the cosmic background radiation observed in 1964, which finally established the theory. His hand-drawing in the book showed a topological distortion of a man walking on earth and admiring the starry sky: everything was turned inside out. If in reality the organs were all enclosed in the body, which was surrounded by the universe — with the only access to that outside world via the mouth, the alimentary canal, and the anus — now the internal had become the externaclass="underline" his intestine stretched out limitlessly like extestines, while the universe, full of planets and stars and spiral nubulae, had become the interior of the man, where he was still walking inside out on the earth and which his eyes were still looking at. Who was the wretched man? Himself, looking through the vanishing point into the negative space-time to the far side of the Big Bang? God? Or was it perhaps a woman? Was it Ada, in her womb the tumor that had taken the place of Quinten? Or was it his own mother, with him in hers? The mother of the universe. . Ada and Eva.. Women. . only women. .
Again he had fallen asleep. When he woke up he felt tired and happy. He was now in his fifties and he was still preoccupied with the same things as when he was seventeen. Had anything really happened in his life since then? There was no break, as there was with Onno; the boy he had been had no need to be ashamed of him. He got up and again thought of the child that Tsjallingtsje wanted by him. Of course: Octavia! He couldn't make the child tonight — he was too drunk for that; what's more, the coil was still in place. He opened the door and with the handle in his hand he stopped.
Where was Onno? Who had Onno become? How was it possible that he could deny his child so completely? And poor Quinten himself — who was farther away for him now, his mother or his father?
The house was dark, the garden lay silently in the moonlight. Janácek, he thought. Fairy Tale. Forcing himself not to stagger, he walked down the path to the erratic stone, on which he sat down to have a break. The March night was cool and damp. Was it all nonsense that he had thought up? Had the VBLI really seen the primeval singularity, perhaps seen right through it, into another, timeless world, which was therefore larger than the universe? Wasn't he forgetting something? How drunk was he, actually? How was it possible to demonstrate that none of this was the case?
If something like that were possible, then at least an enormous red shift must have taken place — so great that it did not occur to anyone. The maximum that had been measured up to now, in OQ 172, had a value of 3.53; the lyman-line had found its way into visible light. For MQ 3412 they were now looking somewhere between 4 and 5, but perhaps you should look around 20, or 50. Or 100! No one in his right mind would look there, not even Maarten. What would such a shift be good for? He tried to calculate, but he was no long capable. Somewhere on the shortwave band, probably. Perhaps some radio ham had once received a singular voice: "I am the Lord thy God!" — after which he had turned the dial in boredom because he thought he was dealing with a weirdo on the air! Obviously not a second Moses!
Max raised his arms, threw back his head and began laughing loudly.