He lifted my hand and dropped it on the table. He retracted the blade of the knife and put the knife in his pocket.
On the white silk were the two thumbprints, one black one red with a cut across it. Underneath was written in wet letters
Washed white in the Blood of the Lamb
4
A good samurai will parry the blow
Looking for a father had turned out to be an unexpectedly high-risk activity. Stand behind the door, Kambei tells Katsushiro. Bring down the stick as hard as you can, it will be good training for you. Any more training and I might not live to see 12.
A week went by and we got three red bills on the same day. Sibylla called the project and asked when she could expect her cheque for £300 and the person she talked to was rather snide and said if they took as long to pay as she did to do the work she would probably get the cheque around Christmas. So Sibylla said she would send in 10 issues of Carpworld by the end of the week and the rest the week after that. They sent the cheque for £300 and Sibylla paid off the bills and we had £23.66 to keep going until she got paid for Carpworld.
I was reading a book on solid state physics. Sibylla gave it to me for my birthday because it said inside the front cover that the extension of our understanding of the properties of solids at the microscopic level is one of the important achievements of physics this century and because she had found a damaged copy on sale for £2.99. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the bargain it looked, because the blurb went on to say: Dr. Rosenberg’s book requires only a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. Sibylla thinks no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is; it is certainly an absorbing subject but to follow it you really need at least some kind of introductory materials on the above-mentioned subjects. I was getting rather frustrated but I thought I would rather die than sell the heart, not because I wanted to keep it but because it would be horrible to take money for it.
I came in one night after a useless day at the Museum of Science and Technology. Considering they charge an entrance fee you’d think they’d hire people who knew about science and technology, I thought the attendants would be able to help me when I ran into trouble but the one I asked couldn’t.
I was thinking about the Umklapp process, or thinking about it as much as you can think about it if you don’t have a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. The Umklapp process relates to groups of waves that cross each other’s paths: there is little or no interference when the waves are in a linear medium, i.e. one in which the displacement at any point is proportional to the applied force. The waves are said to be harmonic, and the energy of the wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude; the displacement of the medium at any point can be obtained by adding the sums of the amplitudes of the individual waves at that point. If the medium is not exactly linear, on the other hand, the principle of superpositon no longer applies, and the waves are said to be anharmonic. The Umklapp process is a special case of this: if the sum of two oncoming phonons is large enough, their resultant will be a phonon with the same total energy, but travelling in the opposite direction!
The staff at the museum had not been very helpful when I had asked questions, and I knew that Sibylla would not be able to help. I was wondering whether I should try to get into a school. I came into the house and Sibylla sat at the computer with the 12 issues of Carpworld 1991 to her left and the 36 issues of Carpworld 1992 1993 and 1994 to the right. The screen was dark. I opened the door and she said:
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.
She said:
The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out
At one stride comes the dark.
She asked if I had had a good day. I said I was reading The Solid State by H. M. Rosenberg. She asked if she could see it, and when I handed it over she looked inside. She said: What is a phonon?
I said: They are quanta of lattice vibrational energy.
They died as men before their bodies died, said Sibylla.
I said: What?
Never mind, said Sibylla. I believe that the body can survive 30 hours of typing Carpworld into a computer, for mine seems to be still of a piece.
She was flipping through the book and now she said: Oh, listen to this!
However carefully we prepare a specimen, using extremely high purity materials and very specially controlled methods of crystal growth, one form of defect will always be present—that due to the thermal vibration of the atoms. At any instant in time the atoms are never exactly at their correct lattice sites. At room temperature they are vibrating with approximately simple harmonic motion at around 1013Hz about an origin which is at the geometrical lattice position. Even at very low temperatures the zero-point motion of the atoms is still present.
This is delightful, said Sibylla. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport. And look! It was written in 1976, so that Liberace might have read it in his intellectually malformative years and profited thereby, instead of allowing his mind to solidify, we may say, to the state where the cerebratory atoms spent their time perpetually away from their correct lattice sites. I wish I understood this, said Sibylla, and she flashed a bitter look at Carpworld 1991, but I’m glad that you have come upon it so young. Approximately simple harmonic motion—it sounds so Platonic, doesn’t it? Plato says—oh what does Plato say? Or it may be the Stoics. But I think Plato says something about it in the Timaeus. And she looked even more bitterly at Carpworld 1992-94, and she said at last: Well anyway I know what Spinoza says, he says—and she stopped. And she said: Well I can’t remember the precise words but what he says is that the mind when it becomes conscious of its own weakness is saddened. Mens blankety blankety blank tristatur.
Her face was pinched and grey. Her eyes were burning. The next day I took the heart out and put it in my backpack and left the house.
I took the Circle Line and when it stopped at Farringdon I stayed on. I didn’t want to go to the agent but I was going to have to do it. Sometimes I thought the problem wasn’t really money but then I remembered that someone had saved Sib’s life because it wasn’t worth killing yourself over money.
Someone left an Independent behind at Baker Street so I went around another time doing the crossword.
The train reached Farringdon. I started reading the paper. Red Devlin had come out of hiding and was publishing a book about his experiences as a hostage. There was an article about nationalism and intervention. There was a short column about Mustafa Szegeti, who had been reprimanded by the authorities in West Papua for claiming to be Belgian consul and issuing a number of Belgian visas in that capacity. Suspicions had been aroused; the Belgian embassy in Jakarta had denied any connection with Szegeti, who was in fact of Egyptian and Hungarian descent and bridge correspondent for the Independent. When asked why he had impersonated a member of the Belgian diplomatic corps he had replied: Well, someone had to.