Earth

In comparison, the Kai-Keri was as homey and familiar as the Washington, his own local back in Belsize Park. The bitter brown ale was much the same. True, the crowd around the dart board stood closer than in a typical British pub, and Alex had gotten lost during his last two trips to the loo. But he attributed that to the coriolis effect. After all, everything was upside down here in kiwi land.

One thing you wouldn’t see in Britain was this easy fraternizing of the races. From full-blooded Maoris to palefaced, blond pakehas and every shade in between, nobody seemed to notice differences that still occasionally caused riots back home.

Oh, they had names for every pigmentation and nationality, including postage stamp island states Alex had never even heard of. The New Zealand Herald just that morning had run an outraged expose about promotion discrimination against Fijian guest-workers in an Auckland factory. It had sounded unfair, all right… and also incredibly picayune compared with the injustices and bigotries still being perpetrated almost everywhere else, all over the world.

Actually, Alex figured Kiwis fretted over such small-scale imperfections so they wouldn’t feel left out. Harmony was all very good in theory, but in practice it sometimes seemed a bit embarrassing.

Soon after arriving in New Zealand, he had asked Stan Goldman just how far the attitude stretched. How would Stan feel, for instance, if his daughter came home one night and said she wanted to marry a Maori boy?

Alex’s former mentor had stared back in surprise.

“But Alex, that’s exactly what she did!”

Soon he also met George’s family, and the wives and husbands and kids of several Tangoparu engineers. They had all made him feel welcome. None seemed to blame him for the deadly thing that was growing in the Earth’s core.

And you’re not responsible. It’s not your monster.

Again, the reminder helped, a little.

“Drink, Lustig. You’ve fallen behind Stan and me.”

George Hutton was accustomed to getting his way. Dutifully, Alex took a breath and lifted the tapered glass of warm brew. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and put it down again, empty.

When he reopened them, however, the pint had magically resurrected! Was this divine intervention? Or defiance of entropy? The detached portion of Alex’s mind knew someone must have poured another round, presumably from a pitcher that even now existed somewhere outside his diminishing field of vision. Still, it was fun to consider alternatives. A negentropic time-reversal had certain arguments in its favor.

With yet another of his unraveling faculties, Alex listened to Stan Goldman’s recollections from dimly remembered days at the end of the last century.

“I was thinkin’ about becoming a biologist in the late nineties,” his former research advisor said. “That’s where all the excitement was then. Biologists think of those days the way we physicists look back on the early nineteen-hundreds, when Planck an’ Schrodinger were inventing the quantum, and old Albert himself nailed the speed o’ light to the bleeding reference frame… when the basis for a whole science was laid down.

“What a time that must have been! A century’s engineering came out of what those lucky bastards discovered. But by my time it was all lookin’ pretty dumpit boring for physics.”

“C’mon, Stan,” George Hutton protested. “The late nineties, boring? For physics? Wasn’t that when Adler and Hurt completed grand unification? Combinin’ all the forces of nature into one big megillah? You can’t tell me you weren’t excited then!”

Stan brought one spotted hand to his smooth dome, using a paper serviette to dab away spots of perspiration. “Oh, surely. The unification equations were brilliant, elegant. They called it a “theory of everything”… TOE for short.

“But by then field theory was mostly a spectator sport. It took almost mutant brilliance to participate… like you have to be eight feet tall to play pro basketball these days. What’s more, you started hearing talk about closing the books on physics. There were profs who said ‘all the important questions have been answered.’ ”

“That’s why you thought about leaving the field?” George inquired.

Stan shook his head. “Naw. What really had me depressed was that we’d run out of modalities.”

Alex had been pinching his numb cheeks, in search of any feeling. He turned to peer at Stan. “Modalities?”

“Basic ways and means. Chinks in nature’s wall. The lever and the fulcrum. The wheel an’ the wedge. Fire an’ nuclear fission.

“Those weren’t just intellectual curiosities, Alex. They started out as useless abstractions, sure. But, well, do you remember how Michael Faraday answered, when a member of Parliament asked him what use would ever come of his crazy ‘electricity’ thing?”

George Hutton nodded. “I heard about that! Didn’t Faraday ask, um… what use was a newborn baby?”

“That’s one version,” Alex agreed, commanding his head to mimic the approximate trajectory of a nod. “Another story has him answering —  ‘I don’t know, sir. But I’ll wagell, er… wager someday you’ll tax it!’ ” Alex laughed. “Always liked that story.”

“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “And Faraday was right, wasn’t he? Look at the difference electricity made! Physics became the leading science, not just because it dealt in fundamentals but also ’cause it opened doors — modalities — offering us powers we once reckoned belonged to gods!”

Alex closed his eyes. Momentarily it seemed he was back in the meeting house, with Auntie Kapur slyly referring to the ways of heavenly beings.

“Grand unification depressed you because it wasn’t practical*.” George asked unbelievingly.

“Exactly!” Stan stabbed a finger toward the big geo-physicist. “So Hurt described how the electroweak force unifies with chromodynamics and gravitation. So what? To ever do anything with the knowledge, we’d need the temperatures and pressures of the Big Bang!”

Stan made a sour look. “Pfeh! Can you see why I almost switched to quantum biology? That was where new theories might make a difference, lead to new products, and change people’s lives.”

Hutton regarded his old friend with clear disappointment. “And I always thought you math types were in it for the beauty. Turns out you’re as much a gadget junky as I am.” He waved to a passing barmaid, ordering another round.

Goldman shrugged. “Beauty and practicality aren’t always inconsistent. Look at Einstein’s formulas for absorption and emission of radiation. What elegance! Such simplicity! He had no idea he was predicting lasers. But the potential’s right there in the equations…”

Alex felt the words wash over him. They were like swarming creatures. He had a strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young. Normally, he had little use for the popular multimind models of consciousness. But right now the normal, comforting illusion of personal unity seemed to have been dissolved by the solvent, alcohol. He felt he wasn’t singular, but many.

One self watched in bemusement while a dark pint reappeared before him, again, as if by magic. Another sub-persona struggled to follow the thread of Stan’s rambling reminiscence.

But then, behind his tightening brow, yet more selves wrestled over something still submerged. Benumbed by fatigue and alcohol, logic had been squelched and other, more chaotic forces seemed to romp unfettered. Ninety-nine to one the results would be just the sort that sounded great during a party and like gibberish the morning after.

“… when, out of nowhere, the cavitron appeared! Imagine my delight,” Stan went on, spreading his gnarled hands. “All of a sudden we found there was, after all, a way to gain access to the heart of the new physics!”

The elderly theoretician made a fist, as if grasping tightly some long-sought quarry. “One year the field seemed sterile, sexless, doomed to mathematical masturbation or worse — perpetual, pristine theoretical splendor. The next moment — boom! We had in our hands the power to make singularities! To move and shape space itself!”