Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (20 page)

He now regretted being so nasty to Jeremy Stone. It was bitterness that had made him do it, he could acknowledge that finally.

Renata had one final look at the back of the Freud book, where she had written down three words. Two years before. She had thought no one had been looking.
Thanatos. Destrudo. Mortido.

The conversation proceeded. It never really stopped, as they moved back and forth from the living room to the kitchen and back. They ate; they drank. Sometimes they fell silent, as though by agreement, and pondered. Often Renata would take down a book from the shelf and find an image to illustrate her point.

"Frank Beers called it the Autotelic Constellation. The constellation forms itself. Always. Certain minds happen to be in position, maybe even put into position, according to Frank, to read the constellation as it writes itself in nature, fashions itself..."

"... or even weaves itself into gossamer embroideries..."

"If you like. Embroideries made out of gossamer graphite. Anyway, one of Frank's examples was this: Marvell writes his poem 'The Garden' in the middle of the seventeenth century in Yorkshire. And it has these lines in it:

Ripe Apples drop about my head;

The Luscious Clusters of the Vine

Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine.

"You can see what's happening. In that garden nature is making all the moves. That's in Yorkshire in 1650. Just over the other side of the Humber in Lincolnshire one decade later one of those same apples will press its attentions on Isaac Newton. Fall from its tree to the ground at precisely the moment that this young redeemer of consciousness, a posthumous child born on Christmas Day in 1642, is ready to receive it. Ready to be imprinted. The Autotelic Constellation inscribed itself on Marvell's mind as a poem and on Newton's as the universal law of attraction we now call gravitation. Robert Hooke is calculating the inverse square law at exactly the same moment, by the way. Later on Joseph Priestley will understand something about oxygen more or less on the same day that Lavoisier is understanding it, too.

"When Einstein works out the meaning of relativity Henri Poincaré had been formulating the same stuff, even using the same words, as Einstein. He wouldn't abandon the ether, though—not as ruthless as Albert was in that regard, but the Autotelic Constellation was pressing itself on both their minds at exactly the same moment. It is never an accident. Einstein was a slow child. Not some brilliant prodigy. Even burst into tears when he saw soldiers marching down the street. And Newton was pretty odd, too. Might never have worked out gravity if he hadn't been an alchemist. His belief in the attractive force let him consider the actions of force at a distance. Pretty occult. These people —they seem to have been specifically shaped so that the Autotelic Constellation could press into them, without distraction."

"So what's the Autotelic Constellation pressing into our heads now then?"

Renata thought for a moment before replying.

"I'd have to say supersymmetry. String theory. That seems to be as significant now as Einstein or Newton were at an earlier time."

"And how would it be expressing itself exactly?"

Once again Renata fell silent as she sipped at her wine. Third glass.

"Maybe you've been investigating how it's expressing itself. That's why you're here. That's why you were led to me. That's why I was led to me."

Banks stared at her for a moment.

"You mean that one of the strings of our string theory..." He stopped, and Renata continued the thought for him.

"Has been materializing as an unknown form of gossamer. Gossamer graphite."

"And weaving embroideries that then function as neutrino gauzes. Got a pretty lethal way of expressing himself, this cosmic spider of yours."

"Why do you say himself? Why not herself?"

"What?"

"I think we might be talking about a her, to be honest, not a him. And she seems to have chosen another she to talk to. Little old Renata: girl talk. Sorry if I'm upsetting any of the theological apple-carts you might have been sitting in. It's just that sometimes we need to pay attention to the genders of words, even to their status in grammar."

"You're going altogether too quickly for me here, Renata. Even with the aid of this malt whisky of yours. Slow down and explain to someone who doesn't have your education."

"We've been sent a message. Written on three dead bodies. The message spelt out was
Thanatos,
and Thanatos—the Greek god of death—was male. The signature on the inside of Charlie's computer screen was
Aranea,
remember. It's the Latin word for spider. That's a female spider. So we seem to have a female spider weaving very special webs out of gossamer graphite, and thereby fluking neutrinos with some new force so that they'll interact with certain parts of the male brain and crystallize it.

"Frank's phrase, remember, was Autotelic Constellation. A spider's web is a type of constellation, and as with all constellations, the interstices are just as real as the filaments. What doesn't seem to be there is just as much a reality as what is. So this deviant Higgs, or whatever it might be that's causing the fluking, sends little blasts of materiality breaking through the interstices of the standard model."

"Universalize that procedure, presumably, and we'd all be dead in an hour. The greatest terrorist device in the history of the world. Nuclear detonators and biological weapons would look like peashooters and paper airplanes. Not very motherly, is she, this spider of yours?"

"Not sure, Inspector. She does seem to have chosen me to direct her messages to. The chosen daughter. Childless, mind you."

Renata laughed, if a little dismally.

"That might have been the sound of laughter on the deck of the
Titanic."

"Let me get this right. It's men who die, signed with the name of the Greek god of death."

"God not goddess, note. All three of these men were engaged in different ways on their lethal business. Trying to make money by sending people to the kingdom of Thanatos. I've just realized something. Those three words I wrote. Wait, I have to get another book." She walked over to the bookshelf and found the book she wanted. She sat back down with it on the sofa and flicked through the pages.

"Here. Been trying to work out why Freud is here at all. Why I'm being directed to Freud. Images and words. Now I think I've got it. It was after the war. Freud had been working up to fifteen hours a day in Vienna, but he needed to re-think his psychology entirely. Before the war he'd assumed that all human motivation, unless it gets reversed in some traumatic way, obeys the pleasure principle. We are always trying to maximize whatever in life is most pleasurable. But the war throws him. What is this massive force driving hundreds of thousands of men to mutual destruction? And he writes this little book:
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Now he engages finally with Thanatos, with the death-drive. There is a force in us, he reckons, that is committed to death. Part of the psyche that is a partisan of death. And he tries to find a word that will match libido in the psychic machinery. He comes up with
destrudo
and
mortido.
Now the curious thing about both those words is that they are male. In Latin and the Romance languages, death is normally female:
la mort, la muerte.
In English and the Slavic languages and Greek, it's usually male. And Freud wants his death-drive male. Presumably because that's where most of the killing comes from."

"You're losing me, Renata. Where does all this tie up with string theory? Not to mention you. And your mother, the spider."

"Not sure. Trying to work that one out myself. Frank had a line on this, too."

"Was it made of gossamer graphite?"

"Death is a noun. A male noun according to Freud. Self-contained like an explosive device; like an Urbino Roach. Women sometimes have the gift of being more verbal. Little nouns can grow inside us and start to do things."

"String theory, Renata?"

"It will all come down to nouns and verbs, according to the late lamented Frank Beers. What we have been calling particles are in truth only particular manifestations of the strings that underlie all material existence."

"Strings?"

"Strings, yes; that's why it's called string theory, Joe. Pity there isn't a verb here instead of a noun. Pour yourself another whisky and try to keep up. These strings are incredibly thin but unearthly in their strength."

"A bit like gossamer, you mean? Or even gossamer graphite?"

"That might be the nearest we get to it in our material existence, yes. Except for one big difference. A strand of gossamer goes round the world..."

"And weighs less than a toothbrush."

"Well done. You've been doing your homework. But should we ever encounter one of the underlying strings of the cosmos, it would be just a little heavier. One centimeter of it would probably weigh a billion billion tonnes. A fragment of it smaller than your fingernail could fall right through the earth like a lump of lead going through tissue paper. That's a cosmic string, not a superstring. Obviously."

"Obviously. And we're all made out of this stuff?"

"If the theory's correct, then all of creation is made out of it, ultimately. So we've made a mistake trying to treat everything as though it all goes into individual units, individual little boxes. As though everything is an object or a possession. As though I can point to this particle here and say, Look, there's one particle, all by itself. Quite different from all the others."

"Can't we do that then? It's my job usually, doing something very similar to that. It's called forensics. It was this knife had the victim's blood on it; not that one."

"No, we can't do it. Not with physics anyway. That's one of the discoveries of quantum mechanics. If I could point to one particle in the universe, just one, and say, I know it's here, exactly here and nowhere else, then the uncertainty of its velocity would in that instant have to become infinite. And reality as we know it would fall apart. I heard a bloke on the radio yesterday. Diagnosed as schizophrenic. He said something very interesting. They'd been doing some neurophysiological imaging with him. Feeding him stimuli, then seeing what parts of the brain lit up on their screens. He reckoned they were on the wrong tack. Said you didn't get to understand the plot of
EastEnders
by taking the television apart. Try to see the plot that the machine is just an expression of. But we have this nominal obsession. Well, perversion really."

"Nominal?"

"An obsession with nouns. With assuming that we can cram the whole of reality into these self-contained units called nouns. Now who gave us permission to do that? You see, nouns always tend toward the proprietorial and the static. We can use possessive pronouns with them. My house. My car. My body."

Which I would like to caress, Dr. Dibdin; uncover and caress, believe me. Every particle and inch of you. I could untie your strings for you right now. Entrap you in my web.

"We even do it with God, don't we? People talk about my God. That's because we turned divinity into a noun. A male one, like Thanatos. Do you see what I'm trying to tell you?"

"No."

"Thomas Aquinas asked himself in the
Summa
whether the word God should be a noun or a verb. When the Almighty utters himself in Exodus, he says 'I am that I am,' which is the nearest that Hebrew can get to being entirely verbal. He's saying, 'Don't try to trap me in a noun, because that would be idolatry. All of your nouns are too small for this vastness.' It's what Blake called eternal delight. Energy is eternal delight. Anyway, the Greek word for God is
theos,
and John Damascene reckoned that that word derived from caring or from kindling or from contemplating—all verbs, you see. We take the mightiest action and try to trap it in the possessive spaces we call nouns. The Latin word
deus
goes back to the Sanskrit
di,
which means to gleam. Now David Bohm said that our big problem whenever we talk about the subatomic world is that we keep using nouns when we should be using verbs. We shouldn't talk about an electron; we should say 'to electron.' It's a process, not an object. Ever treat it as an object and it disappears immediately.

"String theory is another way of saying the same thing. All particles, or what we call particles, are simply moments, instances in space and time, of these vibrating strings that constitute our underlying reality. We should treat the particles as momentary expressions of a process, not self-contained entities."

"As verbs not nouns, you mean."

"Exactly that."

Then let the noun tonight be Renata. I know precisely the verb I'd like to apply to that noun, the process I'd most like to engage in. My energy really could be eternal delight, if only I can manage to bring these nouns and verbs together. To be. He remembered from his language course that you called that the copula.

"And you learned all this from Frank Beers? You were an avid student. Zealous, even."

"Yes, I was greatly taken with Frank's ideas at that point. Pity he decided to betray them all."

"And why do you think he did that?"

"Why do you think? For money. Decided the world was going to hell in a handcart and he wanted some security in his old age. So he joined the League of Thanatos."

"I'm a bit like Sherlock Holmes myself. Like to stay on the Earth as I know it as far as possible. Find rational explanations here. Could someone be organizing all this? I mean, could it be some elaborate joke about the control that the World Wide Web has over our lives? If so, I'm going to make sure the sonofabitch goes down for a very long time indeed."

"A joke involving two dead scientists, one data entrepreneur, and some new matter that can't be explained in terms of the periodic table or the standard model? That's a pretty big joke, Joe."

"You don't get ones like that in the average Christmas cracker, I grant you."

Renata had carried on drinking the wine. She had almost finished the bottle now. Banks kept helping himself to glasses of malt, without asking any more.

"Did Thanatos have any relatives, out of interest? Might anyone else from the family archive be coming on a visit? You'd be the one to hear first, presumably. You'd be the one they'd ask to do their bookings."