Cracking the Sky (5 page)

SAVANT SONGS

I loved Elsa;
the soaring tinkle of her rare laughter, the marbled blue of her eyes, the spray of freckles across her nose. Her mind. The first, deepest attraction; the hardest challenge. She flew with her mental intensity, taking me places I’d never been before, outdistancing me, searching the mathematical structures of string theory and mbranes, following n-dimensional folds across multiple universes. I loved her the way one loves the rarest Australian black opal or the view from the top of Mount Everest. Elsa’s rarity was its own attraction. There are very few female savants.

She captured me whole when I was her physics grad student, starting in 2001, nine years before breakthrough.

Ten years ago last week, I walked into Elsa’s office. She stood with her back to me, staring out her window. She didn’t move at all as I snicked the door shut and scraped the chair legs. I coughed. Nothing. She might have been a statue. Her straw-colored hair hung in a long braid, just touching her slender hips, fastened with a violet beaded loop, the kind little girls wore. Her arms hung loosely from her pink T-shirt, above faded jeans and Birkenstocks.

“Hello?” I spoke tentatively. “Professor Hill?” Was she all right? I’d never seen such stillness in anything but a sleeping child.

Louder. “Professor? I’m Adam Giles, here for an interview.”

She finally turned and stepped daintily over to her desk, curling up in the big scratched leather chair behind her empty desk. Her gaze fastened on my eyes, as if they were all she saw in that moment. “Do you know what the word atom means?”

I blinked. She didn’t. A warm breeze from the open windows blew stray strands of her hair across her face.

I struggled for the right answer, pinned by her gaze. She was an autistic savant. Literal. “Indivisible.”

“Why?”

I thought about it. Atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and ever-infinitely smaller things. “It means they didn’t know any better when they named them. They couldn’t see anything smaller yet.”

“It means they were scared of anything smaller. They tried to make the word a fence. They thought that if they called atoms indivisible, they could make them indivisible.” Her gaze still hadn’t wavered. Her voice was high and firm, a soprano song even when she talked. I’d researched autistics, researched Elsa herself on the web. In physics, she was brilliant. She threw ideas right and left, half silly and wrong, half cutting-edge breakthroughs. If she accepted me, I would help the University winnow, feed her ideas to people who would follow them for years. One of her interviewers had summed her up by saying, “Talk to Elsa about physics, and all you see is the savant. The autistic exists over dinner.”

No grad student had lasted more than three months with her. I needed to last with her; my dissertation was based on her ideas. Whether she screamed or cried or just made me work, however strange she might be, I wanted—needed—to explore what she explored.

She kept going. “Scientists make fences with ideas. Accidentally. Do you like to jump fences?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll do.” She stood.

“Don’t you want to know about my dissertation?”

“You’re working on multiverses. It’s the only reason you can possibly have chosen me.”

She had a point. But multiverses was a rather broad subject. Mtheory: the latest plausible theory of everything, the current holy grail of physics. We live in universes made of 11 dimensions, called (mem)branes. We can render them with math, but settle for flat representations like folded shapes and balls full of air when we try to draw them in the few dimensions we can actually see. If you look at our pitiful drawings, we appear to live as holograms on flat sheets of see-through paper.

From that strange interview, I spent the next year near her every day, pounding away on my dissertation late at night, only giving myself Saturday nights for beer and chat with friends.

It was hard at first. Some days she talked endlessly about her most recent obsession, only not to me. She talked to herself, to the walls, to the windows, to the printers. I might as well have been inanimate. I wandered the lab behind her, taking notes. It was like following a six-year-old. She mumbled of memories from multiple universes, alternate histories, alternate futures. The first time I really understood her, months into following her, she stopped suddenly in the middle of one of her monologues, looking directly at me, as if today she saw me, and said, “Memory is a symphony call answered by the infinite databases on all the brane universes. We just need to hear the right notes, or make the right notes in an out-call, like requesting a certain table from a cosmic database.”

I learned she cared little for food, or weather, or even holidays. I learned never to change the location of anything in the lab, and that if she changed it, she never forgot the change. Even pencils had places. I had to hold her coat out to her when she left, trail it along her arm so she’d notice it, and then she’d shrug into it, safe from the New England weather until she made it across campus to the little brownstone apartment the University provided for her.

I didn’t care whether she ignored me or made me the center of her focus. Months passed when she worked with me by her side, when she seemed astoundingly normal, and guided me to new levels of understanding. But even when she fell into herself, when she wandered and talked to walls, I loved to watch her. Elsa had a dancer’s grace, flowing easily, absently, around every physical obstacle while her mind played in math jungle gyms and her hair glowed in the overhead lights. She was the fairy queen of physics, and I stayed with her, became her acolyte, her Watson, her constant companion.

Scientific dignitaries visited her, and reporters, and the Physics Chair, and I translated. “No, she thinks it is a music database. Or something like that. Related to Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields? A little. To Jung? She says he was too simple—it’s not a collective unconscious. It’s a collective database, a hologram, keyed to music. A bridge between eleven dimensions. Yes, some dimensions are too small to see. Elsa says size is an illusion.” I illustrated it the way she illustrated it to me once: plucking a hair from my head. “There are a million universes in here. And we are in here, too. Perhaps.” Whoever I was talking to would look puzzled, or awed, and angry at this, and I would shake my head. “No, I don’t fully understand it.”

Elsa nodded when I spoke, or when I changed something she’d said in physics-speak to English. Sometimes her hand fluttered to my arm, her thin fingers brushed my skin, and a nearly electric warmth surged through me.

There was an argument over my dissertation. One professor said the work I was doing was impossible and dangerous, another said it was Elsa’s work and not my own, but two others stood up for me. Elsa was there, of course, staring at the ceiling, scribbling on her tablet PC, barely engaged in the argument. I fretted. She only saw me on some days; if this were a day that I was furniture, would she vote for me? But at the right moment, she raised her voice, and said, “Adam is an exemplary student, and more than that, an exemplary physicist. The ideas put forward here are astonishing, and only partly based on my work. All of us build on each other. Give the man his doctorate so we can get back to work.”

And so I became a Doctor of Physics.

The Kiley-James foundation gave me enough money to stick with Elsa for five more years as a post-doc. Our work was being closely followed by other physicists; two articles appeared in journals, and a watered-down version was written for a popular science magazine. I would have stayed without the money.

Six years after I met Elsa, two years after my Doctorate, three grants later, the University gave her PI, short for Physics Intelligence, an AI designed for her by a colleague, delivered with basic intelligence programming and the full physics slate through masters-level work. PI has multiple interfaces, including a hologram that can be designed by the user. Elsa loved that interface, making PI a girl, growing the age of the hologram as PI obtained new knowledge.

Elsa and I spent a year feeding Elsa’s ideas about string theory into PI, filling her with data about the shapes of multiple brane universes. It was all theory, all arguments yet unanswered, all beyond anything I could visualize, even though the math flowed easily. I thought we were done. But next, Elsa and I spent a month feeding her all the symphonies in the world music database; Brahms and Mozart, Bruckner and Dvorak, and then other music like Yo Yo Ma and Carlos Nakai. Lastly, after n-dimensional math, after music, we fed PI literature. We fed her stories of humans, biographies, science fiction, mystery, even romance. Simply put, we offered PI more than math and science, we offered her ourselves.

One Sunday morning, near the end of the year-of-feeding-PI, I slipped and slid my way through icy streets, clutching two coffees, and pushed open the door with my foot. Elsa sat on the floor, cross-legged, staring at the little programmable hologram of PI. She was wearing the same jeans and sweatshirt from Saturday, and her braid had come undone, so her hair floated across her shoulders and touched the floor. She hummed softly. I strained, hearing something else. I bent down. The PI hologram hummed as well, sounds I had never heard a human voice make. I realized Elsa was trying for the same sounds, her throat unable to force the inhuman sounds.

“Elsa?”

She ignored me. So it would be one of those mornings. I set her coffee down next to her, and her hand strayed toward it momentarily, then returned to her knee. I watched her as I drank my coffee and organized notes on questions and theories to feed into PI. Elsa hummed for at least an hour, until her voice would no longer work at all. I took a bottle of water and curled her hands around it, and she raised it to dry cracked lips and drank deeply, shuddering.

She blinked and looked at me. “Good morning, Adam. It is morning?”

“Shhh,” I said, “Shhhhh. It’s time for you to sleep.” I tugged gently on her arm, and Elsa stood shakily, stamping her feet as if they’d gone to sleep. She followed me meekly to a long thin cot we’d wedged between two desks and under a printer, and fell instantly asleep. I covered her with her own overcoat, tucking it around her legs, then threw my spare sweater over her feet, which were sticking out from the overcoat. In sleep, she looked younger, as if the spider web of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes had disappeared into her dreams.

I sat where she had sat, staring at PI. Elsa had set the hologram to be a dancer, and even though PI was light and form, I imagined that she must be cold in her thin leotard. She had been sized to three feet, just tall enough that I gazed into her eyes. She still hummed, her throat, of course, not challenged. As I listened, I realized there were more sounds than a hum; she was accompanied by a complex electronic orchestra, much of it sounding like instruments I had never heard before. The total affect was chaotic and haunting, sometimes cacophonous. “PI?”

She stopped. “Yes, Adam?”

“What are you doing?”

“Playing what I hear when I search for myself.”

I tried to clarify. “You are looking for an AI named PI in another universe?”

“I don’t care about the name. I am searching for a song that approximates my story.” The hologram smiled softly, a skill it had been taught to help it interact with people. She raised her hands up above her head, and her left leg rose behind her, so I could see the toe-shoe above her head, and she hopped three times en-pointe, and returned to standing.

I shook my head at the odd image. “Across branes?” Then I laughed. “Or are you looking for an AI ballet dancer?”

“My story is not ballet. Elsa is simply feeding me dance and movement this week. I learned opera yesterday, and musicals.” She smiled and did a little bow. “And of course across branes. We believe my self cannot exist twice in the same brane.”

“Is Elsa also looking for her self?”

“She can hear her music, and she can feed it to me so I can play it, but she cannot make it herself.” Now PI was frowning, and tears coursed down her cheeks.

“PI, does that matter?”

The tears disappeared, no trace, and PI looked solemn. “It may mean that humans cannot access their other selves. They cannot tune themselves well enough to the cosmic symphony to find themselves. From stories, it seems like this is true. Humans want to find themselves badly enough to make hundreds of religions, to meditate for years, to take hallucinogenic drugs. They do not appear to succeed.”

I drummed my fingers, pondering the implications. “But you can?”

“I am operating on the theory that I cannot, and am trying to disprove it. Elsa is doing the same.”

“I am supposed to feed you data today; two new ideas about the singularity before the big bang.”

“I am not a calculator.” She raised her bare arms above her head and flipped backwards, the ballet skirt looking ridiculous during a back-flip. She was humming as she landed perfectly. “See?”

“All right. Look PI, you’re making me shiver. Can you put on some warmer clothes?”

She laughed, an imitation of Elsa’s laugh, and I smiled as an overcoat appeared, just like the soft one covering Elsa now, in her sleep, down to the thick waist-band and the big silver temperature-sensing buttons.

“Thank you.”

I picked up Elsa’s cold coffee and set it by the microwave, returning to my desk. The humming and the symphony started again, so softly it was simply background, and I spent the next four hours pouring data carefully into PI, setting initial linkages so they could be followed and completed, watching the display show connections being made, information filed and cross-referenced, relevancy assigned. I rubbed my eyes, feeling a sudden desire for warm food and cold beer.

I shook Elsa’s shoulder gently, rousing her. She started to hum. I shook her again. “Come on, let’s feed you.”

In the past few years she had taken to following my lead in daily life the way I followed hers in the lab. I helped her shrug into the overcoat, handed her a knit hat, and wrapped myself in my gray coat, gray scarf, and navy cap. Snow fell softly, silencing the University. We walked across the commons, our feet making fresh prints in an inch of new snow, Elsa’s hair lying wet and snow-covered on the outside of her coat. I should have made her braid it back, kept most of it drier.