As She Climbed Across the Table

10

When Alice held her press conference I crept in and sat unobtrusively at the back. It turned out that Alice was right, Soft wrong. Lack was displaying a preference for certain particles. There wasn’t any explanation, but Alice had dubbed it vacuum intelligence, and Lack was instantly and forever anthropomorphized.

Lack had star potential, at least on campus. He was a charismatic mystery, a mute ambassador, a cosmic Kaspar Hauser. Developments in his chamber went murmuring through the faculty daily. And today he was being offered to the larger world.

The larger world was showing only the slightest interest. The conference hall was less than half full, and I recognized a lot of the faces. The physicists might have overestimated Lack’s sex appeal. Alice sat up on the dais, sipping water and paging through her notes, unperturbable, wrapped in silence. Soft was beside her, his legs crossed, pants hitched up awkwardly to reveal spindly ankles, his expression distant. The momentum in the department belonged to Alice now. Soft was just a token, a reminder of the Prize that could be had.

The lights dimmed. Alice stepped up to the podium, waiting for the crowd to fall silent, and introduced herself and Soft. Then she explained, in lucid detail, the sequence that had led to the discovery and naming of Lack. Soft’s venture, the false vacuum bubble. The aneurysm. The gravity event. The audience followed her closely.

My attention wandered. I was busy righting myself. It was useful, seeing Alice at a fixed distance, so far away. She was up there, and I was over here, she was apparently intact—maybe I was intact, too. So I sat and adjusted my own vertical hold after a week of spinning.

Alice went on to describe the state of the experiment—Lack’s gradual stabilization, and the conversion of the chamber from Cauchy-space to earth-normal. “Lack’s tastes make up his being,” she said. “His preference for certain particles is all there is to him. If he stops choosing he stops existing.” She described the attempt to define his exact boundaries, the array of detectors, meters, and photosensitive plates they had aimed at this hint, this tenuous invisible presence.

The audience applauded politely when she was done. Alice nodded her thanks and went to sit beside Soft, to field questions from the crowd.

The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.

“Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.

It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.

I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.

“It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The spin of a particle, the color or flavor of a quark. A field or horizon. Beauty, truth, and strangeness. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”

Some instinct led me to pause. I let the microphone drop to my waist. The audience looked up at Alice and Soft, searching their faces for response.

I am the Lorax, I thought. I speak for the trees.

“I have to question the assumption that Lack’s preference is for particles, in and of themselves,” I continued. “Why do we assume that our visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H’s to M’s. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose? Bebop or swing? I think we’re leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we’re—pardon me—failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror.”

My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallow it, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. For that’s when I played my part, with Soft and Alice, in our collective Dr. Frankenstein. That was how I conspired in the creation of my own monstrous rival, my personal Stanley Toothbrush.

Would it have occurred without my help? I’ll never know. But until then I’d been passive, a victim of fate. Now I was as much to blame as anyone.