Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm Read online

  “She gave it the good college try, which shows considerably more application and ambition than any of my sons have displayed. Speaking of which, your applications have not been accepted yet to any college. What are you going to do next year? As of your birthday, I am starting to charge you rent!” The thimble was ice-cold by now. The conversation had somehow transformed into Dad trying to be motherly, which he didn't do very well. He usually ended on a distinctly unmotherly note, such as the warning about rent. And no, he was not kidding.

  I bit back the comment that Professor Dreadful could afford to have his daughter wreck a yacht in the Indian Ocean. If Dad was so impressed with daredevilry, then maybe he could buy me a used apple barrel on the cheap; and I could ride it over Niagara Falls.

  But I knew better than to argue when he gave me a direct order. After all, I had not raised him; it was the other way around.

  So I said, “Yes, sir. So Miss Dreadful and me, we were looking through the Professor’s desk, and we found this—I don’t know, some sort of research paper for something he was trying to get published. He was working on the enigma of the CERN Collider Disaster Cuneiform.”

  “Don’t call them cuneiform. Sloppy thinking. It is not yet established the cloud chamber markings are in fact a writing system. They could merely be random scratches.”

  The Super Large Hadron Collider is seventeen miles in circumference, five hundred feet below ground, near Geneva. It was too large to fit in Switzerland, so part of it overlaps into France, or under it. Because it was buried so deep, the quench event was contained: no one on the surface died. The ALICE facility in sector twelve was subjected to an inexplicable escape of radiation when the bending magnets in the section failed.

  If there are verbs for each type of death caused by exposure to various exotic particles, I don’t know what they are: so until then, let’s just say over a dozen scientists, staff members, and visitors were electrocuted, microwaved, and Hiroshima’d. If you have not seen the pictures, don’t look them up, because they are gross. Or just stick a Barbie doll into a toaster. You would not think a thing that operates at a temperature not far above absolute zero could unleash such energy, could you? Well, those guys who died did not either, and they understood the math.

  Certain recording instruments — the press insisted on calling them “Black Boxes” even though technically they weren’t — had survived intact, and they showed that some of the mass-energy of particles was unaccounted for, as if it had vanished from the universe.

  Meanwhile, the mass-energy polite enough not to have vanished from the universe had turned into an ultrahigh frequency electromagnetic burst, which, strangely, had left an almost symmetrical pattern of dents in the cloud chamber, arranged in rectilinear rows and ranks. It looked too regular to be natural. And it looked oddly like the triangular letters of Sumerian cuneiform.

  A signal? If so, from where? From whom?

  “The Professor is convinced that they are a writing,” I said stoutly.

  “Mm. He says the same thing about crop circles.”

  “He is a Harvard-trained symbologist!”

  “Amazing what they give degrees in these days. But if you cannot measure it, it is not science.”

  “Measured or not, he found the key to translate the Disaster Cuneiform…”

  Dad grunted. “Was this before or after he started hallucinating?”

  “He really did figure it out!” I said hotly.

  Dad made a skeptical noise in his nose, “Him, and no one else? Not likely.”

  I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking of Bletchley Park and Project Ultra, Alan Turing and the Enigma Project; of MIT and CalTech; of think tanks and linguists and cryptographers and cryptologists and mathematicians. He was thinking of the National Security Agency, who is the biggest employer of mathematicians and purchaser of computer parts in the world. He was thinking of the NASA team that inscribed the Voyager plate and had experts on the theory of how to make first contact with alien intelligences.

  Everyone who was assuming this was a First Contact, assumed we should be doing the things that in theory you should do if you ever pick up signals from space aliens for the first time: you look for common ground. If they are from another planet, your only common ground is the scientific facts of the objective reality surrounding you. What else would you have in common? So you tap about prime numbers in base two or something.

  These people—or entities—who inscribed the Disaster Cuneiform were not doing that. Why not? It was as if they were not even trying to be understood. But then why send the code at all? Maybe people from another universe did not even have any objective reality in common with us.

  I said stubbornly, “He solved it. He translated it.”

  Dad closed his eyes. “How?” And he drawled out the word with a long lingering vowel of disbelief bordering on disgust. Hao-ooo-ow?

  “He sought back to the primordial language, older than Indo-European, theorists say must exist. The ancestor of all languages. The marks that looked like Cuneiform were not a mathematical cipher, and so all the code crackers could not crack it. The marks actually were Cuneiform — but a version so primal and ancient, older than Sumer and Babylon, that no record survives. Because he thought it was a message from another branch of history, an Earth whose events never happened, not here. The papers in his desk were about the Many Worlds Theory.”

  “It does not make testable statements,” Dad said, laying down his head, and putting his elbow back over his eyes. “So it is the Many Worlds Interpretation, not a theory.”

  I realized I was bickering. How much of my ten minutes was left? I had to get back on track.

  “How many are there?” I pressed. “Worlds, I mean? How many could there be? More than one?”

  “The Everett and DeWitt interpretation supposes that every possible outcome for every event at a quantum level defines its own world. That means if one electron twitches for one second in one carbon atom in the photosphere of a giant star in an unnamed galaxy beyond the Virgo Cluster, it creates a new timespace continuum identical, but for that twitch, to ours.” He uttered a noise that was half sigh, half snort. “How that one electron-second has the energy to reproduce the mass of the Big Bang, not to mention the memory to Xerox the location of every particle in the macrocosmic universe, is something Everett and DeWitt did not interpret. Now, Ilya, you’ve known that since you were twelve, when we taught you quantum mechanics.”

  One problem with being homeschooled, is that your parents never stop lecturing you: school is never out. The advantage is that you can get a summer job interning for someone like Professor Dreadful, who seems to know everything about everything.

  But as Dad spoke this, his words were slow. I did not think it was just because he was tired. Something was making him tense again, although his elbow was still hiding his face. The thimble was warmer, but I was not sure why.

  I said, “The Professor’s theory is that only human moral choices would cause a split into two timelines. He thinks the universe was strictly monolinear until the human race evolved.”

  “Hmph,” My Dad’s grunt showed that he was less than overwhelmed. He relaxed again. “The point of the Many Worlds Interpretation was to cleave to classical cause-and-effect while saving the appearance of quantum-mechanical events, which are random. It has nothing particular to do with choices mortals make, moral or no.”

  So the topic of many worlds theory was warm, and so was the cuneiform, but any theory Professor Dreadful had about those topics was cold. So maybe Dad believed other worlds were real, but thought the Professor was fake.

  I had to keep feeling around and get a final answer to my question before fatigue carried Dad away to bed, leaving me with no way to know what to do.

  And time was running out. My phone was in my pocket like a bomb.

  Groping, I said, “The Professor says that the inanimate universe, and the behavior of plants, animals, and most of the things humans do, are all rigidly determine
d like clockwork.”

  “Well, he’s about a century behind the times. Not even Einstein could save classical causation. It seems God does roll dice after all.” This was all muttered absentmindedly. Dad sounded bored. Very cold now.

  I pressed on. “He says most human actions are determined, most, but not all. Things that seem like random choices, like deciding whether or not to have a bean burrito for lunch, are just the brain mechanisms acting out their pre-programmed conditioning. Only when we are making a choice that involves a moral question — such as whether or not to break a promise — do we actually interact with something outside of normal causation and above normal psychological mechanisms, an eternal principle only the conscience can perceive; and that is what splits the universe in two.”

  Dad just sighed. After a pause, he said, “Do you know how long it took me to make up my mind to ask your dear, sainted mother to marry me, Ilya? If this idea were true, that was all time wasted. I both asked her and also never found the nerve, both raised my sons to be fine young men and also never held them in my arms or heart.

  “That choice and every other moral decision would be pointless, because no matter how carefully you use your judgment, in the other branch of time, you always act stupidly. Even to the weakest temptation, in the other branch, you always give in.

  “No, the Professor’s Many Worlds idea is just one of those many ideas that are as pretty as the patterns on a poisonous snake, and you stare fascinated by the sinuous Celtic knotwork of its bright coils and gazing in its unwinking cold eyes, you never notice that all it is really telling you is that life is a lie. Don’t believe it. Only liars say life is a lie.”

  Dad took down his arm and sat up. He had not undressed, so that his Kevlar jacket still covered him mostly; but he had unzipped it, so a flap hung open, and the white collar of the deacon’s uniform he wore beneath was visible above his ammo bandolier. Around his neck, on a chain of rosary beads the Archbishop himself had blessed, he wore an ivory crucifix that contained, in a tiny glass vacuole, the finger bone of Saint Demetrius of Sermium, patron saint of Crusaders, coated in the oil it spontaneously exuded. Next to it, in a sheath, was his black-bladed stiletto with the wide hilts, a dark cross next to a pale one.

  “No, my son, if you must believe that there are many worlds, believe me, I pray you, that if you do evil in this world, you have not the power to create some new world where that choice was made aright. Only the Creator can create new worlds. Only miracles change history; nothing inside nature has the power to undo the natural consequences of what evil men do.”

  Then he looked at me sharply and said, “What order are you thinking of disobeying? What promise were you planning to break?”

  He had been playing Huckle Buckle Beanstalk too, it seemed, and somehow figured out exactly where to put his hand to find what I was hiding from him, my own personal little sizzling thimble.

  The fire was hot, and I was bent over it, so that I did not notice the warmth of the blush of anger spreading through my face until I heard how harsh my answer was: “Is my life all a lie? Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, Dad? If you are my dad!”

  I gave the fake log one last strong blow from the fire poker, then stood and turned. I pointed the poker at him accusingly. “How many universes are there? You know, don’t you?”

  6. Rare Books

  The same day Professor Dreadful was dragged away in a straitjacket, raving, I discovered what he had been working on.

  You see, I did not want to go home and face the looks on the faces of Dobrin and Father. Looks of total not-surprise, looks that said I told you so louder than words. And I could not stay at the Museum; they had a cordon around it.

  It was a simple choice. Either he was crazy, and there was no way to translate random marks left by a random energy discharge during a random accident because there was nothing to translate, just a crazed mind seeing patterns in chaos, like a child who keeps seeing his mother’s face in the fluffy clouds. Or he was crazy, but right, and had read them.

  I decided on option two. Because that meant I did not need to go home right away and face Dobrin’s carefully sarcastic unshocked looks. So your Professor who collects animals that don’t exist actually was a babbling lunatic after all, not just a guy who acted like one?

  What angle had the Professor been working on? What had he seen that the rest of the world had not?

  So I went to the library. I looked up his work, read his papers and articles.

  Hours went by, but it was not hard work, like weeding ruins, just brainwork, and if bow-hunting teaches anything, it teaches patience.

  I struck gold when I found a recent issue of SIGN AND SEMIOTICS journal, which published peer-reviewed papers on comparative symbology. Tucked in between an article on Merovingian Grail-Kings and an article on the links between Egyptian esoteric practices and the Cathars of Andalusia, was a paper by my own Professor Achitophel Dreadful.

  It was an article on semantic drift between Akkadian Cuneiform and a hypothetical proto-Sumerian logogram system, deduced from an application of Grimm’s Law. The article had extensive footnotes, as you’d expect, and some of the references were to books right here in this very library—where, come to think of it, the Professor was doing most of his research last year.

  I had to get the librarian to unlock the case in the rare books room tucked into a corner of the top floor.

  “You have to sign in,” she said sharply, pointing with her beaklike nose toward the visitor’s log.

  I was looking for one book in particular from the Professor’s footnotes. And I found it, tucked between the sole surviving volume, number XI, of the lost First Encyclopædia of Tlön compiled by the Orbis Tertius Society, and a rare unabridged edition of A Study of the Chaldaean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language (with observations on the early tin trade in West Cornwall) by W.S.S. Holmes. The book I sought had the catchy title of Paleogenetic Assessments of Epipaleolithic Migration and Population Replacement in Erythraean Coastal Areas by the Eritrean Research Project Team.

  The librarian had to sit in the rare books room with me, since I was underage, or maybe she just did not trust my sloping cranium with its supraorbital brow ridge. She watched me with a cold and scowling eye while I read, no doubt fretting that, had she not been there, I would have blown my nose on the antique pages. I even had to wear white plastic gloves while handling the book. I don’t know if everyone who steps into the rare books room has to wear them, or only teenagers with oily skin.

  I thought it would be dull as ditchwater. Instead, I kept having that dizzying sensation Dorothy must have felt when she stepped out of her monochrome Kansas house into the Technicolor Munchkinland. Twice I flipped back to the front matter to assure myself that this was a real, copyrighted book published by Cambridge University Press.

  There was a discussion of the Urheimat, which is the hypothetical homeland of whatever tribe fathered the first Indo-European language.

  For over a century, scholars had speculated about the location of Urheimat. This volume claimed to know the secret: one of the most fertile lands of the Fertile Crescent, between Ethiopia and Felix Arabia, between the Kebassa plateau and the Red Sea, where the modern city of Asmara rises in Eritrea.

  This is the spot where legend says the Queen of Sheba gave birth to the son of Solomon, Menelich, while history says the ambition of Caesar during his Egyptian campaigns attempted to annex this rich land but failed. Long before Caesar, before Solomon, before even the long-vanished Sabaeans dwelt here, the nameless and primordial tribe of Man walked upright, invented fire, invented language: The first tribe of the first true humans.

  That original band of fire-using early man was less than two thousand breeding individuals. Recent studies in genetics traced all human lineages back to ten sons of a genetic patriarch and eighteen daughters of a genetic matriarch. The Tree of Man is rooted in a single mother, the mitochondrial matriarch, because all other branches fell extinct. The first three lineages that
arose from the genetic patriarch spread through Africa. Most paleogeneticists rather fancifully referred to the ancestral genetic markers as Shem, Ham and Japheth. This author, more stolid, designated them Son I, Son II and Son III.

  Son III’s lineage was the one with whom this author was mainly concerned, the line from which races as distinct as Chaldaeans and Cornishmen, Peloponnesians and Paleosiberian Macedonians and Manx arose. Perhaps clutching logs, this clan braved the waters of the Red Sea, those straits the Arabs call The Gate of Grief: twenty miles from isle to isle to the coasts of what is now Yemen. From there, Son III and his bloodline migrated to Asia to beget Sons designated IV through X: this great Diaspora of his bloodline reached from the Sea of Japan (Son IV), to Northern India (Son V) to the South Caspian (Sons VI and IX).

  I bent my head over the page. The author speculated about the origins of dialects, and how they grow to form independent languages, and why they change over time. His basic question: since there is such a strong evolutionary incentive for individuals and groups to communicate with each other, either to form alliances in war or partnerships in peace, what possible reason was there for linguistic drift? Why did people form local dialects which rendered them unable to talk to their cousins in the tribe a day’s march away? No other animal signals, birdcalls and suchlike, showed such a strong and rapid drift.

  He saw how you would get special words for birds and beasts in one area not found in another, or why seashore people would have names for tools and nautical terms that mountain-dwelling tribes would lack: but aside from these special cases, whoever stops using a word his neighbors and ancestors used, and deliberately starts using a word no one understands?

  The trait of misunderstanding had no evolutionary value, no good reason to exist.

  He did not think it was nurture that caused languages to divide away from each other. He thought it was nature: a genetic disease. This author had written out the transmission vectors of the disease. As best he could from genetic and cultural clues, he tried to identify where it had started, how it had spread.