The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(91)

Yes.

That’s perfect. It’s not in the Absolute Elsewhere I take it.

Nope. Well. Sort of.

Is this where the mathematicians hang out?

Yes. Church is coming next week.

What happened to school?

I decided not to go.

You’re taking a sabbatical.

If you like.

The Kid was thumbing through the spiralbound ledgerbook. Not much here in the way of numbers. What’s with the poetry?

I’ve always written poetry.

Yeah. I dont think you’re here for the poetry, Duchess.

I dont think I’ve heard you take a position on career choices before. Does this mean that we’re at naughts and crosses?

Maybe. What’s cross and naughty is you splitting like you did. You shouldnt leave your friends twisting in the wind.

You’re not my friend.

I love it when you hurt me. I thought we were further along than that.

Further along what? And why dont you let me see your notebook?

Part of it of course is just coming down off the drugs. Abandoning her doctors. The sense of loss and despair typical in the recently shrinkrapt. When did you eat last?

I ate.

Yeah? When did you sleep?

I dont know. Probably Wednesday.

How long ago is that?

This is Friday.

Yeah? So how many days?

She crossed the room and sat on the bed and started taking off her shoes. You dont know how far it is from Wednesday to Friday, do you?

You dont have to know everything.

What else dont you know?

What else dont you know, mimed the Kid. He sounded uncannily like her. I suppose you think you’ve found something out. But I might be leading you down the garden path. Or maybe if you dont get to start out in life counting on your fingers you’re already at something of a disadvantage. Ever think of that?

No. I hadnt. Sorry.

Forget it. We need to move along. Some of the stuff we got from you needs going over. I got a few notes here.

Stuff you got from me.

Yeah.

He was dredging up papers from his clothes. He wet his flipper with his tongue and began to sort through them. We’re starting to see these shifts. We checked everything and it’s not the stylus so it must be the graph. Yeah? How’s that work? All right. Maybe it’s in the transmission. You cook off the overprint. Nope. Reversed polarities. That’s got a familiar smell to it but we dont think it’s the problem. And what you thought was a graph may be sequestering a dimension such that closer study reveals a lattice that no matter how you turn it it’s always right side up which brings into play certain problems with boundary conditions and you’ve got an ugly feeling the whole system could be out of true or it’s drifting and where to define your mean deviants who for the nonce shall remain nameless. It’s nicely aisled and crossaisled and the long and the short of it is we’ll know it when it gets here but is that good enough?

When what gets here?

The day of the locus.

The day of the locus.

Yeah.

This is what you came out here for?

Is that okay?

If they could get their hands on you they’d put you in the boobyhatch. Are you aware of that?

Yeah? Well it takes one to know one.

So did your little friends come with you?

You dont have to worry about them. Where was I?

Even if I knew I wouldnt say.

Not important. It’s a new year. Time for everybody to buckle down. Did you make any resolutions?

No.

What did you do New Year’s Eve?

We went to dinner.

We?

My brother and I.

Any dancing?

No dancing.

Maybe he’s weaned himself off of that. The scented hair and the breath in his ear. Hard on a lad. To coin a phrase.

You’re disgusting.

Still I suppose this was before you dipped down into the double digits avoirdupoiswise. Bones coming through the skin. Not the hallmark of the erotic. Even if hunger is rumored to hone the senses. Maybe you should get back to your calculations.

I work all the time. I just dont write that much of it down.

So what do you do? Just loll around and mull over the problems?

Yeah. Loll and mull. That’s me.

Dreaming of equations to come. So why dont you write it down?

You really want to talk about this?

Sure.

All right. It’s not just that I dont have to write things down. There’s more to it than that. What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I dont know how one does mathematics. I dont know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they dont just go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.