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When a stone gargoyle reveals the secrets of the universe, should a reasonable mathematician listen?
Fiction
Speculative
And the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
~Luke 4:5
The lights came up and the room spun with dizzying light, refracted from the crystal chandeliers above. It had been one of his most popular presentations ever. Dr. Cayley Willows felt nausea slam the pit of his stomach as he stepped down from the podium, surrounded by vibrant applause. The musicians reclaimed the stage, perfect in their penguin suits. Cello, flute and violin began to lilt in decorous harmony. The champagne diffused the golden hue of the evening as trays full of glasses whisked by, borne by servers who flitted like benign shadows through the elegant background.
Cayley might actually throw up. Grade-school humiliations ghosted to the forefront of his thoughts.
“Fabulous presentation, Dr. Willows,” said a sharp-faced, thin man in an expensive suit. One of the wealthier alumni. “I actually understood you. I didn’t know there could be an equation to predict the ups and downs of the stock market. Now, that’s useful math...chaos math, you called it?”
“Thanks, and yes,” Cayley managed, resentment prodding his unstable innards. I wanted to talk about set theory and the structures and motion of galaxies and solar flares and storm systems. They made me do stock market analysis. Is that all that matters to people anymore?
The alumnus was oblivious. “I should hire you as my financial consultant, with your attention to detail. Just like that...er...Butterfly Effect, yes, that’s the thing. Brilliant. Every little thing matters. Love how you brought that home.”
Cayley clenched his teeth at the man’s keen acceptance of that lie. He swallowed the sourness surging in his mouth and attempted a wispy smile. “Actually, what I said, and what Lorenz originally found, is that every little detail has to be taken into account or the math won’t forecast properly. That’s why we can model the weather, but we’ll never truly predict it. No computer has infinite calculating power. You have to round off your significant digits. Because of that, the model’s no longer accurate past a certain point. There are times when I think the weather has more sensitivity than human beings do.”
The alumnus smiled, brandishing his champagne glass like a ceremonial weapon. “Quite a thought, after that last hurricane down in the gulf. It seems you’re a mathematician-philosopher of chaos. Well done, Dr. Willows.”
Cayley fled to the balcony. He ducked off to one side, into the darkness, and sank to his knees. Out here, the air held a tang of cigarette smoke and car exhaust, rising from the street below. There was no truly unsullied refuge within his reach. Snowflakes melted as they touched the building, their purity swallowed by the carcinogenic crust that layered the city.
When had his life become like this? A swirl of politics and the pursuit of happiness, revolving in ever more inward-focused repetitions. Cayley stared out at the cars flying along the street, headed for who knew where. Galaxies...Julia sets, collections of points in motion...All around me, escape points flying free, and I’m in the prisoner set. I know exactly where I’m going and where I’m going to end up. That was the plan.
Cayley hated the plan.
Feeling less ill now, Cayley rose from his knees. He took up a post beside a contorted gargoyle carving that peered out from the building’s stone facade. “Well, old fellow, I suppose you’re in the prisoner set too,” the mathematician mused, perusing how the ugly, grimacing head was fused to the marble wall.
“Actually, I’m in the escape set,” the gargoyle said with quiet contempt.
Cayley felt the blood drain from his face. He leaned a quarter-inch closer, then pulled back, as if the carved tongue might lash out and wrap a stranglehold around his neck. “That’s not right,” he gasped, rubbing his hands quickly up and down his face. “You’re stone.”
“Stone is as stone does.” The gargoyle half-closed its leering eyes and shot him a disdainful glance. “Since you’re thinking about fractals and whatever sorry metaphors they provide, I suppose you’re feeling a little confined by your life.” The creature laughed, a pig-like, snorting sound. “The prisoner set. Would you like to escape, Cayley Willows?”
“Somebody must have put something hallucinogenic in the punch,” Cayley muttered.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” the gargoyle said.
The diminutive monster opened its mouth wider than any jaw should stretch, revealing fangs top and bottom like a snake; and it breathed in. The blank, city-lit sky stretched and darkened, as if yawning awake.
Cayley trembled deep within.
The gargoyle gasped deeper and deeper, and the night plunged downward as the stone maw stretched upward, gulping. Black emptiness shifted in a thousand planes and angles, real as light and far more tangible.
Cayley stumbled back as the night reached for him, hard-edged and many-pointed. “What is that? What’s happening?”
The gargoyle shot him an exasperated sideways glance and continued to draw in the material of the universe. Two rock fists full of talons exploded from the wall and grabbed the electrical darkness. The gargoyle bit it off and dropped it to the grey stone railing with a cough and a wheeze.
“Step up,” the gargoyle said.
Cayley stared at the multifaceted, upward-arcing black bridge before him. He squished his eyes shut and blinked them wide. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a Koch curve. Honestly,” the gargoyle snorted, “I just bisected the universe for you, and you’re not even grateful? You want to explore all its mysteries, right? So step out there.”
“A Koch curve—the universe—a snowflake fractal?” Cayley studied it. On closer inspection, the impenetrable velvetiness did appear to have an endless number of sharp-edged peaks and valleys, climbing and falling within the larger peaks and valleys, which climbed and fell within a yet larger structure. Time, matter and energy—and something more—crackled and bunched, ever flowering toward the infinitesimal, never quite reaching it.
Cayley tipped his head back, his mouth hanging open. He wrinkled his nose and squinted. “The universe is a flake. That explains everything.”
“If you want to get technical,” said the gargoyle, “from this angle, it’s a six-dimensional sphereflake. The seventh got lost pretty early on, but I hear it’ll pop back eventually.”
Cayley swallowed hard, staring. “Isn’t it...bad to bisect the universe?”
“Only from a four-dimensional point of view.” The gargoyle folded its rocky arms with a sound like puffed rice cereal. “Think, Professor Pea-Soup-For-Brains, you’re neither inside nor outside your existence now. It’s your choice where you go from here.”
Cayley shook his head and rubbed his eyes. No response came to mind.
The gargoyle sighed, a sulfurous, condescending sound, and waved a sarcastic claw. “Behold. I set before you an open door. Go on. You’re no longer constrained by what you thought you were. Walk to the place where the light slivers through and jump off. Be free.”
Excitement and wonder roiled in Cayley’s gut, and his imagination began to traverse the darkly scintillating planes. “And then what?”
The gargoyle rolled its eyes and raised both sets of talons, holding them out to Cayley as if the point could be grasped manually. “Escape towards infinity. Be one with the Greaterest.”
“But—this is a fractal,” said Cayley, still stunned by the revelation. “The universe is a fractal. A fractal has an equation, and an equation indicates a mind. You can insult mine all you want, but I’m pretty sure yours isn’t big enough for this either.”
“Sue me,” said the gargoyle. “Come on, nobody ever said snowflakes are the product of an intelligent mind. When things get cold enough, they just happen. So, apparently absolute zero snowed. Your existence is the dandruff of dimensionality. Joy to the nerd.”
Cayley blinked hard. But the shimmering blackness remained, a chaos of frightening order. He hoisted himself up onto the railing, wobbled and straightened, gazing into the unanswering silence. Jump off...
Tempting.
His eyes fixed on a single point in the velvet crystalline planes before him. He squinted, and it seemed that he could see a distant whorl of stars flame within that obsidian chip.
A galaxy. Full of solar winds, methane storms, dust rings...fractals. Things no computer was accurate enough to fully replicate or predict.
A thrill of understanding flashed down Cayley’s spine. “There have to be infinite significant digits, and infinite knowledge of all the variables, or this whole universe would be thrown off. To calculate this—”
“This flake isn’t infinite,” the gargoyle spat. “You don’t know anything about infinity. Get up there and jump off! Experience the real thing, you chicken!”
Cayley threw back his head and laughed for the first time in months. “I’m standing in a body, in a city, in a country, in a world, in a solar system, in a galaxy. In a multidimensional fractal equation! In the mind of—”
“Stop it!” The gargoyle sputtered like a fire being doused with water. “I open the door of your pathetic mortal cage, and all you can think about is equations!”
“Math doesn’t lie.” Cayley hopped down from the railing and perused the squirming stone creature. “But I think you do.”
“Dang me,” grunted the gargoyle.
A blinding flash stunned Cayley’s senses, throwing him backward. He landed firmly on his rear, blinked several times and shook his head to clear it.
He was alone on a normative, three-dimensional balcony; four-dimensional if you counted time, though Cayley wasn’t sure about that at the moment.
Classical chamber music and traffic noise drifted on the still night air, anchoring him. He looked around, shivering in the cold. The gargoyle on the building’s facade, oddly, had crumbled into dust. Warily, Cayley eyed the heap of powdered marble.
It lay perfectly inert. The only motion in the shadows was the gentle swirling of hundreds of snowflakes.
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Copyright 2008, C.L. Dyck. All rights reserved. C.L. Dyck is a freelance writer and editor. She wrote and illustrated her first fantasy story at the age of 6, a whole three pages with nearly a full sentence on each page. Formerly a staunch non-Christian, she now spends her spare time in blog musings about Christian writing, biblical thinking and the presuppositions that form religious viewpoints.
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