Fiction
Science Fiction
“You can’t hide here forever.”
“Hide?” I raised an eyebrow at Mitchell Trevellyn. “You forget. For me, this is home.”
Beyond the office window, the desert stretched out; red dirt and spinifex and more life than outsiders would guess at.
Mitchell shifted in his chair, turning his shoulder to the glare from the window. “Kane Thorgood never thought up the idea of quanta singing. He’s a solid physicist, but not a visionary. He stole your idea, Raye.”
I stared at Mitchell. Only Kane and I knew that his revolutionary hypothesis and nanorecorder were my work. Maybe it was a fair trade: Kane got fame; I learned a life lesson. I looked away from Mitchell. What would he know, a successful physicist, head of an international team based across town from my former university?
“In a way, Kane didn’t steal anything. I gave him his success by being too cowardly to publish the hypothesis myself.”
“Huh.” Mitchell’s grunt was skeptical. “If it’s any consolation, Kane used your design of nanorecorders to record the quanta singing. He proved your hypothesis and design.”
“And won tenure, professional acclaim and funding for his troubles.” I fidgeted with the knuckle-sized quartz stones given to me by a cousin. They rattled back into their bark basket. “I thought I loved Kane,” I said quietly.
Nothing had prepared me for Kane Thorgood. He was a sexy, studious Will Smith, and I was naïve and vulnerable, far from home in America. Growing up I had known only the close ties of kinship and obligation which define a desert community, and Catholic boarding school had set the pattern for my interaction with the wider world: A single-minded fixation on physics. When Kane had wooed me, I’d believed every word he said.
“We could challenge Kane,” said Mitchell. “Prove that he stole your work.”
“It’s not important.”
“Of course it is,” said Mitchell. He looked around my small office in the observatory cum laboratory situated four hours drive from my hometown; and out here, a four-hour drive is only neighborly. “You have a brilliant future, Raye. I’m here to make sure you don’t throw it away. With my backing, people will listen, and computer file records will show that you developed the hypothesis of quanta singing.” Mitchell waited till I looked at him. “I have the records.”
Revenge.
I leaned back in my chair. At a word from me, Mitchell would set in train the destruction of Kane’s professional life.
“You could come back and work on my team, Raye. Chief researcher.”
“I can work here.” I glanced out the window at the familiar landscape with its distant horizon. The Australian outback is an ideal location for physicists interested in studying Earth’s outer atmosphere and the weirdness of our universe. It wasn’t the work I really wanted—the quantum world fascinated me—but it would do. “I enjoy being back with my family.”
Mitchell shook his head. “Think of what you’ll be missing. I’m serious about the place on my team.” He stood, fished in his pocket and dropped a disc on my desk. “It’s a copy of Kane’s work—your theory. Listen to the quanta singing.” Mitchell walked out.
I stared at the disc.
Quanta are the smallest things that can exist. They give their name to quantum physics and are both waves and particles. In America I had played with the idea that quanta could as readily be fragments of sound waves as anything else.
String theory, as its name suggests, defines quanta as tight, uniquely shaped strings. At particular frequencies, the vibrations of these “strings,” quanta, create their properties of mass, spin, charge and so on. It gets technical. The point is, quanta have the basic properties necessary to produce sound. The problem is designing machines able to measure such minuscule sound waves. I’d developed a couple of ideas for nanorecorders, but Kane had laughed at my dream of hearing quanta sing.
“Don’t tell anyone, chick, they’ll think you’re crazy.”
Then he’d published my hypothesis.
The betrayal still hurt; hurt so much that thinking about it I wanted to call Mitchell back and shout that I wanted Kane exposed now!
I flung the disc into a drawer and slammed the drawer shut. Mitchell was offering more than revenge. He was offering me status in the scientific community, a place in the world. If I seized the lifeline with both hands, I needed to know I was doing so for the right reasons, and not because, as Mitchell seemed to think, I had the opportunity to rub Kane’s nose in the dirt.
Aunty Sue was closing her hair salon when I arrived in town. It’s only half day trading on Saturdays. Aunty moved briskly; turning off the air conditioning and lights, checking that no taps were dripping, and locking the morning’s takings in the small safe. “Lunch,” she said to me, asking no questions. “I’m starving.”
We walked the couple of hundred meters to Aunty’s house with its single, dramatic pink rosebush by the veranda stairs. Half a dozen kids were playing in the street, and they paused a moment in their games to greet us, Aunty Sue and Aunty Raye.
“Feeling old?” Aunty Sue laughed at me.
“No.” Actually I enjoyed the feeling that I was part of what I’d enjoyed as a child; providing a caring background for the kids. It’s hard to go off the rails when you know there are people who love you.
We ate and gossiped gently about family and friends.
“Aunty.” I ate the last olive, studying my mum’s sister. Aunty Sue was comfortably plump and attractive with her short-cut hair, pink shirt and three quarter pants. Rose quartz crystals dangled from her ears, their color carried across in a sweep of glittering eye shadow that highlighted the sharp intelligence in her warm, brown eyes. In a different culture, we’d have called her a medicine woman. “Aunty, can you sing someone healing for heartache?” It wasn’t the question I’d meant to ask.
“No,” Aunty said gently. “That is something everyone must heal themselves. It is a choice.”
A choice? I shook my head. What choice was there in the hurt someone inflicted on you? I hadn’t asked Kane to hurt me.
“What about other sicknesses?” I asked at random—anything to keep Aunty from asking the painful question of why I’d run home. “How does the healing work?”
“I remind people’s bodies and spirits of how they should be.”
“You sing the song their bodies should be singing?”
Aunty nodded. “Sometimes they don’t want to remember the song. Then they stay sick. There’s always a choice.”
I drove back to the observatory the same day, arriving after dark. Eight hours driving was too much. My muscles ached and my eyes were gritty. I avoided everyone, went to my room, showered and slept.
Mitchell found me at breakfast. “Have you made a decision?”
I switched off the cartoons on television and set aside my cereal bowl. I’d considered Mitchell’s offer each time I’d woken through the night. I’d had a wakeful night.
Project funding is only as good as a scientist’s profile. Mitchell’s profile is high, but recognition of my hypothesis would help the project team, if I joined it. On the other hand, exposing Kane meant people would know I was the fool who had believed Kane’s words of love. More than that, our gossipy scientific community would learn that when I’d been betrayed, I’d run; that made me a fool and a coward.
Mitchell’s fingers, podgy at their base, tapped the arms of his chair. He didn’t belong in the outback. Even in the observatory’s communal lounge his fashionably casual clothes were expensively out of place. He was here only because he wanted my decision. For the first time I considered how kind he had been to fly out.
Mitchell sighed impatiently. “Have you at least listened to Kane’s disc, the recording that should have been yours?”
I ducked my head, caught out. “I’ll go and do that now.”
In my office I slipped the disc into a computer and clicked on the audio. The room filled with a weird, distorted, wordless song. I let it play through, then re-ran it.
“Oh, hell.” The chill of the air conditioning choked me. I recognized the sound. The quanta were singing the chant Aunty sang through my childhood to wake the night. I had asked her years ago why she sang it.
“To remind the world of what it is,” she had said. I shivered at the memory. The quanta were singing my people’s ancient songs. Forty thousand years and more in Australia, and Americans still asked, wide-eyed, “Are there blacks in Australia?”
“Raye.” Mitchell stood in the doorway. “Weird sound, isn’t it?” He had tamped down his impatience. “I have to fly out to a conference in Sydney this afternoon. I’ll be back next weekend. Can I have your answer then?”
“My answer?” Recognition of the quanta’s song had left me dazed. My people sang quantum-level songs. How?
“When do you want Kane’s theft exposed? When are you joining the team?”
The team. Mitchell’s project team would have all the equipment needed to study the singing quanta.
“Unless you’ve made your decision?” Mitchell prompted. He must have sensed my sudden enthusiasm.
The recording ended and in the silence I reached restlessly for the quartz stones. They clacked and grated in my fist.
“Mitchell—why are you here? You’re too important to act as an errand boy, bringing me Kane’s recording, and you could have phoned me with your offer of employment. Why should you care that Kane cheated me?”
He hesitated. “Did you notice the crackle in the recording?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it won’t take long to filter out static. Before you, no one thought to listen for quanta singing, but now the reality of the idea is out there, part of the scientific domain, and people will build on it. We have to deal with what that means.” Mitchell looked at me directly. “There’ll be a whole new style of weaponry.
“Once we have the true quanta song, calculated distortions of it will destabilize the physical reality formed by the quanta. That’s why I’m here, Raye. I want you to work on defining the song and identifying its breaking points.”
I stood, and walked to the window. “A weapon.” I rested my forehead against the glass, feeling its warmth from the desert sun. “You want the quanta to sing destruction.”
“Consider the matter logically, Raye. You have to thoroughly understand a weapon before you can counter it. That’s why I want you to work on the project. Do you want quanta singing to destroy people? You unleashed the technology, Raye. It was your idea. You can’t walk away from the consequences.”
I walked away from Mitchell, though. I drove into town, needing to talk with Aunty Sue. Through the four-hour drive I scared myself with the imagined horrors of quantum destabilization.
Aunty Sue was at home, feet up, fan blowing on her, drinking iced lemon water. The front door was open and I walked in.
“Aunty, you know how you said you sing people healing?”
Her feet came down off the sofa. “Are you sick, Raye?” She looked worried and I can imagine how bad I looked after four hours of imagining waking nightmares. I shook my head.
“I’m okay. It’s just that your singing has crossed over into my science.” I saw Aunty Sue relax back against the sofa. She interrupted me.
“Do you want a drink?”
“No.” I sat down in an old rocking chair. “You’ve heard of quantum physics, Aunty. Quanta are the smallest things that can exist. They are the basis of all existence, but until they are observed or measured, they exist in a state of possibility. They could be anything.” I took a deep breath. “I think quanta are our Dreaming; recreated with every moment. I heard a recording of the quanta singing and it sounded like the chant you sing to wake the night.”
Aunty nodded. “I knew you would be the singer after me.”
“What?” Of all her responses, this I hadn’t expected.
“As a kid, you were the only one to sing the songs before I started. You heard the Dreaming.”
I shook my head. Aunty remained calm. “It’s just a talent,” she said. “Like being tone deaf, except the opposite. You can hear the Dreaming.”
“Aunty.” I stopped; started again. “If you can sing someone back to health, can you also sing them sick?”
“I never have, but the power is there,” said Aunty.
“Is it hard?”
“Raye, why ask about this?”
“Mitchell, an American scientist, wants me to work on a weapon that disrupts quanta singing and so destabilizes reality.”
Aunty’s mouth twisted. “That’s not good.”
“Tell me about it,” I kicked the floor and set the old chair rocking. “He says if we don’t understand how the weapon works, we can’t counter it.” Aunty and I traded skeptical looks. I sighed. “The thing is, Mitchell may be right.”
I decided to stay overnight at Mum and Dad’s house. They were in Canberra since Dad was the Federal MP for the area and Parliament was sitting. I didn’t want to go back to the observatory and Mitchell.
I went to mass; Saturday night mass since the visiting priest would be gone tomorrow. I slid into a pew where my brother sat with his family. My five year old nephew, Jake, looked unnaturally clean and solemn. I winked at him, and his face split in a delighted grin, displaying the gaps in his baby teeth. He wriggled across the pew to share his colored children’s missal with me.
The pattern of the mass was reassuringly familiar, right down to old Uncle George’s two-seconds-behind-everyone-else responses. I watched how easily everyone smiled and greeted each other and rocked grizzly toddlers into silence. Aboriginal, Celtic, Slavic, and Asian faces blurred simply into community; sharing common worries, joys and interests. I knew this was worth protecting.
Within the confines of the church, we offered each other peace; but outside of it, could I stand aside and let people develop weapons to destroy that peace in new and crueler ways?
I shook my head at my sister-in-law’s offer of dinner. “I’ve some thinking to do.”
Patricia didn’t argue. “We’re having a barbeque next weekend; you’ll come,” and she looked across the churchyard to a tall man with dark hair and a devil’s smile. “Our new doctor, Patrick, will be there.” She giggled. “He’s gorgeous.”
“Matchmaking?” I asked.
Patricia sobered. “Have some fun, Raye.” She caught Jake as he tore past. “Time we were going. Saturday, three o’clock. Don’t forget.”
“And don’t think of disobeying the royal command.” My brother Stuart had approached unnoticed. He slid an arm around Patricia’s waist. “But if you don’t fancy a doctor, tell matchmaker central here, and she’ll dig up a substitute.” Patricia punched his shoulder. Stuart grinned. “Take care, sis.” And he shepherded his family home.
The house I’d grown up in was empty with just me in it. I didn’t turn on the air conditioning, but opened the windows to the desert wind and let a fan stir the warm air from the house. The fan clicked at regular intervals, circling as inevitably as my thoughts.
It was hard to sleep, with the tension stretching me like barbed wire. Mitchell was demanding more than collaboration on weapon design; he was forcing me to decide who I was and where my commitment lay. Only I could reconcile the extremes that formed me—ancient and new knowledge, the Dreaming and quantum worlds, science and community, even intellect and passions. None demanded the rejection of the other; instead, they fought each other for dominance.
And perhaps Mitchell had tipped the balance. He was offering me the world—revenge, professional status, money, and more than that, the slim chance that in researching quantum weapons I could devise a means of stopping them.
I didn’t notice my tears at first. It was ironic. I’d run home heartbroken and found a sense of belonging, and now, to protect the people I loved, I had to leave them.
No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
I drove out of town before sunrise, and into the darkness of the desert. I watched the sun creep over the land, pushing back the cold and darkness of night. A bandicoot skittered for its burrow and I tilted my head back and watched a wedge-tailed eagle soar overhead.
“Are you hunting?” I asked.
I sat in the dirt and drew the land of my people: The circle of water that called us there, the people and animal spirits, the trails of the Dreamtime. I hesitated, then placed my finger where djang, the Dreaming power, collected by the hill of the two sisters.
The desert wind, still night cool, rustled the grasses and skipped sand across my picture until only the memory of it remained.
The knowledge slotted so easily into my mind that it made my worry seem a little thing.
The Dreaming is continually creating the world; and that is exactly what the singing quanta do. Each in its place sings the reality of its existence and sings, too, the experience of its own entangled self occupying a different position in space.
Can you insert a lever into a crack and shatter the Dreaming? No. It’s like patterns in the desert sand, instantly lost to the wind. Shatter it in one moment, and the next moment it is remade. Or to put it scientifically, the quanta singing together form a higher harmonic which if forced into a destructive pattern by technology, simply reassert themselves in a different form.
Mitchell couldn’t see it because he’d grown away from hope—and I hadn’t seen it because I’d believed him—but our world is constructed to survive. Some people call it resilience. Some call it God. Maybe you could call it love.
“You’re back,” said Mitchell as he stepped into my office.
The lab was familiar and strange. I looked around it, seeing possibilities. “I’m going to study the effect of quartz on amplifying and clarifying quanta level sound.” Most Aboriginal singers channeled their energy through a quartz stone and maybe the practice was more than superstition. I let my cousin’s quartz stones fall through my fingers.
“Quartz might work, and the first step is to eliminate distortions.” Mitchell’s eyes narrowed. “Still, your intelligence would be better employed concentrating on the theory that will enable the new quantum level weaponry.”
I shook my head. “Quantum weapons aren’t possible. We’ve inflated the power of science, Mitchell; inflated our personal sense of power. Singing with the quanta isn’t going to destroy the world. The world’s stronger than that. If it can’t survive one way, it’ll survive another. It has redundancy built in to its continuance, and that gives it resilience. You’ll never get quanta to destroy themselves.”
Mitchell scowled. “You’re being naïve.”
“No.” I smiled. “Optimism and trust aren’t naïveté.” My smile faded as I realized how close I’d come to being lost. Kane’s betrayal had obscured that truth. Almost I’d forgotten what my ancestors knew—we sing not because the universe needs us to, but because we need to sing. It’s like being Catholic; we pray not because God needs us, but because we need God.
Science didn’t make the universe, and nor could it break it. Science was only a lens for understanding our place in the world, and I’d been reminded that other lenses also existed. Kane could own my hypothesis and its fame.
“I’m staying here, Mitchell,” I said. “I’m home.”
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Copyright 2009, Jenny Schwartz. All rights reserved. Jenny Schwartz lives in Perth, Western Australia. Some people say the place is remote, but that all depends where you're starting from. Her short stories have appeared in Mindflights, Arkham Tales, and The Nautilus Engine.
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