“Impossible,” he said, his glassy eyes bugging even more than usual. “The Bolyas are in Tolz. A report came in yesterday.”
He wouldn’t even listen to their arguments. Why should he waste his time?
104
Between the pages were two index cards with Zef’s writing.
Today I put down the two formulas I worked out, one beside the other:
The number of Lands = (n + 2)2.
The number of Significant Names = 144 × 12(n - 1).
I left out the number of versions of Nest of Worlds as well as the time of staying in a Land, since so far no pattern suggests itself. So far.
I dislike the inelegance of the second formula. If this is supposed to be a fundamental law governing the nested worlds, every constant that appears in it (every number, Dave!) should mean something. I think I have too many (there are three: 144, 12, -1) for a basic relation, and the first two are too big.
How to simplify? Intuitively I feel they should be reduced to small constants like 1 or 2, factored down.
The pattern for number of Lands doesn’t look bad: only one constant, 2.
And the second card:
I returned to this problem after an hour break. I have the feeling that if I keep digging into my head (through one nostril or another), there will be some harvest soon.
We need to look differently on these patterns. The number of Names in a given nested world equals:
144 × 12(n - 1)
I must have had one heck of a froze not to have seen that this is also:
12 × 12 × 12(n - 1)
Or simply: 12(n + 1)!
Much prettier. Do you see how superior it is to the one before? I got rid of one of the numbers, and at hardly any cost: replacing a -1 with a +1.
This is how one does science—tracking down nature’s bright ideas. Some lightbulbs did go on in my skull before, but lately I’ve been unfocused, distracted, because of the deaths.
Dave, no doubt you’re bored to tears with this cogitating and number juggling, this replacing of one constant with another. Well, maybe you’re right, and it’s all silly, just the mental contortion of a science nut playing with a book. And yet this is good exercise, staying in form, because in science first you find the relations that join fact to fact, and then you try to simplify those relations as much as you can, in order to see the deeper sense in them…
105
Dr. Nott suggested that he see for himself what Ra Mahleiné looked like inside. First, for comparison, she allowed him to look inside herself. She opened her mouth wide and tilted her head back. He peered in. The interior resembled the hall of a great factory.
Strong, elastic tendons joining massive muscles crossed space like stairs, like bridges; reddish belts of muscle, vein, nerve went in different directions. All this machinery of flesh moved rhythmically; one could hear the muffled beat of a distant, powerful engine. From the slight gaps in the joints among the pulsing vessels, drops of blood or colorless juices seeped. Seen from inside, the hanging double chin of Dr. Nott resembled a mountain slope covered not with rocks but with yellow-orange bladder spheres in a spiderweb weave of tubes that carried blood. Gavein thought that turkeys had such air sacs in their wattles, and that was why they tried to fly. He dared to look up: the ceiling was lost in darkness, and below it hung, like gigantic icicles, tongue-pink protuberances. He also saw the tonsils: yellowish, bulging, potatolike. When he strained his eyes upward into the darkest gulf, there loomed the enormous surface of the brain, smooth as a ball, a deep-brown honey color. It slowly dripped into a huge funnel that was suspended on pink membranous ropes and ties. From this funnel flowed a mixture of red blood and a yellowish fluid.
“The dripping signifies that I’m thinking,” said Dr. Nott. “If I wasn’t thinking, you would see no fluid. And now look inside your Magda.”
The interior of Ra Mahleiné’s body was similar, at first glance identical.
The same dark hall, the bridges of tissue, the stairways of pulsing tendon, the conduits of veins and nerves, the giant brain in far darkness. The only difference was that into the funnel placed below the brain a considerably greater quantity of fluid dripped.
Ra Mahleiné thinks a lot more than the doctor, Gavein thought with pride. He had always suspected that Dr. Nott was not that bright.
“Look closely” came the doctor’s voice.
He examined the interior with more care. He hadn’t noticed them before, but they were everywhere, on the veins, on the tonsils, on the red bridges: fleshy cauliflower spheres, deeply rooted in the floor. All the other parts were dim, toned down, as if faded. Only the cauliflowers flourished with an enviable, triumphant, pink vitality. He looked at the brain of Ra Mahleiné, mighty in the dark, and it too, like a firmament speckled with stars, was covered with these evil pink growths. One of the cauliflowers was growing at the mouth of the funnel and would soon block it. As Gavein watched, a bridge leading deep into the giant hall that was the body of Ra Mahleiné buckled under the weight of its burgeoning cauliflowers and fell like a limp rag. The spheres began to eat it voraciously, until they had consumed it completely, uniting to make one, furrowed, intensely pink, massive growth.
“You see, Dave. There’s no hope. It’s a lost cause.”
He wanted to shout, to defy the spheres, to tear them and remove them, but of course there was no way he could enter the body of Ra Mahleiné.
As if a hand had him by the throat, he was unable to cry out, and yet he heard a cry. Someone was calling. The dream slowly dissolved.
Ra Mahleiné repeated his name. Kneeling on the sidewalk, she was holding the head of Lorraine, who lay still.
“Gavein, call an ambulance! Tell Nott to come immediately, or someone else.”
Gavein’s mind cleared. He jumped from his chair.
“She was hit by a fragment from the helicopter. She’s conscious, but it has paralyzed her.”
An unknown doctor answered the phone and promised to send an ambulance.
Lorraine could not say what hurt her the most. She spit blood. There was a stabbing in her legs, a numbness, the same in her arms.
“It’s time for me now, Dave?” she said, with a pleading look. “I did my best. Magda didn’t complain…”
Her voice, usually high and piping, was hoarse now. On the other side of the street an aluminum bar from the copter clattered to the pavement. Lorraine had been struck with two pieces: the first, larger fragment in the back; then, when she fell and rolled, a piece of a pipe hit her in the stomach. Several other fragments had fallen on the street in the course of the day. The two women had been watching as if it were a show: the objects almost motionless in the sky, then suddenly accelerating, to strike the pavement or buildings like bullets. None of them fell so close as to alarm the women. Ra Mahleiné had been knitting. Lorraine had gotten up to make some tea when she was hit. Ra Mahleiné had barely lifted her eyes from her work when the second missile reached Lorraine on the ground. On the sidewalk lay the metal fragments, indifferent to the tragedy they had caused.
Gavein saw in time that Lorraine was going to throw up; he turned her on her side, so she wouldn’t choke. She vomited long and abundantly, first dark blood, then bright. With a groan she lost consciousness.