If the adults were remote, the children were elusive. I could love them, but I couldn't really understand them. I could be jealous of them easily enough. Especially of the little girls. Womanhood had become so very convenient! I'm not just talking about childbearing, because I got the benefit of that too—but that little trollop Molomy had got to me. Before us, I don't think the woman ever lived who took menstruating so easily—not for the first ten years of it, anyway. I don't think the woman ever lived who welcomed it, either—oh, maybe they were relieved sometimes, when they found they weren't knocked up, after all. But it had absolutely nothing else to recommend it. Especially when you were just starting. You'd be sitting in school, or in church, or in your boy friend's car, and you'd feel that warm damp spot growing, and, oh God, what shall you do? Get up and embarrass yourself? Stay there until you died? Ann Becklund could do that, in her damn padmasana, but not me—
"I did not know you hated her so," Uncle Will whispered from the rhubarbs.
"I didn't know I was talking out loud," I said, hiccoughing. "Sorry. Thanks for chasing Jeron away, though."
He didn't answer for a moment, and he had not chosen to make himself visible. Uncle Will makes me nervous. I said, as much to make sure he was still there as because I had anything to say, "She hurt me yesterday."
"I know. You disturbed her."
"I thought she was sick or something! And then .she said something crazy about Chandrasekhar—you know, the astronomer, I guess—"
"About Chandrasekhar's other limit, yes."
"I don't even know what it is! Oh, of course, Chandrasekhar's limit is one point four solar masses, the mass range above which a star goes supernova; everybody knows that. But the other limit I never heard of."
Will did not exactly appear, but he let a shimmering sort of suggestion of himself appear among the rhubarbs. He sighed softly and whispered, "It is an old folk story he is supposed to have liked to tell, Evelyn. It is about dragonfly larvae. You see, if you are a dragonfly larva, swimming around in the water and getting ready to metamorphose, you don't know what will happen to you; you only know that from time to time your friends suddenly go to Heaven. That is, they go up through the surface of the water. What happens to them then? You don't know. What really happens, of course, is that they change into adult dragonflies; but you have no way of knowing that until you yourself become one, and then you can never come back to tell. No one ever does. Can't, because they can't penetrate the surface tension of the water, even if they had the desire to. So, being a stupid larva and not knowing this, you call all your friends around you and say, 'I will be different! I will come back, I promise! And I will tell you what lies beyond this shiny, wavery thing we see over our heads!' But you can't do it, when the time comes. It is an irreversible process."
I lay there staring at him in amazement. It was the longest speech I had heard from Will Becklund since he was alive. "And what has that to do with your dear widow, Ann?"
There was a hint of shadowy laughter, but all he said was, "That, too, is an irreversible process, Eve. And you interfered with it. She still had one tentacle on this side of the surface, so to speak, so she could communicate just a little.
But not anymore. She will pass Chandrasekhar's other limit, you see, and will never speak to a human being again."
I suppose it was the beer, but I suddenly felt that that was the saddest thing I had ever heard. "Oh, the poor thing!" I cried, forgiving her completely.
There was a pause. " 'Poor thing'?" Uncle Ghost whispered questioningly.
"To be cut off like that, forever! When will it happen?"
"It is already happening, Eve. It is what Jeron came to tell you about."
"Oh, my God! Where?" But I didn't have to ask, because I could see. I scrambled to my feet, staring at the place where Ann had sat so long and so silently, but she was not there anymore. She was still in the padmasana position, legs folded back on themselves, hands grasping her toes, head lowered to her breast, but instead of perching on a mound of undistributed soil she was floating in the air, a good hundred yards above the surface, moving slowly toward the end of the habitat. By the time she reached it she was too distant for me to see clearly, but I knew what was happening. That was where the exit lock was. It was open and waiting for her; it closed behind her, and she was gone.
"She'll die!" I cried.
"Why should she die?" whispered Uncle Ghost.
"But even if she lives—out there, all by herself! And you say she won't ever come back?"
"Never, Eve." There was a pause, and then his soft, despairing whisper: "Oh, how I wish I were she!"
20
My name is Willis Becklund, deceased. I am an engineer, a soliton, an astronaut, and a ghost—depending on how you look at me, and providing you can see me at all. You can see me when I want you to, though, because unlike most of us dead I have a foot on either side of Chandrasekhar's other limit. Do you think that is an advantage? It is not. It means only that I am not wholly in either your here or that other here; I have no home anyhere, and so I wander.
This is what demonstrates that I am a ghost.
What demonstrates that I am an engineer is that I was trained that way, long ago when I was alive and young, and I'm still good at it. Better than all of them. Shef could never have deployed his dis-ray without me, not to mention building the O'Neill we all live in—no, make that reside in. Not to mention even the rebuilding of the drive long and long ago. None of this would have happened without me, although I do not usually claim credit. In some of those cases I am not sure there is any credit to claim.
What demonstrates that I am an astronaut, of course, is that dirty Dieter manipulated me into being one, and what demonstrates I am a soliton is that there is no other way to account for the fact that I am here. A standing wave. I don't dissipate. I just keep on being a wave.
Now, I know this is all very difficult for you. See, it is not what you don't know, it is what you think you do know that gets in the way. Take the dis-ray. That was very elementary. (Ha-ha. In the sense of elementary particles, do you see?) "Dis" doesn't mean disintegration. It's an acronym. The kaons break up atoms. They don't do it through fission in the normal way—they don't fiss—they do it through deep inelastic scattering, which we call DIS for short The DIS weakens the bonds, and electrostatic repulsion breaks the heavy atoms up; could anything be more simple?
The best way to understand, really, is to roll the bones and absorb the hexagrams, but as most human beings are too lazy for that, let me simply say that your big problem is to avoid getting lost in the miasma of things like Einstein separability, which, when you come right down to it, I suspect is the single dumbest question Man has propounded to Man since the days of counting angels on a pin. Take the simplest case, that is, the question of spin in quantum mechanics, all right? Perform a simple experiment:
First steal two protons. Put them together in the singlet state, then break them up. Well, now, experiment will show you that every time one of them will turn out to have + spin and the other has - spin, whatever axis of the proton you measure spin on. Wow! How strange! How can that be? you demand. I mean, how can this proton over here, with a plus spin, know that that one over there has a minus, so it knows what to be?