You didn’t make the best impression on the Kraut — what’s the use of denying it? — but then again, neither did I. She was in grad student mode at the time, living in her big, drafty studio on bread and liverwurst and Turkish coffee, as single-minded and disheveled as her secret patron saint, Madame Curie. My decision to drop out of Ogilvy had disappointed her deeply. The one thing I’m grateful for, even now, is that we managed to keep the Husband’s identity from her. She didn’t blame Synchronology for the end of her marriage — that would have meant giving the UCS some credibility, however slight — but she had nothing but contempt for its disciples. The only thing she viewed more skeptically was love.
“Where is she?” she said, before she’d even let me in the door.
“She’s coming,” I answered, defensive already. “I think she’s taking a tour of the Opera.”
“I see,” said the Kraut. “She’s off shopping somewhere?”
“You don’t know the first thing about her, Ursula. For your information—”
“I’m sorry, Waldy. I’ll untwist my knickers.” She squinted past me, as if checking to see whether I’d been tailed. “I’m assuming that those flowers are for me?”
“Of course they are,” I said, giving her a kiss.
The only furniture in the place was a cot in one corner and a rolltop desk and chair against the wall. A pot of goulash sat on a hotplate in the middle of the floor. It looked as though she’d been eating out of it for days.
“I’m doing what I want to do, Waldy,” she said, guessing my thoughts as always. “I don’t cook anymore. I’ve done quite enough cooking.”
“Just as long as you’re remembering to eat.”
She smiled. “Tell me about your relationship. I assume you find it sensually fulfilling.”
I made a face and wandered over to the desk. “I’ll have to defer to Mrs. Haven on that point.”
Her eyes narrowed at once. “Mrs. Who?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “That’s just a name I call her sometimes. As a joke.”
“Ah,” said the Kraut.
“What’s ‘aha’ supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t say ‘aha,’” she said, following me to the desk. “I said ‘ah.’ Would you like to ask me how my work is going?”
“Of course I would. But I probably wouldn’t understand your answer.”
The Kraut frowned at me for an instant, as if the possibility had only just occurred to her. She wasn’t as different from the rest of the family as she liked to think.
“You might find some of it rather dusty, I suppose — it’s true you never were much good at theory. But what I do isn’t so far removed from what your father did, at times. The difference between a hypothesis of mine and a hypothesis of his — the only meaningful difference, it sometimes seems to me — is that mine must be expressible in terms of mathematics.”
“I know the difference between science and science fiction, Ursula.”
“Do you?” the Kraut said. “Your father seems to think he does, as well. You’re both so sure.”
That surprised me, I have to admit. “Aren’t you?”
“Orson once wrote a story — more of a fable, really — called ‘The Principatrix of Gnawledge.’ Do you remember it?”
I shook my head.
“It’s in the only book of his I brought along,” she said, digging a coverless pulp out of a drawer. “You can read it, if you like, while I make coffee. It’s quite short.”
An itching began in my palms as I reached for the book. The Kraut had never before suggested that I read anything of Orson’s. The story was marked with a postcard of Znojmo, featuring a portly businessman in a bowler hat, riding an enormous green gherkin above the Dyje River.
THE PRINCIPATRIX OF GNAWLEDGE
The Imperator of Omphalos-8, a satellite of Ganymede-12 in the System of Mines, had a proGene, a female, who duly attained to principatrix when she came of age. This principatrix, it is told, was the rarest of beauties: skin the color of subpolar frost, hair luminous as ore from a core-stratum vein. The Imperator doted on her, as fathers will, and built her a stronghouse of chromium and silica by the shore of a quarry on a neighboring moon, far removed from the intrigues of court. There she ripened to the first term of youth, and had no care for the Winter, and no means of influence over the Great Thermodynamic Arc, after the manner of ordinary men.
Now it happened one autumn, as she walked by the quarry, that the principatrix saw an other: a wizened old thrall, humming to herself as she cast cicada shells into the water. The oiled and ore-heavy waves danced about the thrall’s feet, and the leaves rustled about her hunched back, and her mica-colored rags flapped about her gray face in the beating of the ruthless autumn wind.
“Here,” said the principatrix, “is the loneliest thrall betwixt the Seven Poles. What brings you to my quarrylake, old woman?”
“Imperator’s Daughter,” said the thrall, “you live in a stronghouse, and your hair is as ore from a core-stratum vein; but what good does it bring? Duration is brief, and existence is grief — you exist after the manner of ordinary men, with no thought for the Winter, and no influence over the Thermodynamic Arc.”
“Thought for the Winter I do now possess,” said the Imperator’s daughter; “but influence over the Arc, I have not.” And she began to consider.
The thrall cast the last of her shells into the water and laughed.
The light turned, and the air cooled, and the principatrix returned to her stronghouse. When the door had been bolted and the fission-lamps lit, she summoned her governess to her.
“Governess,” said the principatrix, “thought for the Winter has found me, so that I grow out of the manner of ordinary men, like a cicada growing out of its shell. Tell me what I must do to have influence over the Arc.”
Then the governess sighed like the subpolar winds. “Alas!” she said, “that this should come to pass; but the thought has now entered your lymph and your blood, and there is no antidote against thought.”
So the Imperator’s proGene sat in her pressurized chamber in the silica-and-chromium — masoned keep, and gnawed there day and night upon the thought. Ten-and-seven years she was gnawing, and as much time again; and the wind beat against the fastness of the stronghouse, and the stars transcribed their arcs as if to mock her. Her governness fed and clothed and washed her without speaking, and she ate and bathed and slumbered without any thought but one.
Now when thirty and four years were passed away, the principatrix raised herself up slowly to her feet, and she passed from chamber to chamber of her ruined house, and saw that all her thralls and keepers had long left her; her governess remained, but she was stone-faced now and still. The principatrix walked out of the stronghouse, leaving its doors open behind her, and the gate to the garden, and the gate in the fortified field. She walked to that part of the shore where the old thrall had been, and where thought for the Winter had first found her, and there she sat down. And the ore-heavy waves lapped at her feet, and the shells of cicadas rustled at her back, and her mica-colored rags flapped about her in the beating of the wind. And when she lifted her eyes, behold! there was a daughter of an Imperator come up along the shore. Her skin was the color of subpolar frost, and her hair was as luminous as ore from a core-stratum vein; and she had no care for the Winter, and no means of influence over the Great Thermodynamic Arc, after the manner of ordinary men.