The Negative Butterflies
by Laurence M. Janifer
Illustration by Arthur George
Dear Stan:
They do say that you never hear the one that gets you—and I believed that, just like everybody else, until I heard the one that got me. You may be wondering where in hell I have been, this last year or so, and I have been in several hells and am still clambering out of the last few; it all started at John Gotti’s party.
You must know about this party, even if you live in Connecticut: Gotti, a big-time Mafia person (and I can avoid that weasel, “alleged,” since he has been well and almost truly convicted) throws a gigantic Fourth of July party every year for his neighborhood out in Thither Queens, and he hasn’t allowed prison to cramp his style any. Last year’s party was at least as big as usual, chock full of carousers, as well as food, drink and fireworks—and of course I was safer there than I’d have been in my own small apartment: people do not commit unwanted violence on Gotti’s doorstep, and the immediate area of his home may be the most peaceful immediate a. within a thousand-mile radius.
I had never been to a Gotti bash; I was in fact doing the tourist routine. New Yorkers can be tourists here too—it’s just that the sights are different: the Japan Air Lines origami Christmas tree, the Tibetan museum on Staten Island (but call first; they tend to open only by request), the spare Statue of Liberty (64th Street East of Broadway, on the roof of a building on the uptown side; it’s smaller than the original, but I guess it would do in a pinch), and the Gotti Fourth of July.
The street was in full swing when I arrived about seven; this is a family party, beginning early enough for the kids. I grabbed an Italian sausage sandwich and an iced tea—and sort of filtered my way through the crowd, eavesdropping on a conversation here and there, mostly about the kids’ school scores or a local grocery sale; peaceful neighborhoods tend to be dull neighborhoods.
Suddenly there was a bang and a hiss, and I was on the ground with my beard on fire. I did hear it—a fairly small firecracker gone out of control—and it did get me: I have had a good deal of Hospital and Rehab, but I am now a one-eyed man who has recently learned to walk all over again, damn it.
As for the one eye, if Odin can live with it I guess I can—but all this H&R is why I have been out of touch recently. I had some nerve jangles, too, and had to learn to type once more with my usual three fingers.
The beard has grown back, thanks.
And this adventure is what took me back to the Local University of New York.
LUNY is a small college (though there are those that love it, as Daniel Webster said about some other damn place), only the one building, but it’s a truly big building. They have a sort of teaching rehab setup occupying part of the top floor (and they do have elevators, thank God), and a friend in Computer Sciences up there told me it was first-class. He turned out to be right, according to some other friends and kibitzers, so I signed on. Made an X, in fact, which made me feel like one of the Joads, but that was before I started to get my hands back.
Rehab is surprisingly mathematicaclass="underline" everything gets measured, and every little ratio has a meaning all its own. This letter isn’t about Rehab, though—I’d just as soon forget it altogether; it’s just that their math hooked in, at LUNY, with a section called bio-mathematical physics, and I got friendly with a Professor Inkling over there.
His whole name was Amadeus Inkling, and his specialty was the mathematics of butterfly behavior—which I admit sounds like an odd specialty, but the whole department sounds a little odd—very LUNY, in fact. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from a place that uses Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories as a history honors course, or Charles Fort’s “Lo!” as the text for a Probability course. LUNY isn’t exactly like any other university I’ve ever heard of, and they’re rather proud of the fact. Even the usual university structure, by the way, is a little strange: faculty tenure is voted by the students (from sophomore class on up through the graduates) and is re-voted every eight years. I don’t say this is a good idea—I also don’t say it’s a bad one. But it certainly is a LUNY one, and there are more LUNY ideas than you might think, ideas that don’t seem to show up anywhere but at the Local University of New York.
Inkling was a lovely fellow, if you discount his habit of quoting Mark Twain, or whoever really said that thing: Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody and so on. Charles Dudley Warner, if memory serves (my Oxford Quotes is still packed, because I’m unpacking one teeny bit at a time in order to be able to do the job without turning into a nervous breakdown product; I tell you, one firecracker can make for a surprising amount of chaos).
Whoever it was said it originally, Professor Inkling said it regularly. It did get tiring, but lots of things get tiring, and he was, once you had discounted the damn quote, a very nice change from Rehab. He knew some number theory, which has been my playground for a long while, and we traded divisibility theorems now and then.
But mostly it was the weather—I don’t mean the quote, but the whole subject. Inkling had the idea that weather prediction (“in the very short term,” he said) and weather control were both finally within man’s grasp, and he didn’t mean stuff like satellite predictions or cloud seeding: “Or anything really complex,” he said one afternoon. “It is all going to be very simple, once it is set up—you’ll see.”
Well, people who think things are all going to be very simple usually have me backing away politely but damn rapidly—but Inkling had a sort of Nerd Magnetism about him. He was a reedy sort of fellow with sparse white hair that hadn’t been cut in two or three years, and metal-rimmed eyeglasses that made his eyes look about the size of, say, the eyes on Whitley Streiber’s visiting aliens. But he had this N. Magnetism; he was the sort of fellow who could persuade you that brown shoes would, too, come back into high fashion.
How it was going to be very simple to predict and control the weather he didn’t say, and I mentioned, as casually as possible, chaos theory. “That started with weather people, more or less,” I said. “The butterfly effect—one butterfly flaps its wings in Iceland, and weather patterns change all over the world. And you can’t predict the butterfly.”
“There are no butterflies in Iceland,” Inkling said.
“St. Olaf drove them all out?” I said—Olaf being the coldest-weather Saint I could come up with offhand. Inkling just stared at me.
“St. Olaf was never in Iceland,” he said. He had me there; I am not an expert on the Peregrinations of St. Olaf. Or anybody else; I tend to stay put, and assume other people will do the same.
“Iceland or Tierra del Fuego—and there’s a good title for a Robert Frost poem hidden in there someplace—you still can’t predict the butterfly.”
Inkling smiled at me. It was the thin smile of a man who knows something you don’t, and is sure that, when you find it out, you are going to be crushed flat by the surprise.
“We may not have to,” he said.
Many scientists have this habit—it’s a variation on the Royal “we,” and when they say: “We may not have to,” or: “We’re making great progress,” what they mean is the good old first-person singular. Inkling had the habit—picked it up from a Monarch butterfly, I shouldn’t wonder.
“Why not?” I said, but I didn’t get an answer, not then. Answers came later, as you’ll see, along with a rather urgent request for your readership.
I suppose I ought to pay for an ad, and make the request there, but all this Rehab and such has left me temporarily strapped, and I have to ask you to oblige me, if at all possible, and run the request somewhere in the book. If you’re planning any sort of What’s New In Science article, as Analog occasionally used to, a few lines at the end of that would be a fine spot—I can’t say for certain whether you’re still doing this sort of thing, since Rehab was not conducive to Analog reading. Or any other sort—it’s been a long while since I went gaily through a newspaper, for God’s sake. And the request for your readers will come along when I’ve explained to you why I’m making it. All will be made clear; we just need a little patience here, OK?