Death Qualified (23 page)

    She moved aside as a young man led a group of freshmen up the stairs to the library, with several parents trailing along.

    The students didn't look old enough to go away to college.

    From the unhappy look on some of the parents' faces, it was clear that they thought the same thing.

    Then she heard someone say, "Barbara Holloway?"

    He was younger than she had thought from his telephone voice, low thirties probably. He was dressed in sky-blue running pants, sweatshirt, running shoes. Give him a tennis racket and plop him down into a Fitzgerald novel, she thought with misgivings; she had wanted a staid, responsible mathematician. His hair was medium brown, straight, his eyes light blue; he was deeply tanned, and muscled like a jock.

    "Hi," she said.

    "Mike Dinesen?"

    They shook hands.

    "You're disappointed," he said.

    "Don't be ridiculous": You're just not what I expected."

    "Exactly what my mother said, they tell me."

    She laughed.

    "I have to move my car before they tow it away. Is there someplace close by where we can talk for a few minutes?"

    "Sure. You're running early, I'm running late. Let's compromise. You drive me home, five blocks, and we'll talk there after I shower and change. Or, we can meet somewhere in half an hour."

    "Your place," she said without hesitation and set a brisk pace back to her car. A campus-security woman was ticketing a car just three spaces down.

    "Nick of time," Mike said.

    "First a warning ticket, then, fifteen minutes later, the towing company. Eighty-five bucks before you're through with them. You'll want to head out that way." He pointed.

    "Before I moved in close enough to walk back and forth, I paid out two hundred eighty dollars in parking tickets in one year. Actually, I never paid a cent; they took it out of my paychecks."

    He sounded serious, but when she glanced at him, his eyes were sparkling with amusement.

    "And I had a parking permit," he added.

    He directed her to his house, six blocks, not five. It was a two-story duplex; he had the lower floor. There was a flower box with dead geraniums and petunias and a sleeping orange cat. The cat got up, flowed out of the planter, stretched, and sniffed her with interest, then began to tangle itself around his legs.

    "Saber Dance," he said, motioning toward the animal.

    "Come on in. Come on, Saber, you too."

    The room they entered had two rattan sofas with garish covers in lime green and purple. There were rattan tables here and there in what appeared to be no order whatever, and a dozen or more large plush pillows. Two walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Three lower shelves held hundreds of record albums; a stereo at the end of one of the sofas was impressive, expensive, she was certain. And two computers were on a long table made from a door, supported by sawhorses. The wall behind the computers was covered with pictures Mandelbrot sets blown up to large size, each one dazzling and beautiful. There were fractals, Julia sets, other computer art, little of it framed, some overlapping.

    "Kitchen that way," he said, moving past her, pointing.

    "Help yourself. Make coffee, tea, see if there's anything in the fridge that you want. Back in a second."

    She wandered slowly through the house, a tidy kitchen with flour and sugar, an assortment of dried beans, all in mason jars on a counter. There was a small table and two chairs. On the table another mason jar contained several withered daisies. What appeared to be at least a week's supply of newspapers was stacked on the floor, apparently never opened. Beyond the kitchen door was a large back porch and another orange cat regarding her. A second door led to a dining room that had been converted to an office, with yet another computer system, file cabinets, and an army-issue metal desk covered with stacks of books and unruly piles of papers.

    She returned to the living room and sat down, strangely pleased with this house and its absolute disregard for the Joneses. Mike returned a few minutes later, toweling his hair. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt with fish swimming across it, and sandals. Just right, she thought approvingly.

    He was of a piece with his house.

    "Didn't you want coffee or anything?" he asked.

    "I'm fine," she said.

    "Please, don't bother. I promised I wouldn't take up much of your time, and I suspect you have classes to prepare, things to do."

    "Yep. And first on the list is coffee. You said Wiley Aronsen gave you my name. Friend of yours?" He was walking from the room as he talked; she followed him to the kitchen.

    "Friend of a friend," she said, and for the next few minutes, as he made coffee, they checked each other's circle of friends and acquaintances.

    He cut it off by sitting at the table and saying, "So what do you want to know, and why?"

    "As I told you on the phone, I'm an attorney " "You don't look like a lawyer."

    "What are they supposed to look like?"

    "Men in four-hundred-dollar suits pretending they're not wearing corsets that pinch."

    She laughed.

    "I have a three-hundred-dollar suit, actu ally. And I have a girdle, or used to. Somewhere."

    "Still not right. No corset pinching you twenty-four hours a day every day. That shows every time."

    "Well, a lawyer is what I am, and my client is Nell Kendricks." She raised her eyebrow questioningly, and he shook his head. She already had decided to tell him no more than what had appeared in print, and she did so succinctly, and then said, "So I'm left wondering what they were working on. A mathematician, a computer ex pert, a psychiatrist, and Frobisher, who was a mathematician also."

    He nodded thoughtfully.

    "And you're sure they were concerned with chaos? Mathematicians, sure. But computer people don't like it. They like things to be on or off, no indecision, and they hate the almost-intransitive. And a psychiatrist? Behavior maybe, but psychiatry? I don't see how that fits in." His coffee maker was making rattling noises, done. He got up to pour coffee for both of them. "What's almost-intransitive?"

    His thoughts apparently had galloped far beyond that already. He shook his head slightly, came back to the table with two mugs of coffee, and wandered away again for cream and sugar. He took both, she took neither.

    "Okay," he said, "let's use weather, or more precisely, climate.

    Say for millennia the weather is balmy, moist, subtropical;

    that's the Earth climate. Then, for no reason that anyone knows, it changes and we're in an ice age, and everything gets stuck there for years and years. Then it changes again.

    And so on. But the point is that during the period of ice age, or subtropical, that's the Earth climate, and it continues long enough to take it for granted that that's the stable condition and always will be that way with minor fluctuations that we call weather, and then it changes. The change can be awfully fast."

    "Damn," she muttered, "and I thought I was getting a glimmer of understanding. What about the butterfly effect;

    you know, the butterfly in Brazil changes the weather in New York?"

    He shook his head.

    "That's something else again, the Lorenz Effect, talking short term now, not eons. That says that a minute change in a system can have very large effects. And since you can't predict the minute variation, you can't predict the large system. Meteorology is deep into chaos these days."

    She sipped the coffee, frowning.

    "According to the books I've already read, the chaos theory is being applied up and down the line in every field you can name."

    "Hardly a theory," he said.

    "We like to say the laws of chaos." He was grinning at her.

    "Look, do you have a couple of hours? Let me give you the introductory lecture I'll be using this term, complete with slides. Like I said, I can't make a connection between the shrink and the mathematician, but maybe something will occur to me.

    Game?"

    "With equations?"

    He laughed.

    "Two or three, no more than that, I promise, and they're pretty elementary. Come on. You can always stop me."

    But it would have been impossible to stop once they began to view the slides, and he began to point out strange attractors, the fractal qualities of coasts and trees and clouds, and turbulence, and phase space. The slides he had arranged for the lecture were astonishingly beautiful, compelling.

    "Start with the whole tree," he said, "and then the single leaf, and now the veins in the leaf, and the root system, all similar. Not identical, mind you, but self-similar. And in this slide, see how the attractor seemed to fly out of control and create islands? Then it got back on the main course, but if we zoom in on one of those islands, magnify it, see? Similar to the whole. And zoom in again, focus on details that are smaller and smaller, and you can see that the island's not isolated at all, but attached by that filament. Nothing's isolated, nothing. It's all connected."

    He changed the image again.

    "Now, about scaling. It's very simple really. We usually use the island of Great Britain because we have such good satellite pictures of it. How long is the coastline? The answer must be infinite. At this distance, from space, the coastline would be a few inches." The NASA photograph showed the whole of the Earth, and then the whole of the island of Great Britain in sharp detail. Mike traced the island with his finger.

    "You could print out a picture and measure it with a tape measure.

    But get in closer, change the scale, you see, and the measurement increases. As the distance narrows, the measurement increases." He zoomed in on a section of the coast, then again on a bay, again to a miniature bay, and again and again. Each time the similarity was there; each time with more and more detail, the measurement changed.

    "Until finally," he said, "you are down to measuring grains of sand, and you could go to the molecular level, the atomic, the subatomic. The same land, the same island, always similar, always using a different scale.

    Where does it stop? Only when we get beyond where our instruments can follow."

    The screen cleared and a magnificent Mandelbrot set appeared with golden seahorse figures, and pale green dragons, flaring bands of fluorescent blue, and silver filigree.

    He zoomed in on a tiny section of the border to reveal the self-similarity again, and again.

    "It's infinite," he said softly, "limited only by the number of decimal points the computer can handle. Fourteen in this instance.

    You fall right into it and through it forever, and it's all one thing, all connected, whole. Science has done a complete flip-flop. Reductionism is dead, holism lives. It's a brand-new game we're into."

    Suddenly the show ended with a constant, unhurried zoom after zoom into a new Mandelbrot set, this one silver and blue. The illusion of falling forever was so strong that when the screen went blank, Barbara felt vertiginous. She was holding the edge of the computer table as tightly as she could.

    Mike laughed and moved away. Until then she had not realized that his hand had been resting on her shoulder.

    "So how do you think it will play in Peoria?"

    "A sellout," she said weakly.

    "Good. Let's have some more coffee and then in a while go out for Mexican food. You do like Mexican, don't you?"

    "Yes, but.... I have to make a call first. And use your bathroom."

    And just what do you think you 're doing ? she demanded of herself, standing at the bathroom sink holding a bar of soap. But she knew, and so did Mike. They would have coffee, go out to dinner, come back here, and go to bed together. It had been inevitable from the moment he had laid his hand on her shoulder because it was a natural thing to do, and she had accepted the naturalness of the act, from the moment he said her name on the library stairs, from the moment she dialed his number, from the moment she heard her father's voice on her answering machine in Phoenix, from the moment of her birth. It had been inevitable.

    They had stepped on the edge of one of his infinite images, and they would fall forever, bound together by an invisible filament that had been drawing them together all their lives.

    SEVENTEEN

    "Do you understand any of this?" Frank Holloway asked Barbara on Sunday afternoon. She was on the terrace, surrounded by newspapers, but had paid no attention to any of them for a long time, had gazed at the river, at the trees, the clouds, ^everywhere but at the paper. She looked up at her father, who was holding two of the latest books she had borrowed from the library. One had an article by Ruth Brandy wine; the other was yet another book on chaos.

    "Not enough," she admitted.

    "The Brandywine article is all about the transition from one belief system to another in the adolescent. She's a lousy writer." She motioned toward the other book, with another of the lovely Mandelbrot sets on the cover.