Dark Terrors 3 (43 page)

Once upon a time, I dreamed about becoming an astronomer - next best thing to astronaut - but Cs and Ds in physics and calculus quickly stymied such fancies and sent me running for the shelter of Chaucer’s little helpers.

Still, my interest never entirely waned. I kept up with Drexler on nanotechnology, and was hyping VR and cyber-culture
long
before
Wired
magazine. Barnsley and Gleick and all the others opened up new worlds for me even as I completed my doctorate in English. I sprang for a top-of-the-line PC and high-res monitor when that kind of stuff was still an arm and a leg, and played with fractal-generating software, staying up into the wee hours, reliving the ‘star-gate’ sequence from
2001.

And I re-channelled my interest from science to science fiction, cajoling the department chair into letting me teach a graduate seminar by throwing a little Pynchon and Lessing in with the Dick and Ballard. I set to work on the
definitive
study of Olaf Stapledon and even scammed some funding to organize a small conference on popular science and science fiction.

Which was where I met Klein.

* * * *

‘Klein call?’

I nodded and gave Elaine a mug and a kiss. It was a morning ritual and sort of unwritten contract that I get up first and bring her tea in bed. I like it. The ritual, I mean. Like any red-blooded American - even a Yank at (well,
near)
Oxford - I hate tea.

‘He wake you? I didn’t see you stir.’

She took a series of quick, tiny sips, the way the dog laps his water, and leaned back against the pillows.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I dreamed of bells.’

‘Wedding bells?’

‘Don’t be a cheek. What did he want this time?’

I stood at the mirror adjusting my tie. My sole sop to respectability. I ran the back of my fingers under my chin and decided maybe I should have shaved after all.

‘He wanted me to explain deconstruction to him.’

‘Aauuuughhh,’ Elaine laughed and Darjeeling sprayed out of her nose. She dabbed at it with her nightie, still giggling. ‘What in the world for?’

I stared at my face in the mirror. A nasty zit was blooming in the crease between my nose and cheek, and my hair had visibly thinned again during the night. Where did it go?

‘You know Klein. He’s on to another of his big ideas. Something about a relationship between deconstruction and chaos theory. Really, the bastard already knows it better than I do. You remember Derrida’s notion of
sous rature,
putting things under erasure?’

Elaine half-squinted at me. ‘Ehhhhh . . .’

I sat on the edge of the bed, softly rubbing her belly. I often do it without even thinking. ‘You know how he writes a word, then crosses it out, but leaves the crossed-out expression in the text?’

‘I think I vaguely remember. It’s been a while, though, and I could never stomach any of that crap.’

‘Yeah, it’s all a bit of a con. Or a decon. But erasure’s meant to indicate a concept or idea that’s under question or whose meaning is to be doubted. An idea that’s been negated, but not dismissed. By placing it
sous rature,
it can be there and not there at the same time. Well, that’s a nasty simplification, but you get the idea.’

‘Uh-huh . . .’

‘So Klein thinks this somehow ties in with fractal geometry. After reading some Derrida, he’s decided that deconstruction is, and I quote, “a chaotic philosophical function”. And he claims that the process is dangerous because it has fractal contours. Something about gamma matrices approaching a threshold in maximum likelihood models.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know, I know. He explained it to me for an hour, but I didn’t get it, and it was four o’clock in the damn morning. Anyway, he’s all excited about it, so we’re going to meet for lunch. But you know Klein.’

‘We all know Klein,’ Elaine sighed. I kissed her again and
headed out the door. I thought she said something and stuck my head back in the room.

‘How’s that?’

Her hands were folded over the empty mug resting lightly on her bulging stomach and she stared at the wall with her head cocked slightly to one side.

‘I thought I heard bells again,’ she said.

* * * *

The student union is the oldest building on campus: a massive Gothic structure embraced by thick tendons of ivy and perched at the edge of Library Slope. The Senior Common Room offers a stunning view of the valley below and a sparkling expanse of water to the northwest. The place was packed, but Klein had already secured seats. The canteen food was your basic pre-processed, post-industrial gruel, but the university subsidizes the prices so there’s always a queue.

Klein looked his usual dishevelled self, every bit the absent-minded professor. He wore a creased, sky blue shirt that was a couple of sizes too big, with the cuffs flapping loose and the buttons fastened all the way up to his chin. His black polyester pants nearly matched the shade of his peeling Hush Puppies, but he wore them at high tide depth and they didn’t go at all with the brown socks that drooped around his bony ankles. Klein’s kinky red hair was thin across the top, lending him an unfortunate Bozo the Clown look exaggerated by his over-large nose. The bags under his eyes were thick and dark as war paint, and magnified by a pair of cheap glasses that were filthy beyond belief.

Klein hadn’t shaved and had his usual odour about him. It was the smell of someone who’s just come off a lengthy flight: not dirty, exactly, but musky and tired. Klein works odd hours and on more than one occasion I’ve been around when his wife - a truly stunning redhead named Margaritte - has had to publicly scold him about bathing. Klein never gets embarrassed; he just forgets such mundanities.

‘You see the paper?’ he said by way of greeting.

‘Let me guess: rationing on soap and water.’

Klein looked puzzled for a moment, then unselfconsciously sniffed at his armpit. An elderly administrative type at the next table snorted, but Klein didn’t notice.

‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’ve been working.’

‘What’s in the news?’ I smiled.

He handed me a copy of the
Guardian,
folded over to the Style page.

‘You fashion beast!’ I said. He grinned like a kid and pointed at the lead item.

It was about a new line of women’s clothing. The patterns were to be fractal-based and there was considerable to-do about how they mirrored nature’s own true design, with some outrageous pseudo-scientific doublespeak about chaos theory and complexity.

‘Old B. Bronski’s ahead of his time,’ I mumbled.

‘Heh?’

‘Nothing. Yeah, so what? You could have predicted something like this. I think people already have. Christ, the bookstore sells fractal postcards.’

‘Read the sidebar.’

I skimmed the accompanying article. It was about the manufacturing process that had been devised for producing the clothes. The process was also rooted in fractal concepts, so that a standard assembly line could be employed, but every item produced would be subtly different. The idea was to create complete uniqueness within the confines of mass production. The engineer who designed the system was quoted as saying that his software package was going to revolutionize every aspect of assembly line manufacturing.

‘Interesting,’ I said, digging into my salad, ‘but also a little scary in that zany, fin-de-millennial way.’

‘Scary how?’ Klein’s eyes were alight.

‘If this is right, it maybe changes - or changes again - the definition of “unique”. If you can mass-produce singularity, then what does it mean? What possible value could be left for such a notion?’

Klein nodded approval and handed me the business page with a short item circled in red. Grundrisse-Rand had commissioned Frank Gehry to design their new EU headquarters in Bonn. It would be the first corporate commission of a piece of deconstructivist architecture, and one of the few major deconstructivist designs to be realized.

‘Yeah, I heard about this the other day on Radio 4. I thought the deconstructivist thing was yesterday’s news, but I guess
someone’s
interested. Gehry’s still hot, at least.’

‘But what do you make of it?’

‘I can’t say I much care for it, at least not the sketches I’ve seen. The stuff makes me sort of dizzy with all those odd angles and exposed superstructure. Very Weimar, somehow. Decadent. The kind of thing that’s fun in theory, but awful for the poor saps who’ll have to live and work in it. But then I don’t really know much about architecture.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Klein said, slapping his palm on the spread-out paper. ‘I’m talking about two articles on the same day in the fucking
Guardian!
Fractals and deconstruction!’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s the ideas, Steve. Don’t you see. The ideas.’

‘Yeah?’ I tried again.

‘It’s what I was talking about last night. You know that there are very precise mathematical models for how things are diffused in culture? It doesn’t matter what - VCRs, compact discs, AIDS - they’re all the same in these models. Threshold criteria and critical mass levels determining rates of adoption. It’s all very calculable and occurs along an exaggerated S-shaped curve, with a small number of people adopting early on, then an explosion during which most everyone else climbs on the bandwagon.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘Well, the thing is that it works for ideas and concepts, too. And what’s more, I think that when certain ideas - in the form of the things we call theories - fulfil those critical mass requirements, they become something more. Something . . . substantial.’

‘Don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds neat,’ I said. ‘I can’t even balance my chequebook so I don’t know from math models, but...well...what do you mean substantial? You mean accepted, right?’

‘No, Steve. I
mean
substantial. Palpable. Real. And it’s dangerous as hell.’

I was shaking my head. ‘You said that on the phone last night - this morning - but I still don’t follow.’

‘There’s a very thin line separating conception from reality. From the idea of something being true to that selfsame thing becoming physical law.’

‘Ahem,’ I said.

‘Okay, look. You know that everything we do, everything we build, the entire design of the western world is more or less based on parameters set forth in Euclidean geometry.’

‘I suppose I know that somewhere.’

‘Exactly. Well, mathematicians have always known that Euclidean geometry is itself based on certain approximations of reality — lousy approximations, it turns out - but they’ve always just brushed that little matter aside and stuck it under the label of “assumptions”. They’ve gone ahead and said it doesn’t matter.

‘But Euclid is the law for most of us. For two thousand years we’ve regarded those Euclidean approximations as realer than Coca-Cola. For the vast multitudes, for
you,
to take an example, those assumptions about the logic of space and geometry aren’t ignored, they’re completely
unknown.
Let me ask you something. What was the world like before Euclid?’

‘I don’t know. It was . . . simpler, I guess. Smaller, more compact. Less technological, certainly.’

‘Yes!’ Klein practically jumped out of his chair. His glasses flew off his face and bounced on the table. He grabbed at them, smearing the lenses with butter, but stuck them right back on his nose.

‘Before Euclid this wasn’t a world of science and technology, it was a world of gods and magic. Euclid came along and reshaped geometry, yes, but at the same time he reshaped
an entire
cosmology!’