Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (29 page)

“Ray, I....”  He broke off,
unsure of what to say next. “I’ll get dressed and go.”

As he turned to retrieve his clothes,
Rayna caught his hand, then pulled away as if jolted by a static
electric charge. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said
solemnly. “The world’s changing. Maybe we’re changing, too. I don’t
much like it. But the one thing I’m sure about despite what
happened is that we have a better chance of dealing with it all if
we stick together.”

He smiled and held out his arms, but
she shook her  head. “Not yet, Keith,” she said. “I’m not
ready for you to touch me just yet.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets
and looked down at his feet. “Let me stay the night, Ray. I won’t
bother you. I promise. Let me try to make things up to
you.”

Rayna drew a deep breath and studied
his face once more. “All right,” she finally agreed. “You can stay.
Maybe tomorrow we’ll be able to figure out what’s going
on.”

  “
They fired two of our teachers,”
Rayna told Keith the next morning, “just because they had relatives
in the colonies.”

“Oh?”

Rayna nodded. “Bob Carlson says he’s
been getting phone calls about my field trip to the
Milgrom-Rensselaer debate, too.”

Keith had no trouble reading the
message in Rayna’s chilly manner:  Allowing him to remain in
her apartment last night didn’t mean that things between them were
settled.
She doesn’t trust me anymore
, he thought.
But
then, why should she?  Hell, I’m not sure I trust myself.
He fixed his gaze on the Trans-Mat Food Service menu.

“Don’t you want your usual bacon and
eggs?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sure. That’ll be
fine.”

She punched in their selections. “I
think I’ll try
gualatur
.”

Keith couldn’t help laughing.
“What?  You?  You’re going to have
gualatur
? 
I thought you hated colonial food.”

“I decided I should give it another
chance. After all, I’m giving you....”  Rayna stared at Keith
briefly, then turned her face away. “Aurora says the merchanters
used to love
gualatur
whenever they had the chance to get it
in the Asteroid Belt,” she said. “I just thought it might be worth
another try.”

Before he could respond, the food
materialized on the Trans-Mat platform. He helped Rayna move the
dishes to the table, and they began to eat.

“This stuff really isn’t bad,” she
said, picking unenthusiastically at a brown, lumpy mass on her
plate.

Keith pressed his lips together and
tried to hold his breath, but a chortle escaped despite his best
efforts to stifle it. Rayna glanced up as he fought to control his
reaction. A moment later, she covered her mouth and began to
chuckle. Slowly, the chuckle grew and expanded until it resolved
itself into the kind of breath-stealing, eye-tearing laughter that
can shatter the coldest reserve.

“How can Aurora and the others stand
this stuff?” she gasped.

Keith shook his head. “I have no idea.
I tried it for the first time just recently—over at Tauber’s place.
He and Barnard seem to like it, too. Me?  I think I’d rather
starve!”

“Maybe space does something to your
taste buds,” Rayna said. “Hard-cooked squawker eggs served in some
goo made from unpronounceable, hydroponically grown grains? 
 No thanks. I think I’ll go back to bacon and
eggs!”

“Right away, madam,” Keith said,
quickly ordering a serving for her.

A calm enveloped them as they finished
their meal. The laughter seemed to have a cleansing effect.
What
got into me last night?
  The unanswered question nagged at
Keith, but he tried to shove it aside. Right now, he was just
grateful for the thaw in Rayna’s demeanor. Eventually he’d win her
back completely.
It’s for damn sure I’ll never let anything like
that happen again.

“Thanks for bringing back the
permastore,” Rayna said after breakfast. “It means more to me now
than ever.”

“I understand. A legacy from your
grandfather.”

Rayna nodded. “Did you go through
everything?  All the tapes?”

“Listened to every one of them,” he
told her. “Went over the papers pretty thoroughly, too. I think I
finally have some idea of just what Mr. Al Frederick was doing all
those years. Probably a better idea than he ever had
himself.”

Rayna tilted her head to one side and
waited for him to continue. “Go on.”

“It’s pretty complicated stuff, Ray.
Like I said, I think I have a pretty good idea about what was
happening, but there’s no way to prove it, and the only guy who
could be considered an expert died 49 years ago.”

“You mean that physicist, ‘Azey,’ or
whatever his name was?”

“Yes. Alec Zorne. I don’t think even
he really knew what he was on to. I have the advantage of later
research into basic physics, research that validated a lot of
Zorne’s early work.”

Rayna looked carefully at Keith. “I
get the feeling that you don’t think I’ll be able to understand
you.”

Keith rubbed the back of his neck.
“It’s not exactly  that. It’s more that I’m not sure I know
how to say it so that you’ll understand what I think I
understand....”

Hearing his own words, Keith frowned,
then heaved a sigh. “Oh, hell, I don’t think I can confuse you much
more than I just did.”

“You’re probably right,” Rayna said,
“so please give the explanation a try.”

He rubbed his hands together and took
a deep breath. “Okay. Here goes. First of all, do you remember much
about the tapes where Al talks about Zorne’s theories?”

“Just a little,” Rayna said. “I can
listen to the tapes again, now that you’ve brought them back, but I
guess I could do with a short refresher course right
now.”

Keith nodded. “Well, basically,
Zorne’s theory involved two things:  unusual oscillations
associated with psychic activity, and something he called a
person’s ‘reality matrix’.”  He ticked the points off on his
fingers. “A reality matrix is a mathematical construct that Zorne
developed to reflect a person’s value system.”

Rayna’s brow was creased in
concentration. “How in the world could he reduce a person’s value
system to a mathematical construct?”

Keith shrugged. “I’m not sure just how
he did that. After all, what we have here are Al Frederick’s
papers, not Alec Zorne’s. The stuff is incomplete as far as Zorne’s
methods are concerned. All I know is that Zorne assigned numerical
values to attitudes—positive and negative—about  certain key
issues that he believed were basic to human
values.” 

Rayna arched her eyebrows and shook
her head. “Sounds like this Zorne character had a pretty high
opinion of himself. Takes quite an egotist to figure he can reduce
the human spirit to a bunch of numbers.”

“I don’t think he was an egotist, Ray.
Probably closer to a genius. Take a look at his book on
reality-matrix physics when you get the chance. He picked his list
of attitudes based on the work of leading experts in psychology,
sociology and other fields, too. Very eclectic. Anyway, he
recognized the fallibility of his system. Remember, he told your
grandfather he was still refining his technique for quantifying the
matrix, and....”

Rayna put her hands to her head.
“Okay, Keith, I’ll take your word for it. Hmmmm....”

“What is it?”

She tapped her lips with a forefinger.
“I was just wondering why he called it a ‘reality
matrix’.”

“He explained that in his book. Zorne
believed that people’s values affect the way they perceive reality.
You remember the old story about the optimist and the pessimist and
the half-glass of water?”

“Sure. The optimist says the glass is
half full, and the pessimist says it’s half empty.”

“Right. But Zorne thought a person’s
reality matrix could make even more fundamental differences in the
perception of reality.”

 
Rayna closed her eyes and took a
breath. “Okay. Now what does all this have to do with Al—I guess
I’m still not quite used to the idea of calling him my
grandfather—what does this have to do with Al and whether he was
really able to change reality?”

Keith ran his fingers through his hair
and tried to arrive at a way of explaining the process
clearly.

“According to Zorne, certain types of
psychic phenomena occur when oscillations in the brain of a
‘sender’ cause harmonic vibrations in the mind of a
‘receiver.’  Zorne believed—and this was consistent with
information available in his day—that strong emotions sort of
supercharge the process.”

“You mean, emotions act like a kind of
amplifier?”

“That’s the general idea,” Keith
agreed. “Zorne found that the emotional boost was strongest when
something conflicted with a person’s reality matrix. In Al
Frederick’s case, that reality matrix apparently included some
pretty intense feelings about the world at large.”

“Hmmmm, yes, that sounds like Al,”
said Rayna. “We used to have these long talks about the way the
world was when he was younger. Even just talking about the past, he
could get pretty worked up. I know he got a big kick out of the
fact that so many of the things he’d hoped for years ago wound up
coming true, even though all the ‘experts’ of the late Twentieth
Century used to call his dreams impossible. Things like world peace
and a truly United Nations, for example, and....”

 
Rayna scratched her head. “What
does that have to do with— Wait a minute!  Are you saying
that Al’s ideals gave him the psychic power to change the
world?”

“Not exactly, Ray. That’s an
oversimplification. His latent psychic ability was triggered when
something conflicted with his reality matrix—like when John Martin
Roberts was shot. The bigger the conflict, the stronger the
psycho-affective spike. It’s true that those spikes affected
reality, but your grandfather figured the changes were all
completely his doing—that whenever he got upset about something,
the world would just change to suit him.”

“Well,” Rayna began, “that’s what you
seem to be saying. That’s not right?”

“No, there was more to it. Zorne’s
papers show that one person alone can’t provide enough psychic
energy to change reality. What happened was, a psycho-affective
spike from your grandfather would cause harmonic vibrations in the
mind nets of people with compatible reality matrices. All these
vibrations
together
molded reality into a pattern consistent
with his reality matrix.”

Keith waited for Rayna to comment.
When she didn’t, he filled the silence with his own speculations.
“Now, if the Everett-Wheeler-Graham interpretation of quantum
mechanics applies here, it’s possible that the combined psychic
vibrations split reality into two coexisting branches. Of course,
under that theory, there’s also some branch of reality where
Roberts was never even born!”

Rayna looked at Keith,
wide-eyed.

 “
On the other hand,” he
continued, “it may be that only one reality exists, after all, and
your grandfather directed it for 50 years. At the time Zorne died,
he was refining a hypothesis that combined a lot of the most
advanced physics concepts of his time with some new twists of his
own. His mathematics are pretty impressive, but, as Zorne himself
said, it’s really impossible for us to know for sure just how
closely all that corresponds with the way things actually
are.”

“Please stop!” Rayna said, rolling her
eyes. “I’m more confused than ever.”

Keith smiled and waved his hand.
“Never mind. Let’s forget about this, at least for now. I just
don’t know how to explain it any better.”

“But—”

“All I can tell you is that it looks
like the changes in reality depended not only on your grandfather
but also on the reactions of other people who cared about the same
things.”

“My head hurts!” Rayna
said.

Keith laughed and tentatively reached
out to her. Reluctantly, she stepped into his arms. He breathed a
sigh of relief as he felt her body relax against his.

“Don’t worry about all this,” he said,
continuing to hold her close. “It’s fascinating stuff—and worth
further research. But right now, it’s just a hypothesis. I’m not
really sure about any of it.”  Gently, he pushed her back to
arm’s length so that he could look into her eyes. “One thing I can
tell you:  Al Frederick and his psychic powers definitely
played a major role in shaping the modern world as we know
it.”

The corners of Rayna’s mouth drooped.
“Not the way it is today. Not with the things that have been
happening lately.”

“You mean like your friends’ getting
fired?”

She nodded. “Among other things. It’s
as if whatever Al managed to do, however he managed to improve the
world over the last 50 years, it’s all started coming apart since
he died.”

Keith stared at his feet, brushing the
sole of his right shoe back and forth across the carpet. “I’m not
happy about the Nitinol situation or what’s going on at your
school, Ray, but maybe it’s just as well that we’ve all been kicked
out of Eden.”