Beaker's Dozen

  I dreamed about numbers.

  They swam in front of me, pounded the inside of my eyelids, chased me through dark and indistinct landscapes. They hunted me with knives and guns and fire. They hurt. I didn’t wake screaming, or disoriented, but I did wake sweating, and in the middle of the night I hung over the toilet, puking, while numbers swam around me on the wavering, double floor. The numbers wouldn’t go away. And neither would the thing I was trying to drink myself out of. No matter how drunk I got, the double vision stayed. Except for the equations, and they hurt just as much as the polished floor I couldn’t touch, the cool sheets I couldn’t feel, the competent Jack I couldn’t be. Maybe the equations hurt more. They were Fran’s.

  Take Arnfelser’s Constant. Plug it into a set of equations describing a nonlinear system . . .

  Phase space diagrams. Diverging, diverging, gone. A small difference in initial states and you get widely differing states, you get chaos . . .

  Take Arnfelser’s Constant. Use it as r. Let x equal . . .

  A small difference in initial states. A Fran who diverged only a small amount, a Jack who . . .

  Take Arnfelser’s equation . . .

  I almost saw it. But not quite.

  I wasn’t good enough to see it. Only he was.

  I poured another whiskey.

  The knock on the door woke me. It sounded like a battering ram.

  “Get out. I paid at the desk this morning. I don’t want maid service!”

  The shouting transferred the battering ram to my head, but the knocking ceased.

  Someone started picking the lock.

  I lay on the bed and watched, my anger mounting. The chain was on the door. But when the lock was picked the door opened the length of the chain, and a hand inserted a pair of wirecutters. Two pairs of wirecutters, physical and ideal. Four hands. I didn’t even move. If the motel owner wanted me, he could have me. Or the cops. I had reached some sort of final decimal place—I simply didn’t care.

  The chain, cheap lightweight links, gave way, and the door opened. Mia walked in.

  “Christ, Jack. Look at you.”

  I lay sprawled across the bed, and both Mias wrinkled their noses at the smell.

  I said, even though it wasn’t what I meant, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “Well, didn’t you see how I got in here? Weren’t you even conscious?” She walked closer and went on staring at me, in soiled underwear, the empty bottle on the floor. Something moved behind their eyes.

  “How did you find me?” it hurt to speak.

  “Hacked your Visa account. You put this dump on it.”

  “Go away, Mia.”

  “When I’m good and ready. Jesus, look at you.”

  “So don’t.”

  I tried to roll over, but couldn’t, so I closed my eyes.

  Mia said, “I didn’t think you had it in you. No, I really didn’t.” Her tone was so stupid such a mix of ignorance and some sort of stupid feminine idealization of macho asshole behavior—that I opened my eyes again. She was smiling.

  “Get. Out. Now.”

  “Not till you tell me what this is all about. Is it Dr. Schraeder? They told me you two were pals.”

  Fran. The pain started again. And the numbers.

  “That’s it, isn’t it, Jack? She was your friend, not just your adviser. I’m sorry.”

  I said, “She was the only person I ever met who was what she was supposed to be.”

  “Yeah? Well, then, I’m really sorry. I’m not what I’m supposed to be, I know. And you sure the hell aren’t. Although, you know . . . you look closer to him this morning than you ever did on campus. More . . . real.”

  I couldn’t shove her out the door, and I couldn’t stop her talking, and I couldn’t roll over without vomiting. So I brought my arm up and placed it across my eyes.

  “Don’t cry, Jack. Please don’t cry.”

  “I’m not—”

  “On second thought, do cry. Why the fuck not? Your friend is dead. Go ahead and cry, if you want to!” And she knelt beside me, despite what I must smell like and look like, and put her arms around me while, hating every second of it, I cried.

  When I was done, I pushed her away. Drawing every fiber of my body into it, I hauled myself off the bed and toward the bathroom. My stomach churned and the rooms wavered. It took two hands to grope along the wall to the shower.

  The water hit me, hard and cold and stinging. I stood under it until I was shivering, and it took that long to realize I still had my briefs on. Bending over to strip them off was torture. My toothbrush scraped raw the inside of my mouth, and the nerves in my brain. I didn’t even care that when I staggered naked into the bedroom, Mia was still there.

  She said, “Your body is closer to his than your face.”

  “Get out, Mia.”

  “I told you, when I’m ready. Jack, there aren’t any more of us. At least not that I know of. Or that you do. We can’t fight like this.”

  I groped in my overnight bag, untouched for four days, for fresh underwear. Mia seemed different than she had in the cafeteria: gentler, less abrasive, although she looked the same. I didn’t care which—or who—she was.

  “We need each other,” Mia said, and now there was a touch of desperation in her voice. I didn’t turn around.

  “Jack—listen to me, at least. See me!”

  “I see you,” I said. “And I don’t want to. Not you, not anybody. Get out, Mia.”

  “No.”

  “Have it your way.”

  I pulled on my clothes, gritted my teeth to get on my shoes, left them untied. I braced myself to push past her.

  She stood in the exact center of the room, her hands dangling helplessly at her sides. Behind her the other Mia stood gracefully, her drooping body full of sorrow. But the physical Mia, face twisted in an ugly grimace, was the only one looking at me.

  I stopped dead.

  They always both looked at me. At the same time. Everybody’s both: Mia, Diane, Fran, the department chair, my students. Where one looked, the other looked. Always.

  Mia said, more subdued than I had ever heard her. “Please don’t leave me alone with this Jack. I . . . need you.”

  The other Mia looked across the room, not over my shoulder. Not at him. At . . . what?

  From a small difference in initial states you get widely differing states with repeated iterations. Diverging, diverging, chaos . . . and somewhere in there, the strange attractor. The means to make sense of it.

  And just like that, I saw the pattern in the phase space diagrams. I saw the equations.

  “Jack? Jack!”

  “Just let me . . . write them down . . .”

  But there wasn’t any chance I’d forget them. They were there, so clear and obvious and perfect, exactly what Fran and I had been searching for.

  Mia cried, “You can’t just leave! We’re the only two people like this!”

  I finished scribbling the equations and straightened. My head ached, my stomach wanted to puke, my intestines prickled and squirmed. My eyes were so puffy I could barely see out of them. But I saw her, looking at me with her scared bravado, and I saw the other one, not looking at me at all. Diverging. She was right—we were the only two people like this, linked in our own chaotic system. And the states I could see were diverging.

  “No,” I got out, just before I had to go back into the bathroom. “There aren’t two. Soon . . . only one of you.”

  She stared at me like I was crazy, all the time I was puking. And the other Jack was doing God knows what.

  I didn’t really care.

  I haven’t published the equations yet.

  I will, of course. They’re too important not to publish: proof that any physical system showing an ultradependence on initial conditions must have a strange attractor buried somewhere in its structure. The implications for understanding chaos are profound. But it’s not easy to publish this kind of innovation when you no longer have even a post-doc position a
t a decent university. Even though Fran’s name will go first on the article.

  I may just put it out on the Internet. Without prior peer review, without copyright protection, without comment. Out onto the unstructured, shifting realities of the net. After all, I don’t really need formal attention. I don’t really want it.

  I have what I wanted: relief. The other faces—other rooms, other buildings, other gardens—are receding from me now. I catch only glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye, diminished in size by the distance between us, and getting smaller all the time. Diverging toward their own strange attractors.

  It’s not the same for Mia. When she said at the Morningside Motel that I looked more like the ideal Jack than ever before, it wasn’t a compliment to my unshaven frowziness. For her, the phase space diagrams are converging. She can barely discern the ideal separate from the physical now; the states are that close.

  She smiles at everyone. People are drawn to her as to a magnet; she treats them as if their real selves are their ideal ones.

  For now.

  The crucial characteristic about chaotic systems is that they change unpredictably. Not as unpredictably as before the Schraeder Equations, but still unpredictably. Once you fall into the area past the Feigenbaum number, states converge or diverge chaotically. Tomorrow Mia could see something else. Or I could.

  I have no idea what the ideal Mia was looking at when she gazed across the motel room, away from both me and him. When you are not the shadow on the cave wall but the genuine ideal; what is the next state?

  I don’t want to know. But it doesn’t matter whether or not I want it. If that state of life comes into being, then it does, and all we can do is chase it through the chaos of dens and labyrinths and underground caves, trying to pin it momentarily with numbers, as our states diverge from what we know toward something I cannot even imagine, and don’t want to.

  Although, of course, that too may change.

  MARGIN OF ERROR

  Some writers write long. Some writers write short. Each can learn to do the opposite, usually, but often they find it no fun.

  I naturally write medium. My favorite length is the novella. Left to myself, I would write nothing but novellas, which give me room to build an alternate reality but not so much room that I become lost and foundering in the terrain. However, I’m not always left to myself. Economic imperatives dictate that, to survive, authors must write novels. Editors occasionally dictate that, to publish in a given forum, authors must write short-shorts.

  Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of Omni magazine in its print incarnation, asked me for a story under two thousand words. I grumbled, but Ellen stood firm. The result, “Margin of Error,” is 2,200 words, which was the best I could squeeze it down to, even though the entire story includes only one scene and three speaking characters. Plus a frog. Had this been a regular story, I’m sure the frog would have gotten at least one “Ribbit.”

  PAULA CAME BACK IN A BLAZE OF GLORY, HER INSTITUTE UNIFORM with its pseudo-military medals crisp and bright, her spine straight as an engineered diamond-fiber rod.

  I heard her heels clicking on the sidewalk and I looked up from the bottom porch step, a child on my lap.

  Paula’s face was genemod now, the blemishes gone, the skin fine pored, the cheekbones chiseled under green eyes. But I would have known that face anywhere. No matter what she did to it.

  “Karen?” Her voice held disbelieve.

  “Paula,” I said.

  “Karen?”

  This time I didn’t answer. The child, my oldest, twisted in my arms to eye the visitor.

  It was the kind of neighborhood where women sat all morning on porches or stoops, watching children play on the sidewalk. Steps sagged; paint peeled, small front lawns were scraped bare by feet and tricycles and plastic wading pools. Women lived a few doors down from their mothers, both of them growing heavier every year. There were few men. The ones there were didn’t seem to stay long.

  I said, “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Paula said, and I knew she didn’t understand my smile. Of course it wasn’t hard. I had never intended it should be. This was undoubtedly the first time in nearly five years that Paula had looked.

  She lowered her perfect body onto the porch steps. My little girl, Collie, gazed at her from my lap. Then Lollie opened her cupped hands arid smiled, “See my frog, lady?”

  “Very nice,” Paula said. She was trying hard to hide her contempt, but I could see it. For the sad imprisoned frog, for Lollie’s dirty face, for the worn yard, for the way I looked.

  “Karen,” Paula said. “I’m here because there’s a problem with the project. More specifically, with the initial formulas, we think. With a portion of the nanoassembler code from five years ago. When you were still with us.”

  “A problem,” I repeated. Inside the house, a baby wailed. “Just a minute.”

  I set Lollie down and went inside. Lori cried in her crib. Her diaper reeked. I put a pacifier in her mouth and cradled her in my left arm. With the right arm I scooped Timmy from his crib. When he didn’t wake, I jostled him a little. I carried both babies back to the porch, deposited Timmy in the portacrib and sat down next to Paula.

  “Lollie, get me a diaper, honey. And wipes. You can carry your frog inside to get them.”

  Lollie went; she’s a sweet-natured kid. Paula stared incredulously at the twins. I unwrapped Lori’s diaper and Paula grimaced and slid farther away.

  “Karen . . . are you listening to me? This is important.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The nanocomputer instructions are off somehow. The major results check out obviously . . .” Obviously. The media had spent five years exclaiming over the major results . . . but there are some odd foldings in the proteins of the twelfth-generation nanoassemblers. Twelfth generation. The nanocomputer attached to each assembler replicates itself every six months. That was one of the project’s checks and balances on the margin of error. It had been five and a half years. Twelfth generation was about right.

  “Also,” Paula continued, and I heard the strain in her voice, “there are some unforeseen macrolevel developments. We’re not sure yet that they’re tied to the nanocomputer protein folds. What we’re trying to do now is cover all the variables.”

  “You must be working on fairly remote variables if you’re reduced to asking me.”

  “Well, yes, we are. Karen, do you have to do that now?”

  “Yes.” I scraped the shit off Lori with one edge of the soiled diaper. Lollie danced out of the house with a clean one. She sat beside me, whispering to her frog. Paula said, “What I need . . . what the project needs . . .”

  I said, “Do you remember the summer we collected frogs? We were maybe eight and ten. You’d become fascinated reading about that experiment where they threw a frog in boiling water but it jumped out, and then they put a frog in cool water and gradually increased the temperature to boiling until the stupid frog just sat there and died. Remember?”

  “Karen . . .”

  “I collected sixteen frogs for you, and when I found out what you were going to do with them, I cried and tried to let them go. But you boiled eight of them anyway. The other eight were controls. I’ll give you that—proper scientific method. To reduce the margin of error, you said.”

  “Karen . . . we were just kids . . .”

  I put the clean diaper on Lori. “Not all kids behave like that. Lollie doesn’t. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Nobody in your set has children. You should have had a baby, Paula.” She barely hid her shudder. But, then, most’ of the people we knew felt the same way. She said, “What the project needs is for you to come back and work on the same small area you did originally. Looking for something—anything—you might have missed in the protein-coded instructions to successive generations of nanoassemblers.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s not really a matter of choice. The macrolevel problems—I’ll be frank, K
aren. It looks like a new form of cancer. Unregulated replication of some very weird cells.”

  “So take the cellular nanomachinery out.” I crumpled the stinking diaper and set it out of the baby’s reach. Closer to Paula.

  “You know we can’t do that! The project’s irreversible!”

  “Many things are irreversible,” I said. Lori started to fuss. I picked her up, opened my blouse, and gave her the breast. She sucked greedily. Paula glanced away. She has had nanomachinery in her perfect body, making it perfect, for five years now. Her breasts will never look swollen, blue-veined, sagging.

  “Karen, listen . . .”

  “No. . . you listen.” I said quietly. “Eight years ago you convinced Zweigler I was only a minor member of the research team, included only because I was your sister. I’ve always wondered, by the way, how you did that—were you sleeping with him, too? Seven years ago you got me shunted off into the minor area of the project’s effect on female gametes—which nobody cared about because it was already clear there was no way around sterility as a side effect. Nobody thought it was too high a price for a perfect, self-repairing body, did they? Except me.” Paula didn’t answer. Lollie carried her frog to the wading pool and set it carefully in the water. I said, “I didn’t mind working on female gametes, even if it was a backwater, even if you got star billing. I was used to it, after all. As kids, you were always the cowboy; I got to be the horse. You were the astronaut, I was the alien you conquered. Remember? One Christmas you used up all the chemicals in your first chemistry set and then stole mine.”

  “I don’t think trivial childhood incidents matter in . . .”

  “Of course you don’t. And I never minded. But I did mind when five years ago you made copies of all my notes and presented them as yours, while I was so sick during my pregnancy with Lollie. You claimed my work. Stole it. Just like the chemistry set. And then you eased me off the project.”